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 want to talk about a topic that in one way or another isn’t necessarily restricted to this week or last week. It has to do with loyalties, and I suppose some are using the word traitor or sedition. What we’re interested in talking about is what happens when there’s a conflict, a deep national conflict, and in one way or another, people who either oppose the nation or are on the opposing team, fighting the nation need in one way or another to get reintegrated back into society. So basically, we’re looking at what enemies of the nation, how they become, or actually don’t become Americans after a conflict is over. Obviously this is something that in one way or another, we keep tap-dancing around as we talk about extreme polarization and we talk about the January 6th attack on the Capitol and Congress and all the discussion that goes on about what did people do? Who did it? What were they guilty of?

What does it mean if they’re guilty of something and does that count as a serious crime of one kind or another? So today by delving into some similar examples in the past with different kinds of groups of people, we really want to explore that kind of question.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I want to point out here, Joanne, that as a scholar of reconstruction, there is literally nothing I spend more time thinking about. This is what we do. What would have made reconstruction more effective procedure to get America unified again, and to move us forward? How do we avoid the kind of backwash, if you will, that we had after reconstruction that still affects where we are today? And what do we do now in this present moment when there is in fact hanging out there, this horrendous attack on the US Capitol. And there is a significant portion, not only of our population, but also of our lawmakers, trying to pretend it doesn’t matter. And the people, how they are dividing within the Republican Party, the lawmakers within the Republican Party, even over that specific issue, tells us a lot about how we might move forward comparing it to the past. So for example, when Liz Cheney said.

Liz Cheney (archival):

We cannot leave the violence of January 6th and its causes uninvestigated. We must know what happened here at the Capitol.

Heather Cox Richardson:

She really hit the nail on the head. And that goes back to things you and I were talking about with the hearings and why hearing so important. When she goes on to say, “The American people deserve the full and open testimony of every person with knowledge of the planning and preparation for January 6th.” And that’s, I think one of the things we’re going to be getting to the heart of.

Joanne Freeman:

And what’s interesting and what you just gestured at, which I think is worth noting because it’s going to play a role in the examples that we’re going to discuss today is we’re not even just talking about loyalties. We’re talking about episodes of conflict in which insiders in one way or another, government insiders are involved with dealing with categorizing, in one way or another, sorting out and allowing people in or out and all of the controversy that that raises. So we’re going to talk about the loyalists and what happens to them after the American revolution. We’re going to talk about the Confederate States and Reconstruction and how that played out. And then we’re going to talk about the integration of Nazi scientists into the United States to take advantage of some of their skills. And all of these examples, it’s obviously it’s the government that for one reason or another has to grapple with this, partly for legal or national reasons, partly for bigger reasons that have to do with us and them.

But as you just suggested with the quote from Liz Cheney, some of what’s going on here is we’re questioning insiders, we’re questioning government power holders, and trying to figure out what their loyalty is, what their purpose is. So all of those questions will be running throughout what we discussed today.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, in one of the pieces of that is that while in fact it is about the government and the law, it’s also about how the American people react to what’s happening on the ground. So let’s start with one of the things that really jumps out to me when we talk about all this material today, and that is the fast and loose use of the words, treason and traitor, primarily on the right. When you have people like Arizona, Representative Paul Gosar saying sedition and treason for stealing votes is appropriate. And what they’re leading toward is the idea that somehow there should be, and people have used this word executions for this loosely designed position of treason. And one of the things that jumps out of course is that treason is the only crime that’s talked about in the constitution. And yet they’re very, very careful when they write about treason in the constitution, not to specify exactly what that looks like for the simple reason that they don’t want to make political protest treasonous.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, certainly as you just suggested, the one crime of sorts that that is really outlined in the constitution is treason. That’s defined. And it’s defined as people who are either taking side against the United States with the enemy or aiding in some way an enemy fighting against the United States. Now, one of the interesting things about what we’re talking about today, and whether we call it treason or not is another issue, is that on the one side, that sounds very categorical, right? And you can see how the framers and framing the constitution would be like, well, obviously the one thing we can put in here is if you side with the enemy, if you attack the United States, if you join with them, if you help them in conflict, particularly during a war, that’s a crime that very obviously violates sovereignty and violates what this new nation without very much power represents.

So that’s all well and good, but things get a lot fuzzier when you get down on the ground and you start dealing with individuals and what they’re doing and what they’re not doing, and the reasons for what they’re doing. So despite that clear statement in the constitution, what you see during and after the Revolution is all of the ways in which that becomes complicated. Now, of course, I think when people think traitor they think Benedict Arnold, right? That’s the person that comes to mind and Benedict Arnold kind of fits very clearly into that category. He was a praised American soldier who ultimately sides with the British and tries to surrender West Point to them. And he flees the United States and ends up in England. So he’s very obviously a trader, he’s called that. But during the Revolution, it’s a much fuzzier issue because it’s really a question, not so much a siding with the enemy to deliver a fort, but it has to do with loyalties.

And who are you loyal to? Are you loyal to the immediate community or are you loyal to the king and the Crown. And the Revolution, we don’t tend to think of it this way very often, but at the time, even it was called and considered a civil war. It was Americans turning on Americans in one way or another. And as with any civil war, this kind of a war tears families apart, tears communities apart, people shift their loyalties depending on a situation and who is moving to one side or another. So it’s very unstable ground when it comes to allegiances and loyalties, particularly during a civil war or revolution.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Can you walk us through that a little bit more in the sense that I have always heard, and this makes sense, of course, as first the British come in and demand loyalty, and then the colonists take back over and they demand loyalty and things are going back and forth, that the, especially in the cities, during the Revolution, it’s incredibly violent. I mean, the people are really, really… I mean, I don’t think it shows up in the history book so much that in fact Americans really are divided as if it is a civil war during the Revolution.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh absolutely. And that’s particularly true in big cities where New York city ends up being a British stronghold where they really headquarters there. And that becomes obviously a fraught kind of area. But when I teach about the Revolution, at Yale, I talk about the Battle of New Haven, which I will admit, I didn’t know existed until I began teaching this course. What’s striking about it is just what you’re talking about, which is it’s fought in the streets. The British embark, and basically just want to sweep through New England and take things as they go. And they come to New Haven. And what you see is people immediately deciding they’re on one side or another, abandoning their belongings, deciding that actually no, no, I’m actually a loyalist, and then being turned on by their neighbors and their houses burned down. People being shot in the street, British soldiers being shot in the street, Americans trying desperately to learn how to ride on horseback so they can shoot. So we’re talking about actual hand-to-hand combat in some cases, particularly in this Battle of New Haven.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so this fascinates me because when I think of the Revolution, and I’m no specialist in the Revolution at all, but one does not think of the post-war years as the post-Revolutionary war years as being ones in which the population remains divided. I mean, we don’t have pockets of Americans or still loyalists running around flying the British flag and attacking their colonial neighbors. We don’t have that. So how did that play out? And I think I have an idea, but I want to see what you have to say about it.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it plays out in a number of ways. So during the Revolution, there were a lot of test acts of various sorts in which people were demanded to swear oaths of one kind or another about who their loyalties would be committed to. After the war, you do have these loyalists and by that point, too many people, it appears clear who were loyalists and who weren’t. A good many loyalists, roughly 60,000 of them flee. And they go either to Britain or they go to the Caribbean or they go to Canada.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So 60,000 people leave America. Do you have any sense of, is that a lot of them, a few of them, is it symbolic or is it actually the undercutting of a large population?

Joanne Freeman:

It’s roughly one in 40 of the population.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So it’s not insignificant, but it’s more symbolic.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s somewhere between the two. But in addition to that, what it also has to do with, and this is true during Reconstruction, and it’s true during the Revolution, the question of reintegrating people who have in one way or other violated the constitution or attack the government, the way that that is prosecuted one way or another has to do or demonstrates what kind of regime, the new regime or the new government is going to be. So it ends up having really extreme importance in a sense symbolically or representatively in addition to legislatively and politically and even economically. And that’s the case certainly after the revolution.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So I totally want to get into that, but right now we’re busily getting the loyalists off the continent. And part of that, I think is they lose their property, right?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, that’s actually complicated.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s important to remember that we don’t have the constitution yet. All this is happening before the constitution, then the constitution gets written in the middle of it, right?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, the constitution is written after. So the war, basically 1783 is The Treaty that ends the Revolution. The constitution is 1787. The government starts 1789. So it’s a nice little string of things. But at this early point, this sort of 1783, 84, 85, right after the Revolution, on the one hand, you have a treaty that says Americans will not basically carry out acts of revenge against Tories, Loyalists or the British in the wake of the Revolution. That’s nice. On the other hand, you have individual states, and at this point, really, you’re talking state to state each having its own sense of citizenship and its own decision as to what it wants to do about loyalties and the Loyalists. In one way or another, they are creating acts to punish the British. And as you just said, Heather, sometimes it means taking territory, sometimes it means raising taxes or banishing people.

I mean, there are all kinds of punitive measures that are being passed in the wake of the Revolution. And of course, this is complicated because in the case of one case, I’ll come back to a legal case, in that particular case, you have one family, the Rutgers family that had a brewery, owned it. They fled New York when the Revolution starts and the British get there. The British come, a fellow named Joshua Waddington comes, takes over the brewery and uses it for a while. Ultimately, it burns to the ground. So after the war, the question is what happens to the brewery? And there’s a big case, Rutgers v. Waddington, and what that’s about in part is what happens to that property. It’s American property, it was British property. Does the British man who had it, does he pay rent or money to the people who owed it?

Does he owe something to the British government in taxes? I mean, it’s a complicated issue because there are all kinds of levels of sovereignty in addition to personal attachments involved. You have this case in New York, what’s going to happen to this property that the Rutgers owned and that Joshua Waddington took over. Becomes a big case. Alexander Hamilton defends the Loyalists and part of what he argues throughout this period is what should define this country after the war, is the way we govern. Is the fact that we should govern fairly, that the rule of law should apply. So for example, he says, “We’re the people of America with one voice to ask, what shall we do to perpetuate our liberties and secure our happiness. The answer would be govern well. And you have nothing to fear either from internal disaffection or external hostility. Abuse not the power you possess, and you need never apprehend its laws, but if you make a want and use of it, if you furnish another example that despotism may debase the government of the many, as well as the few, you like all others that have acted the same part will experience the licentiousness that is the forerunner to slavery.”

So Hamilton is basically saying we should be governing now in the way that we want to be governing going forward. We shouldn’t act as a tyranny because we’ll be encouraging that to happen. He ultimately argues that a treaty created by the Confederation Congress, which at that point is governing the nation, a treaty is superior to these individual laws and acts to punish the British that the states are making. That when these acts are being made in the states, they’re violating a treaty, and so the treaty and the law of nations should have precedence. So in one way or another, what Hamilton and those defending the Loyalists are saying is that morality and the principles of the new nation demand and the rule of law demands that we treat these people fairly.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. I’m on board with that, but I also-

Joanne Freeman:

But.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… feel. I’m sorry, I want to get into Reconstruction here, but I also think it’s not unimportant that 60,000 people left and that in a popular level, Americans in the new nation made loyalty to Britain odious, if you will, without necessarily having mass executions, but I think it’s really significant that you don’t see in the early 1800s people walking around on the streets, waving British flags and saying we really need to go back to being British.

Joanne Freeman:

There are people who are afraid of that. So people talk all the time about you just want to take us back to Britain, but you’re right, the people aren’t walking around in that same way, celebrating. There’s one other factor I’ll bring in before we segue on into Reconstruction, because it’s also going to play a role in the final example, when we’re talking about Nazis in the US government, and that is part of what ultimately sways American state governments to back down a little bit on anti-Loyalist laws and acts of various sorts is that economically, the Loyalists would be really good to have around.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m fascinated by the Revolutionary period and the construction of a nation out of that period, because of course the Civil War is our second reconstruction of a nation. And it plays out entirely differently. And as I say, this is something that keeps people like me awake at night because we end up within a really short period of time after the shooting. After the shooting, which takes hundreds of thousands of American lives costs almost $6 billion, destroys half the country, we end up with people saying the wrong side won, and walking around, not with Confederate flags, those are really going to come back in the 20th century, but they’re walking around saying the Confederacy was right and continuing to have enclaves and even public spaces where they defend the Confederacy. So one of the things that jumped out at me when we were going to go ahead and do this episode was a song that is sung in the south in 1866, immediately after the war, it was called, I’m A Good Old Rebel and it went like this: ‘I hate your Spangled Banner, your great republic too. I hate your Freedmen’s Bureau, in uniforms of blue. I hate your constitution, your eagle and its squall, and a lying thieving Yankee, I hate the worst of all. 300, listen to this, three’… I’m sorry, I live this stuff.

Joanne Freeman:

Go for it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

‘300,000 Yankees lie moldering in the dust. We got 300,000 before you conquered us. They died of Southern fevers and Southern steel and shot. And I wish it was 3 million instead of what we got.’ Can you imagine that after the Revolution and that entering American culture in that period?

Joanne Freeman:

Now, let me ask you a question because obviously a huge difference between the period you’re talking about and the period I just talked about, has to do with the government. Because in the Revolutionary period, we have the articles of Confederation. It’s a weak government. And although the states, the colonies and then states joined together to fight England and they’re fighting the Crown it’s not quite the same as Confederates pulling away from the national government that they were part of and attacking that American government. So is there some… there must be some difference of dynamic because of the difference in what the national government is at one time and the other.

Heather Cox Richardson:

There is a profound difference in that matters hugely even in the present in the conflict between the states and the idea of the federal government enforcing black equality. And the continuing fight between the power of the states and the power of the federal government is absolutely definitive even up to the present, but you will love this. I’m going to say that while I would like to talk about the way the government worked and the way the laws worked in that period and we need to, what really jumps out to me in this period is I’m so glad you’re sitting down, culture.

Because what really matters in the determination of the way this is going to play out is the fact that when Ulysses has generally, Ulysses Grant for the United States goes ahead and accepts the surrender of The Army of Northern Virginia from General Robert E. Lee. He does so with minimal punishment. He lets the men keep their firearms on their own words saying they’re not going to continue to fight. He says, go ahead, go home and plant your crops because I know everybody in the South is starving as they were. And he believes that being lenient is going to bring these people back into society. And interestingly enough, a number of the leaders at that point including people like Wade Hampton are like, well, I wasn’t there, I didn’t give my word, I’m going to go run a guerrilla war, which they don’t actually do and that’s itself an interesting story. But what he sees, what Grant’s sees as being magnanimous, because everybody is really going to want to be in this together, really quickly gets reinterpreted on the Southern side as being, look, see, they knew we were right all along.

We had the better argument, nobody dared to stand up against us because we were the ones with the moral argument. And you can see really quickly in the summer of 1865, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, by a Southern sympathizer, the idea that they’re going to literally assassinate the leader of the opposite government, the government that won the war, and there’s not going to be any kind of backlash in a legal sense against that. Of course, John Wilkes Booth is killed in the manhunt for him and they do actually hang the people that are believed to be responsible for Lincoln’s death, a number of them. But that’s it. That and Henry Wirz who ran the Andersonville Prison camp, they’re the only executions of Confederates after the war. But again, one of the things that keeps me up at night is there are tons of executions after the Civil War, tons of them, but they’re of African-Americans who fought for the United States government.

I mean, you look at the whole picture here. It was an incredibly vengeful period, but not of the victors against the losers, the other way around. And one of the things I think that really drives that is the idea that the government had represented first by Grant and then after that, by Andrew Johnson who took over after Lincoln was assassinated, that everybody’s got the right idea, everybody wants to get along, we can do this and all be friendly and the people who wrote things like the Good Old Rebel song have every intention of taking every step that they can, and they continue to push that envelope until they essentially re-take over the south after 1877.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s interesting about this is the ability to do that, to act independently, to push that envelope. What we’re talking about is people relying on that most fundamental American thing that basically is responsible for the constitution being ratified and that’s federalism, which is the idea that there are things you can do on a local level, and there are things you can do on a national level, and there’s an amorphous area in between. And so in this case, after a civil war, there are things happening in the South that people feel justified in doing in the South on a state level, and there are things happening on a national level and there perhaps are, or are not attempts to pull in some of what’s happening in the South. In the work that I’ve done, my last book on physical violence in the US Congress in which Southerners are using violence to silence and intimidate Northerners, particularly on the issue of slavery, one of the arguments that I make at the end of the book is that when the North wins the war and Southerners can no longer behave that way in Congress, a lot of that violence and a lot of that conflict shifts to the South.

And that’s becomes a place where violence can still enforce control. So it absolutely makes sense and federalism sort of helps cocoon it, that this kind of violence can be happening on a state level, even as the national government is saying something different.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, but this is really interesting. Why does the national government give up essentially? Why does it give up on enforcing a new vision of human equality across the country?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, let me ask you that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, you’d be surprised hear that I’ve written quite a bit about this because I can’t… And like I say, we think a lot about this. It is not unimportant as in it is important that the newspaper reports coming out of the American South are written by former Confederates. And this is a period when nobody can check, nobody can look. So they’re hearing when you read the newspapers, people in the North are hearing stories that misrepresent what’s happening in the south. And at first the government pushes back against this. It has hearings after Andrew Johnson wants to go ahead and essentially readmit the Southern states to the Union only with slavery removed, the repudiation of Confederate debts and a nullification, not simply a repeal, but a nullification of the Ordinances of Secessions saying oopsie poopsie, that was a mistake that can’t be done.

The Congress looks at that and says this so is not happening. We just lost hundreds of thousands of our constituents. We are not going to turn over the reigns of the government to the former Confederates in greater numbers than they would have had before the war, because after the census of 1870, African-Americans are going to be counted as full people, rather than three-fifths of a person. So if we do it under your terms, the South is literally going to have more representation after the Civil War than it did before the Civil War and we’re going to end up right back where we started, or worse. So they said that’s not going to happen. And they put together the Joint Committee of Fifteen, as it was known as the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, and what they say is that before we decide how we can actually go ahead and reintegrate the South into the Union, we need to have hearings.

We need literally to sit here and listen to what the conditions are on the ground in the South. So they have a bunch of people start to tell Congress people what it looks like in the South. And the people that they allow to testify among others are African-Americans who talk about the extraordinary terrorism in the South. And when they have listened to this, they say, okay, we’re going to have to figure out a way to go ahead and protect the rights of black Americans in the South. And the way that they decide to do that, of course, is through the 14th amendment to the constitution, which they pass through Congress and send off to the states for ratification in ’66. It’s ratified, it becomes part of the constitution in ’68. And the idea behind that is that the federal government is going to step in and going to go ahead and protect equality across in this case, both the North and the South.

I don’t want to get into the west right now, but theoretically the west as well. And yet, the government protects that concept in 1870, when it goes ahead and establishes the Department of Justice under Grant, and they actually send people down to the South to break the gangs, the KKK, for example, that are going ahead and abusing African-Americans and keeping them away from the polls. But by 71 and 72, they’re backing off of that. And the reason I think that they’re backing off of that is twofold. One it’s that the newspapers coming out of the south are reporting a very different reality on the ground than actually is real. But I really think going back to your Revolution, it’s because there have been essentially no punishments for white former Confederates who are down there singing, I wish it was 3 million, instead of what we got.

There is no punishment. They can write the articles. They can go ahead and put into Congress people who are advocating their position. They can take over the newspapers and they can go ahead and they can murder their black neighbors and basically get away with it.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, and I want to put in a word here, just to harken back to the episode that we did about culture, because one of the things that we talked about was the real power because it’s can be a sort of sub level power of culture in shaping everything. Shaping politics, shaping law, shaping society. So it doesn’t surprise me in any way that that’s some of what is being used in the south to essentially fight, continue to fight their cause.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So one of the quotations that jumps out in this period, and it comes from Thaddeus Stevens, who is often.

Joanne Freeman:

I love Thaddeus Stevens.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, you know what bothers me about this? One of the many things that bother me about this period is that people refer to congresspeople people like Thaddeus Stevens from Pennsylvania, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania as a radical. But listen to what he’s saying, and then remember that literally, former Confederates are killing in this period, former United States soldiers, their black neighbors. Steven says, he’s talking about this. He’s like, what’s going on here? We just had this war. It killed all these people. It destroyed the country and now we’re basically saying, okay, why don’t you all come back into the Union? And he says, “How many captive enemies it would be proper to execute as an example to nations? I leave to others to judge. I am not fond of sanguinary punishments, but surely some victims must propitiate the mains of our starved, murdered, slaughtered martyrs.

A court martial could do justice according to law. So what he is saying there is that we must have some sorts of punishments, maybe courts marshal, maybe land confiscation, although the way that the constitution was written, made it difficult for them to do that during the Civil War, maybe some kind of disfranchisement, but you cannot simply walk away from an attack on the United States government and say, we’re all good now.

Joanne Freeman:

He makes sort of, what’s almost a counter argument that has an absolute logic to it, as you’re suggesting, right? He says that not punishing people enough is going to create more violence. It’s going to make things worse. He says, “I never dreamed at all punishment could be dispensed with in American society. Anarchy, treason and violence would reign triumphant.” And he’s talking about some of the Reconstruction measures. He’s saying here’s the mildest of all punishments ever inflicted on traitors. So he, unlike actually Hamilton who’s saying, no, we, we absolutely have to do things here so that people will see that we’re the kind of nation that we want to be, he’s saying, well, yeah, that’s true, but we also have to do things to be the kind of nation that we want to be, and in this case, he speaking in favor of punishment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Including enforcing the law.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And so that brings us to actually the thing that sparked this particular episode and that’s Operation Paperclip.

Joanne Freeman:

Indeed, which I will confess, Operation Paperclip is not something that I knew about before we decided to do this episode.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so it’s this period between 1945 and 1970, when the United States brings more than 1600 German scientists, former Nazis, to America to go ahead and work in our scientific establishment.

Joanne Freeman:

The program is headed by a group that becomes known as the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which is a War Department council made up of representatives from different intelligence agencies and military branches and the director Bosquet Wev explains why he thinks this program is necessary in a 1948 State Department memo. “Responsible officials have expressed opinions to the effect that insofar as German scientists are concerned, Nazi-ism no longer should be a serious consideration from a viewpoint of national security when the far greater threat of communism is now jeopardizing the entire world. I strongly concur in this opinion and consider it a most sound and practical view which must certainly be taken if we are to face the situation confronting us with even an iota of realism. To continue to treat Nazi affiliations as significant considerations has been aptly phrased as beating a dead Nazi horse.” So in addition to that snazzy phrase, right, he’s saying, well, we have more important enemies now, we don’t need to keep fighting Nazis.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and one of the things that I love about this story, first of all, is you do know about the story because the key team is led by Wernher von Braun, which any of us who grew up in the 1960s and early ’70s know from Tom Lehrer’s album, This Was the Year That Was. I think that’s the name of it. And believe me, I don’t have notes on this. This is coming from the fact that that played in my house, growing up, on a loop.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, of course, my response to you saying this, Heather is to demand that you are the one who should come forward and sing the song about Wernher von Braun.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, let’s do this, let’s get through the material, and if there is time at the end of it, I will go ahead and do that. Because where I want it to go with this is that I want it to link directly to what you just said, because Eisenhower, who is to my mind a really an extraordinary thinker. I got kind of into Eisenhower a number of years ago and read a ton of his work and he is… His life changes when he first sees the concentration camp. And this becomes his life goal to make sure that such a thing never happens again. I mean, he writes these really profound letters back home to Mamie, and he says, “I never dreamed that people could treat each other this way.” So this is not a man who takes Nazi-ism lightly at all. And yet, when his people went ahead and captured Vaughn Brown’s rocket research site, which delivered his rocket team to the United States, he actually writes to the Pentagon.

He sends him a cable and he says that he has in custody more than 400 top research scientists, the ones who developed the V-2 rocket, which is the one that carried the terrible bombs into London, among other places, they are developing more and more rockets, he says, and he goes on to say, believe this development would be important for Pacific War. The research, directors and staff realize impossibility for continuation of rocket development in Germany. They are anxious to carry on their research in whatever country will give them the opportunity.

Joanne Freeman:

Now that’s fascinating.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Isn’t it? Because Eisenhower who cares so deeply about this is like, I’m keeping my eye on the ball here, we need to win in the Pacific. I’m going to close my eyes to the fact that these people have been instrumental in enabling the Nazis to reign destruction on European cities.

Joanne Freeman:

But then what becomes interesting is von Braun who leads this team of rocket scientists has to in one way or another justify what he does. And he tries to wrap it up in morality. This gets back to loyalty and morality, which in one way or another are often at the heart of some of the things we’re talking about here, he says, when discussing this.

Wernher von Braun (archival, 1945):

I myself and everybody you see here have decided to go West. And I think our decision was not one of expediency, but a moral decision. We knew that we had created a new means of warfare and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we’re willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision, more than anything else. We want to see the world spare another conflict such as Germany has just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible would such an assurance to the world be best secured.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And this is such complicated moral position because I’m sitting here as cynical as I always am about things like this saying, yeah, right. And yet the situation with Operation Paperclip does reintegrate these people. And I will point out that scientists and academics are single-minded about what they do. And one of the reasons that we… I mean, there’s a big argument in the history of technology about morality, because there’s an argument that you can’t stop the advance of science and to try and impose morality on scientists is a mistake because that automatically means that it’s going to be the bad scientists who develop all the really dangerous stuff. So there’s a much larger question here that I’m not really going to get into, but the question of society and whether or not it was a good idea to essentially give these people a pass, because we’re going to find out that a number of them were in fact, actively participating in Nazi activities that led to extraordinary numbers of human dead, is a political problem.

And again, I want to go back to culture because one of the things that is interesting to me is the fact that von Braun becomes a cultural icon in America in part, because he cooperates with Walt Disney to go ahead and create all these television broadcasts about manned space flight.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s the thing. That’s the key there is that connection between his science and America’s quest to get a man on the moon. And as you said, that kind of made my jaw drop when I was first thinking about former Nazi von Braun and Disney. He connects with that cause and takes part in all of these popular programs and TV shows that are linked in with NASA and this idea that America is going to send a man into space.

Disney narration (archival, 1955):

One of the man’s oldest dreams has been the desire for space travel, to travel to other worlds. Until recently, this seemed to be an impossibility, but great new discoveries have brought us to the threshold of a new frontier, a frontier of interplanetary space.

Joanne Freeman:

He becomes a national icon. He gets a National Medal of Science in 1975, and this gets us actually back to Tom Lehrer and the song that he creates, which was created in 1965, when all of this is happening, when the space program is taking off and von Braun is becoming this cultural icon. I have to read the introduction and sing the four lines. I do. I just, I can’t resist. So it starts with an introduction, the song, and it says.

Tom Lehrer (archival, 1965):

Well, speaking of bombs, what is it that makes America the world’s greatest nuclear power? And what is it that will make it possible for us to spend 20,000 million dollars of our taxpayers money to put some idiot on the moon? Well, it was the great, enormous superiority of American technology, of course, as provided by our great American scientists, such as Dr. Wernher von Braun.

Joanne Freeman:

And he then launches into his song. Gather round while I sing you a Wernher von Braun, a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience. Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown. Nazi-shmatzy, says Wernher von Braun. I just needed an excuse to say Nazi-shmatzy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, no, no, the next one. Non, no, you need to do the next one.

Joanne Freeman:

I don’t have the next one in front of me, so you are going to have to do the next one.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, no, no.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I mean, again, I’m looking at this and this is literally where I learned the word expedience. I loved the word. I was too young to understand much of this, but I love the word planet. But there’s this wonderful moment where he goes, ‘Once the rockets are up, who cares, where they come down? That’s not my department says Wernher von Braun.’ I still remember that. But what’s interesting about this is that you don’t see Wernher von Braun and his compatriots out in America singing songs, like they died of German fevers and German steel and shot. I wish it was 3 million instead of what we got. I mean, they have in fact been integrated.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, and they were masked before they were integrated, right? So they were given… like von Braun was given a false past so that who he was would not be quite as obvious.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes. But they could have gone ahead and run underground… started an underground organization, and they didn’t. They didn’t the same way that the Southerners did with the KKK.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I mean, in this case, this brings me back to where we started in a sense, which is part of the reason for really wanting to reintegrate the Loyalists is economic, right? There’s a gain. There’s something to be benefited by it, and that’s what I think we’re looking at here, right? Is that on top of whatever else we’re talking about here, von Braun has something very valuable that he can give to the United States that the United States wants and that has a big pull.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think that’s exactly right. And so that brings us back to the present where we’ve got this really true crisis on our hands, where we have a significant portion of the American population that is willing to attack our government and we have lawmakers who are egging them on. And I don’t mean former lawmakers, I mean, currently sitting in the Capitol building lawmakers like Paul Gosar from Arizona, for example, or Mo Brooks.

Joanne Freeman:

Egging them on in not only sort of among other Republicans in Congress or in the government, but egging them on in the press, right? Egging them on in the face of the public.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So how do we move forward? Is there a way to reintegrate, provided they don’t win actually, but is there a way to reintegrate these people into a forward-looking society? And I think the past gives us some clues to that. So first of all, it seems to me absolutely crucial that we have hearings and that we have trials and there is a whole movement of history now called transitional justice. And one of my colleagues, a guy named Devin Pendas writes about transitional justice. And one of the points he makes is that it continues to be important, for example, to hold trials of former Nazis even though right now, there’s one going on and the guy’s a hundred years old. And you’re like really? He’s a hundred years old.

And what Devin points out is that these trials are not really about the person involved. They’re about first of all, laying out for the public, what we consider to be the parameters of our society. So to hold the trial and to say what you did is not okay and to make that statement again and again, and to give the person, of course, the opportunity to apologize in a tone, many of whom don’t, and at a hundred years old, who cares really in a way. But part of being able to move forward is making sure that there is an accounting of what happened, but also that we keep replaying for our society, what we stand on.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. And what we stand against, right? Just as you said, that that kind of a hearing or a trial of a sort is a line drawing mechanism that’s important. It’s important to get a record of truth that’s being testified to and that has evidence. And it’s important, particularly in the case of democracy, to have accountability, to have the people who did things at least be held accountable in this way of being revealed to the public, that this is what they did and it is not allowable. Whenever I think about that and right now I’m writing about it, on one level, it sounds so soft, like, oh, Americans need to be told that this is bad, but it isn’t. Because without that kind of shared understanding, there’s no reason why it won’t happen again.

Joanne Freeman:

I mean, in a sense, even the constitution when it started out was little more than a shared understanding, a shared national agreement to abide by certain laws and structures and strictures. So the things that we might see as soft and matters of opinion, they’re not. They’re the underbelly of how a government and a nation coheres and runs.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and the next piece of that is the playing out of the legal system. That does not necessarily mean mass arrests or mass punishments that are extra judicial. But it does jump out to me that after the American Revolution, legal cases went through the system and people got punished for their behaviors. And it didn’t happen after the Civil War, and as people said at the time, and I think still echoes, you need to make treason odious, not necessarily fatal, but odious enough that people don’t sing the I’m A Good Old Rebel song and they don’t continue to lionize Confederate soldiers, and they don’t end up over a hundred years later walking through our Capitol, carrying a Confederate flag.

Joanne Freeman:

You need to construct a barrier of law of the sort that you’re talking about here, that is tall enough, that culture can’t climb over it so easily, to get past it, to supersede it. You need to create something that really… I mean, this comes down to truth and accountability, to things that right now are really being fought over and in some cases avoided, but I think you’re absolutely right. I think that’s a brilliant way of thinking about it, is that after the Civil War, you didn’t see that kind of definitive moment when lines were drawn and carried through. And just as you’re saying, I think it’s important to say because so many people on the right are talking about mass arrests and even sometimes executions. That’s not what’s being talked about here. What’s being talked about is just a demonstration, the exposure and discussion and proof of what happened, the people who facilitated that inside the government being outed for their role in having done that, and it being clearly stated that that’s not acceptable in our system of government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I think it’s really important to harp on the fact that the reason that that did not happen after the Civil War is that the United States government was trying to be lenient. They believed that it would help reintegrating former Confederates into the United States if they did not punish them. And all they did was they managed to go ahead and spark more than a hundred years of continued attacks on the United States government, which at the end of the day maybe no Confederates were punished immediately in the wake of the Civil War with the exception of Henry Watts and the people who were convicted of conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. But the number of deaths that have come from that decision, that lenient decision in the course of our history after 1865 is truly horrific. And we have suffered some this year alone. So at the end of the day, it really comes down to making sure that we portray who we want to be as a country, but also that we enforce the laws that establish who we want to be as a country.

Joanne Freeman:

So interestingly, as much as we’re talking about on this episode, some of the haziness and the people choosing sides and switching sides and people not necessarily being pointed to as traitors and the gray area, sometimes, that exists when it comes to loyalty and treason, in the end, what it sounds like we’re coming to, is the fact that at some point there has to be a line that says a line has been crossed, we need to acknowledge that. We talked about this in a recent episode about commissions. At some point, there has to be an indication, a statement about what this country stands for, how the government acts, what is allowable under that government and in this country, and what is not.