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’s episode is inspired by events that have been unfolding in Tennessee and as we’ll discuss in a moment, this one event somehow bound together so many different topics that are all significant at this moment and that deserve to be talked about. And we’re talking of course, about the expulsion of two members of the Tennessee legislature and the third member, two black men who were expelled, a white woman who was not, by I believe one vote. This event in Tennessee involves, for one thing, protests against gun violence. In one way or another it involves race to black men, expelled, white woman not. And because we’ll be talking about expulsion of representative members of a legislative body, it has to do with democracy itself. As many of you know, in late March, a shooter opened fire at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, killing six people.

And in the wake of that mass shooting, these three Democratic lawmakers took to the floor of the Republican controlled Tennessee House chamber to rally for gun safety measures. And these lawmakers were Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, and Gloria Johnson. On March 30th, they took part in a larger protest, including hundreds of students, parents and teachers that brought legislative business to a halt for about an hour. Jones and Pearson, two of the youngest black lawmakers in the legislature used a megaphone to address the protestors who crowded around the chamber’s viewing platform. Pearson said, “We don’t want to be up here, but we have no choice but to find a way to disrupt business as normal because business as normal is our children dying.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Just to be clear here in the state of Tennessee, the idea of gun safety measures is overwhelmingly popular. And the democratic members of the house were trying to introduce legislation to introduce some of those gun safety measures, and they were not able to get those measures even taken up because of the way that the Republicans had cracked, and then later packed, the districts in Tennessee in terms of representation. So Nashville, which is an overwhelmingly democratic city, was cracked in such a way that it is now represented by a number of far-right Republicans.

And so Jones and Pearson and Johnson started to work with the protestors to say, “Hey, this is not right.” They were non-violent, really important because there’s a lot of stories out there right now saying that they were violent, they were not, they were non-violent. They were simply taking over the legislature by their voices to say, “Hey, we really want gun safety legislation.” And this is not, again, a fringe position in Tennessee, but the Republican dominated legislature, which is taken over the system, is refusing to even hear any kind of legislation on that issue. They don’t want to debate it, they don’t want it on the floor. They don’t want to have anything to do with it. So this is the way that Jones, Pearson and Johnson tried to get the people’s voice back onto the floor.

Joanne Freeman:

You made the point that it was not violent. A second point, because of things that are circulating around out there, is that it was a, quote unquote, insurrection. It was not an attempt to take over the government. It was an attempt to make voices heard, period.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It is also enormously important that there are videos of what happened because what we’re going to talk about are cases in which there were not videos. And so the way that people spun what was happening had a huge effect on what came out. And again, it was really interesting to me to see within about four days after the events in Tennessee, a number of right wing media outlets insisting that these people were violent and that they were on a par with the January 6th insurrectionists in Washington DC and they simply weren’t.

Joanne Freeman:

There we are with Jones, Pearson and Johnson taking part in this protest in a stunning act of political retribution, the house Republicans attempted to expel all three Democrats from the legislature, and on April 6th they succeeded in expelling two of them, Jones and Pearson. The third lawmaker, Gloria Johnson, who is white narrowly avoided expulsion by one vote. It’s only the third time since the Civil War era that the Tennessee House has expelled a lawmaker from its ranks.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So what has come out since that happened was a tape of the discussion amongst some of the leaders of the Republican members of the legislature, furious at the person who changed their vote over Gloria Johnson and saying, “How dare you have changed your vote. You said you were going to vote to expel her because you didn’t vote to expel her.” You, and I’m paraphrasing here, but this was the gist of it. “You made us look like racists.”

But what was really, really striking for me in listening to that tape was the degree to which the Republican members of the state legislature who had just voted to expel two of their members and wanted to expel a third, they had not expelled people who’d been accused of child molestation. They had not expelled a member of the Republican, now leadership, who peed on somebody else’s chair, but they were adamant that they had to get rid of these two and possibly three lawmakers because they were, in the words of this recording, enemies against whom the Republicans were at war. This is the language that they needed. And even if it meant essentially breaking some eggs, they had to make the omelet of getting rid of these democratic legislators because they felt they were at war.

Joanne Freeman:

At war. Which gets to a larger point about where we are right now, which is that in a democratic system of politics, people disagree all the time. And if you disagree with someone even profoundly, they aren’t your enemy in war.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It was the language of reconstruction.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It just absolutely popped out. And the fact that they would say that anybody who was trying to speak for their constituents who had just been gunned down, including three nine year olds, that they were somehow not worthy of a seat in the place where the people’s business is discussed is a complete rejection of the concept of democracy.

Joanne Freeman:

Apparently in 2019, there was a discussion about the expulsion of members of the Tennessee legislature by the Tennessee Attorney General, and the case involved a discussion of a member being expelled for something that he or she had done before they were in office. This is from the statement by the Attorney General. The expulsion power may be exercised only to the extent consistent with the voter’s constitutional right to choose their representatives. And with the members’ state and federal constitutional rights such as the right to due process and equal protection.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The Republican lawmakers did not exercise due process for the young black legislators. They expelled them under the expulsion clause of the Tennessee State Constitution, which says that the state legislators can expel a member for disorderly behavior. And this is what they did. And again, if you listen to the tape, when they talk about why they don’t expel representative Gloria Johnson, the man who switched his vote says, “You guys didn’t even try to make a case against her. All you proved was that she walked across the floor. You made us look like idiots. If you’d made a stronger case, I would’ve done that. I warned you that you needed to make a stronger case.” Nonetheless, of course, what that ended up with was the scenario of the Tennessee state legislature erasing the voices of two young black men and not the older white woman.

Joanne Freeman:

As this was unfolding, I thought about members of the US Congress who weren’t necessarily expelled but were censured, which was seen as a very humiliated punishment, and then resigned their seat and went home. In the case of Joshua Giddings of Ohio, he was censured in 1842 because of anti-slavery resolutions that he presented in the house. And what I thought about as I was watching Tennessee is what happened in the case of Giddings. Giddings is censured. He resigns, he goes home. And he is reelected by a whopping 7,469 votes to 393. His constituents celebrate him in town meetings. They pass all kinds of resolutions and statements supporting what he did, and he comes back to Congress with an anti-slavery mandate. As a pro-slavery Virginian says at the time that Giddings return was, “The greatest triumph ever achieved by a member of the house, it’s the backlash of that kind of extreme action.” And so as this was unfolding in Tennessee, that was my thought is, “Oh, that’s not going to just sit there. There’s going to be a significant and important response among the people of Tennessee, nevermind the nation at large.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

So one of the things I love about the two young men in Tennessee, the representatives, because they’re going to be reinstated, but the two things I love about them, first of all are they’re names. They’re both named Justin. Of course, the root of Justin is the same as the root of justice, but they’re also both really inspiring speakers. What I loved about their speeches both Jones and Pearson, is that they both deliberately tied into American history. One into the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution and the other into Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech without saying so. And what jumped out to me about those two speeches was that people who are advocating for having a voice in American society and changing democracy so it fits the American people have our great leaders on their team.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, according to Tennessee state law, local governing bodies in each legislative district have the power to appoint temporary representatives. And in the week that followed the expulsion of Jones and Pearson, their respective local governments voted unanimously to reinstate both lawmakers and then ultimately the seats will need to be filled permanently in special elections. And both of those lawmakers have said that they will run again.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So there’s your Joshua Giddings example.

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’d like to point out this is one of those occasions in which there really is no precedent for this until you get to reconstruction, right? I had to-

Joanne Freeman:

You said with a really, really straight face.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I just had to.

Joanne Freeman:

The first member of Congress to be expelled is William Blunt, a Jeffersonian Republican from Tennessee. He’s one of the first two senators from Tennessee, and he ended up in one way or another, conspiring with Great Britain and having to do with Western lands. And he was a big speculator in land, and he may seemingly have been messing around to do something to increase land values in the West. What’s interesting about him is he’s expelled and then there’s a discussion of going further with charges. He goes back to Tennessee, the national government goes to Tennessee to speak with him and bring him back to Washington to discuss what actually happened. And he has people in Tennessee protecting him, his friends, his supporters. They don’t want to see anything happen to him, and he ultimately remains very popular in Tennessee. He served in the state Senate, so he might be found guilty of doing something and expelled, but he goes home and is supported by the people there who gave him office in the first place.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He is kicked out of the US Senate for what amounts to treason. Is that correct?

Joanne Freeman:

Yes, correct.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Probably to break off that western part of the country and attach it to either England or Spain.

Joanne Freeman:

Or certainly part of it, yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. Just so we’ve got some parameters over what’s acceptable behavior and what’s not. You’re not supposed to plot with a foreign government, which honestly there’s another whole discussion that we should have there, but now we get to do reconstruction because when President Biden said this is unprecedented, he probably heard heads exploding across the entire body of people who do reconstruction history because this is so not unprecedented, but it is not from a period of which we are very proud. So let’s start in Mississippi in 1875 because it is a beautiful picture of all the themes that we are looking at now and where they really came into crystallization for the first time. What happens, of course, is with the American Civil War, the institution of legal slavery ends except as punishment for crime, and we’re not going to go there. But I feel like that’s a really important caveat always to keep in mind at the same time that immediately after the war, African-American men, again an important caveat, get the right to vote.

We also get in the same period the rise of national taxation, which is invented during the Civil War for the United States by the Republican Party. So there is after the war, the possibility to link money to voting in a really visceral way at the same time that black Americans, black men get to vote for the first time. So what happens first is that after the war, white supremacists in the American South that are associated with the Democratic Party say, “There’s no freaking way we’re going to let black people have any rights.” This is not happening. And they try a lot of measures to make sure that black people can’t actually have rights. And the federal government steps in, it steps in with the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which is ratified and added to the Constitution in 1868. And then when nonetheless, Georgia throws out a number of its state legislators, Congress establishes the Department of Justice and the job of the Department of Justice, which is formed in 1870, is to make sure that black Americans are treated equally to white Americans under the law in the States.

So what happens is that after 1870, it is possible for white supremacists in the South to actually run into federal trouble. And in fact, the federal government is prosecuting cases of abuse of black citizens in the South, that run into trouble if they’re talking about things in terms of race. So they change their language, the exact same people who said, “Hey, we don’t want black people to have any rights.” Change their language, and they start to say, we have no problem at all, black people having rights. So it was never a problem. This is complete not truthiness.

And instead they start to say, “Hey, we got no problem with black people. Our problem is poor people who don’t have property getting to have a say in our government because they’re going to vote for policies that cost money like roads and schools and hospitals, and that’s only going to be able to be paid for by tax levies on people with property, that is white people.” This is going to play out in a number of states, but really dramatically in Mississippi in 1875 when Mississippi Democrats, white supremacists institute what becomes known as the Mississippi Plan. And the Mississippi Plan is not a plan to work hard to improve the state of Mississippi. It is in fact a campaign of violence and murder to intimidate black state legislators out of office. They’re going to end up killing at least two politicians and they’re going to reestablish white control over the state.

Joanne Freeman:

So in 1868, president Andrew Johnson appointed a former Union General and pro and franchisement Republican, Adelbert Ames as Mississippi’s provisional governor, and Ames shepherded a new state constitution through that gave black Mississippians the right to vote and to hold state office. So in the fall of 1869, five black senators and 35 black representatives, 47% of the State House of Representatives, took office. So by 1874, 79% of the Mississippi State House of Representatives was black. Organized, white democratic backlash, however, was not surprisingly intensifying.

So for example, here we have on August 4th, 1875, a statement that was put in the Hines County Gazette, and it was right along with this sort of war theme that we’re talking about here. The Hines County Gazette said, scoundrels, white and black have obtained full control over the diluted and duped negroes and have used them as tools, as the potter uses the clay in his hands for the robbery of the people, for the exaltation to office of thieves and rascals and for the disgrace and ruin of the country. And here we get to the war lingo here, the war language. Desperate cases require desperate remedies. We must use remedies equal to the emergency of the case if we desire to arrest the disease.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And catch what’s going on there, they are robbing the people, they’re putting thieves and rascals in office and ruining the country. Again, the idea here that it all comes down to the use of tax dollars for doing things like putting in place roads, which are going to be used by poor whites and poor blacks both, and middle class whites and blacks too, and rich whites and blacks too. But the statement there that letting marginalized voices have a say in society is a fundamental attack on property, this is really where we get the language, this is really where it crystallizes. And I’m sorry, have you looked at the news? Oh, I don’t know. Today, this is still absolutely fundamental to the tying together of race and class in this country so that you can argue as the Tennessee Republican legislators did, “Hey, we don’t want to be called racist. This is not about race.” Of course, it’s about race, it’s also about class. It’s about who should have control over this country and over the property in this country.

Joanne Freeman:

When you don’t necessarily have facts on your side. And when you are denying, this isn’t about race aspects of it, which of course it is a really powerful tool that you can deploy that gets you past the fact that you can’t pull in history on your side is emotion, is anger, is outrage, and some of what we’re seeing, now, we’re talking about Mississippi, but it happens all around us all the time these days, is the deliberate rage harvesting, saying things to make people feel that something’s being taken away from them. They’re losing somehow their rights, they’re losing property, they’re losing money, they’re losing something, regardless of how true that is or isn’t.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the reasons, again that reconstruction historians and I would argue all American historians are particularly concerned right now because we know what happens when you start to talk this way, when you start to expel legislators, when you start to try and silence voting, which is what we’re seeing also in places like Tennessee and other Republican dominated states as well. What happens is that on September 4th, 1875, about 2000 black Republicans assemble outside of Clinton, Mississippi for a political rally. One of them was state Senator Charles Caldwell, and he had been an enslaved blacksmith before the Civil War. He was a close ally of Governor Ames and he and his fellow organizers were concerned about violence, so they banned weapons and alcohol from the event and they invited Democrats.

Remember, the parties are reversed in this period. They invited Democrats to speak alongside Republicans. They were like, “Come on, let’s have a discussion about this and what you’re concerned about.” The event begins peacefully, but once a Republican begins to speak, who represents Governor Ames, a white mob opens fire.

They kill five black people in the audience, including two children. They also kill three white Republicans and they wound as many as 30 of the people attending. The white mob continues to grow and it indiscriminately kills nearly 50 black Americans around Clinton. They drag black families from their homes, they loot them for their valuables.

Joanne Freeman:

Ames reached out to President Ulysses S. Grant at that moment and requested federal troops to try and quash the vigilante violence. And when Grant refused Ames’ initial request, Ames sent a second more forceful telegram arguing that he understood the political risk of sending federal troops, but that he would take responsibility for any fallout and felt it was his duty to protect black citizens. So Grant refuses the request and he responds via his Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont, that the northern public doubted press reports about the violence against black Mississippians and were largely unwilling to intervene. Grant wrote, “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South, and there is so much wholesome lying done by the press and people in regard to the cause and extent of these breaches of the peace that the great majority are ready to condemn any interference on the part of the government.”

Even Republican northern newspapers viewed Governor Ames and the legislature with some disdain and argued that they had brought the backlash upon themselves. So for example, here you have the Republican Philadelphia Press, “The administration of Governor Ames, a carpet bagger and political adventurer has done much to disorganize society and teach general contempt for all authority in Mississippi. The disorder is palpably the result of a corrupt and powerless government that has taught its ignorant negro dependents that they were above the law in a struggle with the whites and they have the common mistake of taking the leaders at their word.”

One thing I’ll note here too, which again is a continuing theme when you’re talking about expulsion and even now is part of the conversation is that when you do something like this or when you are talking about throwing people out of a legislature or questions about enforcing the law or not enforcing the law, you are meddling with public opinion of institutions themselves, whether that means the legislature, whether that means the government generally. And so that’s part of these conversations too. That’s part of these events.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Even though Governor Ames and his administration were trying desperately to protect the black citizens in Mississippi, they couldn’t protect them. They were right when they said that there was going to be a disaster. Barely a month after the killings outside of Clinton, on October 20th, 1875, a white mob lynches black state representative James G. Patterson in Yazoo, Mississippi, they alleged almost certainly falsely that he had hired another black man to kill a political enemy. And one of the things that jumps out about this entire episode of Mississippi is the degree to which control, racial control, economic control, is couched as politics. This is about political control. As Patterson was dying, allegedly he asked that the money in his pocket be given to his family, but a retrospective account of that murder in the Wisconsin State Journal suggested in fact that white murderers had pocketed the money and used it to buy a buggy.

The image of one of the white young gentlemen engaged in the murder as the Wisconsin State Journal said, “Was riding in a new buggy behind a fine horse.” It doesn’t stop there, it continues until on December 30th, 1875, even Representative Caldwell comes into their sights. He returns to Clinton to check on a nephew who’s being harassed by local white men and a white man who posed as his friend Buck Cabell, pressured him into sharing a drink with him, a Christmas drink with him at his house. And Caldwell’s wife Margaret later explained to a Senate select subcommittee investigating Caldwell’s death.

What happened? In June of 1876, she explained Cabell took him by the arm and told him to drink for a Christmas treat, that he must drink, and carried him into Chilton’s cellar and they jingled the glasses and at the top of the glasses, and while each one held the glass, while they were taking the glasses, somebody shot right through the back from the outside of the gate window and he fell to the ground. As they struck their glasses, that was the signal to shoot. And as Caldwell lay on the floor bleeding out allegedly, he said, “Remember when you kill me, you kill a gentleman and a brave man. Never say you killed a coward. I want you to remember it when I am gone.”

Joanne Freeman:

Now, this campaign of white terror was largely successful in ending black representation in the Mississippi legislature. Many black voters stayed home out of fear during the November 1875 state elections. And so in 1876, black representation in the State House of Representatives had decreased from 79% to 32%, 24 legislators. By 1892, there were only two black legislators in the house, and from 1894 until 1968, there were no black state representatives in Mississippi. It’s an important point as well to make here, which is that it takes sometimes just one big event, one bloody outburst, one big credible threat, to frighten and intimidate people enough that they will step back. And that’s a lot of the dynamic of the politics of racism.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is why the Freedom Summer focused on Mississippi and voter drives focused on Mississippi, because of the Mississippi Plan and because of how thoroughly it had worked for almost a century when of course reformers tried to register black Mississippians to vote in the 1960s, it’s not going to go well for them. This is when we’re going to see the assassinations of people trying to register to vote and to register others to vote.

Joanne Freeman:

Not unprecedented.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, not unprecedented. That’s right. And of course it happens in other states as well across the south. In the 1870s, we covered Georgia, in the Georgia on my mind episode that we did when the original-

Joanne Freeman:

Carol Anderson.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, with Carol Anderson, when the original 33 of black legislators in Georgia were forced out of office through similar violence. Alabama, same thing, Louisiana, same thing. The violence comes from, and the expulsions come from a way of reading these people rhetorically out of our democratic process by saying they are anti-American because they are espousing the idea that the government should work for ordinary Americans.

Joanne Freeman:

They are anti-American And they are [inaudible 00:28:55] enemies.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Enemies to go to war with, that it is appropriate to take up arms against them and to literally lynch them, shoot them. And we’re not talking about the other forms of intimidation, the rape, the assault, all the other things that happened. But of course, it’s going to echo forward.

Joanne Freeman:

If that Mississippi plan obviously shows the racial hatred associated with some state congressional expulsions in American history. The 1920 controversy over the expulsion of five socialists in the New York State legislature shows how intolerance toward political ideology can also fuel expulsion and exclusion from the state political process.

Heather Cox Richardson:

See, I would argue it’s the same thing. It’s just that one is couched in racial terms because you know the white supremacists have read the black legislators in Mississippi out of the American process. This in 1920 in New York, at a time, of course, when black Americans don’t have a voice. This is the middle of the Jim Crow and the Juan Crow years. Now, the people being read out are going to be white Americans who are socialists, who are advocating a political system in which the vast majority of the wealth is not moving upward as it was in the 1920s.

Joanne Freeman:

So in 1920, the New York State Assembly had a five man socialist caucus, August Claessens and Louis Waldman of Manhattan, Samuel Orr and Samuel DeWitt of the Bronx and Charles Solomon of Brooklyn. Now, some of these men represented largely Jewish districts, the Swiss borne Claessens even taught himself Yiddish to participate in socialist groups with his Morningside Heights constituency. Now, the start of the new legislative session in January 1920 opened just after the Palmer raids, US Attorney General, a Mitchell Palmer’s aggressive arrests against socialists who he believed were planning bombings across the United States. And the height of the Palmer raids came on January 2nd, 1920 when 4,000 suspected socialists and anarchists were detained across the United States.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And he went around arresting all these people, claiming that they were going to bomb everything. And at the end of the day, a bunch of people were deported. But basically it was a scare. It was just part of the red scare.

Joanne Freeman:

So five days later on January 7th, 1920, the Republican New York State Assembly opened and the Republican assembly speaker Thaddeus Sweet was seemingly whipped up by Palmer’s incendiary response to socialism. So when the Five Man Socialist Caucus rose to be sworn in, Sweet called for a trial to determine their loyalty to the United States and their fitness to serve, demanding that they’d be suspended from their seats. In the interim, all Republicans voted for the trial and only one Democrat opposed the plan. And a 21-day trial followed, overseen by the legislature’s judiciary Committee. Now during the trial, former New York Republican Governor, 1916 Republican presidential candidate and eventual Secretary of State and Chief Justice at the Supreme Court… Boy, that’s a CV. Charles Evans Hughes took a leadership role in opposing Sweet, a member of his own party. Hughes, empowered by the New York City Bar Association led a committee to Albany to protest the Trial.

Sweet’s counsel lawyer, John Stanchfield, argued that any statement made by members of the Socialist Party could be used against the five accused men in a staggering argument of guilt by association, let me repeat that. Sweet’s counsel said, “Any statement made by any member of the socialist party could be used against these five accused men.” And thus they would be somehow guilty by association. Stanchfield said, “Everybody who upholds those socialist claims, who supports these principles, who stands upon that platform is bound by the speeches, the sentiments, the writings, the books, the publications of every other man affiliated with that association, whether they were present at the time when it was made, or they were uttered or whether they were absent.” That is an amazing statement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The Judiciary Committee ultimately votes in favor to expel the men. And the issue is brought up in front of the assembly in late March of 1920. An overnight debate on March 31st, 1920 was especially rancorous over this issue. One Democratic assembly man, a man named Martin McCue openly advocated for stringing up the socialists. These five men ought to be an example to the other traders and violators of the law. They ought to be strung up to the nearest lamppost with their feet dangling in the air. Remembering, of course, the 1920s are the era when lynching of black Americans is seen as a civic duty. This is when we get the postcards, this is when we get the images of-

Joanne Freeman:

Audiences.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Of audiences. That’s right, watching, of people lynching. And part of that, of course, is an attempt to define who is a good American. And there’s all that literature from the time that does that. Part of it as well is an attempt to say, “Those of you who have different ideas are not welcome here.” Despite the language and the Declaration of Independence, it talks about the right to have a say in your government.

Joanne Freeman:

And again, not welcome here in a sense, saying you’re not really an American and casting you as an enemy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Republicans as well thought that the socialist should be executed for treason. And the one man Louis Culliver, who’s a Republican, said they ought not just be expelled, but take it out and shot. A really powerful moment there. And one that again, historians look at and think, “Uh, oh, this is not a good idea. When you define people as outside having rights to a say in their government.” The expulsion vote does pass the assembly on April 1st, 1920, and Sweet argued that America was now protected from traitors. “We are building by our action today a granite bulwark against all traitors within the boundaries of our republic. Our flag of the republic is whipping the breeze in defiance of enemies from without.”

Joanne Freeman:

Hughes, on the other hand, did not mince words in his reaction to the expulsion, arguing that the Assembly’s choice was deeply damaging to American democracy. He said, “I do not care to speak of the action of the Assembly in a casual or flippant manner. I regard it as a serious blow at the standard of true Americanism and nothing short of a calamity. Those who make their patriotism a vehicle for intolerance are very dangerous friends of our institutions.” I’m going to say that last sentence again. Those who make their patriotism a vehicle for intolerance are very dangerous friends of our institutions.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So after the expulsion of those five from the New York legislature, they of course go home, and I got to throw this one to you, Joanne.

Joanne Freeman:

They’re reelected in special elections. So by mid 1920, the entire episode comes to be seen as the beginning of the end of the first red scare. Okay, so here’s a slight upside to this, Heather, which is sometimes if you push too hard, there actually is a response and people step up and say, “You’re pushing too hard.” Which is all of these people getting voted back into office.

Heather Cox Richardson:

After they are reelected, the same way with Joshua Giddings, but I would argue that the 1920s are different because there are so many new voices saying, “Hey, hey, that’s not what really happened here.” Harvard Law School professor Zechariah Chafee, who was among the most famous First Amendment scholars at the time, wrote about the impact of Sweet’s crusade in a piece he wrote in 1920 called Freedom of Speech. And Chafee said, “The assembly was past saving, but the nation was saved. The American people long bedraggled by propaganda were shaken out of their nightmare of revolution. The red terror became ridiculous on the lips of Speaker Sweet. A legislature trembling before five men. The long-lost American sense of humor revived and people began to laugh. That broke the spell. The light of day beat in not only upon the assembly, but upon Congress and the Department of Justice. Never again did the hysteria of the past year return.”

And I think that that looks forward to what happens in the modern era in 1986 when we have an attempted expulsion in California. In that year, Tom Hayden, who had been an anti-Vietnam war protestor, was serving as a state assemblyman in California and a coalition of Republicans, this is of course the Reagan era, ’86, who were very hawkish at the time, tried to throw him out of office. Hayden was born in Michigan in 1939. He attended the University of Michigan, began to protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, which was being run by anti-communist activists in the late 1950s. In 1960, he joined the lunch counter sit-ins and voter registration drives in the south. And then in 1960, he founded the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, with 35 other activists.

He joined the Freedom Riders in their rides on southern buses to integrate the public transportation of the American South. He was jailed in Georgia in 1961. In his cell, he composed a 25,000 word treatise calling on college students from across the country to join up and overthrow corporate greed and racism. A moment in which they’re trying to get away from the idea of organized labor, for example, as a tool to rework American capitalism and instead are focusing on individuals, especially educated young individuals to attack the system as they see it. The tract was presented at the first SDS conference in Port Huron, Michigan in 1962, and it argued that the way to enact political change was not, as I say, through established organizations that were associated with the political left, but rather with independent thinking individuals characterized by the college students who were putting this forward.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s generational again.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Generational, yeah.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, Hayden, while he was still leading the SDS, visited North Vietnam in 1965 in open defiance of State Department bans on travel to the country, and Hayden toured Hanoi and wrote a 1966 book The Other Side about his journey. And he then returned to North Vietnam several times throughout the war and also organized for the release of American prisoners of war with North Vietnamese leaders, again without US government sanctioning. In 1968, Hayden helped to organize anti-war protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Chicago Police Department wielded clubs in the streets outside the convention in a televised melee that injured hundreds.

The Department of Justice charged Hayden and six other defendants with conspiracy and incitement to riot. There was then a lengthy trial of the so-called Chicago seven, in which Hayden and fellow defendants, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, and Rennie Davis were sentenced to five years in prison. Although the sentence was overturned on appeal. In 1972, Hayden and Jane Fonda went to Hanoi, where Fonda took a much maligned photo sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft tank. Fonda subsequently loathed by conservatives, including, I’m sorry to say, my grandfather who had all kinds of nasty names for her, and dubbed Hanoi Jane married Hayden in 1973.

Heather Cox Richardson:

As a marker of how angry people were about that. I got a message this weekend talking about Hanoi Jane, this is 2023 people still using her in that moment as a touchstone for anti-Americanness. So by the late 1970s, Hayden has really entered the mainstream political fray, if you will. In 1978, he is appointed by a California governor, Jerry Brown, to head estate group devoted to solar energy development. And then in 1982, he’s elected to the California State Assembly. Now, in the assembly, he really operates as a moderate, he supports establishment democratic leaders. He turns away from what he wrote in the Port Huron statement, but three years into his work there in the assembly, he comes under fire from an insurgent Republican group from Southern California. And it’s a really interesting moment because they’re trying to pull him up as, again, a political symbol.

He is a symbol in this Reagan era from these far right Republicans, or I guess now they wouldn’t be far right, but they were Reagan Republicans to try and say, “We’re the good guys and the Democrats are the bad guys. And we can tell you the Democrats are the bad guys because look, they have Tom Hayden.” The charge is led by a man named Gil Ferguson. He is a freshman Republican from Newport Beach. He was 61 when he was elected in 1984. He had been a lieutenant colonel in World War II in the Marine Corps and Korea, and then in Vietnam. He got a Purple Heart in 1943 after the Battle of [inaudible 00:44:05] and he had been wounded in that battle with shrapnel from a grenade and still went on to continue to fight. After he retired from the Marines, he worked in public relations, which I think matters here before he pivoted to politics.

So shortly after he took office, he introduces a resolution to honor Vietnam veterans, and it included the language suggesting that the war was quote, “Waged upon an honorable premise and for a noble purpose.” This is, again, clear Reagan era, political staking out of territory. That is we’re going to rewrite American history to make it look like America has always been honorable. And of course, there were then and continue to be really profound criticisms of American behavior and even engagement in Vietnam. Hayden and other Democrats refused to support the measure.

Again, it’s an resolution to honor Vietnam veterans, which they can probably get behind. But then it says, “This is an honorable war” which they can’t get behind. So Hayden goes in front of the press and he says, “He, Ferguson, tried to sneak through a resolution defining Vietnam as a noble war. That’s a buzzword for all the retired Rambos who want to rewrite history.” Ferguson then goes on the offensive, referring to Hayden in 1985 as a traitor on the assembly floor, and he literally begins to cry over this language. “Tom Hayden was not a simple war protestor.” He said, “Tom Hayden was a traitor.”

Joanne Freeman:

Now Hayden fights back, and he argues that Ferguson was prejudiced and had misinterpreted his activism. Hayden says, “The charges of Mr. Ferguson’s are utterly false. I am a patriotic American and no narrow-minded bigot can strip that away from me.” Ferguson in turn moved toward introducing a resolution to expel Hayden from the assembly using a provision in the California constitution approved during the height of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. The provision, article seven, section nine, barred from state office, anyone who advocates the support of a foreign government during wartime. And Ferguson, not surprisingly, as is a theme throughout this entire episode, positioned his quest in military terms.

“It is like having to land in the morning at 0500. You wish you didn’t have to do it, but you can’t go over the hill.” Hayden lampooned that kind of war-like rhetoric saying, “Maybe Ferguson is having a midlife crisis and wants to find a new war to fight, but I think he will definitely lose this one.” There’s that humor pricking the sort of massive rhetoric of war and [inaudible 00:47:13] nastiness. The assembly voted on Ferguson’s resolution in June of 1986, and the assembly narrowly voted to retain Hayden’s seat by a mostly party line vote of 41 to 36, the exact majority that Hayden needed. Ferguson continued to push for Hayden’s ouster until the mid 1990s, even after Hayden moved to the state Senate in 1992.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So where this comes out, I think brings us really full circle, in that Ferguson couches his crusade as a war against traitors, a war against, we have to take our country back, very much the language of the 1980s and going forward within the increasingly radicalizing Republican Party after that. But Ferguson’s crusade is hurt by his own racism. He questioned whether in fact there had ever been such a thing as Japanese internment. He called LGBTQ+ protestors slurs, beginning with the letter F. He argued that repeat rapists should be castrated, and he opposed efforts to offer free condoms to California teachers, which led to a ferocious standoff in the middle of what was then the terrible years of the AIDS crisis. So for all that he’s talking about protecting America from traitors. The traitors that he is defining are people who are not like him. It’s not a question of people who are actively siding with the enemy, although that’s the language he is using in the 1980s. It’s that he doesn’t share my political beliefs.

Joanne Freeman:

They, Hayden and others like him, are not one of us. I want to give Hayden the last word, though. Hayden lays it right out there and says, “Ferguson has attacked civil rights, affirmative action, gay rights, Hayden, environmentalists. And it must be frustrating for him because as far as I can see, he hasn’t gotten anywhere. He’s just kind of made his point.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that idea of the now Republican Party, as shown in the Tennessee legislature, doubling down on this idea that they and only they define America at a time when their numbers are really a minority in this country.

Joanne Freeman:

Which of course is why they’re doing this.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which is exactly why they’re doing it. That’s right. It was rhetoric that served them to try and build a majority. When it didn’t do that, it is now hardened into a kernel of minority rule that is profoundly anti-democratic. And in Tennessee, what just happened there is all on tape. And you wonder if this is the moment when, for example, people look at this and say, this is not our country. This is not the way we want this country to operate.

Joanne Freeman:

Historically speaking, there are those moments when something is pushed too far, when people assume too much of a lack of total accountability, where things go to such a length, or there’s such undeniable evidence of a wrong being done, that there is a reaction. And the fact of the matter is, regardless of what’s happening all over the United States, our government is grounded on public opinion to an extreme degree. It’s grounded on public opinion through the representative process. It’s grounded on public opinion, just for the simple fact that what Americans think matters to politicians. That’s their base, that’s their constituency. It’s why we see so much of the extremism that we see is politicians and people with power trying to pander to or appeal to the American people. So just as you’re saying, Heather, historians that we are, we can’t predict what’s going to happen. But given everything that we said at the outset and given the outcomes of these incidents that we’ve been talking about throughout the episode, this is a really interesting moment to see what the ultimate response will be to what’s happening in Tennessee and how that will play out.