Heather Cox Richardson:

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

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’re going to talk about, in a sense, choices and democracy. We’re at a moment, we’re around January 6th and there’s a lot of commentary on what that represents and how, in some ways, it represents some choices that we face that we’re going to need to make. And the fact of the matter is that there are many ways in which any kind of a democratic politics faces you with ongoing choices.

One of the ways in which we want to discuss that today has to do with who we pick to represent us or to give political power to. And what that suggests about either what we’re looking for in one of these figures or what we’re not looking for, that one of the joys and weaknesses of democracy is that it is, in a sense, an open system that any number of different kinds of people can be raised to power, ideally speaking, the democratic system then enables you to remove those people from power. So who is in power at a given time and their fate has a lot to do with what we, the public, choose to do that is assuming, of course, that the electoral process is functioning properly.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I’m laughing here because you made all that sound so gentle. And I’m sitting here being like, come on, let’s have some names here because we are really talking about our-

Joanne Freeman:

You need to ease us in.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, right.

Joanne Freeman:

You need to even us in.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, so we just talk gently about how people dress, for example, because we’re talking about, on the one hand, in this modern era, people like Lauren Boebert who jump out to observers as a first term member of Congress, she’s 35 years old. She’s from Colorado’s third congressional district, which has Grand Junction in it and Durango and Aspen. And she is out there. She called a fellow representative, Ilhan Omar, black hearted and evil. She has characterized a group of other Congress people known as the Squad, as the Jihad Squad. She is not as well qualified as many of the other members of Congress. She dropped out of high school during her senior year. She did later get a GED in 2020 about a month before the primary election. And she is known for her really outrageous anti-government statements.

She has taken a lot of headlines as has somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a far right conspiracy theorist. She’s a first term member of Congress from Georgia’s 14th congressional district. She did graduate from college, but she has no previous experience in government. And she too is essentially printing for the cameras and getting her attention by making extreme statements. And yet on the other side, you have other people who on paper don’t look all that different.

You have people like Cori Bush, who’s a representative from Missouri who does not have a traditional college diploma. She has a nursing certificate or somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a representative from New York who was a bartender before being elected to Congress at 29 years old. So they are all people who in many ways are not the people that one normally thinks of as Congress people, they are outsiders. Some of them talk about reforming Congress or changing it. And is this unusual? How do we even think about the idea that you can go from being a bartender to making laws for the rest of country?

Joanne Freeman:

And what does it mean once we make those choices? When we look at Congress and we see who’s there and we see what kinds of choices have been made, what does it suggest about where we are as a nation?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and for me, what is the most interesting thing about this is what does it say about what our government should be? Like is it a problem to have somebody who has a GED in Congress? I would say it’s not. That that is a way in which Congress represents the majority of us. Since only about a third of Americans have college degrees, it’s a bit unusual that in fact about 95% of America’s house members and about a 100% of the Senate have a bachelor’s degree or a higher degree when only a third Americans in general do. And that seems to me to skew our representation and in a way that may not be healthy, but it does say something when we have members of Congress making laws for us, who seem to some of us to be really far out there. So it might be fun to go through our history and take a look at some of those people that we may have had like that in the past.

Joanne Freeman:

In some ways, it’s important to note, there have always been interesting eccentric seeming outsiders or even not seeming outsiders roaming around in Congress or in the halls of power generally. So it’s not as though whatever we’re seeing now is something new. It’s just the version of it. The flavor of it that we’re experiencing now has a lot to do with where we are. And as you just said, with what we really want the nation to be.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We actually picked some people to talk about, but first you have to fill us in on your Swan guy.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, my Swan guy. Right. So initially, if you look at really the early, the 1790s, when the government is in its first decade, pretty much that generation of people with political power assumed that there would be elite, of course, white men running the show. And the degree to which that is true has to do with this fellow named John Swanwick. He gets elected to Congress towards the end of the 1790s. And there’s all this commentary, particularly by stuffy Federalists saying basically, “Swanwick, what is he doing here? The Swanwick.”

And you can kind of sense the general hum ramifying going on in Congress that someone has come into Congress, certainly not the only one, but that there are people appearing who, according to at least some folks more elitist Federalists, really should not be there. That goes all the way back. We’re talking about year seven or year eight of the government, there’s a very clear sense that there’s only a very specific kind of person that should be in Congress. Definitely not representative of the majority and the fact that they’re walking at someone who’s like slightly less in social class or in education really shows you how much they assumed about who their leaders would be.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so he didn’t do anything outrageous. He was… Like I was hoping, he just… I mean, I had visions don’t you have some dude who brings his dogs to Congress.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, that was John Randolph of Roanoke who shows up with his dogs. I mean, there are all kinds of eccentrics. I am like a specialist in eccentric members of Congress who swing Bowie knives, bring their dogs, whatever it is you want, I can talk about those people. And some of them can seemingly be quite conventional. I mean, when you look at what Congress looked like between 1830 and 1860, the average member of both houses was a college educated lawyer in his 40s with a little bit of experience in public office, which does not sound strange and radical. Now, college educated didn’t necessarily mean what it means today. Being a lawyer, there are some states where there really weren’t any qualifications for being a lawyer except good moral character and a little bit of studying. So that’s not quite as a sort of cut and dried version of a Congressman, but still that’s familiar to us.

On the other hand, you have a lot of people in Congress who had little more than a few years of common schooling with like 98% of white men at the time. So for example, there’s wagon maker, Charles Bodle, there’s gunsmith Ratliff Boon. And I just love that name. There’s iron furnace operator, Martin Beattie and they are not Swanwicked.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and part of what they’re doing is they’re democratizing Congress so that it does theoretically speak for the average American. Again, a white man in that period. So it’s not a weird thing to have a wagon maker, for example, although I’m entirely suspicious that you picked those people only because of their names.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, Ratliff Boon.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s such a good-

Joanne Freeman:

I want to go write a trashy novel with that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s such a good name. And I think John Quincy Adams said he had the thickest head in the house. No, the thickest skull in the house. That’s what he said.

Joanne Freeman:

How would one establish that?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, that was just John Quincy Adams being John Quincy Adams.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, does that mean that he was hard to get an idea through it?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. I think he just-

Joanne Freeman:

I was thinking he took a swing at it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That is your specialty I thought.

Joanne Freeman:

I’d like to see that, I’d like to see that. No, I think he was just literally saying dumb.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So that brings up one of the first characters that we had in mind. Do you want to take a crack at this fellow?

Joanne Freeman:

I will take a crack at this fellow, which is Davy Crockett.

Heather Cox Richardson:

A name nobody’s ever… I was going to say, which is a name nobody’s ever heard of.

Joanne Freeman:

I know, I heard of the same, no one has ever heard of the name of Davy Crockett. Not only that, but the first thing that came to mind and you can vouch for me, Heather, that when we began talking about this, I began singing because there was a 1955 Walt Disney movie that created a ballet about David Crockett and you have to put up with me singing a handful of lines because I know it’s going to be like, what is it? Is it called an ear worm that it won’t get out of your head? Is that the right… Okay. Heather’s nodding. Okay. So here’s my bad singing version of the ballet of Davy Crockett. Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free, raised in the woods so he knew every tree, killed him a bear when he was only three. Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier. And you and I both went king. So that’s the ballet.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. Yeah. But did you have to look up those words or did you just know them?

Joanne Freeman:

I knew Davy, Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier. I had to look up the rest of them. I’m being totally honest.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’ve never seen it actually. I mean, I’ve seen the Fess Parker image, but I’ve never seen any one of the shows.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s part of the sort of legend or mythology that rises up around Davy Crockett, who is that kind of a character or kind of eccentric in the sense that he plays up his outsider status and is lionized for it from very early on in the beginning of his political career. He’s born in actually 1787. And whenever we talk about these people and you see that they’re born right at the birth of the Republic, it shrinks time in a sense because you put these people ahead into the 19th century. He was born in Green County, Tennessee. His father indentured him to a cattle driver by the time he was 12. And through his early 20s, he made his living as a herder’s apprentice and a trapper. He went on to serve in some local offices. He was a justice of the peace.

He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the 57th Regiment of the Tennessee militia. He then ends up being in the Tennessee State Assembly. And then ultimately, he ends up being a supporter of Andrew Jackson. He very much appreciates and supports Jackson’s idea that he’s a supporter of the common man. He doesn’t support the elite and Davy Crockett and the way that he presents himself is right along those lines. So for example, when he’s campaigning, he tells a lot of stories and that’s how he campaigns is these tall tales that people know are tall tales, but still they win him a lot of support. So for example, he talks about on the campaign trail, squirrel hunting. He would go squirrel hunting with some of the people who were there to see him. He would pretend to be ignorant of the law and formal politics. Of course, that’s nonsense because he’s serving in these positions that require that kind of knowledge.

When he would go campaigning, he said, “I’m going to wear a hunting shirt and it’s going to have two oversized pockets in it, one for a liquor bottle and the other for a twist of tobacco.” And he said, when he met a supporter, first, he would give him a swig to drink and if he had to spit out his tobacco to take the drink, then he’d give him a bit of tobacco when he parted leaving him no worse off than when he came and met David Crockett. So he had this kind of frontiersman, I don’t even know what to call it. A sort of, it’s not a costume, it’s not a performance. It’s just an exaggerated version of what a frontiersman would be. Newspapers at the time would report that he could whip his weight in wild cats, jump up higher, fall down lower and drink more liquor than any man in the state, wade the Mississippi and carry a steamboat on his back.

And when he comes to Congress, Tennessee newspaper reports, “Colonel Crockett, a member of Congress from the state arrived at Washington City on the eighth day of December and took his seat. It was reported before his arrival that he was wading the Ohio towing a disabled steamboat and two keels behind him.” So he has this reputation as being this frontiersman. He plays it up. He ultimately does a lot of anecdote telling and storytelling. And it’s obviously in one way or another sort of self-mocking, but it’s wildly popular. What ends up really shaping his career more than anything else is the way he does, or doesn’t line up with the political parties that are in power at the time. He starts in as a Jacksonian, but his politics don’t perfectly align with Jackson. For example, he really does not like Jackson’s Indian policy at all and he ends up sort of not being a Jacksonian and kind of being a wig, but not fully being a wig.

So ultimately, although he’s an eccentric, although he plays it up, although during this time period, the real legend of Davy Crockett is beginning to be built around him, books are being written about him, plays are being written in which the characters clearly are based on him, in April of 1831, there’s a play that’s called The Lion of the West. Premieres in New York and the lead character in it is named Colonel Nimrod Wildfire and is clearly a character of Davy Crockett. And advertisements for the play show good old Nimrod Wildfire in a coonskin cap and that helps to lend to the image of what Davy Crockett looked like and who he was. But it really shows how his place in popular culture is really being established.

And for a time, that really does help his political career. And this is significant too. It’s a moment in time when the United States is beginning to see the frontier as opposed to Anglo European culture as something that’s distinctly American and that they’re proud of. And so they’re also pumping up that idea of the frontier. So yeah, ultimately his national political career founders. He ends up heading to Texas in 1835, joining a bunch of other Americans who are off sort of seeking new territories. And I should note that at this point, Texas is not yet a state and it is a place that people that were eyeing as some place where they could potentially go and get land or get power or do something on the spot. Texas was a place where people with ambitions tended to head off. He ends up there with a small force that is stationed at the Alamo Mission. And he did participate in the siege on the Alamo that began on February 23rd, 1836. And he dies as a result of the battle in a way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s very well put.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes. So the assumption is that he ended up dying with everyone else at the Alamo, and he’s a noble figure who died defending the Alamo. And supposedly, and Heather, you told this to me when we were talking about this before, and then I found more of it when I was researching online in preparation for this, it appears more likely that he surrendered to the Mexicans and he, and a number of other people were executed. So he did not go down defending the Alamo, he was executed just the same, but his end might not have been as noble as it has been depicted to go along with the legendary Davy Crockett.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and it’s so interesting because he becomes such a legend. And in fact, the battle was not the way it is remembered in popular culture at all, it was Americans and Texans who were Mexicans who stood against the current Mexican government against the government forces on Mexican land. But that’s not the way it shows up in most American memory in which we think of the myth of Davy Crockett as this wild frontiersman who stood against the idea of the despotic Mexican government, even though of course, it was at the time trying to stop human enslavement that the Americans in Texas wanted to continue.

So the fact that he sort of jumped from being a spat out, if you will, congressperson to being this wild Western hero says a lot about the way that these outside live in our popular memory and what that means. Why lionize somebody like Davy Crockett as this great westerner who in fact stood against some of the policies anyway, the indigenous policies of Andrew Jackson and who fought a war with other Mexicans against the government forces of Mexico on Mexican soil and yet that is what many people consider the foundational event of American Western history.

Joanne Freeman:

It shows you the power of that frontier myth of what Americans want America to be, even at this early point. So he’s becoming a popular figure, not just because he’s eccentric and he tells tall tales and kills bars or bears, it’s partly because of who he is and what he represents as a frontiersman and Americans are priding themselves on that despite all of the politics that surround him.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So when we were thinking about this, we’re thinking about other outsized outsider politicians that really jump to mind. And one of the questions people have asked me over the past many years is, is there any politician in America who compares to the defeated former president, Donald Trump? And my answer is always Ignatius Donnelly, which is a name that I know not a lot of people have necessarily heard, but Ignatius is a such a good name.

Joanne Freeman:

But it’s such a startling. It’s such a good name.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You know what? We should just scrap the title of this episode and just say cool names in the past. Although nobody will ever compete in my book with somebody I found on a letter once whose name was Malwida von Meysenbug.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, that’s a really good one.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s a really good one, Malwida von Meysenbug. Anyway, Ignatius Donnelley was from the late 19th century. He was born into an Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia in 1831. And he was actually trained in a prestigious law office, but he moved west in the 1850s to Minnesota, which at the time was the frontier. And there, he tried to develop a town on the Mississippi river, which really never took off after the panic of 1857. But he continued to day in Minnesota in a fairly large home. He was fairly prosperous. He became an anti-slavery Republican during the civil war and ran for Lieutenant governor with the governor of Minnesota during the Civil War year’s guy named Alexander Ramsey. Then in 1862, when again, he was quite young, he was elected to Congress. He was then at the time the youngest member of the House of Representatives.

And he complained bitterly when he went back to Washington about the way that Washington itself operated. He felt that it was the establishment and he was not comfortable with that establishment. He said, “The great cluttered jangle and chatter goes on, a 1000 interests, wishes, vanities mingle together in one’s stupendous buzz and bur while the mechanical host and hostess stand smiling away and working their pump handles,” by which he meant the shaking hands. That everything was sort of clubby and not the way that this government that he thought he represented should operate. Now, the reason that that what he wrote is of interest and the reason that his story becomes of interest is that Minnesota was in the process of becoming, if you will, part of the establishment. The Republican party had a real strong seat in Minnesota. And one of the people who is coming up in the state alongside him is a guy named William Drew Washburn, who is the younger brother of the Washburn dynasty.

Israel Washburn had been the governor of Maine. Elihu Washburn was a congressperson from Illinois. Cadwallader Colden Washburn, they’re all brothers, was a Congressman from Wisconsin and they were grooming their younger brother to be part of this political dynasty. And so Illinois Washburn, Elihu Washburn, who had been a friend of Abraham Lincoln and kind of rode that to a seniority in the Republican party, started to attack Donnelly to take him down and sort of open up the way for Washburn’s younger brother, William Drew, to get a foothold in Minnesota politics. So Donnelly, who is in fact a Republican, starts to go to war with the establishment Republicans and they trade a war in the newspapers between the Washburn family and Ignatius Donnelley, who is by his own lights now an outsider. Now, again, their backgrounds are very similar. In fact, Donnelley came from a wealthier background and had a better education than the Washburn brothers did.

But by then the Washburn were the establishment, if you will. So Donnelly began to complain that Elihu Washburn who was attacking him had never actually done anything in Congress. He was not very smart and he was unpopular and he was basically just there because he was part of this Washington established. Washburn for his part kicked back and said that Donnelly was taking bribes from railroad companies and that he was corrupt. And so they kicked this back and forth. The way this plays out though is that Donnelly ends up leaving the Republican party and beginning to run for office as an independent, increasingly saying that he was representing agricultural interests and saying that the farmers he represented were being ignored by the Washington elite.

He said that the interest of agriculture is almost voiceless in the nation, it is tongue-tied by parties and gagged by tricksters, let it organize itself. If it can achieve success, all lesser interests can cling to it and be carried forward with it to prosperity. If it perishes, the nation sinks. And for what it’s worth, I’ve actually quoted from him at some length because the language is going to be really important. At the end of the day, Ignatius Donnelly is a writer. He is somebody who’s gotten political power in no small part because he is such a good writer.

Joanne Freeman:

He’s a storyteller.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He’s a storyteller.

Joanne Freeman:

Like Crockett is another storyteller.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Isn’t that interesting? So the first story he tells and in fact, the place that I first met Ignatius Donnelly was not in politics. It was a course in college I took that we affectionately termed Bigfoot on hoaxes in American history. That’s the first time I ever read Ignatius Donnelly because in 1881, he published his first book, which was entitled Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. And it was based on Plato’s theory that there was a continent which had sunk into the Atlantic ocean. It was a best seller. By 1890, it had had 23 additions in the United States and a bunch in other countries.

And people from all over the world wrote to him about it. In 1883, he followed up that blockbuster with Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, which talked about the earth being hit by a comet in the past. Then he tried to prove in 1888 that Francis Bacon had written all the works that were attributed to Shakespeare. That was a great cryptogram. And then my favorite in a historical sense was in 1890 when he published a novel that was called Caesar’s Column. It was set in the future in 1988 and it was a story of America where there had been a bloody rebellion in order to take down a financial oligarchy. And the book is dystopian, it is apocalyptic. It sold about 200,000 copies and he wrote it the night that he lost an election to William Drew Washburn.

Joanne Freeman:

I went, that’s so intrigued me. This is my first contact with him. So I did not know any of this, but when I was noticing Caesar’s Column, this sort of dystopian book that takes place in 1988, I went to look at it today to see what was in there. And indeed, he’s envisioning like these cities with what he calls great airships, and that there’s a commander of the airships that has great power. He spies on the oligarchy to see what they’re saying, and then reports the horrible things that these, what he calls, plutocrats have no thought for any of humanity. And he says, “What I have seen and heard tonight satisfies me that the plutocrats should no longer comber the earth with their presence.” He’s speaking in the voice of his narrator so that’s not John Lee himself speaking. But the book, I mean, it involves blowing up banks and attacking plutocrats and trying to save the people. And it takes place in 1988. It on many counts, it was really striking to look at that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What’s interesting about Donnelley is as he becomes more and more outspoken on these topics and as he increasingly gets rejected by voters, he becomes a conspiracy theorist obviously, but he becomes perhaps he was, but he becomes virulently antisemitic. And he shows up again in our history in 1892 when he’s actually the guy who writes the preamble to the Omaha platform for the populist party, which is just forming at the time. It expands on a lot of what he talks about in Caesar’s Column. It is beautifully written. It is beautifully written and it has this entire history behind it, all the anti plutocracy, all the things that the populists are going to embrace, but it also has within it, these conspiracy theories and the antisemitism to which he is increasingly becoming beholden. It’s a really remarkable document. A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once, it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization or the establishment of an absolute despotism.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, which is just a brilliant line. I mean, aside from just the rhythm and the language of that, the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes unprecedented in the history of the world while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty. And yet his story, while it is going to be important in the way our American politics plays out, ends up getting him rejected by voters because of his conspiracy theories, because of his increasingly outlandish ideas and because ultimately of his antisemitism. So he’s an example of somebody who an outsider who has an outside populist critique of the establishment government and yet gets spit out by the American people because once they get to know him, they discover that’s not the kind of world they want to live in.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, another outsider who has his own view of how he thinks United States should work is Victor Berger, who is actually born in Austria, Hungary in 1860. He emigrates to the United States at the age of 18. And like so many of these other people that we’re talking about here, he and his family at the beginning are impoverished. He works as a metal polisher. He ends up contributing articles for a German language newspaper. He teaches German. He becomes a US citizen in 1886, ends up also being involved in the newspaper business, becomes the editor of an English language newspaper, The Social Democratic Herald, but he begins mingling with socialist leaders.

And in 1902, the perennial socialist presidential candidate, IWW co-founder Eugene Debs thinks about, reflects on Berg’s influence and says it was at this time when the first glimmerings of socialism were beginning to penetrate that Victor L. Berger, and I have loved him ever since, came to Woodstock as if a providential instrument and delivered the first impassioned message of socialism I had ever heard, the very first to set the wires humming in my system. So he is praising him as playing this founding role and again, in a sense, another storyteller who is speaking of what is speaking to him about socialism and what it can do for society.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I love the fact that when Berger actually goes on to co-found the Socialist Party of America in 1901 and runs for Congress in 1904, he develops a socialist machine in Milwaukee, and he’s very practical. He basically wants to make the city work for ordinary Milwaukeeans, if you will. And he is much less concerned with ideology than with providing government services like parks. And in this era, sanitation because after the 1880s, they understand germ theory and all of a sudden they’ve recognized they have to have some kinds of sanitation systems, including sewers. So they become nicknamed the Sewer Socialists, something that they are very proud to call their own. And I just love that.

Joanne Freeman:

That is quite wonderful. And that’s a long tradition in American history, right? When someone throws a nasty name and like Yankee Doodle and British throw that at Americans and the Americans are like, oh yeah, yes, we are Yankee Doodle, take that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We’re going to write a song about it.

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly. Sewer Socialists is quite wonderful.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You can write one for next week for that.

Joanne Freeman:

I’ll try, I’ll work at it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But Berger is interesting as an outsider because once again, he’s using his status as an outside agitator, if you will, to take on the establishment government and to try and make the existing government responsive to ordinary people. And one of the reasons we picked him, it turned out, was because he had a very famous turn of phrase.

Joanne Freeman:

He introduced the concept of draining the swamp of Washington politicians in 1907. And this is how he describes this idea, “As long as capitalism lasts, speculation is absolutely necessary and unavoidable in order to protect the system from stagnation. This is another evil that is inherent in this system. It cannot be avoided any more than malaria in a swampy country. And the speculators are the mosquitoes. We should have to drain the swamp, change the capitalist system, if we want to get rid of those mosquitoes.” So it’s not quite the same swamp we’re draining now. And I like the fact that capitalists are mosquitoes, but I certainly myself before this would not have thought that drain the swamp, which is such a catchy phrase that just begs for people to throw it political speech that it goes this far back.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That it goes this far back and takes what is such a powerful image for anybody in that era, who knows what it’s like to clear fields, or to try and drain an area in order to be able to use it as a field that you need to drain the water out of it in order to restore the soil to a place where you can put seeds into it and also to get rid of the mosquitoes.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. The real harm of a swamp, right? We say it now, and we’re like, hoo-hoo, swamp, but this is a period when people knew that swamps were actually places that worked against the bettering of humankind, they worked against agriculture, against farming. They promoted disease.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Berger gets into the House of Representatives in 1910. He’s the first socialist ever elected to the House of Representatives at the same election, by the way, Milwaukee voted in a socialist mayor. But one of the first things he does is to introduce a constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate, which of course he’s doing from the house, which aside from anything else, I find somewhat amusing. But anyway, he does so because he recognizes something and that is that he understands as other people have understood since the 1880s that the state legislatures are so corrupt that essentially in the period in which our state legislatures picked the state senators, the rich guys simply essentially bought the senators seats. And it was much easier to corrupt a state legislature than it would be to run around the state and corrupt all the voters. So he says, they’re so corrupt that we need to get rid of the Senate altogether, to which people responded with horror.

We can’t get rid of the Senate. What we can do is get rid of the corrupt manner in which they’re elected. And it is in part because of Berger’s recognition of the corruption in the process of electing senators in the early years of the 20th century that we got a constitutional amendment to elect senators directly rather than through the state legislatures. When Berger wrote his constitutional amendment, he wrote a preamble that really pulled no punches. It said, “Whereas the Senate in particular has become an obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people and an obstacle to social growth, a body, many of the members of which are representatives neither of a state nor of its people, but solely of certain predatory combinations, a body, which by reason of the corruption often attending the election of its members has furnished the gravest public scandals in the history of the nation.”

And he goes on, but you can see there, he is identifying a crucial problem and less than seven weeks later, the Senate approved a resolution providing for the direct election of senators, which is going quickly to be ratified as the Constitution’s 17th amendment. He goes on to oppose America’s entry into World War I. And when he does that, he is indicted in 1918 under the Espionage Act. And he and four other socialist party leaders are convicted in Chicago. And in early 1919, they are sentenced to 20 years in prison by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. I always love his name. He appeals the sentence and is free on bail during his appeal. And when he is free on bail, he continues to defend socialism on the house floor and to argue that World War I was fought solely for profit, or at least primarily for profit.

A month after his speech in November of 1919, the House of Representatives denied him a seat by a vote of 309 to one that did not get him elected on that seat. And the next day, the first annual convention of the American Legion unanimously passed a resolution calling for him to be deported. Nonetheless, when Wisconsin’s governor calls a special election to fill his seat in 1919, voters reelected him. The house still refused to seat him and finally, in 1921, the United States Supreme court voided his conviction on the grounds that the judge who had publicly made a number of statements that were anti German and anti-socialist should have recused himself from the case.

With his name cleared, Berger goes on to win reelection to Congress in 1922, 1924 and 1926, during which he emphasizes civil liberties, anti-lynching legislation and repeal of prohibition. He finally loses his final election in 1928, which is not really a surprise. The Republicans clean up in 1928. But what’s interesting about him is that, well, we had Ignatius Donnelley, who is an outsider identifying specific problems with the American establishment who gets chewed up and spat out by the voters, here we have Victor Berger who on paper anyway for his era is far more of an outsider and far more extreme for his time than Ignatius Donnelley was.

And the voters keep reelecting him. They even reelect him when he is appealing a 20 year prison sentence. It’s an interesting contrast to Donnelley I think who is not on paper as far out as Berger, but who gets rejected and Berger, who is a vowed socialist who is convicted to a 20 year sentence remaining popular with voters and getting things like the 17th amendment to the constitution. And it’s going to be interesting once we hit the next character to think about why we keep some outsiders and throw away others.

Joanne Freeman:

And I think it’s worth noting before we move on that in his case, if we do indeed see him as a storyteller, I suppose, in the sense that he is a socialist, he is firmly a believer in that and he is skilled at explaining what that means and why he believes in it, he is someone who is skilled at messaging what he believes into the public in a way resonates with them. So in one way or another, we are talking about people who might be outsiders, but who are skilled in one way or another at presenting themselves in a way that they at least get the chance to get into power. The question then is what happens once they have that power and what people make of them once they begin to use it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Once people can really see what they stand for.

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then we have Huey Long. Huey long is a name that many people probably have heard of and speaking of people I heard of early on, I think Huey Long was one of the absolute first names I ever heard of in American political history. He was born in 1890. I know you look surprised.

Joanne Freeman:

I do.

Heather Cox Richardson:

My grandmother had a book in the barn. All of her books were in the barn and there was a book that talked about him. It was just sort of a trashy novel from when he was probably still alive actually. And I was mesmerized by the book and I mentioned it to my mother and she said, “It’s a fictionalized account of a real life.” And I’m like, “No, nobody could do that.” And she’s like, “Yeah, his name was Huey long. You better start reading.” He was born in 1893 in Winfield, Louisiana, one of nine children. He initially was homeschooled and then he went off to two lane to the school of law where he passed the bar in 1914 and promptly won a seat on the Louisiana Railroad Commission in 1918, where he worked to fight monopolies and the high utility rates in the region at the time winning favor with working people. Remember in this period, the American South was a one party state where there was a lot of corruption in the governments and he was an outsider working for the people.

In 1922, he became the chair of the Louisiana Public Service Commission. He sued the telephone company when it raised rates. He gets elected governor in 1928 and then ran for Senate in 1930, where he won, but then left his Senate seat unattended to consolidate his power in Louisiana before he left the state, installing cronies into his significant spots so that he would continue to be able to dictate what was happening in Louisiana. He would demand, for example, that the state legislature meet in a special session whenever he visited so he could go ahead and push through an agenda while he was there. In one, five day session for example, they passed 44 bills. He at first through his support behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, he was a Democratic presidential candidate of course, and managed to help FDR get the votes of Louisiana and a number of other Southern states. But he became really virtually a dictator in Louisiana, where he pushed for his own state legislators to take office.

And at one point, somebody was trying to stand up against him and he challenged them to go ahead and try and break what he called Longism. He said, “They tell you that you’ve got to tear up Longism in this state. All right my friends, get you a bomb or some dynamite and blow up that new state capital, then go out and up the concrete roads I’ve built, get your spades and your shovels and scrape the gravel off them roads we graveled and let the rain come in on them. That’ll put them back like they was before I come. Tear down all the new buildings I’ve built at the university. And when your child starts to school tomorrow morning, snatch the free textbooks out of his hands. Then my friend, she’ll be rid of Longism in this state and not before.”

Joanne Freeman:

Now, once FDR is in office, Long quickly begins to criticize the new president for not moving quickly enough to redistribute wealth. Roosevelt in turn becomes increasingly aware of Long’s potentially dangerous rhetoric and the degree to which it’s heard the power of that rhetoric. Roosevelt is quoted as telling an aide, “It’s all very well for us to laugh over Huey, but actually we have to remember all the time that he really is one of the two most dangerous men in the country.” And supposedly that the other most dangerous man was Douglas MacArthur. Now, in the Senate in 1933, Long begins advocating for a series of reforms that becomes known as Share Our Wealth, which is intended to redistribute wealth and cap personal income at 50 million. And he formally announces the Share Our Wealth platform during a national NBC radio broadcast on February 23rd, 1934 in an address that became known as the Every Man a King Speech. And he fiercely criticizes FDR and the Washington establishment and argues along the lines of what we’ve already heard several times in this discussion that there’s a small oligarchy that controls the economy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Now, one of the things that’s interesting about him and about that speech is that FDR says we make fun of Huey and you’re thinking, why are you making fun of him, he’s a populist who’s rising to power? He very deliberately played the clown. He very deliberately wore clothing that was outrageous, made outrageous speeches and guaranteed that he would get press coverage. He played the country bumpkin who was getting attention by the way he dressed, by the way he talked and by his slogans. So he is your storyteller, but he’s your storyteller along the lines of Davy Crockett.

Joanne Freeman:

He’s presenting himself as this bumpkin, which on the one hand is an image. On the other hand, that is a very good way to appear to have less power than you actually do. It’s a way to put off people from assuming that you are a dangerous person. So it’s a slime maneuver as well, but you’re right, not necessarily with the same dynamics, but the same idea of presenting yourself to the public in a way that grabs their imagination, that they can sort of stick an identifier on you as to what you represent to who you are.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Huey Long articulates a real problem for the 1930s. He says, “We have in America today, my friends, a condition by which about 10 men dominate the means of activity and at least 85% of the activities that you own. They either own directly everything or they have got some kind of mortgage on it with a very small percentage to be accepted. They own the banks. They own the steel mills. They own the railroads. They own the bonds. They own the mortgages. They own the stores and they have chained the country from one end to the other until there is not any kind of business that a small independent man could go into today and make a living.”

Long becomes enormously popular during the 1930s to the point that FDR is concerned that he is going to challenge him for the 1936 Democratic presidential nomination. And Long believes in fact that he has a shot at the nomination and he is increasingly powerful. He starts his own newspaper called The American Progress to spread his ideas. His idea of sharing the wealth starts political clubs around the country that have more than seven million members in more than 27,000 clubs. And increasingly, he called out titans of industry by name, in which, for example, he said in 1934…

Huey Long (archival):

The Lord has answered the prayer. He has called a barbecue, “Come to my feast.” He said to 125 million American people, but Morgan and Rockefeller and Mellon and Baruch have walked up and took 85% of the victuals off the table. Now, how are you going to feed the bounds of the people? What’s Morgan and Baruch and Rockefeller and Mellon going to do with all that grub? They can’t eat it. They can’t wear the clothes. They can’t live in the house. Give them a yacht, give them a palace, send them to Reno and give them a new wife when they want it, that’s what they want.

Heather Cox Richardson:

His rhetoric and his specific calling out of individuals struck many Americans as being dangerous demagoguery. In addition, his corruption was becoming increasingly clear. A number of his opponents were organizing in Louisiana who were very concerned about how he was evading taxes, how he was bending the will of the legislature to his own. His own finances were questionable to say the least and by April of 1935, one of his men in the legislature had already been sentenced to 18 months in prison for income tax evasions. So it was clear that he was not only corrupt and creating a one party dictatorship or a one person dictatorship in Louisiana, but that was a concept that he would like to take national.

Roosevelt told cabinet officials to stop working with Long, to stop working with Long allies and said to his treasury secretary, Henry Wallace, “Don’t put anybody in and don’t keep anybody that’s working for Huey Long or his crowd. That’s a 100%, anybody working for Huey Long is not working for us.” So he made it really clear not only that he didn’t want to give Long any more ammunition, to give him money for new roads, for example, that would help him be reelected but also that the Democratic party didn’t want to be tied to the corruption that was increasingly apparent with Long in Louisiana.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s worth noting too that in Louisiana also the opposition here is not just on a national level, in Louisiana, a group called the Square Deal Association forms. And essentially it’s a gathering of Long’s opponents and they embrace armed revolt as the only way to stop him. In January of 1935, the East Baton Rouge Parish Courthouse was raided by a group of 300 armed men who were part of the Square Deal Association. So there’s Roosevelt on a national level, there’s now people gathering in the Louisiana to fight against him as well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And now the awkward part is what happens to him because that internal dissent in Louisiana against Huey Long led in 1935 to his shooting by the son-in-law of a judge that he had essentially ruined. And the son-in-law of Dr. Carl Weiss came up to Long, where he stood at the Baton Rouge state house and shot him at close range and Long died of internal bleeding of a couple of days later.

Two months after his assassination, a journalist reflected on his political machine, which did a tremendous amount of good for the white people in Louisiana, but at the cost of creating essentially a dictatorship in the state. The journalist said, “Huey Long’s political creed is not at all clear. In Louisiana, his associates have been accused of corruption and some have been indicted, and at least one has been found guilty of income tax frauds. In Washington, he attacked the rich and the corporations. In Louisiana, where he could do as he chose, he did not introduce any genuine share the wealth measures. And there is ample justification for the suspicion that his attacks on the corporations did them little harm.” When the journalist recalled asking Long if he were a fascist, Long responded this way, something people always remembered about him, Long said, “I’m Mussolini and Hitler rolled into one. Mussolini gave them castor oil, I’ll give them Tabasco and then they’ll like Louisiana.”

Joanne Freeman:

Well, so let’s step back for a minute here, because we started out by talking about how we were going to talk about a number of people who in one way or another stand out and in one way or another, maybe were either seen as eccentric or different. As we’ve seen in what we’ve been talking about today, some of them play on that, actually play that up, get attention for it, get mass appeal, the public supports them that way and they are raised to power through the democratic process. The democratic process also, more typically than not, offers the ability of the people. Once these people come to power, if what they’re doing is either not necessarily living up to what they said, or if once it’s in effect, it proves to be dangerous or unreliable or unwanted, the actual democratic process enables the American populist to remove these people from power.

That’s part of the purpose of a set democratic system of government. Like our constitution put into effect, there’s a set process, there’s a set system and we all in the country agree to abide by that process, by that system. It’s why people take oaths of office when they take office to say, basically, I will abide by this national system. And the system is set up to give people power and to enable the public to take that power away. That’s how a healthy democracy works. And because of that, it might be alarming to someone who has extreme views is given power. The way that the system is supposed to work is that if that proves to be a bad thing, power can be taken away, which brings us to the present.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And let’s just add to that idea where we started that you can disagree whether or not it’s a good idea to have these wild voices on every side in Congress or not. I think it’s a good thing myself. I think that you get somebody like Victor Berger who’s willing to say, “Hey, we need to get rid of the Senate altogether,” to have someone say, “Well, no, I kind of like the Senate, but we definitely need to get rid of the bribery in the Senate.” So the question of whether or not we should have a system that kicks up outsiders to me is, yeah, that’s one of the things that is good about American democracy, but, and that’s where you were going right now is the but part.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s exactly was the but part. So on the one hand, you can have someone say, I think that the Senate is a corrupt, we don’t really need the Senate and suggesting a dramatic change of government, basically speaking against a government institution, you could see that as radical, but he’s doing that within the system. And that’s a good thing. Let’s bring people to power who have different things to say. They should be there. There should be debate and argument. There shouldn’t be a consensus about what we necessarily want. The people should be able to be represented in Congress, but all of that should be happening within our constitutional system. That becomes very different when you’re looking at people who are either trying to tear down or bypass or eliminate aspects of the system that are getting in their way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But the place we are right now is that one of the things that outsiders permit us to do is to reexamine our government and to say whether or not we want it to go in the direction that a Victor Berger wants it to, or an Ignatius Donnelley wants it to, or a Huey Long or a Cori Bush. We get to look at that and say, yes, we do and we want to reelect that person.

Where we are in this moment where a number of states have passed new election laws, making it extremely difficult to throw out Republican candidates, looks a lot like where Louisiana was with Huey Long, where people don’t have the ability to say, “Hey, I listened to your ideas. I liked some of them. I don’t like the direction you’re going, and I want to throw you out and elect somebody else.” And that makes this particular moment of outsiders a very fraught one where we’ve got the usual outsiders that we’ve always had in our society, but it appears we are on the cusp of losing the ability to get rid of the ones we don’t like and to move in the directions that we do like with the other new voices.

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely. And if we lose the ability to remove people who we do not like through a free and fair process of election, we lose democracy. It’s a process that’s grounded on debate and compromised not on from the inside dramatically revamping, warping, and eliminating the ability to have real actual competitive contests. And it’s in those contests that we debate what kind of an America we want to be. So we’re at a moment where yes, I think it’s fine to have people in Congress who have all kinds of different views, who disagree with each other, who we might really not like for what they say but that only works when you actually have the power to think about what they say and respond to it and remove them if you want to. And we’re at this moment of extreme contingency partly because of the last few years, partly because precisely of where we are right now.

So it’s a moment where we really don’t know what’s coming next. And because of that, some of these voices are being heard more than they might otherwise be because there’s a little bit of a void. And that’s happening at a moment where on a state level, the electoral process is being tinkered with. For all of these reasons, this sort of grand American tradition of people, some eccentric, some great storytellers, some extreme in their politics, this tradition of people like that being able to come to power, test out their ideas and then be removed the actual soul of democracy, that’s a danger right now. That’s a big part of the many challenges that we face right now.