Heather Cox Richardson:

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

Joanne Freeman:

And I am Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Today, we thought we’d take a look at something that’s all over the news media these days. And that’s critical race theory. Now, one of the things that’s funny about seeing it in as many places as we are seeing it these days is that virtually nobody who is complaining about it is bothering to try to explain what it is.

Joanne Freeman:

And yet, it’s being depicted as this big, horrible threat that demands legislation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Interestingly enough, I actually for fun went onto YouTube to look up how often it was being mentioned and by whom. And what was really interesting to me was how many times it came up from the Fox News Channel, for example, or from many of the right wing pundits.

Tucker Carlson (archival):

All over the country, beginning early last June, school curricula have changed completely and become explicitly political and openly racist. And most parents have just sat there on their hands and watched it happen and watch their kids hurt by it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

There certainly are clips out there from the people who are trying to advance the ideas in it, but they’re few and far between compared to the clips against it, people who are out in school board meetings, screaming about how they don’t want their children to be taught critical race theory, which I have to say always backs me up against a wall because I’m like, have you been in a classroom? Have you been in a classroom?

Joanne Freeman:

It’s like, really? Really? Precisely. On so many levels, this makes no sense what’s happening in a classroom, the fact that somehow, if we talk about something students are instantly indoctrinated, which is the word that’s being thrown around all the time. There are so many levels on which this doesn’t make sense. And that’s really what Heather and I wanted to do in this episode. We want to be good historians here and talk about what critical race theory actually is. Shock gasp, but we’re going to do that. We’re going to talk a little bit about how it fits into how we understand history and American history. And then we’re going to talk a little bit about the debate that’s going on right now today about critical race theory and who’s using it and for what.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. And what it’s really about, what this political moment is really about. So we thought we’d start with a quotation from one of the people who came up with the idea of critical race theory, which is an idea that comes out of the 1970s and the 1980s. And we’ll talk a little bit about where that came from.

Joanne Freeman:

Her name is Kimberlé Crenshaw, and these are her words describing what it is.

Kimberlé Crenshaw (archival):

Critical race theory just says, let’s pay attention to what has happened in this country and how what has happened in this country is continuing to create differential outcomes so we can become that country that we say we are. So critical race theory is not anti-patriotic. In fact, it is more patriotic than those who are opposed to it because we believe in the 13th and the 14th and the 15th Amendment, we believe in the promises of equality. And we know we can’t get there if we can’t confront and talk honestly about inequality.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which hardly sounds wildly radical if you think about it. So the idea of critical race theory comes out of the legal world. The issue that is facing the legal world in the 1970s, and these are legal scholars, by the way, in the 1970s and in the 1980s is the fact that the post-World War II era, the idea that you could promote equality in America through the use of the law becomes pretty well accepted, certainly among lawyers. And they’re faced with a problem in the 1970s and the 1980s that although the law has changed to become on paper much more equal, in fact, that didn’t really address the profound inequalities in American society. So legal scholars.

Now mind you, this is not fifth grade and it’s not 12th grade and it’s not sophomores in college, these are legal scholars begin to look at what’s happening in America and thinking well, but maybe the issue is the way that we handle the law. And they begin to look at the fact that there are a lot of issues in American society that fall through the cracks of the law.

And so many of the people who start developing critical race theory also develop another theory, which actually to me is much more interesting. And that’s the theory of intersectionality. And all those fancy words mean is that the legal system does not necessarily address the problems of inequality in society, because what it tries to do is it tries to address equality and freedom for individuals, when in fact there are systems in America that discriminate against one group or another or groups that are put together. So for example, if you are a black woman, for example, working in a factory where there are other black men working and there are white women working, but the guy who runs the place really hates black women, you fall through the cracks because where are you going to go to the law to remedy that sort of a situation? Both Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw write a lot about these types of sneaky discrimination.

And one of the examples that really jumps out is an article that Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote in 1989, in which she talked about demarginalizing the intersection, that is taking the place where different types of discrimination come together, the intersections, if you will. And she does that by taking a look at discrimination claims made by women who are suing major corporations, because while they are protected from race-based discrimination and from gender-based discrimination, they’re not protected against the combination of those two things.

So what she’s looking at in that particular article is a case that came up in 1976, a case called DeGraffenreid v. General Motors. And in that case, five black women sued GM for a seniority policy that they insisted made it virtually impossible for them to be promoted. But the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri ruled that since women had been promoted in GM and since black men had been promoted at GM, the plaintiffs couldn’t claim discrimination, although black women were not being promoted. In that decision, Judge Wangelin said, “The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.”

So what he’s ultimately arguing is that we can have protection for individuals who fall into certain categories, but not for any kind of protection across the intersection of those different biases, the intersectionality of those different biases. It’s a really important concept that takes a look at the reality of people’s lived lives as opposed to legal systems that run in highways, if you will. It takes a look at the fact that people’s lives often cross highways, and they’re not in those larger highways, if you will.

Critical race theory and intersectionality usually focus on exactly those types of situations, where the law is inadequate to address on the ground racism and on the ground discrimination. And the reality is that that’s where most of us, especially most women who are facing discrimination live. So all the critical race theory is doing is to say, we have systemic problems within the legal system that are not answered by simply saying, we have to make everybody good little individualists.

And the thing that always jumps out to me about critical race theory is that for historians, I mean, we were on top of the fact that our legal system and all of our systems in America have been shaped by racial, gender and class biases since, like people point to 1619, but you could also point to 1607 when people found Jamestown. But let’s even go back further because you have to start from the very beginning of Europeans arriving on the North and South American continents.

Joanne Freeman:

But this is the key to this, to what Heather just said is critical race theory is about structures. It’s not saying, as many people are accusing it of saying, all white people are racist. It’s not about individual white people. It’s about structures, legal structures, institutional structures, and the fact that some racism is built into them and we need to acknowledge that and we need to wrestle with that. And as Heather said, that’s hardly a shocking thing to say, but people aren’t talking about what this is. They’re using critical race theory as a kind of weapon. And the fuzziness of it and the fuzziness of how people are using it is key. So they don’t really want to do what Heather and I are doing here, which is get to the specifics of what it does and what it doesn’t do.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is a theory that’s developed by legal scholars to critique the way the American systems run first in the legal world and then people start to pick it up and think about other systems in America that are not neutral, that are not absolutely neutral. But as the idea of critical race theory has gotten really weaponized in the last year, a number of state legislatures and a number of state boards of education have expanded what they consider the ideas that are in critical race theory to try and limit what people can teach. I think there’s 21 states who have either passed or introduced legislation to determine what people can actually teach in a classroom.

And their language, the language of all these bills largely comes from the executive order that Former President Trump issued to establish the 1776 Commission. If we’re just going to look at one of them, I mean, Texas is a great example of this. So this bill in front of the Texas Legislature doesn’t actually include the phrase critical race theory, but it reaches for a bunch of provisions that indicate that it’s clearly addressing the way people are throwing around that idea of critical race theory.

So for example, the bill says that teachers can’t teach anything that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex, including the concept that an individual by virtue of the individual’s race or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously. It also goes on to say that teachers can’t teach anything that endorses the concept that the advent of slavery in the territory that is now the United States constituted the true founding of the United States, or with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from betrayals of or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.

Joanne Freeman:

The Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, just recently said just what you’re saying there, Heather, which is.

Ron DeSantis (archival):

I mean, they will attack cops with this type of ideology in schools. And meanwhile, they have like 87% of the kids that aren’t even literate in some of these schools. I mean, so it shows you, they’re not trying to educate, they’re trying to indoctrinate. We’re not going to let that come to Florida.

Joanne Freeman:

Some of what we’re talking about here, Heather, and we’ve hinted at it. It’s like a string of things is guaranteed to make a historian’s head blow up, right? It’s like talking about something that no one’s going to define, making broad sweeping claims that are going to keep teachers or at least intimidate teachers into being hyper concerned about anything that they might say having to do with race. Just the most basic premise of all. You and I as historians, if we’re teaching American history, race is part of it, slavery is part of it. We’re being put in a place where just to avoid getting in legal trouble, we have to think about how we’re discussing it. I mean, yeah, my historian brain is exploding because think about the ways in which that closes down teaching, closes down the ability to just talk about different ideas, to talk about American history, to add things into it that maybe students don’t have.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s invented I think in part because of the particular moment we’re in. And that’s that if you think about the moment that people start talking about critical race theory, one of the things that grows out of is the 1619 Project that the New York Times Magazine begins to run an August of 2019. And what that does is it’s a project that’s begun by a journalist and argues that the true founding of America should be centered on the year 1619, which was the year that Africans come into the colonies, into the English colonies on the North American continent for the first time. And I think actually, they’re brought by pirates as I recall. I always love to work pirates in whenever I can. But they will-

Joanne Freeman:

Get away with it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

There were some issues with the 1619 Project. And in some ways, the original authors backed off from some of their claims. And there was quite a bit of debate in the historical community over the author’s research methods and especially about their claims.

Joanne Freeman:

There was one claim in particular that really got a lot of historians riled up. And that was the claim that the American Revolution was largely inspired by the fact that colonists wanted to protect the institution of slavery. A number of historians stepped forward, particularly protesting against that claim, claiming that it simply wasn’t true. There was a group of historians that published a critical letter in the New York Times. There were a number of other media outlets that talked about this as well. There were some other historians who stepped forward and at least discuss the fact that there were some inaccuracy to that. And in the end, the New York Times backtracked just a little bit to say that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for some of the colonists. So there was a response to the historians, but still centering slavery and African-American history in the American narrative, as you can see, immediately raised big questions.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So this type of historical scholarship is certainly messy and it is imperfect, but clearly, there’s also an opportunity here to wrestle in a really useful way with big questions, the questions of race, for example, and of perspective. And of course, that project became all the more significant after the events of last summer. We have the protests over the murder of George Floyd beginning in May of 2020. And then we have the Former President Donald Trump beginning to weaponize the idea of America being this great exceptional country. And so he puts together his own commission called the 1776 Commission that’s designed to write its own American curriculum and its own American history.

And one of the things that’s really astonishing about the 1776 curriculum is that it says this. It actually says that America is founded in principles from which we have not deviated, just principles of equality before the law. And we have never deviated from that, except when bad actors, if you will, do something bad. And then the good people in America put those bad actions down. So what it does is it takes the idea of the 1619 Project, which says that everything is based on race and says, no, no, no, no, race is simply not an issue in this country.

Joanne Freeman:

But the fact of the matter is as historians, nevermind as Americans, there are a lot of reasons why we and many, many, many others can see the really fundamental problems here.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes. And I’m probably a good person to be talking about this. I like to keep my categories pretty clear. So I’m like, here’s critical race theory. It’s a legal theory. And it’s an important legal theory. It is however, a legal theory that mirrors things that historians have been absolutely all over since 1940, because you can’t do things like look at virtually any aspect of American history and not notice that white people end up on top. But I think t’s probably important to talk about the fact that history is not simply a list of facts, this happened, this happened, this happened. What historians do is they try to make sense of the patterns of the past so that they can make predictions about how the future is going to work and so we can understand how societies change. So the idea that there’s this theory out there is not news. The critical race theory is one theory, but then there’s, we could sit here for the rest of the night and talk about different theories about the way the world works.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. So someone on social media asked me, how can you have a theory about history? Which I thought was a really good question along the lines, Heather, of what you’re saying here, which is yes, there are historical facts, but we think about the facts in different ways, we ask different questions, we have different biases and assumptions. When we ask the questions, conversations happen, people comment to each other. So that at the same time that we can certainly say, yeah, sure, there’s historical facts. The way we think about those facts and the way we frame them and the way we deal with them as historians can change dramatically over time. And in a sense, it’s like a huge conversation, aloud conversation often with people yelling at each other, but still.

I remember bumping up against this when I was just beginning teaching at Yale. And one of the things they really wanted me to do is teach a big American Revolution course. And so I’m beginning to lecture and I had been talking in a general way, and then I began to move into actual events. And I’m writing a lecture about the Boston Massacre. And I suddenly realize, what do I actually think about the Boston Massacre? Not what happened, but what do I think and what version of it? How do I want to frame it for my students? Because the students kept asking, but wait, I thought that everyone says this, so why are you saying that? Aren’t there facts to be memorized? So they and I were confronting at the same time the idea that any time you’re talking about history, it’s being framed in some way or another by how you yourself are thinking.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So are you saying that the central question when you wrote that lecture was, so what? Sorry, I just had to do that.

Joanne Freeman:

You did have to.

Heather Cox Richardson:

God, you got into that and I’m like, oh my gosh, she’s teeing this up.

Joanne Freeman:

Who cares, Heather? Yeah, it’s totally true.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But when you think about it then, if you think about what we do as historians, histories do different things. And the stories we tell do different things. And I always point back in this minute and I’ll say why to that very famous story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and saying, oh, father, I cannot tell a lie, which is written by Mason Weems, Parson Weems in like, I don’t know, about the time of Genesis, right?

Joanne Freeman:

Come on. That’s my time period, Heather.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s all back there. So early on Joanne, the earliest histories of America are really not set up to be histories at all.

Joanne Freeman:

No. Absolutely. And that’s history itself over time becomes more interested, I guess, in what we now assume some kind of objectivity. Initially, a lot of what was being done, particularly with biographies was people writing these biographies of these sort of founder folk were setting up moral lessons. They were trying to write things that would show Americans what a virtuous American would be like. And not surprisingly, George Washington led that parade.

Parson Weems is the person who writes this early biography of Washington. And in that biography is in a sense maybe the most famous story about Washington that people know. And they don’t realize that it comes from a biography written in, I don’t know, 1806. It’s the story about Washington and the cherry tree. And he chops down the cherry tree with his little ax and his father asks if he did it. And there’s some version of, father, I cannot tell a lie. I did it. I chopped down the cherry tree. And that is this famous story about how Washington is the man who cannot tell a lie. That was a kind of little moral lesson that a lot of biographies were aimed at doing in this period. And that was what biography and history did at that particular moment.

I mean, there’s a really fascinating early biography of Aaron Burr, which was not really a moral lesson, as a matter of fact. I believe his name is James Parton, a biographer of Burr. And he’s traveling along, trying to explain what Burr is doing. The fascinating part of it is towards the end. He has a chapter. And what he essentially says is, you know what? I’m trying something new here. I interviewed people who knew Burr, see what they thought of him. And he doesn’t know what to do with that information. And so there’s a final chapter in the biography where he’s like, “Oh, here’s another story people told me.” So he isn’t quite sure what to do, but he’s doing a thing that, of course, now we take for granted as part of history or part of biography. People are figuring out what history is, what biography is and what kinds of messages, particularly in this early period need to be sent to Americans because the country is so new.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Joanne, would you say that this whole attempt on the part, especially of the right and maybe on the left as well to determine what our history looks like is a way to teach people how to be Americans or certain kinds of Americans? Is that fair?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, yeah. I mean, the way I tend to think of it, I’ll be interested to hear what you say about it, but I see clusters of people who have very distinctive views about what they think the United States is, that include politics, that include culture that are multi-dimensional, and whatever they’re doing in their politics is in sync with that general idea about this is what America is. So yeah, I think that people thinking about history, talking about history, deciding what history needs to be taught, in one way or another, they’re sketching out what they want America to be. When I say that as a historian, do you think you’re crazy, Joanne? Or do you have some other way of conceiving of what people are doing in the way that they’re teaching history?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I was really just asking, because listening to you, I mean, I just heard that. And some of the things that we’ve been hearing lately about, for example, patriotic education, or we have to learn that America is the greatest nation on earth. All of those things are, when I have taught Parson Weems in the past, I was interested in one of my students who had lived in South Korea said, “Wow, this really hit me how much this sounded like some of the propaganda coming out of North Korea.” And I thought that was really interesting. And I didn’t feel personally involved in it because it came from whenever Parson Weems wrote back in, what was it like?

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s what it was, in a sense was moralistic, I guess you could say propaganda, it was a moralistic track. It wasn’t trying to present absolute fact.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But as a historian nowadays, I don’t think that’s what history is supposed to do at all.

Joanne Freeman:

No. No.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So to now hear those parallels I find somewhat, not somewhat, I find quite disturbing actually.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes. That’s among the many things that make me want to bang my head against the wall, but yes, it’s a very narrow frame. These are the things we think are important. And we will tell you the things we think are important. It’s not till the 20th century, actually lateish 20th century that for example, you get historians saying, you know what? It’s not just eight elite guys in a room doing things, the general masses of humankind matter. That takes a long time to work its way into the conversation. All of these things that you and I are talking about are similar in a sense to critical race theory in the sense that they represent in that particular moment how people were struggling with history and trying to understand it and trying to understand America’s past in relation to its present.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, that’s what one of the interesting things about the voices that matter, because in fact, we did have historians who were not elite white men. And nowadays, most people have never heard of most of them because they never got the kind of traction that some of the influential white historians like George Bancroft did. So there is this longer history of a number of different kinds of history in America that simply have been read out of the record.

So for example, one of my favorite early historians is a man named George Washington Williams, who was an early black historian. When he was 14, he actually ran away from his home in Pennsylvania to fight for the Union during the Civil War. And then after the war, he’s ordained as a minister and then he’s elected to the Ohio State Legislature in 1879. And then in that period, he becomes interested in the way that African-Americans have lived and what they have done in America.

And in 1882, he publishes this book, is called The History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. And it’s actually a very, very fine piece of work. In that, he describes why he does what he’s done, why he has gone ahead and written this history. And he says, I was requested to deliver an oration on the 4th of July, 1876 at Avondale, Ohio. It being the 100th birthday of the American Republic, I determined to prepare an oration on the American Negro. I had once began an investigation of the records of the nation to secure material for the oration. I was surprised and delighted to find that the historical memorials of the Negro were so abundant and so creditable to him. I pronounced my oration. And the warm and generous manner, which it was received both by those who listened to it and by others who subsequently read it in pamphlet form encouraged me to devote what leisure time I might have to a further study of the subject.

Then he went on to talk about why it was important for him to have undertaken this idea of writing a history of black Americans, but also why he thought it was important to be objective in it. He said, “Not as a blind panegyrist of my race nor as a partisan apologist, but from a love for the truth of history, I have striven to record the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I have not striven to revive sectional animosities or race prejudices. I have avoided comments so far as it was consistent with a clear exposition of the truth. My whole aim has been to write a thoroughly trustworthy history. And what I have written, if it have no other merit, is reliable.”

So the book was actually received pretty well when it came out in the early 1880s. And it really seemed like it was going to stand as a major historical achievement in the country. And about six years later, Williams published a second historical volume in which he took a look at black troops during the American Civil War, which again, people thought was a really good book. And yet he’s going to die shortly after that. And yet that book really doesn’t get the kind of traction that for example, Frederick Jackson Turner is going to get in 1893 when he proceeds to give a vision of America that’s a very exceptional country and Frederick Jackson Turner’s vision of the country is really that of white Americans. That’s what really manages to take off.

George Washington Williams himself doesn’t actually get a lot of attention from the 20th century historical community until John Hope Franklin, a phenomenal black historian in his own right, writes a biography of George Washington Williams. And what’s interesting about that is Williams is loyalty to the truth, to the historical truth is one that rings absolutely through all of John Hope Franklin’s own work. And Franklin himself is an interesting character because his father was present at the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. And John Hope himself wrote an account of what it was like to be a boy, knowing that your father was at that race massacre.

John Hope Franklin eventually taking a spot as one of the great heroes in our historic pantheon, if you will, is that when we talk today about American history and the legacy of American historians, and there are people out there saying that American history has belonged to and been written by white people, in fact, we also have a strong history of black historians writing about African-American history, and yet they are somehow now seen as interlopers, when in fact, it was really just that they never got the oxygen that people like George Bancroft or Frederick Jackson Turner did. So the recovery of those stories as central to what it means to be an American is not only part of our tradition, it’s really long overdue a way to get back to where we should have been all along.

Joanne Freeman:

And that the striking thing about Franklin, particularly given the conversation that we’re having today, is that late in his career, when he looked back at the early part of his career, he said that what he saw as his challenge and goal was to weave into the fabric of American history the presence of black, so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly, which we’re still talking about in this very discussion we’re having here, Heather. He declared that as his goal early on, and yet really had to fight his way and push his way into the prominence he ultimately gained. To me, the most striking thing about him is early on in his career before he becomes a scholar, he tries with the Navy Department and the War Department to get a variety of different positions. And in one way or another, he’s told repeatedly, essentially that he’s the wrong color. And what a journey from that point to ultimately towards the end of his career, winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that you can win in the United States.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Why should we privilege white historians over George Washington Williamson and John Hope Franklin? What does losing them do to our understanding of American history?

Joanne Freeman:

We’ve got more to talk about here, but before we do, we’re going to take a break and we’ll be right back. When we think about each episode, at some early point, when we’re trying to figure out what we’re doing and we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to do it, there’s always a point where we start with the obvious contenders and people and points. And there’s an early point at which basically we don’t ask this question explicitly, but we do in one way or another, what other voices and stories need to be here? That’s a big part of what we’re doing just to understand something more deeply than on a superficial level. So that’s just good history. And what you’re describing here is people whose voices and stories were not being allowed into the mainstream conversation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And as a result, we are not getting a full picture of what it means to be an American. We’re not getting a full picture of America unless you include those voices, which is interesting because if you look at some of the requirements now coming out of school boards about critical race theory is they’re saying, we really can’t privilege any race over another. And what’s interesting is they think they’re attacking the idea of black history in that case. But if in fact, we’re not going to privilege one history over another, what that really means is for a fundamental rewriting of our curriculum in such a way that it is far more inclusive and probably far more interesting, actually.

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s true. Actually, I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But what was interesting, one of the things that really jumped out at me about this whole fight over critical race theory is before this, the big fight was over Howard Zinn and Howard Zinn’s a People’s History of the United States, which he publishes in 1980. And there was a big fight about that when it came out. And we can talk more about that. But one of the things that jumped out to me about Howard Zinn’s book is that people on the right kept saying that this is all academics teach, all they teach is Howard Zinn. And if you actually read Howard Zinn’s a People’s History of the United States, he literally says in the introduction, this is not a standalone book, but this should be read in companion with the other histories of America, this is the untold story. The idea that Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States was somehow sweeping the universe and changing the way we looked at everything, it was never intended to do that.

Joanne Freeman:

And it wasn’t being used that way for the most part. That’s the other thing. It was an in a different example, but another invented, oh my gosh, it’s taking over the universe. That’s all they’re teaching. They’re indoctrinating our students. And that wasn’t happening.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But anyway, I wanted to mention Zinn because that’s the way people talked about in the past, that Zinn was the one who was going to be destroying American history. But when I was thinking about this, it made me reach back to the idea that this is a specific kind of cultural fight. And I want to talk more about what that means economically in this minute, but when I hear cultural fight, I just feel certain that you’re going to write the Federalists or the Jeffersonians or some of those horrible Thomas Jefferson people all over it.

Joanne Freeman:

I was waiting for you to work hatred of Thomas Jefferson came to the sentence. And you did not let me down. I knew it was coming. But I do want to talk briefly about culture as a political weapon because we are living through an example of how powerful that can be. And there’s a very logical strategy to people who deploy culture that way. And indeed, I am taking us back to the Federalists, I’m taking us back in time to the late 18th century, but what’s striking, and the early 19th century is there you have a conservative party, the Federalist Party that, conservative by their standards, that is losing power. And it’s clear that demographically, the people are not moving in their direction, the American nation is becoming more democratic. And the Federalist aren’t really excited about that.

So their strategy, and they pretty much explicitly do this, is to grab control by going to the courts and by grabbing culture, by trying to put the right kinds of people in positions as president of universities. So in essence, they’re using culture as a way to, and I’m not going to use the word indoctrinate, but to get people thinking the right way with the assumption being that if they can, through the law and through culture, get people thinking “correctly”, then down the road, things are going to shift and they’ll be able to slide on back into power.

So what we’re talking about in this early period is a political party, losing power, aware that the demographics are working against them, finding ways to deploy culture to try and get Americans to think about America in the way they want them to with the hope that in the future, they will just vote Federalists. So culture can do that in all kinds of powerful ways. And in a sense, that’s what we’re going through now. I mean, people use the phrase culture war. And that is in a sense what it is. I also think so many of the ways in which people describe what we’re going through right now kind of buzzwords. So culture war ends up feeling that it’s more structured than it necessarily is. I mean, when I use that term, I’m really thinking about people using culture as a weapon to rule things out of conversation, to insist that things are discussed only a certain way in conversation. And that’s what we’re seeing now regarding race.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I have to ask, when one is starting a culture war in the early 19th century, this is when you’re talking about the early 19th century, what did that look like?

Joanne Freeman:

I have a great example. I had an undergraduate do his senior essay, and he found student notebooks who were taking class at Yale in the early 19th century. And the notes are from a class. And these students in their notebooks, the professor will say, okay, suppose that the president of the United States, so at the time is Thomas Jefferson, suppose that the president of the United States is a French loving anarchist. And then he proceeds from there. Now the course isn’t about politics, but every example that this professor brings up has to do with depicting Jefferson as this horrible, evil fiendish figure. And all of the logic of the class has to do with grappling with that. So Yale students, that’s what they get at Yale is well, we all know that Jefferson is an anarchic, French loving, crazy person who’s going to steal religion. So starting from that point, and that’s just one example of one class at one university.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So basically, they were using that sort of cultural construction as a way to undercut Jefferson and his people.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. And to make whatever Jefferson was doing seem dangerous and scary so that even though some people might say, yeah, but he’s more open to democracy, you would say, well, no, actually he’s stealing your religion and he is an anarchist and he likes the French Revolution and et cetera, et cetera. So if you can get people to believe that image, that’s a pretty powerful thing to do.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Let’s throw this up the chain here, because I do like the idea of juxtaposing it with the Federalists people talking about, well, if you had an anarchist and then to say, when first confronted with the Biden administration and its attempt to pass the American Rescue Plan, the Republicans responded not by grappling with policy, but rather by throwing all kinds of cultural stuff at us.

Joanne Freeman:

And cultural stuff as a weapon, that’s about feelings and fear and the sorts of things that grab you and don’t need a lot of logic to have power. What it feels like to me at this particular moment, this sort of cultural warfare moment, we see people that are upset that Mr. Potato Head will not be Mr. Potato Head, it’ll be a gender-friendly Potato Head, or that the people who published the Seuss estate, I believe, decided to stop publishing certain Dr. Seuss books that have offensive depictions of people of various cultures and races in them.

Those are things that have been cried out as horrible, they’re taking away our culture, they’re changing America, ignoring the fact that in the case of Dr. Seuss, it’s the Dr. Seuss people. It’s not they meaning evil people on the left who are taking over our culture had nothing to do with it. But Mr. Potato Head, Dr. Seuss, all of these weird things, it feels to me, the dynamic of it, it feels to me that they’re just tossing everything to see what will stick. I call this the spaghetti against the wall theory of culture war, which is let’s just keep throwing things, something’s going to stick to the wall sooner or later. And actually, I believe now we’ve discovered it’s critical race theory, but in one way or another, it’s an attempt to find the magical issue that isn’t really an issue, but that they can make enough of an issue of to really get fires burning and get people riled up.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And in this particular moment, critical race theory seems to be doing that in a way that Dr. Seuss and the Potato Head kin didn’t manage to do.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. Well, and the silly thing about that is, at those various moments, this is where we are. Some part of me was like, good, Dr. Seuss didn’t take hold because it’s ridiculous. Good, Mr. Potato Head has passed on by, like excellent. And these things make no sense. There was such a sense of, excellent, that’s another piece of spaghetti that didn’t stick, kind of a sense of relief on my part.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Whereas it sent me scurrying to figure out how toy companies decide when to gender toys and when not to gender toys.

Joanne Freeman:

Because this is you, Heather. I’m emotionally like, good, it’s passing. And you’re like, well, let me look up how toys get gendered.

Heather Cox Richardson:

How toys get gendered. That’s right. And did you know that the Potato Head family was originally, you simply bought the little plastic things and you stuck them into an actual potato?

Joanne Freeman:

I did not. I had this sort of the plastic Mr. Potato Head and I don’t even remember. So here’s the great impact. I don’t know which Potato Head I had. I don’t know if it was a potato with a mustache or I don’t know, but I did not know that the origin of that was an actual potato is another fact that Now & Then is allowing me to walk away with. There’s an actual potato.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And you can take that to the bank. So you do have to wonder how we got to a point where our political discussion is about Mr. Potato Head and the cancellation of Dr. Seuss. And one of the routes to that comes from actually California with during the time of the rise of Ronald Reagan. And if you think about what California was doing at that time, there’s a big push among people like Chicanos to open up what our history is going to look like. And one of the complaints about that is that’s going to replace a sort of white or Western canon. And one of the key players in that was actually William Bennett, if you remember him. He was president Reagan’s Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988. And he was a huge critic of people like Howard Zinn, and the idea of expanding the teaching of history to include marginalized voices, in part because he believed that it was somehow a bastardization of the concept of civilization or an abandonment of the Western canon.

And nowhere was his opposition to changes in the curriculum more on display than it was in 1988, when he actually went to war with Stanford, when the school decided to cut some of the requirements for their Western Civ courses, and replace them with courses that were more inclusive of the voices of women and people of color. And he said those forces were ignorance, irrationality and intimidation. Modern universities came into being to oppose the idea that some ignorant people who were irrational had intimidated greater minds into doing their bidding.

William Bennett (archival):

Right from the beginning, this was an assault on Western culture and Western Civilization. And if you look at the Stanford newspaper, editorials and other things, you will see that over this period of time, there were many editorials saying Western culture is sexist, racist, imperialistic, and so on. All sorts of things written out of ignorance.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the very existence of that argument on his part was really a way, it was a political argument, of course, but it was also an extraordinary denigration of the idea that women and people of color could actually produce ideas and art and history and politics that are actually we’re studying. And again, I think if you follow that through the idea of equality suggests that that there really shouldn’t be a hierarchy where you say certain voices are welcome and other voices are not solely on the basis of their race, gender ability, class and so on. Well, I’m interested in Bennett in that period because, of course, he was upset about Stanford getting rid of the Western Civ class, the freshmen Western Civilization class. But I’ve always wondered to what degree what people are reacting to in the 1980s across the nation is the Chicano Movement, which I find an absolutely fascinating movement because it’s one of the many civil rights movements of that era, but it has a really different intellectual foundation than most of the others.

Joanne Freeman:

In what way?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it draws from the idea that the self-identified Chicanos in that period see themselves as inheriting a history and a culture from the land, the La Raza, the race La Raza. They point out the fact that the land on which they are sitting in Los Angeles and in Southwestern America was in fact part of Mexico until 1848. So when they are being taught American history or taught in schools at all, as if America had nothing to do with the lives of people like them, they can quite literally point to recent history within the last 120 years in which that part of the continent had been part of a different country and the border had moved over them. So they wanted to see their history reflected in American history in their schools, which is really a no-brainer if you think about it, but it ends up creating this huge crisis in Los Angeles school system.

One of the things is blamed for the extraordinary rate of high school dropouts among Mexican-Americans, for example, which is incredibly high in Eastern Los Angeles, there was just a staggering drop out rate. It’s like 57% at Garfield High School. And the other schools weren’t that much lower than that. And the graduates from the schools were graduating without much of an education at all. They had like the equivalent to about an eighth grade white student. There was just a sense that the educational system was not adequately serving the people who were in the schools. And one of the ways to address that, of course, was to teach history that actually involved their lives and accurately reflected the history of that region.

And so when they started the civil rights movement on the part of the Chicanos, they actually begin from the idea of how you teach, how you teach history. And in 1968, about 15,000 Mexican American high schoolers walked out of their high school to protest the way they were being taught. These things become known as blowouts. And one of the guys who starts leading the blowouts is a teacher named Sal Castro. And he had actually been an organizer for JFK, and he managed to get a meeting between the organizers and Bobby Kennedy, Robert Kennedy at LAX in March of 1968. And Kennedy actually poses, Bobby Kennedy actually poses with the student leaders for a photograph. And Kennedy goes on to send a telegram then to Castro. The telegram reads, I support fully and wholeheartedly your proposal and efforts to obtain better education for Mexican Americans. Viva la Raza. And what that does is it brings the whole idea of changing the curriculum, changing the way schools are taught into the main stream, and it legitimizes the movement.

Joanne Freeman:

So there, you’re looking at another moment that has so many interesting echoes to the current moment. It’s a reminder about how the many ways in which, and again, not shocking to say this, but when you’re talking about education and you’re talking about people’s understanding of the nation, you’re talking about their understanding of themselves as well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s about representation, but it’s also about money. And this is one of the places that movements like this attempt to address the real deficiencies of the Los Angeles school system for Mexican Americans in the 1960s and the 1970s tends to run a ground because they begin to ask or to demand bilingual education in the schools, they begin to call for more inclusion of cultural traditions, they want to change textbooks so that they include the Mexican experience and the Mexican American experience. And they also call for teachers to live in the neighborhoods that they’re teaching, they’re really calling for a reworking of the way students are being taught.

And it’s a way that, again, looks like it makes sense, but I wonder if the whole point of critical race theory, of course, is to critique the idea that a law that protects individualism, a legal system that protects the individual is under critique beginning in the 1980s and into the 1990s, because in fact, it is pretty clear that protecting individualism alone in American society is not going to achieve any kind of equal or equitable outcomes. And really, if you think about it, the whole Reagan Project was the idea of protecting individualism. So by actually saying, wait a minute, protecting just the individual’s right to do something, the individual’s ability to do something, the individual’s equality, that’s really not going to do the trick is inherently an attack on that whole Republican projects since Reagan.

So it’s interesting to me that it starts with Bennett and we are now at this moment where the idea where legal scholars are saying, hey, wait a minute, obviously, we’ve got a problem here. And they’re putting it down to the legal system that protects individualism. It seems to me that that’s a much larger critique of what has been really the controlling impulse in American society since Reagan.

Joanne Freeman:

So when I think about it, if you think about critical race theory, and it seems to me, people who are protesting against it, they’re angry about three things. They’re angry about criticism, they’re angry about race, and they’re angry about theory. So the criticism, the critical part of it, they’re angry about criticism, making critical commentary on the American narrative in some way. Obviously, the people who are protesting against this are angry about discussion of race in many, many different ways. And theory is very unpopular with the same group of people, because it seems elitist, it seems like something that people in the ivory tower do, and it doesn’t seem related to what I assume many people would consider to be real history. If you consider that, take that together, you can see why a certain kind of person is not going to get very excited about critical race theory.

Those are going to be things that seem threatening, and again, will lead people to assume, if you want to say that slavery is built in or that racism is built into American systems of government, we have to confront that, are you then saying that the United States is a bad place, it’s a racist place and we are all racist? It’s not what it’s seeing, but that’s the train of logic. And that’s a powerful message. And to get back to where we started here, that’s a message that can be weaponized really effectively and grab people by their fears and feelings. And once you’ve grabbed people in that way, you can hang on to that for a while.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, the thing that gets me about this is I literally sit around sometimes and think, how would you teach American history without teaching about race, sex, class, gender ableism? I mean, I literally do not know how you would do it. So take Texas for example, where Texas is talking about the 1836 Project and emphasizing patriotic education for Texas and talking about what a great state Texas is, which I’m actually very fond of Texas history. I could tell you more about Texas history than anybody wants to know for, unless maybe you live in Texas because of all kinds of weird quirks about Texas that are very much like Maine. So I always think of those two states together. I know. Don’t even start me. We should do a show on our weird quirks.

But what’s interesting about that is the Texas Revolution, which looms huge in Texas history and in the way Texas history is thought about from really 1836 on, and it goes through the 19th century when people are writing histories of Texas and writing histories of the West, they point to the Alamo and they point to what they consider this great bravery of these white largely Southerners who go out to declare that they’re going to fight for Texas independence, but, of course, what they’re doing when they’re fighting for Texas independence is fighting for the continuation of their ability to enslave other people. I mean, the Texas Revolution is fought not simply by white Southerners, which are the ones who tend to show up in the history, but also by Mexicans who are opposed to what was at the time the government of Mexico. And they are organized together to go ahead and push back against that government of Mexico, because it has outlawed the enslavement of human beings. So how you can talk about the 1836 Project as this sort of great all inclusive racial moment is-

Joanne Freeman:

Right. It’s like the ultimate historian revenge in a way, because if you’re bragging, we’re just going to use primary documents, we’re going to use actual documents from the time to show you really what Texas is. The historian response can be, okay, you do that. Have we got documents for you? If you’re going to take that approach, there’s a lot of documents that tell a different story that’s not a pure approach, that’s not an escape route, that’s not an exit lane from history is just opening a different door for people to step forward and say, well, here’s some more evidence. Let’s talk about this part of the history too.

And I think about this a lot as someone who teaches the founding period among other things, and that’s another thing that people want to protect, founders are demigods and you can’t say bad things about the founders. And if you do, then you’re not being patriotic. You fundamentally can’t understand what, and there is no one founder, but you can’t understand what that generation of people were struggling with and trying to do if you don’t understand all of the ways in which what they were doing didn’t make sense, contradicted, came with some bad outcomes. If you ask them, I was talking about this this morning with someone else, because, of course, this is what you do in your spare time.

But I was talking about the fact that in his old age, when people went to John Adams and said, “You guys, like you magical guys, you founders tell us about the magic of the founding.” And Adams would say, “We didn’t know what we were doing. And we didn’t always like what we were doing. And I sat in the Second Continental Congress and watch people sign the Declaration of Independence. And there were a lot of really unhappy faces there.”

So the fact of the matter is there is no magical founding. And to assume that there is that, actually strips away the actual process of struggling to come up with something. And the ways in which it does or doesn’t mesh with what we now want the United States to be. So that’s a roundabout way of saying you can’t tell the story of America without including the struggle and the problems and the clashes, because the victories don’t mean anything if you strip away all of the ways in which they were being contested and held back. It’s the conflict that defines the nation.