Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think about it, about the only thing that distinguishes humans from any other animal population is our ability to make sense of the passage of time by telling stories about it.

Joanne Freeman:

It helps define who we are. That’s the process of decoding and understanding history, is figuring out who we are, where we came from and where we can go.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman. They are two of the most distinguished historians of our time. Heather is a professor at Boston College, where she teaches 19th century American history, and Joanne is a professor at Yale, where she focuses on the revolutionary era and the founding of the republic. Heather and Joanne are also the co-hosts of a new history podcast called Now & Then from CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The first episode is out now, and it focuses on the blurred line between foreign and domestic policy, both in the Biden administration and at key moments in American history.

I’m so pleased to welcome Heather and Joanne to the CAFE team, to work with them, and to learn from them. Today, they joined me for a wide ranging conversation about why they decided to start the podcast, how this is a uniquely fraught moment for American democracy, and whether we are getting better at acknowledging the dark chapters of our history. That’s coming up, stay tuned.

Let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet from Rene Alexander, who asks, have you made any progress getting the word poppadom added to spelling bee? So, Maybe that everyone knows what Rene is talking about, there’s a puzzle game from the New York times that in recent months I’ve become kind of obsessed with, it’s called the spelling bee, but it’s not about how to spell. Every day, you get seven letters from which you’re supposed to try to make as many words as possible. And if you make a word that uses all seven letters, that’s a pentagram for extra points.

The point system changes every day depending on the difficulty of the puzzle. Proper names are not counted as words, so I guess it’s more or less the Scrabble rules or not completely. Anyway, it’s a fun game, and Rene clearly pays attention to things I tweet, because foodstuffs, even ethnic foodstuffs, tend to be recognized words on The New York Times spelling bee, but I was kind of miffed one day when poppadom was not accepted, and it’s a nice lengthy word for a good amount of points.

For those of you who don’t know what poppadom, or as we called it in our home poppad, it’s kind of like the equivalent of getting bread on the table before the rest of the meal comes. I guess it’s a seasoned flat bread made from dried dough, very crunchy the way my mom made it and the way you get it in Indian restaurants. It’s delicious and lovely and should be a word recognized on the spelling bee. In fairness of the spelling bee, there are other Indian foodstuffs that do counted and do get recognized like naan, which is a good word to always get, N-A-A-N, the delicious bread.

Tandoor, which is the clay oven in which naans and tenderly chicken and other things are cooked. And also ghee, G-H-E-E, which is a type of clarified butter that is used in a lot of Indian cooking. I will confess also that I’m not great at the spelling bee. I always quit when I get to the genus level, and for those who know what I’m talking about, I have never once gotten queen bee. Thanks for that legal question.

This question was an email from Craig, who writes, “Hi, Preet. I had the honor to have been called for grand jury duty in the Western District of New York. It looks like it’s for a really long duration. What might I expect from the experience that’s different than the usual jury duty one might serve on? How do prosecutors view the grand jury process? Is it just a formality or does the process really add value?” Those are great questions. Thank you for serving. It’s a really important kind of service that citizens engage in. A little bit less is known about it. As you point out, people watch television and they watch movies, and they see a lot of actual trial practice, and they see jurors sitting on panels where there’s actually a trial unfolding.

It’s a little bit more unclear what happens behind closed doors. The grand jury is intentionally a black box in many ways. There are rules both in the federal and the state system everywhere in the country that require a tremendous amount of grand jury secrecy, depending on who you are in the process. Certainly, if you’re a grand juror, certainly if you’re a prosecutor, you can’t reveal any information that goes on, or that is disclosed within the grand jury. There are a lot of differences between serving on the grand jury and serving on an actual jury. Among them, and perhaps most importantly, in the grand jury, there’s no judge.

It’s just the prosecutor and witnesses, and potentially documents that will get shown to the grand jury. Remember, in the grand jury, your obligation and duty is to pay attention to the witnesses, review documents as you’re asked to do, and if presented with a draft indictment, vote on whether or not to approve the indictment. That’s just a charge, and that’s very different from what happens at a criminal trial when you were a regular juror sitting in a courtroom, when you have to decide guilty or not guilty. The standards of proof are incredibly different and make a huge difference in the grand jury.

Just probable cause that the person or persons identified probably committed the crimes that have been identified. In a criminal trial, of course, proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And a criminal trial in a courtroom, you need unanimity. In the federal system and the grand jury, just a majority. Now, how do prosecutors view the grand jury process? I guess that depends on the prosecutor and it depends on the grand jury system, because it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The federal system, which I’m familiar with, New York State is a wholly different system in which sometimes defense lawyers are allowed in to the process. Not so in the federal system. And there’s the popular Quip, that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich, and I take the point.

I think it’s overstated. I think part of the reason that there’s a very, very low likelihood of grand jurors not returning a true bill, which is essentially not returning an indictment or not approving an indictment, is that prosecutors are careful to make sure they have sufficient probable cause to go into the grand jury. And on occasion, when there are a lot of questions coming from the grand jurors, and I’ve experienced this myself because you haven’t put enough evidence or there’s something dicey about the legal provision, this applicable to this facts that you’re putting forward to the grand jury, what prosecutors will sometimes do is wait, and not ask the jurors, the grand jurors to vote on the indictment until they can shore up their case.

One way that I was taught to think about the grand jury was obviously, it’s a necessary step and tool and proceeding in a case. When you made the decision to charge, you need the grand jury to be with you so that you can commence the case and get a judge assigned and proceed. But the other thing is, it’s a preview of how ordinary Americans in the community will view your case. You will understand from the questions they ask or the looks on their faces, whether they find witnesses credible, whether they find your theories credible. I thought it was a good lesson for prosecutors to be taught that the grand jury presentation should be taken seriously and should allow you the opportunity to see how your case comes across to people who might be the kinds of folks who would also serve as jurors in a criminal trial.

So, take it seriously, ask questions if you have them. Don’t go along with the crowd just because everyone seems to be nodding at the prosecutor. Again, it’s important service and I thank you for doing it.

My guests today are historians Heather Cox Richardson, and Joanne Freeman. They’ve just launched a new podcast called Now & Then, which looks back at key moments in American history to help make sense of our current challenges. Today, Heather and Joanne join me to discuss the state of American democracy, the forces that led to the rise of Donald Trump and the modern GOP, and how history will judge the early Biden presidency.

Professors Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman, welcome to the show.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s a pleasure to be here, Preet.

Joanne Freeman:

Thanks for having us.

Preet Bharara:

So, we’re recording this on a historic day, and I use the word historic intentionally, given the industry that the two of you are in, but it’s a historic day for us at CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast network, because you have launched a joint podcast with us called Now & Then. Congratulations, it’s a great episode.

Joanne Freeman:

Thank you.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Isn’t it cool we’ve finally got it over the finish line?

Preet Bharara:

It’s kind of amazing, because I can’t remember how long ago it was because space and time don’t have the same meaning during the pandemic, but I was reminding Heather before we started taping today that she was a guest on Stay Tuned almost exactly a year ago. If you had told me it was three months ago or two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed either one of those things. And then I reached out not that long ago. Again, if you told me it was three months or a year ago, I would believe you, and got Heather on the phone and talked about doing a podcast, and here we are. I know there’s no question there. I’m just going for a comment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

For what it’s worth, it must have been in the winter, because I remember sitting in the back room where I work in the middle of a snow storm freezing on the phone with you.

Preet Bharara:

Yes. Well, I was warm in my basement. And the, in that first conversation, as we were just discussing a moment ago before we hit record, you said there’s really someone who’s perfect for me to do the podcast with.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, it was great.

Preet Bharara:

Whatever happened to that person.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It was actually great, because we were talking about different ideas, and I said, there’s so many of these things out there and those things out there, but it’d be really cool, and I know who I could do it with, and that was Joanne. Because we had done so many things together since the pandemic started and it was really clear that we had a very good rapport and we worked together very well in this sort of media. So, I was glad you decided to give it a try, and one thing led to another and we pulled it together, I think.

Joanne Freeman:

I’m really happy to be the beneficiary of that.

Preet Bharara:

But I do remember, in that first conversation with you, Heather, was when you talked about doing a podcast as an extension of some of the things that you and Joanne also you were doing and educating the public and informing them, and I know, Heather, you also do that through your Letters From an American. But you used a phrase that I want to ask both of you about. We have a new president. Things, depending on your perspective, are more on track than they were before, but you said, this is the phrase, “There’s still a lot to do to right the ship of state.”

Both of you care deeply about democracy and have been discussing how that seems to be the word of the day. Discuss.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I think we need to start an early American history, don’t you, Joanne?

Joanne Freeman:

Tricky, Heather. Really tricky.

Preet Bharara:

It’s just like you historians. Like, it’s now and then. Every once in a while, you have to go do the then.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. Then then always loses in that somehow. It’s like, let’s be chronological. I will say that Heather and I, in many ways, are engaged in the same kind of enterprise, which is, as historians and as political historians, we think all the time about patterns and politics, about the strengths and weaknesses of our particular kind of politics in the United States. I also know that, for Heather, for the last few years, and for me, for the last year or two, we’ve been using various media to get out into the world and make clear that there’s a crisis in democracy going on, and that the only way to push things in the right direction is to get the public aware and engaged.

That’s part of what I think Heather and I, and you, and everyone else plan to do with Now & Then is, it’s part of a continuing enterprise to make the public aware of what’s going on now and what the longer roots of it are, and about the fact that people need to be aware and take action.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I would add to that, that one of the things that really jumped out to me about the Trump administration is a lot of people looked at that administration and thought of it really as a wake up call, that this was a moment where they could really see that democracy was under siege, but as a historian, the things that came to fruition during the Trump administration had their roots way back. I mean, they had their … Let’s say at least in World War II, but a lot of the mechanics of democracy came under siege in the 1980s. One of the problems that I have found, as I consume so many different levels of media, is it’s often very hard to get the backstory.

So, you don’t really understand why maybe it’s important that a certain bill gets filibustered, because you’re only looking at that particular bill, but as a historian, if you step back and look at the broader sweep of American history, you can recognize anti-democratic movements as they are building and as they’re picking up steam, and eventually as they come, either to fruition or not, that they get stopped. I think what Joanne and I have both done over the last several years is to say, hey, this individual event is part of a longer pattern that threatens our democracy.

You really need to understand that larger pattern in order to see just why, for example, Texas’s Senate Bill number seven was so important. You don’t get it if somebody is just like, oh, there’s a bill in Texas. Well, it’s not just a bill in Texas. It’s a bill trying to keep certain members of the population from voting, and here’s why that matters in America, and here’s how it has played out in a number of different ways throughout American history.

Joanne Freeman:

Right, and the thing that makes clear, which I think also has become increasingly obvious that this exists lurking out there, but it’s existed for a very long time, when you recreate those historical roots, you can get past the point that a lot of people I believe are still in at the moment, which is that the United States is exceptional to all other rules and problems, that somehow other bad things have happened in other places can’t happen here. I’ve been saying for years that I think this assumption that somehow we’re not vulnerable to things because we’re somehow different is really dangerous, and particularly dangerous at this moment.

When you can plug in those roots and show people the past and the ways in which there were fraught moments in the vast, there were great contingencies in the past, and which things could have gone a very different way, that’s a pretty crucial thing for people to understand now when both of those things are really true.

Preet Bharara:

Joanne, do you ever find yourself saying to people, either in academia or outside, I told you so? We’re not so special, that the things that have happened in South America and in parts of Europe can also happen in America?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, the interesting thing about that question is, I think a lot about what’s the proper way for a historian to sound and speaking with the public, when, in your mind, part of what your mind is saying is, oh yeah, I can see the patterns of the past and it looks like things are going in this direction. I even written about it this way. I don’t want to come forth with some Cassandra figure and say, it is doom looming in the future. I do want to say.

Preet Bharara:

And if you do, you have to use that voice, obviously.

Joanne Freeman:

I do. I do, and I’m glad that you approve of it because you never know if it’s going to appear in our podcast or not, but …

Preet Bharara:

Can I tell people one thing that they might be interested in?

Joanne Freeman:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Without spoiling surprise, I believe in the first episode of your podcast of Now & Then, Joanne sings.

Joanne Freeman:

I do.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. I want to put that out there.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Very well.

Preet Bharara:

Because maybe some people weren’t persuaded to subscribe and listen based on the brilliant musings of two noted historians. They also might want to hear it too.

Joanne Freeman:

I do that all the time. I do something that I believe is … That just pops out of me, and then about 10 seconds later, I think, why did I do that?

Preet Bharara:

But I interrupted. You were saying, not a Cassandra figure.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh yeah. No, just because I think if you want people to listen and to hear. You have to be in the moment and not looking ahead to some doom laden future. I think it’s important for people coming forward at this particular moment in time to say, we’re in a moment of crisis, to make it clear, rather than predicting doom, we’re saying, “Well, we don’t know what’s going to happen next, and it’s possible, there might be some doom in our future, but if we act now, perhaps there won’t be.”

Preet Bharara:

Act now.

Joanne Freeman:

Act now.

Preet Bharara:

Here’s the other way you folks put it in the live show last week, that a lot of folks think that history, the enterprise of history is to excavate what happened. That’s how a lot of people think about it, that’s how I’m sure I thought about it in high school and in grade school. Each of you has a different way of describing what the proper inquiry is. It’s not what happened, it’s who cares or so what? Remind me, which of you says which, and why that’s the proper inquiry and enterprise.

Joanne Freeman:

Heather, you start first with who cares.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I’m who cares.

Preet Bharara:

You’re who cares. Okay.

Heather Cox Richardson:

My graduate students refer to it as the dreaded Richardson question. Because what historians really do this different than journalists, is journalists uncover the story, but historians understand different ways of looking at patterns and how societies change, which is really what we study. And we take the events of really anything we study and we try and figure out what created change in that moment. Yeah, is it great men, is it social movements, is it politics, is it religion? What creates change? When you look at, for example, a law that’s in front of Congress or the insurrection on the Capitol on January 6th, the real question for journalists is what happened? Who was where? How did things unfold? The question for historians is, who cares?

Why is this particular moment of interest to human beings as they’re trying to figure out their world? Joanne, on the other hand, has a distinctly inferior phrase called …

Joanne Freeman:

Harumph, called so what. But the same idea.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I was wondering if you’re going to disagree on anything. Here we go.

Joanne Freeman:

Here we go. No, so what is better, but-

Preet Bharara:

A little bit with both of these phrases, tell me if I’m wrong, there’s almost an implied expletive.

Joanne Freeman:

I don’t know if I imagine that. I think there’s a little bit of a prod. There’s a little bit of an elbow that’s like, so.

Preet Bharara:

So what.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, so what. Students do all kinds of great research and they write great papers and they come up with really interesting information, and that’s all really good, but the big question in the end is, so what? What does this give us that we didn’t have before in addition to that information? What does it tell us? When students are, whether undergrads for research papers or graduate students learning how to write professional articles, the so what, and I use it as a noun, the so what is really important and it has to be really clear, particularly in an article at the beginning and at the end, because if there isn’t a clear so what, it’s unclear whether people are actually going to read it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So what is, what’s the takeaway? And I would say there’s an expletive, but it is enormously deflating to have spent months and months and months working on a topic and having someone go, oh, this is all very interesting, Ms. Richardson, but who cares? Ask me how I know, but it does manage to turn-

Preet Bharara:

I bet those people don’t have a podcast.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, but they were pretty famous. But it does manage to turn the events of every day, it helps you to figure out which ones of them are important and why, and what they tell us about our present.

Preet Bharara:

I believe last week, the two of you were discussing something about this moment. I think the phrase uniquely fraught was used. Before we started taping, we were discussing how the word fraught is used a lot, and maybe it’s more appropriate now than ever before. But when we’re talking about historians who collectively have expertise over the long sweep of American history, one of you more about the founding, and the other more about the era around the civil war, when people like you say, this is uniquely fraught, shouldn’t we be horribly terrified?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I think … How do I say this? I don’t want to just say yes.

Preet Bharara:

Doom, doom.

Joanne Freeman:

Doom, doom.

Preet Bharara:

I’m trying to get you to do the doom voice again.

Joanne Freeman:

Doom. That’s the doom voice. I do think, on the one hand, I think the combination of things that we’re facing right now, you could say it’s a uniquely fraught moment. On the other hand, as a historian, Unique is a really dangerous word, because as Heather started out by saying, we’re looking at a lot of things with very deep roots. So, the question isn’t, has this ever happened before? There are no two crises in American history that are exactly the same with the precise, same bundle of problems adding up to that crisis. But the patterns, the problems that we’re looking at right now have a deep past, and when you add them together, you begin to get, I will use the F-word, a fraught moment.

And this moment, in some ways, is uniquely fraught because the bundle of problems includes a unusual sort of president that just came and went.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I would actually say we are in entirely a fraught moment. I’m stronger, I think, on this one, or feel more strongly about this, I think, than Joanne does, because this is the only time in our history, with the possible exception of 1879, in which we’ve had a significant number of our own federal lawmakers and state lawmakers who no longer believe in democracy. This has never happened. In the civil war in 1860, the Confederates took their marbles and went home, and the 33 who didn’t work spelled by Congress. So, the people who were still legislating did believe in the democratic process. Since the 1980s in America, we’ve had a number of moves from the Republican Party, which … I’m an expert in the Republican Party, and I would argue that what is happening now is not really indicative of the history of that party.

But since the 1980s, they really have worked to suppress the vote, to stack the courts, to gerrymander, to alter the mechanics of our democracy in such a way that they have undermined it in ways that look extraordinarily like what the Democrats did in the American South during reconstruction. This is the alarm I keep sounding that, what is about to happen, if we go down this road, is that we will get the solid south, except it’s going to be all of America, and that, for many reasons, is a bad idea. But the other side of that, although I think we’re in a moment we’ve never seen before, and that is uniquely dangerous, it’s also a moment of extraordinary opportunity.

For all that I’m incredibly negative about the direction we could be going, I am equally as positive on the other side, that if Americans take this moment in hand, they really do have, within their grasp, the opportunity to approach much more of a multicultural democracy than we have ever had before. So, it’s this funny kind of, on the one hand, we’re in real trouble, and yet we’re also in a moment of extraordinary opportunity, and which one is going to win is what keeps me up at night.

Joanne Freeman:

But that gets back to part of what you and I, and Preet, but all of us do routinely, which is try to get people to understand the contingency, the extreme contingency of this moment, and that it really matters.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I knew you were going to get contingency in there.

Joanne Freeman:

Of course, I’m going to say contingency. I do a webcast on Friday mornings called History Matters, and the people who listened to that create bingo cards, and one of the words on the bingo cards, which they play bingo with every Friday has the word contingency appears on every bingo card.

Preet Bharara:

Is fraught on that bingo card too?

Joanne Freeman:

Fraught has not made it yet, but now I might push for fraught.

Preet Bharara:

I think you might want to put that on there.

Joanne Freeman:

I think so.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask a question about the negative and then about the positive? So, as Joanne, you were talking before, about how every moment in history, every crisis has a slightly different or significantly different bundle of problems that pile up to create the crisis, what’s different here, and what do you say to people who have the perception that it happened all of a sudden? Did it happen all of a sudden, or have we been in a very long-term frog in the boiling water kind of exercise?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it didn’t happen all of a sudden. I mean, Heather just sort of touched on this as well. I do think one thing that’s distinctive about the current moment in the very recent past is the degree to which people on the right are proudly flag-waving only proclaiming things that are obviously in line with suppressing votes and things that there has been a tradition of several decades, but now, and it’s partly, I think born of the last presidency, now it’s a proudly proclaimed policy. Not proclaimed saying the word suppression, but sort of buzzwords and other sort of impulsive suggestions about what their policies are doing.

And with four years of training in people getting confused about what’s truth and what’s not truth, this becomes a prime moment for that kind of information, misinformation to be spread in support of these efforts that are really moving things in a very frightening suppressive direction.

Preet Bharara:

Heather, do you agree what I take Joanne to be saying, that a lot of this dramatic change in terms of how people talk about these things that should be laid at the feet of Donald Trump, the person?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think it’s a mistake to look at where we are and blame it solely on Donald Trump. I think he brought to the table, the policies and the ideology of the current day Republican Party without the veneer that they had put over it for generations. The reason I would like to emphasize that it’s not just about Trump is because people seem to have this idea that somehow, if we can forget that presidency, or if we can finally make him exit stage right, that we will be back to normal, whatever that normal is, but we won’t be.

I mean, America has been on the path that we are currently walking since at least the 1980s, that’s two generations, and there’s a lot of unwinding to do, but even if you took us magically back to 1979, that still was not a fully realized multicultural democracy in, many, many ways. There’s a lot of work to be done in a way in maybe a backdoor way, you have to give the four years of the Trump administration credit for really ripping back the curtain and making people confront that, that language about taxation, for example, really was about race, which scholars like Joanne and I had been saying for a generation.

People on the right were saying, no, no, no, no, we’re really just fiscally conservative. Well, now you can’t make that argument any longer. So, we need to recognize that he was certainly gasoline on the fire, but the fire was already there.

Preet Bharara:

Joanne, do you agree with the way that Heather described it earlier? It’s a moment, obviously that’s fraught, bingo card, get your bingo card out.

Joanne Freeman:

Ding, ding, ding.

Preet Bharara:

But also, there’s massive opportunity going forward. How do each of you think about that opportunity? Because I think we need to hear more optimistic talk.

Joanne Freeman:

No, I absolutely do feel. Moments that are open to extreme change, in those moments, things can go very badly, or things can go really well and there can be really positive change. I’m going to do the really Freeman-esque thing now and go back to the founding, but in many ways that period was a really similar period in which there was a new government, was unclear if it was going to work, it was unclear how it was going to work. And in that big moment of indecision and experimentation, there was a widespread assumption and a justly held widespread assumption that things might go down, down, down really quickly, that the whole enterprise could sink, or that something really different and positive i.e., not a monarchy, might result from it.

I think that same dynamic is very true now, and I think some of what is unsettling to people is the awareness, even if they haven’t given words to it yet, that we are at a moment when there could be great changes happening in a variety of different ways, positively or negatively. That’s unsettling. That’s frightening. But what that means is unsettling opens the door for opportunity, just as Heather said. I think about that a lot, because I think it’s profoundly true, but again, I think it’s part of why it’s important for people to talk about how history can show us that we’re in that kind of moment and where we can hope to get to.

Heather Cox Richardson:

If I were thinking about writing a history of this moment in a hundred years from now, what I would center it on is The Unite, the right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer in August of 2017. Not just for the fact that the American president came out in support of the right wing rioters who killed Heather Heyer, but also because that was centered around the taking down of a Confederate monument. One of the things that really interests me about the moment we’re in is one that people are talking about and not, to my mind, hitting the point.

That is that when so many things centered around the removal of Confederate monuments, one of the things that always marks regime change is the taking down of monuments. Aside from whatever those monuments symbolized, if you’re going to change the direction of a country, you take down the monuments. The Confederate monument, in so many ways in America, stood not just for human enslavement and all the things that have come down from that moment, the lack of generational wealth, the racism, the lack of political power among minority populations, all the things that came down from our history of human enslavement.

But what also came down from the Confederate era was the American emphasis on oligarchy. The coming together of those two things in the last five to seven years, I think is a really important moment in the longer sweep of American history, and that, I think, has a lot of potential for really enabling Americans to embrace democracy again, wholeheartedly, but for once saying, it can’t just be the white guys.

Preet Bharara:

How important, at this moment, is the president of the United States, the name is Joe Biden, the right person? Does he have the qualities to seize these opportunities that you’re talking about?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I can answer part of that question, which is, given that I was at that table with him and a number of other historians …

Preet Bharara:

I was going to ask you, what did you say to Joe when you had his ear?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, what was interesting about that meeting, I guess a few things that were interesting about that meeting is, he was collecting information. So, this wasn’t an agenda driven meeting. He didn’t expect us to say anything. We weren’t given questions in advance. He wanted to understand past moments of crisis in American history and what past presidents had done. He was information gathering in a really open way. He spent much of that meeting, and it was several hours long, mostly taking notes and asking occasional questions. He really wanted to understand patterns of the past and how they might help the present, which obviously, to a historian’s ears, it was a very happy thing to hear.

But for that very reason, because I believe he and his administration are very open to trying to figure out the right pathway for right now and their awareness, I think, of what they’re up against, does that make him the single one best person for this job right now? I can’t say that. What I can say is his mentality and his outlook, I find really encouraging.

Preet Bharara:

That he’s thinking big.

Joanne Freeman:

He’s thinking big, he’s open-minded, he’s taking in ideas, and he’s aware of the crisis that’s looming.

Preet Bharara:

Did anyone speak too much at this meeting, and was it Jon Meacham?

Joanne Freeman:

No. No, no, no.

Preet Bharara:

That was a bit unfair. We love Jon Meacham. He’s been on the show, but-

Joanne Freeman:

He’s wonderful, but no.

Preet Bharara:

You have to take your shots.

Joanne Freeman:

When he’s not here. No.

Preet Bharara:

… when you can.

Joanne Freeman:

No, no. It really was, we all were supposed to come in with an idea that we wanted to talk about and we each talked about them and then it was just a general discussion.

Preet Bharara:

Heather, I wonder what you think about this, it’s not an uncommon practice, at least from the little I’ve read about American presidents in my lifetime and before, to have audiences with historians, whether we’re at a crisis moment or not, to understand their role, to understand where the country is going and what change can be effected by making smart kinds of decisions. I don’t think this happened during the Trump administration. Do you think that there have been moments over time where these kinds of conversations have had a real impact on a president’s thinking?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, I do, and that’s what I would say about Biden in this moment, is he’s working very, very hard to restore to the presidency the traditions of it and the old borders on it, the old boundaries of it. For example, he’s trying to put the focus on Congress, which is of course, the lawmaking body. While he did come into office and pass … I’m sorry, and sign a number of executive orders, he’s made it clear he would prefer to work through Congress in a bipartisan fashion. He’s also returned the idea of a president who stays out of your face all the time. You don’t have to wonder what he’s tweeting next. He’s doing his job.

Preet Bharara:

I forget he’s the guy sometimes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Every Monday, there’s somebody on Twitter who says, and once again, I have no idea what Biden did this weekend and it’s expletive amazing. I think that, that’s important. I also think that the reason that you are noticing that he is talking to historians in the same way, for example, that Eisenhower or JFK did, is because, one of the things that was really I think important about the Reagan administration, and especially the George W. Bush administration, was the attempt to get away from the idea that they were bound by the past.

You saw this really dramatically in 2004 when a member of the George W. Bush administration actually gave a quotation to Ron Suskind, who was writing at the time for the Wall Street Journal, and Ron was trying to chase him down about some fact or other. He said, and I paraphrase here, you’re making a mistake. You, people like you, historians like Suskind, belong to the reality-based community, and the person went on to say, “But we don’t live in the reality-based community any longer. We create our own reality, and you people are going to have to react to the reality that we create and you’ll do it and you’ll do a good job, and then we will create a different reality because we are an empire now.”

There was that sense that they had cut loose from history altogether. Interestingly enough, Biden, I think is, the fact that he’s an older man, has made him more able to reach back to that older history and to see it having value in the way that it actually played out in a way that, perhaps a younger person who really was not aware of those older traditions and the older role of the president may not have been able to do.

Preet Bharara:

As I’ve heard some people joke, Joe Biden was at the founding, right?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I didn’t go there, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

I said, other people have said this. Can I ask a question about bipartisanship? I’ve noticed an interesting tactic, and because I’m not a historian, I don’t know if this is rhyming with something that happened before, and the way I’ve always thought about bipartisanship when politicians talk about it, particularly when they’re talking about moving a bill through Congress, you want to have Democrats and you want to have Republicans, people from both parties, vote on the bill. And they’ll get something advanced and passed into law only on the votes of one party.

Now, that’s not happening so much because there’s so much polarization in Congress. But as people have been suggesting on the democratic side, there’s a little bit more consensus on some of these issues like guns, like infrastructure, like health care, maybe even on a January 6th commission, and so that the idea of passing something with only democratic votes, but with bipartisan public support, people who identify both as Republicans and Democrats and independents being supportive of something, well, that’s what we mean by bipartisanship.

Preet Bharara:

So, you can’t complain anymore, because what’s really happening is, you guys, the Democrats will say you Republicans are out of touch with the American people and the bipartisan spirit of the American people. A, is that effective? B, does that have any parallel in the past?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it seems to me that what you’re identifying there is a hold over from, as I say, this increasing radicalization of the Republican party. And make no mistake, they have become extreme radicals. This current faction that holds the Republican Party, and I feel like that’s a really important distinction, because of course, the party has this long history and it’s in this moment that it really has never lived in before, but as they radicalized, they adopted an ideology that said that they wanted to cut the federal government, what was known as the liberal consensus that was put in place after World War II, first by FDR, and then of course by Truman, and then by Dwight Eisenhower in his middle way.

So, a democratic president lays down the roots of the liberal consensus, and a Republican politician, a Republican president goes ahead and completes that cycle. So, we get this idea between both the Democrats and the Republicans that the government had a role to play in regulating business and providing a basic social safety net and promoting infrastructure, things that most Americans came to believe were going to be around forever. And the ideologues who took over the Republican Party wanted to get rid of that altogether. Well, if you want to get rid of that, you can’t compromise. The idea of compromise is built on the idea that, you want this and I want this and we can meet somewhere in the middle.

But if you can’t compromise, the world has to continue to move toward you, and that’s what has happened, really since the 1980s on the Republican side of the aisle, but then Biden hit them with something that was very surprising, and that was that, when he got into office, he began to go ahead and push through, either executive orders or the American Rescue Plan, which were enormously popular with the American public. And he did so without any Republican support. So, if you’re a Republican, you’re looking at that, and as you know, there are Republicans who’ve gone back to their states and are touting the benefits of the American Rescue Plan that they voted against. That puts them in a terrible place.

Preet Bharara:

That’s my favorite thing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. Well, it puts them in a terrible place because Americans have woken up to the fact, they actually liked that liberal consensus. They like a government that does these things. So, if you’re a Republican who is increasingly adhering to an ideology that says, no taxes, no regulation, no social safety net, no public infrastructure, how on earth do you square the circle? And the idea of sort of saying, oh, we’ll give you lip service in public, but we’ll tell our donors that we’re going to make sure they continue to cut regulations and taxes, is it a circle they can square? I would say no. It’s interesting to watch the Republicans right now to see how they’re going to climb out of this particular hole, or if they’re going to climb out of that particular hole.

Joanne Freeman:

And what they’re banging up against is small D, democracy, right? What makes a democratic government different is the power of public opinion. It’s one thing to sort of mouth off platitudes about the people and whatever other kinds of democratic platitudes you want to throw out into the world, but if you are compelled to praise something that you voted against, you’re smacking up against the fact that really ultimately, it’s the public that matters. How do you deal with that if they disagree with you? Well, I don’t know.

The question is, do you lie or do you feed disinformation or? I don’t know. There are any number of ways in which you can deal with not really liking the reality of what the public things. You can try and change what the public thinks, but it strikes me that, that, as you put it, squaring that circle, it’s democracy that they’re banging up against, which is the fact that what the people think and what the people want matters.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Maybe one of the ways that you get away from that is you make sure people can’t vote. I mean, there are two ways to do it. You change your ideology, which doesn’t seem to be an option for, at this point, the Republican Party that’s currently in office, or you simply say, we’ll make sure that the people who disagree with us don’t get to vote. That’s where we come up against why we did the podcast, was the idea of convincing people that they really need to protect their democracy or they’re going to lose it.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you folks a question about whether we are getting better at remembering history, especially some of our bad history? The reason I mention it is we are speaking on a day that marks the 100th anniversary of the massacre of up to 300 black people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That’s something that I never learned about in high school. There have been some interesting questions on social media about, had people learned it in the past? I didn’t know about it. I learned about it recently, and people are talking about it, the president United States is talking about it. The attorney general of the United States is going to Tulsa to speak and to commemorate the event and to honor the victims of that violence.

I guess, my questions are, are we getting better or is it spotty? And can an event from the past that has been either erased or forgotten, for nefarious reasons or for understandable reasons, can that make a difference a hundred years later in a way that was unexpected back in the day?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I mean, one part of the answer to that question, can it make a difference? Where part of what’s happening at this moment and history is part of this struggle, where, I don’t want to quite say debating, but the question of who we are when we talk about the American people, in a sense when we’re talking about injustices, when we’re talking about prejudices, and we’re talking about cutting people out of the political process. In one way or another, we’re talking about the American we, who we are. If we can look to these kinds of past moments that also represent moments in which people are being cut out or silenced or pushed aside, and reveal those moments for what they are, yeah, I do think it can make a difference because people, communities who feel marginalized, or are marginalized today, you can point to the past and show that happening, and it’s very clear that it’s happening again, and that gives an added meaning and an added weight to what’s going on at the present.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This speaks really back to what historians do. We do look for patterns in society and to look for the stories that are important. In this moment, the story of what happened to Greenwood in Tulsa really matters, because it’s the story of the destruction of a prosperous black community that had organized during segregation. One of the things that always jumps out to me about the Tulsa massacre is, not only that it’s the first time that any American city is firebombed, it’s firebombed by white citizens who drop incendiaries from the sky on their black neighbors, but it also to me, is so indicative of the crisis of the lack of generational, the ability for minority populations to build up generational wealth in America.

Because that is not just about money, that’s about access to education and to criminal justice and all the things that go with generational wealth. So, all of a sudden that story matters in this particular moment, but history is always changing. Right now, for example, we’re looking at what happened in Tulsa, and that’s incredibly important, but I look at what happened in Tulsa, and take one more step back and say, what happened in Tulsa was not an aberration. It was one of many riots in that two-year period after World War II, in which white populations were not at all prepared to permit African-American veterans to come back from World War I, where they have been fighting in France and had become sort of folk heroes in France.

And they came back to America, and they were like, hey, wait a minute here, folks. What’s going on back here in America. We want the equality that you say we just fought for in World War I. We’re supposed to make the world safe for democracy, how about making America safe for democracy? That was something that the white population was completely unprepared to accept. Right now, the story of Tulsa is important for all the reasons that I mentioned at first, but there’s a bigger story that will also be important as American society changes to say, hey, it wasn’t just this one event, it’s part of a much larger pattern.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Can it change the way we behave? Absolutely. The stories we tell about our past are the stories of who we are. If you think about it, about the only thing that distinguishes humans from any other animal population is our ability to make sense of the passage of time by telling stories about it.

Joanne Freeman:

It helps define who we are. That’s the process of decoding and understanding history, is figuring out who we are, where we came from, and where we can go.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk about a different kind of violence, political violence? Or maybe it’s not so different, but dueling used to be a common practice in this country. I know Joanne, you’ve written about this and talked about dueling, and you’re an Alexander Hamilton expert. If dueling were permitted today, would we just be seeing a lot of them? And/or, because I know I have a misimpression, but what was actually the point of that kind of political violence back in the day?

Joanne Freeman:

Right. Well, and those two questions obviously are interrelated. It’s really counter-intuitive. But the fact of the matter is dueling was not about killing, which I realize is hard to believe, because two men go to a field with guns and shoot at each other.

Preet Bharara:

And often that’s the consequence.

Joanne Freeman:

And yes, unfortunately, right. People died, how could that be? But the point of a duel was to show that you were willing to die for your reputation and your honor. It was about being willing to risk your life for your honor and reputation for both people who were involved. One of the things that I found early in my research was there are an enormous number of, what I called affairs of honor, which meant all of the formal negotiations that go on that could enable a duel to be settled before it went to the field of honor and became a shooting fight.

Basically, all the time, people of all kinds, elite people of all kinds and politicians were using affairs of honor and threats of duels to settle political fights in one way or another. A lot of what you see, when you’re talking about honor culture and violence is threats of violence being used to settle political disputes. What would I expect to see now if it still existed? I would expect to see, in a sense, some of what you see in the past, which is people acting like they’re really ready duelists, they’re really going to step forward and they’re ready to go to the field of honor, but they’re actually really not. They just want to make that claim and sound very threatening in the hope of intimidating someone into doing whatever they want that person to do.

In the most recent book that I wrote, you see that. You see Southern members of Congress suggesting you do that one more time and you might end up with a dual challenge, and you see Northern members of Congress not standing up and not protesting against measures because they’re afraid of that outcome. Dueling is a really useful political tool that goes way above and beyond actual bloodshed.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But you’ve also talked about this as sort of a form of bullying, haven’t you?

Joanne Freeman:

Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s primarily what it is. It’s a way of bullying people into submission, in one way or another. You frighten them, you intimidate them, so that they don’t even stand up. They’re afraid of what they might get, and so they sit down and allow things to pass, and it could be profoundly effective.

Preet Bharara:

Can we expect, in a moment of disagreement between the two of you on the podcast, a potential modern duel?

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, but I know all the rules.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, I was just going to ask, what-

Preet Bharara:

Do they matter?

Joanne Freeman:

I’ll make the matter.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I was just going to ask, what happens then, if you go through all that with the dueling in the 1850s, or whenever, you go with all three, whatever the steps are, and then the bully, the person who is being bullied stands up and says, “Okay, you want to fight this out? We’ll fight this out.” Does the bully back down?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, no, then you really can’t.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Does anybody ever back down?

Joanne Freeman:

After being in the middle of negotiations, and then said, you know what? Changed my mind, I’m done? No. I mean, not that I know of.

Preet Bharara:

In the field, it’s too late.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, on the field, it’s way too late. Yeah, but there are all of these rules and regulations about passing notes back and forth and everything else, and the reason why they’re there is because you can, on the one hand, use them to avoid having to fight a duel. But also, what that means is that if you violate them, unfortunately, they are pretty bluntly telling you what is honorable behavior and what is not honorable behavior. So, it’s very hard, past a certain point, it’s very hard to back out without doing yourself serious damage. In my research, I’ve definitely seen people who, in one way or another, were perceived as backing down, and it really hurts their reputation. They’re seen as cowards, and they’re not people who are popular in the realm of politics because they are seen as having less power.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve gotten like 30 minutes without mentioning the podcast. Can we go back to Now & Then, and the first episode, which is excellent and people can listen to. I thought that the subject you chose to address is super fascinating. And it’s, in part, and I’ll let you guys describe it, because you’ll do a better job than I will, but about sort of the eraser of the line between domestic and foreign policy. One of the things that you … In the then part of the podcast, as opposed to the now, you talk about how at the beginning of the Republic, there could really be not any distinction between domestic and foreign policy.

And the thing that everyone was concerned about on the domestic side was foreign influence, because people forget how fragile the country was, how fragile the government was, this new experiment and idea. How do you relate that to what’s going on today in the episode?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, one of the interesting things that Heather and I began talking about when we were thinking about the subject of this episode is that, I think, generally speaking, Americans see foreign affairs as some separate thing that is done by experts and is remote and the American people don’t know a lot about it. One of the things that we start out by discussing in the podcast is Biden saying outright …

President Biden (archival):

There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy.

Joanne Freeman:

What I sort of threw into that conversation at a very early point is, well, that pretty much sounds like 1793 or 1798. At that early point, people did not see really much of any distinction between foreign and domestic affairs. The United States was so new and it was so weak. The assumption was foreign influence could do any number of things. A foreign nation could sweep in and really basically swallow up states or the nation, could pervert public opinion in one way or another. The first actual presidential election that was a contest, because it’s the first time Washington didn’t run, 1796, is the first election in which people were afraid about foreign influence swaying the election, in that case, the French.

So, it’s for a very clear and real reason that George Washington’s famous farewell address, he highlights two things that he thinks are the most dangerous for the nation. One of them has to do with entangling alliances or getting too close to any one foreign country and allowing their influence to come in and the other has to do with extreme partisanship. Those two things coming together can really tear a nation apart.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It was interesting, because when we started looking at Biden and the way he was talking about foreign affairs, to me, it jumped out that, that’s exactly the same way that Teddy Roosevelt had talked about it, and that had not been the case really in my lifetime, although you could make some allowances there for president Jimmy Carter. But then that sort of begged the question of, why was the present different than the way it had been right up until World War II? That got us digging around a little bit and we remember the National Security Act of 1947, which dramatically reorganizes our … It gives our National Security Council and dramatically reorganized as the way we do foreign policy, and hands it over, if you will, to true experts.

But that, as Joanne and I were talking, it became pretty clear that well, Americans think that somehow foreign affairs are different off they’re being managed by experts. What in fact happened was it gave an inordinate amount of power to the executive branch, especially to the president, who then used foreign affairs to hammer on his opponent to say, oh, you’re not strong enough on foreign affairs. So, foreign affairs continued to be enormously important in the way that we understood our domestic sphere. And yet, at the same time, it was important, not because people were honestly engaging with whether we should be involved, for example, in Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather, it became enormously important as a domestic political weapon that permeated all kinds of culture, which is why we’re talking about music and blue jeans and what things looked like in the ’60s and the ’70s, because we really focused on the Vietnam war.

It ended up sort of being a way to understand that you do really have to see foreign affairs always as part of domestic affairs, although, whether they’re being used really to advance the good of the American nation or of American democracy, or whether they’re being used simply as a cudgel to go ahead and try and hammer your domestic opponents is always something to keep in mind.

Preet Bharara:

Doesn’t the ability to fuse domestic and foreign policy or foreign affairs depend a little bit on the public being smart and educated and informed and knowledgeable about foreign affairs, and isn’t there a limitation on that, given what I understand from polling, is the degree of Americans’ attention to things that happen outside the country?

Heather Cox Richardson:

In fairness, that’s one of the things that happens after World War II, is because America is so fully on the world stage, it’s very, very difficult to stay abreast of all the different things that are happening in all the different places that they are. That flattening of foreign affairs then makes it easier, I think, for the executive branch and the president to use foreign affairs as a way simply to hammer him his opponent.

Preet Bharara:

Are you surprised that it was so difficult to get a 60 vote bipartisan agreement on the January 6th commission, or even in other areas, is that how it would’ve played out, given how some folks are implicated, some folks are witnesses who are among the members voting, and that it would be a political football, especially if it continued into the election year, the midterm election year?

Joanne Freeman:

I can’t say that I was surprised given the moment that we’re in. That said, the fact that it was voted against is so indicative of the seriousness of the moment that we’re in. That what happened on January 6th happened on January 6th, and there isn’t even … There are people who don’t even want to discuss the possibility of going further into an investigation. Did I expect this to happen? Did I expect people to just step up and say, yes, this must be investigated? No, and I don’t think most people would have expected that to be the outcome.

But if you think about what happened on that day, and you think about the seriousness of it, and you think about the degree to which people are unwilling to talk about it, to get into any of the details, that’s really, disturbing is not a strong enough word to describe what that says about the moment that we’re in and the degree to which people will go to really cling to power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I would absolutely echo that, because I think it indicates that power is trumping democracy, and that the Republican Party is currently willing simply to throw democracy overboard if it means they can continue to stay in power. But I would only add one thing to what Joanne said, and that’s that she kept saying folks, and it’s not folks, it’s the Republican leadership, and that really matters that this is … Has this sort of thing happened before? Usually, when there is a sense that something needs to be examined because it threatens the survival of American democracy, even if somebody doesn’t want to look into it, the same way they didn’t want to look into the events of 9/11, for example, both parties eventually suck it up and do it, and that’s been the case really since the civil war.

So, the fact that there is currently not a bipartisan move within the Senate to go ahead and do that, and to have the Senate minority leader ask as a personal favor for that not to go forward, it’s a really, really big deal. We talked earlier about why this is a fraught moment in democracy and why, especially this week, people are suddenly saying, oh, we’ve got a real problem on our hands. It’s in part because of the fact that the Senate leadership of the Republican Party, which theoretically is supposed to be the senior body that’s looking out for the health of the American government has said, nah, we don’t really care that there was an attack on the very basis of our democracy on January 6th.

Because we’re concerned, either that it’s going to mean that some of our own are implicated, which is going to hurt our ability to hold on to equal power within the Senate. Because if you remember the February 3rd, 2017 power sharing agreement was predicated on the idea that there was a 50/50 split in the Senate. Either we’re not willing to take the chance of giving up power in the Senate, or we’re not willing to take the risk that voters can hear what happened before the 2022 election, and that’s really eye popping.

Joanne Freeman:

Eye-popping, and once again, smacking up against the bounds of democracy, and in this case, trampling it.

Preet Bharara:

Heather Cox Richardson, Joanne Freeman, thanks so much. It’s really great. What an exciting thing to be working together. The team loves working with you. They’ve done a great job putting the podcast together. Looking forward to every episode, maybe some singing by Joanne. Congratulations. Congratulations, and good luck, and we’ll talk again soon.

Joanne Freeman:

Thanks.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Thanks a lot, Preet.