Heather Cox Richardson:

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

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’re going to be talking about history related to a trend that Heather and I and a number of others here picked up on in recent weeks among Democrats, and that is, in a variety of different ways with a variety of different candidates and others, the Democrats have been more confrontational in their approach to politics. And there are any number of examples, probably those of you listening are coming to mind right now. One really obvious one was Beto O’Rourke who was speaking about gun violence and school shootings regarding the Uvalde shooting and kneeled down to demonstrate the military purpose of an AR15. And someone mocked him in some way, and Beto came back and said something along the lines of, “It may be funny to you mother effer, but it’s not funny to me.” And that got a huge response. That’s not the mode of democratic politicing that we’ve seen.

And there were other things like that. There’s Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman who has been using a rough and ready mode of attacking Mehmet Oz online, particularly on Twitter. And there’s even President Biden who, in his most recent speech, really aggressively came out and attacked some MAGA folk for really acting against democracy pretty directly. Basically, the idea here is that Democrats, in one way or another, are really punching back. And that’s interesting to us because there’s a tradition of that kind of behavior having an impact depending on who’s doing the punching back.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I want to ask you about this too, Joanne, because you make a really important distinction between that kind of confrontational, like you said, but kind of a bullying behavior and the need to hold norms. And so I believe when we have talked about this before, you have set up the idea that it’s very difficult for people who are defending democracy or who defending norms to deal with bullies. Why?

Joanne Freeman:

Very often, the way that bullying breaks down, and when you look in the long history of Congress, this is true, you have on the one side people who are really aggressively, assertively breaking rules, violating norms, threatening people, threatening violence. And on the other side, you have people who are desperately clinging to the institution and its rules and trying to uphold order. When you look at Congress in the 1840s and 1850s, that’s what you see is Southerners are the ones who are breaking rules and threatening violence and threatening people with duel challenges and the northerners are the ones who are constantly clinging to the rules to try and uphold the institution. It becomes hard to not be that side when you’re upholding rules to step away from the rules and say, “Okay, we’re just going to do the same thing right back at you.” It suggests that you’re sinking down to the level of the people you’ve been attacking.

If you’re going to take that stance, if you’re going to punch back in some way, you’re going to have to be very careful in the way that you do it so that you’re not seeming to say, “Rules don’t matter anymore,” and yet that you are pushing back enough to show that a line has been crossed. It’s a delicate place to be. It’s easy to do it incorrectly. And I think some of what we’ve been seeing recently, and what also we’re going to talk about today when we talk about the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s, is people who were bullied for a long time, in a sense, they have a little bit easier time of it, stepping forward and saying, “You know what? We’re not as bad as you. We’re not going to do the same thing you guys do, but we are going to push back.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that is one of the things that really jumped out to me about Beto O’Rourke standing up not only when he said, “It’s not funny to me,” but even before that when he went up to the town leaders at Uvalde and said, “You’re not doing anything. You need to do something now.” And they shouted him down and they wanted to throw him out. And it was really an electric moment.

In a way, they’re “punching back.” And I’m putting air quotes around that. Is just telling the truth. Like Harry Truman said, “I just tell the truth and they say I’m giving them hell.” And that may be part of what we’re looking at is the bullies go so far that we reach a point when you’re able to maintain the traditions and the norms and tell the truth, and that looks like you’re fighting back.

Joanne Freeman:

It looks radical even though what you’re basically saying is that simple fact: “You guys have gone too far.” That’s really all that it’s saying. It’s truthful. It’s actually not necessarily particularly aggressive, but in contrast with how people were acting or speaking before, it has a real power.

The immediate connection I made between what we’ve seen recently and the 1850s when northerners finally start to fight back against southerners was the response that I saw to the tweets of Megan Coyne, who the Biden administration hired as a deputy director of social media platforms. And there were some Republicans who were attacking the president’s student loan forgiveness policy. And Megan Coyne, seemingly was her, actually, I don’t think she ever aggressively stepped out front and said, “Yes, that was me,” was creating these tweets in which she would take that assertion on the part of a Republican and then couple it with, partner it with the amount of loan forgiveness that member of Congress had received through PPP loans.

It was a way of calling out hypocrisy, but what’s interested me about that was the response I saw online to that. Over and over and over again, what I saw was people seeing those tweets and one way or another responding by saying, “Yeah. Finally. Yeah. Do it again.” And that sense of relief and that sort of vicarious joy in seeing people push back, that took me directly back to that similar moment in the 1850s when you had northerners pushing back for the first time and people back home in the north saying identical things. “Yeah, finally; push back. Yeah, we’ve been waiting for it.” There’s a kind of emotional power to seeing, seemingly, the underdog, the person who’s been following all the rules, push back in a way that they haven’t been before. There’s an emotional punch to that that I think, in some part, is what’s been driving some of this recent behavior on the part of Democrats. It gets a response.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Why don’t we start with the one that’s sprang to both of our minds when we started thinking about this? And that is our friend and buddy, Anson Burlingame. I’m sure you have a favorite Anson Burlingame story. I have a favorite Anson Burlingame story. I’m sure all our listeners have their own favorite Anson Burlingame stories.

Joanne Freeman:

You should just send them in, folks, your favorite Anson Burlingame story. Dear Heather and Joanne-

Heather Cox Richardson:

But Anson Burlingame is actually incredibly important for many reasons, and I actually do have some favorite Anson Burlingame stories, but most people today haven’t heard of him. I say that broadly, and I feel certain we’re going to get 1,000 letters of people going, “I have a statue of him in my living room.” But he’s enormously important because he does exactly what Joanne is talking about. He is the first northern lawmaker who stands up to the southern enslavers in 1856 and says, “We will fight.”

The South had been characterizing northerners as shopkeepers who didn’t know how to shoot very well and couldn’t ride horses and all they cared about was math and all they cared about was money, whereas the Southerners are supposed to be great nights in shining armor on horses that are going to fight and they know their horsemanship and they know how to swing a sword and they’re going to just be these great heroes. And then, perhaps Joanne, you will walk us through what happens in May of 1856.

Joanne Freeman:

This people will have heard of. It’s the one in the years that I worked on physical violence in Congress. This is what everyone knows, which is the 1856 caning of Massachusetts abolitionist Senator, Charles Sumner by South Carolina Representative, Preston Brooks. Brooks really beats Sumner to the ground. It’s violent. It has huge repercussions around the country, but also in Congress.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Let me expand on that just a little bit. He beats him over the head. And every time you read about this, you’ll hear it was a gutta-percha cane. Gutta-percha is the stuff that used to make night sticks out of, so it’s that black stuff that bends a little bit, but not a lot. It’s like a baseball bat. He comes up in front of him and he hits him. He cuts his head to the bone in three places. And the reason that I mention that is because think of how much head wounds bleed. There is blood everywhere. And Sumner tries to get up and he can’t because he’s wedged under his desk. He eventually wrenches out of the floor. But there is blood absolutely everywhere. And this guy’s wailing on him with a cane. And there’s a bunch of southern senators who are standing there watching. One of them is Steven Douglas. And afterwards, someone said, “Why didn’t you step in?” He said, “Well, I didn’t figure it was my fight.”

Joanne Freeman:

Brooks is a South Carolina representative. He is someone who himself as a history of being a rough character. He was already worked up and threatening and telling people that he was worked up at what he heard, the sorts of things that he heard Sumner say, partly because it was about the south, partly because it was about a relative of his who was also in the Senate named Andrew Butler. Sumner included him in his insults.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And doesn’t Preston Brooks actually walk with a limp because he’s still got a bullet in his hip from the last duel he fought?

Joanne Freeman:

I don’t know if it’s from a duel, but he does walk with a cane, for sure. And he does confront Sumner by saying, “I heard what you said. I waited for the newspaper account. I read your words to be sure that they were accurate, that what I heard was what you said. And they are, the words are accurate. You insulted my part of the country, you insulted my kinsman.” And then he takes his revenge, as others said, by just bashing him over the head with his cane until the cane breaks and Sumner wrenches the desk from the floor, collapses on the ground and ultimately is carried away.

Now, northerners are horrified and offended, and it has a real personal impact. I’ve read the letters of people writing to them, members of Congress, after the caning, and the degree to which this felt like a personal wound to them. And some of them wanted to ride to Washington to take revenge themselves for the north and for Sumner; had a huge impact. It did indeed have that kind of representative power to it.

In Congress everyone says, “Well, at some point we’re going to have to discuss what happened and what kind of punishment there should be; what should happen to Brooks.” And many people predict that’s going to be ugly, that’s going to be bad. If we’re talking about this, there’s going to be bloodshed, whether it’s because Brooks feels insulted or whether it’s because Northerners feel that they need to step forward in an aggressive way, people predicted real trouble.

And in the end, there isn’t bloodshed but there are actually two people who end up potentially getting involved in some kind of a fight with Preston Brooks. One of them is Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. He arms himself because he’s worried that someone’s going to come after him, but he decides he’s not going to engage at all with Brooks. And Brooks is threatening to want to duel with both of these men for attacking him during debate in Congress. Wilson says, “No, I won’t do that. I’m armed, I’m ready, but I’m not going to engage in dueling behavior with you.” And he gets praised for it.

Anson Burlingame initially actually steps forward and says, “Okay, maybe I was a little aggressive in attacking you in Congress and I didn’t quite mean it that way.” And then steps back from that, actually takes back that apology and essentially accepts Brooks’ suggested invitation to fight. Now, that’s a huge thing for a northerner to do. Here’s what Burlingame did that so offended Brooks and others. On June 21st, 1856, Burlingame stood up and said-

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s about a month after Sumner gets stuffing beat out of him.

Joanne Freeman:

Almost exactly a month after. “I denounce it.” And by it, he means the caning. “I denounce it in the name of the Constitution, which it violated. I denounce it in the name of Massachusetts, which was stricken down by the blow. I denounce it in the name of civilization, which it outraged. I denounce it in the name of humanity. I denounce it in the name of that fair play, which bullies and prize fighters respect. Can you call that chivalry? In what code of honor did you get your authority for that? I do not believe that member has a friend so dear who must not, in his heart of heart, condemn the act. Even the member himself,” Preston Brooks, “if he has left a spark of that chivalry and gallantry attributed to him must loathe and scorn the act. God knows I do not wish to speak unkindly or at a spirit of revenge, but I owe it to my manhood and the noble state I in part represent to express my deep abhorrence of the act.” That’s powerful stuff, and it’s personal. It’s an attack on Preston Brooks in addition to being just aggressive language.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and what’s cool about that is that if you know that era, you’re like, “Oh, finally, somebody is stepping up.” Charles Sumner himself didn’t think it was such a good idea. He’s going to change his mind, but at first he writes to another colleague and says, “Alas for Burlingame. He has deliberately discarded the standard of northern civilization to adopt the standard of southern barbarism. He turns his back upon the public opinion of Massachusetts to bow before that of South Carolina.” And just for the record there, Sumner always seemed to think that he was the only one who had a hotline to the public opinion.

Joanne Freeman:

Sorry, Sumner.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, because he called that one wrong, of course.

Joanne Freeman:

As we’re about to talk about. But yeah, he absolutely called it wrong. And I should say that apparently, as he was being carried away off the floor of the Senate, he did ask someone if there was a way to play it so that the public would get the full impact of it. Even as he’s bleeding and being carried away, he’s thinking, wow, that’s a powerful thing. Maybe there’s a way that it can promote our cause, that it can promote the cause of abolitionism.

This whole dramatic thing happens. Berlingame initially takes responsibility for his language, says he didn’t mean to reflect upon the personal character of Mr. Brooks, which is a way of saying, “I didn’t insult you personally, and so this is not a matter that can be dueled over,” because duels are fought over personal insults, attacks on a person’s character.

But not long after that statement comes out, Burlingame comes forward and then says, “You know what? I’m going to take back that apology.” He says, “I stand behind what I said. I no longer apologize for that language.” At which point Preston Brooks essentially does what a offended man of honor would do and writes to Burlingame, quote, “Will you do me the kindness to indicate someplace outside of this district where it’ll be convenient to you to negotiate in reference to the difference between us,” which is basically a challenge to a duel.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And this is freaking brilliant because Burlingame, he chooses Canada, which means that that Brooks is going to have to go through this place where he is now loathed. His-

Joanne Freeman:

The entire north. He’s going to travel across the entire north to get to where this duel is supposed to take place.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Although that being said, that’s a bit of a red herring because of course he could have gone by water. And a lot of Southerners doing the war are going to go up to Canada by water, and they get away with that. That’s part of red herring.

But the part I really love about this is Burlingame… I don’t know how Brooks didn’t know this, but Burlingame was a sharp shooter, and so Burlingame proposes weapons that he is deadly with. But suddenly faced with the prospect of traveling across the north where he is in danger and fighting a duel with weapons that his opponent is a sharp shooter in, Preston Brooks suddenly gets extremely cold feet.

Joanne Freeman:

He does indeed, and says, “This would force me to go through,” and I think he calls it, “enemy territory.” On the one hand, you have Senator Henry Wilson who said, “I’m not going to stoop to that kind of behavior,” and he gets praised for that. But now you have Burlingame who ultimately says, “Fine, bring it, I’ll do it.” And he ends up coming out of this seeming brave and heroic and he stood up to the barbaric Southerner, and the Southerner proved to be too cowardly and didn’t have the fight.

And what’s interesting about it is, in the end, Burlingame receives much praise for being the person who was willing to fight, for doing precisely what Wilson is praised for not doing. Wilson wouldn’t stoop to Southern barbarism. I always talk about this when I talk about Northerners and Congress at this time. They were really in a difficult position because they’d get bullied by Southerners, and if they didn’t respond, they could be accused of being cowards, and if they did respond, they could be seeming like they’re stooping to southern barbarism. Here in the two responses to these senators, you can see that divide.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And he manages to make Preston Brooks look like a total weenie because he’s been running around being like, “I’m the big guy. I’m the bully. I’m the one who duels everybody. I’m this great cock of the walk.” And he’s like, “Okay, fine. You want to fight? Let’s fight. Let’s go up to Canada where we can get away with dueling, and we’re going to use deadly weapons. And it happens that I’m very, very good at them.” And at that point, Brooks just like, “Ooh, Oopsy poopsy. Maybe not so much.”

Joanne Freeman:

Not so much. Not so much. And this is the part that fascinates me because it’s so of a kind with the people cheering for the tweets in response to attacks on the Student Loan Forgiveness Plan, there’s upcoming elections. Burlingame goes barnstorming out west for upcoming elections, and he is celebrated and praised like a hero for what people call his, quote, unquote, “manly spirit.” He stood up to Brooks and he showed that he was going to fight.

In Ohio and Illinois and Indiana and Michigan, people sing Burlingame’s praises, they have parades, there are processions, people come by the thousands to hear him speak. In Indiana, they came in horse teams to see him. Apparently, there was one event, and I just cannot picture what this looks like, but supposedly women dressed as states. What that means, I don’t know. And men as border ruffians. This is about Kansas. But how you dress as Kansas? I don’t know. But here, people are coming dressed related to the slavery fate of the state of Kansas to celebrate Burlingame for standing up to the south.

And he’s amazed by this, he’s fascinated by it and charmed by it. He writes to his wife and says, “It touches my heart, Jenny, to find out, on account of that Brooks affair, the people seem to regard me with tenderness. The whole population of the west seems wild to see your naughty husband because he did not run away from Brooks. The people like such bad men as I am.”

And what’s fascinating about that to me is that, indeed, people were cheering on what would have been deemed by anyone bad behavior. They were thrilled with the fact that he essentially pushed back. He is absolutely right in saying, “The people like a bad man such as myself.” That is what they are cheering on is that he pushed back. He stood up, pushed back, basically said, “Bring it,” and showed up southern bullies.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And took the moment. I will point out that the Southern enslavers represented by Preston Brooks had literally beaten a northern senator almost to death on the floor of the Senate. While Berlingame may have seen himself as a bad behavior guy for saying, “We’re not going to put up with that,” it is one of those moments where there is extraordinary asymmetry between the parties here. And instead of doing, as even Sumner suggested he should do, which is not stoup to their level, he’s finally like, “Oh, come on.” And you can see why people were finally like, “Yes. Thank God somebody is finally going to step up because they almost killed a senator on the floor of the Senate.” It’s such a big deal, we still talk about that. But we have forgotten Anson Burlingame and his role in that.

Joanne Freeman:

And the fact that there were other incidents, not quite as severe, that happened around the same time, so this is part of a big bullying campaign. But the Southerners came away from this understanding that if you are that aggressive in attacking a northerner, it might backfire on you, that northerners might end up loving the person who gets attacked and even potentially stands up for himself. There’s a half joking comment in a Richmond newspaper not long after all of this happens, and it’s pleading with southern senators not to cane, kick or spit on Henry Wilson, another Massachusetts senator, again involved with Brooks, because he seems, quote, “Fatally bent on sparking a fight to ensure his reelection.” There’s a direct link made that if you are a northerner who stands up against these bullies, you’re going to be immensely popular, and you might win elections. That’s fascinating. And particularly in the light of some of what we’re seeing today, it’s that kind of response in the 1850s that came right to mind when I started seeing some of the behavior that we started out by talking about.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The other thing that really jumped out to us was, of course, when FDR does something very similar because when he is running for reelection in 1936, there is huge pushback from those who hated his programs during his first term in office. And his Republican challenger was the governor of Kansas. There’s Kansas again, Alf Landon. And Landon was very critical of social security, which had been signed into law in August of 1935, and even though that was actually quite popular. And Landon was attacking all kinds of the programs that Roosevelt was backing in ’35 and ’36. He was against the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Act, social security, of course, and the Wealth Tax Act. And increasingly, the Republicans were hammering together a coalition of industrialists and newspapers and southern Democrats, even, who didn’t like the more even handed racial aspects of the new deal, although they were not at all even handed, they were better than what had been there in the 1920s. And they were hammering those people together against the idea that, essentially, the programs that FDR was trying to put in place were communistic. They were basically sneaking socialism into America.

And the American newspapers really got behind Landon. Landon got so much support, in fact, that he managed to get the Democratic presidential candidate from 1928 to get behind him. He got Al Smith behind him and a number of what were known at the time is progressive Republicans, especially those in the West like William Borah of Idaho and Hiram Johnson of California actually swung behind Landon. Landon tried to get people behind his candidacy in ’36 in part by working together with companies in Detroit to scare workers about the idea that Roosevelt was basically going to take all their earnings through tax money.

Joanne Freeman:

This is the thing that when I first was reading about it was like, “Holy smoke.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, this was not uncommon. They put messages in people’s pay envelopes. The actual pay envelope said, “Effective January 1937, we are compelled by a Roosevelt new deal law to make a 1% deduction from your wages and turn it over to the government. You might get this money back, but only if Congress decides to make the appropriations for this purpose.”

There’s this huge movement growing against the idea that FDR is a communist, that he is destroying America, that he’s going to take everybody’s money. Landon actually gave a speech in September of 1936 called I Will Not Promise the Moon in which he said, “This is the largest tax bill in history, and to call it social security is a fraud on the working man.” Of course, we know how that’s going to play out.

Roosevelt gave a speech at Madison Square Garden three days before the election that was viewed as a response to Landon’s I Will Not Promise the Moon in which, before he gets on stage, there’s all sorts of rousing songs. He was always really great with the way he handled culture. Rousing songs and speeches. And by the time he gets up, the crowd is whipped up to the point that they give him a standing ovation for 13 minutes before he can get them to calm down.

Heather Cox Richardson:

FDR figures out that rather than trying to say, “Well, that’s actually not the way social security works, and that’s actually not what I’m trying to do here. I don’t think you should worry about that because this is how I’m doing this.” And he calls out Landon and the coalition he has built saying that it’s a coalition of money and media and they had circled the wagons against his programs. And what he does is he turns their opposition on its head by saying, “The fact that they don’t like me, the fact that they distrust me shows that I am doing the right thing.” He said-

President Franklin D. Roosevelt (archival):

For nearly four years now, you have had an administration which, instead of twirling its thumbs, has rolled up its sleeves. And I can assure you that we will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace, business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.

Joanne Freeman:

That is pow. Once again, bring it, bring it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

As a writer, you just have to admire the syllables in this and the way he put it together, and knowing his voice, every one of these syllables are ones, with his accent, they would’ve really rung. It was just really beautifully done.

Joanne Freeman:

And he was deliberate in wanting that speech to be extremely assertive, extremely aggressive. The speech writer, who was working with him on it, Samuel Rosenman, in his memoirs said that Roosevelt had become very indignant at some of the tactics of the Republican leaders in the campaign. “He told us to take off all gloves in the final speech at Madison Square Garden. We did, and if there was a trace of glove left when we got through, the president himself removed it.” They were very assertively wanting to push back aggressively to send that kind of message.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I love that particularly because Roosevelt himself, of course, was a man of great privilege, and yet he took the bant all that had been put on him in his attempt, as he said, to save the system and turned it into his own. And of course, it paid off. Three days after that speech was the election, on November 3rd, 1936, and he won 60% of the popular vote. He had a winning margin of 10 million votes, and he carried every state except Maine and Vermont.

Joanne Freeman:

Wow. That message rings.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, yes it does. And again, the people who had been pushing and pushing and pushing him sadly said, “Oh, politics has gotten so divisive. People are saying mean things to each other.” He finally just stood up. And that’s why we remember that speech.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s the bring it and that’s the emotional response of that election.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We’re in this new moment, and one of the things that I think pointed to this new moment a long time ago was in the 1980s when we got a whole bunch of movies that featured the theme of the underdog finally pushing back against the bullies. And those seem particularly relevant today.

Joanne Freeman:

And there are a couple movies that, if you’re thinking about the ’80s and you’re thinking about what we among ourselves we’re referring to as underdog films, you think of films like, for example, the Karate Kid from 1984, which actually is directed by someone who also directed another very famous underdog film, Rocky.

The story of the Karate Kid is that a young guy named Daniel moves with a single mother from Newark, New Jersey to California, and he ends up being bullied by jocks at his new school. And he ends up befriending a Japanese janitor in his family’s apartment building who agrees to help Daniel learn Marshall Arts so that he can defend himself against the bullies who themselves were karate students at the Cobra Kai Dojo led by an ex Vietnam Special Forces teacher named John Crease.

Daniel and Mr. Miyagi, the Japanese janitor, train. Miyagi shows Daniel how to… And has all of these exercises, which, I’m sure many of you have seen this movie, that seem to have dubious logic behind them. And then when you finally get to the end of the movie, you can see how all of the training absolutely pays off. But Daniel, who’s this underdog-

Heather Cox Richardson:

Wax on, wax off.

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely. That’s exactly what I was thinking of. Wax on wax, wax off.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Wax on, wax off.

Daniel (archival):

Wax on, wax off.

Mr. Miyagi (archival):

Wax on, wax off. Hey, wax on, wax off.

Joanne Freeman:

But here’s this underdog movie where the guy who’s being bullied, the guy’s being attacked, he’s small, he’s a newcomer, these other people are nasty and they’re taught by someone who’s mean and nasty, he learns this special craft and then he goes on to a tournament where he proves himself. And he comes through and he ends up being victorious. I have to step in here and apologize because Newbie, my history parakeet, is chirping in the background, so that’s what you’re hearing if you’re hearing something.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Then the next year, we get a similar movie with Back to the Future. And Back to the Future is another one of those that… such a piece of the 1980s Back to the Future is the story of Marty McFly, a guy who was in high school, played by Michael J. Fox, and he wants to be a popular guitarist at his high school but his family, like that of Daniel in the Karate Kid, is struggling, although in a different way, because there’s this bad character in town known as Biff Tannin played by Thomas Wilson who makes Marty’s father, George, played by Crispin Glover, write his work reports. He’s constantly bullying him, taking advantage of him, harassing George’s wife, who’s also Marty’s mom, played by Leah Thompson.

Marty McFly has a relationship with a mad scientist, Doc Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd. And he has constructed a time machine out of a DeLorean. The story is a little bit complicated. They actually pull it off very well. But Doc has stolen from a group of Libyans in order to complete his time machine in the DeLorean.

Joanne Freeman:

Which I have to say, most people who are thinking about Back to the Future probably do not remember that plot point because I did not before reviewing it for this episode. I was like, “Wait, Libyans?” That was not in my head.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Curiously, that stuck with me. I don’t know why it did. The other funny thing about this is that I have seen DeLoreans I think probably twice on the road since then, and every freaking time I’m like, “Look, look, it’s a time machine.” For those of you who don’t know, the DeLoreans had these weird doors that opened like wings.

Anyway, Marty McFly ends up, by accident, traveling back 30 years to 1955 where his own parents, George McFly and his mother, Lorraine, are just starting their courtship. And of course, he gets into the middle of that. The whole point of this whole story, though, is that in the process of trying to get out of their relationship, because Lorraine thinks he’s cute, is that Marty has to teach his father, in 30 years, his father… This must have been complicated to write as well as to speak about.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s true.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He has to convince him how to stand up for himself. And in a crucial scene in the movie, he has set it up where George is supposed to punch out him, Marty, who is supposed to be pretending to take advantage of Lorraine. Biff Tannin is there instead and George has to stand up to her, and has the very famous line in which George very deliberately has to figure out how to clench his fist. And he clenches his fist and says-

George (archival):

Hey you, get your damn hands off. Oh.

Biff (archival):

I think you got the wrong car, McFly.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which is, of course, this great moment. But the way the movie then plays out is that their lives are completely different. When Marty McFly goes back… or forward in time 30 years, his father is a successful science fiction writer, a man obviously of some wealth, his mother is beautiful and they’re still in love and not fighting any longer, as they were before, and the guy who’s running around working for them, and the guy who’s lower on the totem pole now is Biff Tannin who is constantly trying to get in good with George McFly. By having him stand up for himself, you not only get that emotional moment of, yes, finally, you can look into the future and see how the story plays out very differently.

Joanne Freeman:

A number of years later, 1989, you get Back to the Future Part Two. And in this, Marty goes to the future, Biff is still around, the elderly Biff. He realizes that Marty has been traveling from the past to the future so he manages to sneak back to the past with a 2015 sports almanac that he gives to his younger self who then uses it to gamble and make bets and do any number of other things so that he becomes massively wealthy and ends up taking over Marty’s hometown, turns it into this casino city.

Now, what’s interesting about this is in 2015, screenwriter Bob Gale, who wrote part two, revealed to the Daily Beast that Trump was one of the major inspirations for that second ruthless incarnation of Biff. And this is what Gale said when he was asked about the comparison. He said, “We thought about it when we made the movie. Are you kidding? You watch part two again, and there’s scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office, and there’s a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there’s one moment when Biff stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait.” Yeah. That moment in this movie very much is planted, in some ways, in our present.

But again, playing at the same… The thing that comes back again and again to me as we’re talking here, Heather, is the way in which these comeuppance moments, in one way or another, have such a righteous sort of emotional punch to them that you almost can’t help but cheer, which is the real power of these kinds of underdog stories, that you root for the underdog, and when they finally managed to come forward and get some measure of justice, some part of you thinks, yeah, yeah, this is what should be happening.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I think there’s an important distinction, though. There are a number of movies like this, and the other one that comes to mind, we’ve talked about this in the show before, was Red Dawn. And this all has been associated with the underdog moment in which the US hockey team triumphed over the hockey team from the Soviet Union in 1980. And this is a great underdogs fighting the communists. There’s something really different between those cultural moments and the movies based on them that involved, in the case of Red Dawn, high school kids taking up arms to fight a government and the movies that we’ve just talked about, because in those former ones, especially Red Dawn, those become major recruiting tools for the American military, and they’re really about what I would call a cowboy heroism, an internal heroism for a group of guys who take up guns and take on a government.

These movies that we’re talking about are ones in which individuals fight back because of empathy, because they are protecting somebody weaker than them, or because they are defending a community, as Marty McFly is going to do in the second, I think it is, of the movies. The underdog story is the underdog story forever and always, amen, I’m sure, but how that is used is really different.

And in the case of the moments we’ve identified, FDR, for example, saying, “I’m going to take on big business and the reactionaries in the south to defend you individuals,” or Anson Burlingame going, “Come on, you just beat the crap out of my colleague. I’m going to protect Massachusetts.” The speech was called in Defense of Massachusetts. That’s a different thing, I think, than saying, “Yeah, we’re all going to go fight this empire.”

Joanne Freeman:

Oh no, absolutely. The key is that those actions come after being bullied and unfairly attacked and victimized. That kind of behavior would not at all resonate in the same way without the fact that there’s a history of these people being, in one way or another, emotionally and physically attacked. It’s after that unjust behavior, that unfairness that you know is inherently unfair and you feel the unjustness of it, it’s the fact that these people stand up after that behavior and don’t say, “I’m going to get you in the same way,” but instead say, “You know what? You can’t cross that line with me anymore. I’m going to stand up for myself. I have something to say. I’m going to push back.” That’s what gives it that kind of emotional resonance. There’s a sense of justice or of rightness to it that the person who has been unfairly attacked has a right to at least stand up and push back.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I think the word justice is really important there because it’s not only that they are standing up for themselves, because certainly Preston Brooks would’ve said that’s exactly what he was doing. They’re not really standing up… They are standing up for themselves, but they’re also standing up for fairness and for reality and for the rule of law. They’re not going outside the law to say, “We’re going to win over the guys of the other karate studio.” To the contrary, it’s Daniel who continues to play by the rules, he’s just standing up for that system and for the fairness of that system. And certainly, the same is true of FDR saying, “They’re skewing the system,” or the movies we’ve talked about. Or in the present, somebody like Beto O’Rourke saying, “Come on here, you guys are so far out there. I’m standing here and I will defend, with courage and with power, our system.”

And the reason that I think that matters is because, interestingly enough, the whole concept, and we’ve talked about this year too before, of transitional justice and how you restore the rule of law in a democracy after it has been taken off the rails is by militantly, if you will, defending the system, which sounds bizarre, but the idea that you were saying, “We are going to stand on the law, but we’re going to do it in your face,” that, I think, is what Biden was doing when he said, “These people are a danger to our country. Here’s what our country stands for.” And it’s interesting that he got the pushback he did for that because it really was not unlike somebody saying, “Then you can’t beat up a senator on the floor of Congress. That’s just not okay.”

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely. Precisely. And that’s key, which is throughout this episode we’re talking about the visceral pleasure of seeing people stand up who have been pushed around. But you’re absolutely right, they’re not standing up and behaving in the same way, they are standing up and saying, “Yeah, you’ve been violating rules all over the place. We’re going to call you out on it. I’m going to stand up in front of you as you do it. This is a different moment now. We are here not just following rules, we are here to stand for them. And if that means you’re going to attack me for standing for them, bring it on. I’m not seeking a fight, but if you’re going to bring one to me, I am prepared to fight for the system. I am prepared to fight for the rules.” That’s precisely what we’re seeing now, and that’s, again, going back to the 1850s.

You had northerner after northerner standing up in Congress and saying, “I’m a different kind of northerner than the ones who were here before. I’m going to stand up in front of you southerners. I’m not going to sit down. You do what you feel you need to do. I’m a different northerner, and you’re going to have to deal with me now when you try and break laws and violate rules.” It’s a fine line, but it’s an important line, which is people standing up to the bullies not by bullying them back, but by exposing the bullies for what they are and standing up to them with the rules and with justice on their side.