Untitled Article

Here home for. His Law and Disorder. Talk with the author of the new book. The deep history of the radical right. For America after an acclaimed puts it all together this is like evolving. That's going on now the bad guys are halfway there a dispute still over the legal settlement in the experiment involving $600.00 black men in the south with the government. They had syphilis the government found out how to treat it never did this is the most powerful metaphor you could imagine racism in America. York City attorney and author Michael Steven Smith and New York City Attorney and activist. Michael I was surprised to hear that recently you paid a visit to Trump tower I was there last week I actually had been on vacation and I drove 112 miles with my wife Debbie down from the Catskills to go to the 1st international luncheon at Trump Tower sponsored by Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping wait hold on inside Trump Tower on the 5th floor there's a park it's also mentions really crummy you have to take the escalator up to it right and I think that Trump must to give it a big tax write off for dedicating this piece of his skyscraper to the park luncheon was held in the park you take the escalator up do you have to go through security I've never been in a 30 like you've never seen in your life I mean you know 8 guys with submachine guns flak vests metal detectors I mean the place is swarming with cops and secrets are. On a secret service of every description then you come up the escalator that's the very same escalator that trump descended when he announced his presidential campaign and it's in the lobby of this extremely vulgar building places I should write out a Las Vegas like a 2nd class building in Las Vegas right the 1st 5 floors when you go up the escalator are encompassed by a kind of a tawdry orange colored marble floors of marble fallen got out or water trickling down a marble well and the escalators of course are all gold coins last chandelier is now follows the handlers are up and as I live on the 5th right floor the chandelier is are up on his apartment we can talk about it later yes I want to tell you about the event Ok so is he a take the escalator up when you get to the 4th or the escalator is broken. If you ask to go to the men's room they tell you it's in the basement to get to go all the way down 5 floors when you go down then you notice what's going on there the whole place is like a shopping mall everything is brand to trump they've got Trump beach tiles Trump shot glasses pencils of course the Make America Great Again ball cap they've got all this supernal lyricists crap right that you can buy there then they've got a little store dedicated to Ivanka Trump jewelry then they've got Trump golf balls I mean the whole thing is like awful and Anyway so we get up to the 5th floor and Reverend Billy has got a large following He's got the Church of Stop Shopping right which was initially kind of an anti Kirshner as a material or I can tell you as a nominee now they've evolved into doing wonderful ecology work on the planet warming so so we get up there and they're all these supporters of Reverend Billy they've got the choir the Church of Stop Shopping choir and course they sing gorgeous because it's New York. You know you get all these people here who come here who have great voices and they had a couple of renditions of songs and a comedian did a bit and all these tourists are walking in here I can't believe what's going on and they're all of us or most of it about 60 of us with brown bag lunches Reverend Billy said Bring something that harkens back to your traditions so I was thinking maybe I should bring a lox and bagels sandwich but in any case people brought brown bag lunches and you know I call when you sitting or standing sitting there tables up there at the park itself has got a couple of scraggly bushes and some crummy flowers weeds growing through the cement and there's no sun The sun does not shine on Donald Trump's Park and we're all sitting up there and there are police up there Guard Oh yeah an extra place because they knew Riven Billy They spy on him they knew that he was coming up right so in fact they encountered him and they said we understand you're going to be a 3 o'clock he said no you've got a rod we're only here for an hour Fortunately Anyway the vet was hysterical and I hope they have again this one might go out what are they doing exactly Well Reverend Billy gives a sermon so he talked about how he hopes one day this building will be reduced to part of the woods disintegrate that nature will take over he talked about there a college you work but in a humorous way where there is a lot of people laughing and making boisterous noise I was. It was it was a really good thing with a singing we all sang a lot tonight the choir sang 2 numbers and sang along with one of them and were tourists observing all this they couldn't believe it the tourists like shaking their him elsewhere just what they encountered right fight and then they left to go to Times Square but you know Trump lives in that building yeah he lives he's got 2 floors the 58th in the 59th floor I believe and I've seen color photographs of his apartment it's all a shell just awful it's all. Full of fake photo Louis the 14th furniture because you can't if you want to buy furniture that went back to the late 18th century it all be falling apart right this is furniture that's recently been made to look like shining century you know right now this crappy furniture in there that has got chandelier is going to lore right at the ceilings are not high so the chandeliers are like hang in there and the ceilings are painted like the Sistine Chapel right well at least they don't embarrass on the ceiling No but they've got a lot of mirrors on the wall right along with the chandelier is this is God and it's god no pun intended I read an article I think was the New Yorker about Trump's taste in architecture and how it coincides with a number of other dictators taste interest in architecture like the late day dictator of the Philippines and these people all have the same kind of Saddam Hussein had the same they had all had the same kind of awful a vulgar taste right no mid century modern here No no not at all the places that the building is Trump personified I mean the man has an edifice complex to begin with and he built this just off to date and this is come play I was interested Ah So anyway I wanted everybody to know that if this happens again next to our way might go to the photo taken of yourself in the park no because I ran out of space and my camera but but I will inquire about whether there are any photos of it and I are well putting up a lot just sort of dot org fabulous. Spectacle of stuff from the palace intrigue in the White House has served daily to just read people from the political strategy and accomplishments of the radical right which is taking over the Republican Party. Over time the g.o.p. Has been transformed into an operation conducting a concerted effort to curb democratic rule in favor of capitalist interests in every branch of the government whatever the consequences it is marching ever closer to the ultimate goal of reshaping our Constitution to protect moneyed interests this gradual takeover of a major political party happens steadily over several decades and often in plain sight do Professor Nancy McLean exposes the architecture of this change and its ultimate aim she has written that quote Both my research and my observations as a citizen lead me to believe American democracy is in peril. Her book Democracy in chains the Jeep history of the radical right stealth plan for America has become an intellectual flashpoint and caused her to become the victim of a coordinated right wing attack she chose the long overlooked story of James Buchanan the political economist who developed the playbook for Charles Koch and his brother and their web of billionaires and millionaires who beginning in the mid 2000 have become a force to reckon with to talk about the subversion of our democratic system from within is Professor Nancy McLean Nancy McLean Welcome to Law and Disorder thank you I'm happy to be with you the Republican Party has been transformed both locally and nationally it's no longer the party that is you wrote My father used to vote for today we're hoping to explore how the Republican Party has become an instrument of the far right you argue that key to the story what you call the missing piece is understanding the rise of the billionaire radical right and its radical impact on our politics there's a man named James begin Buchanan tell us about him and how you learned about Him Yes Well I what I learned is that James McGill Buchanan's ideas are what enabled Charles Koch to break through in his quest for radical transformation of our institutions after decades of pretty much ineffectual work on the margins James McGill the can was the 1st Nobel Prize winner to have been born in the us south and to have worked most of his life in southern institutions he was the founder of a new one of the co-founders I should say of a new school of thought called public choice economics which is actually a broader tradition that includes people like Cass Sunstein who worked for President Obama and others but his particular variant of that public choice school was the Virginia School of Political Economy and he was. Always preoccupied with critiquing democracy as it existed in his early years and then ultimately with prescribing measures by which it could be in his words in chained and it was those ideas that Charles Koch picked up and what Koch do to fund Buchanan Can you talk a bit about the network of organizations and think tanks that Coke has set off Yes Well Coke for years was the single biggest funder on the radical libertarian right by a long stretch so anybody who was on the libertarian right and looking for money went to Charles Koch now James Buchanan from his 1st years in Virginia in the late 1950 s. Had had also broader corporate backing from some of the corporations often associated with the radical anti new year new deal right you know some of the fossil fuel companies the General Electric and so forth but by the late 1990 s. 1097 in particular Koch had become very frustrated with the inability of his menorah Tarion cause to make progress and so he began to invest in a big way in Buchanan's Center at the George Mason University and since then the Center at George Mason has become the kind of academic base camp of this this radical right so the economics department there something called them or Kate a center and the now renamed Scalia School of Law are all important components in the Koch backed effort to transform the country and they've actually become pipeline and coke asked for this he wanted to kind of talent pipeline you know he said that their greatest problem was a shortage of talent and so what they're doing is setting up institutions little training centers that various other schools modeled on this George Mason case where they turn around and train young operatives to go off and staff the various pieces of the apparatus which now is huge I mean it is literally do. Signs in dozens of organizations actually hundreds if you take into account all the affiliates of the state Policy Network and the international If affiliates of something called Atlas network so this is a huge operation larger than either political party and quite determined to affect radical change in our country what is Coke you know who I think you write is a 7th most wealthy person in America what is Coke and his cohorts what is their vision of a future society. Well it's very interesting what they say when they're trying to put it out put their vision out popularly as they talk a lot about liberty they sometimes do to now call themselves the freedom movements they talk about limited government and low taxes but if you actually look at the works that most influenced Koch in his construction of that vision and you look at what some of the people say in their own words our country would look like after success what you see is an America that would be unrecognizable to your listeners it's a place in which the 3 functions of government are maintaining the National Defense overseeing the rule of law and ensuring social order and beyond that we are individually responsible for all of our needs so ultimately in their dream world we have no social security we have no Medicare we have no public education what we have instead is a great pressure for us to save as soon as we are sent to and beings for our own future needs and if we fail to save and fail to protect right for them then tough luck we will be examples to others of what happens when you do not save and I think you're seeing. In an act man if you will of this vision in the discussion over health care and you know Americans of both parties are wondering why it is that the Senate is being a rushing to push through the repeal of Obamacare and it held and you know they've had different incarnations but basically proposed policies that don't get. More than 20 percent support in any poll usually it's about 12 they don't have majority support in any state in the country and it's horrible in the view of most Americans and yet the donor class is putting pressure on these Republican politicians to make them toe the line or they will face a primary challenge and forcing them to vote for something that their own constituents don't want so it's actually gone so far this transformation of the Republican Party into a delivery vehicle that that party is pushing through the agenda of its wealthiest most extreme right donor class rather than it's the voters who support it needs to continue as a political party Well they've targeted the state trumps Maine advisor Steve van and has said that he wants to destroy the state one of his allies Grover Norquist famously said that he wants to shrink the government down to the size that is so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub. What is their strategy to take down the liberal state well that is where Buchanan's ideas came in and where as other people in this you know some some of your listeners might refer to them as neo liberal others free market fundamentalists whereas others in that mill you like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek concentrated more on making the case for free markets James Buchanan spent his career making the case against government and basically trying to take down and his words the understanding of public interest that prevailed at mid century the idea that all politicians should be seeking the public interest and all political actors and then we persuade try to persuade one another of our case for what that public interest was in Buchanan instead looked at the incentives in politics and so he focused particularly on how different groups made demands on public officials or you know also corporations made demands on public officials and. Elected officials and those elected officials in his terms would have a self interest in reelecting reelection so that they would try to you know appease multiple constituencies without worrying about the cost and so he did have a very original interpretation of where deficits came from now what the Koch team has done is taken his ideas and turned them into a strategy for kind of retrofitting American government so the 1st part of that is to break down all the progressive groups that made demands on the state that would lead to Tex agent and any transfer of of resources from one section of the population to another so. You know all the radical attacks we've seen on unions in the last few years fall into this pattern they're also attacking the American Association of retirement people and trying to stir young people up against older people to say older people are getting money as they shouldn't so so lots of efforts to to break up groups also to privatized public resources and services so they want to privatized ultimately social in the name you know they're saying reform but they're and they're not question about what they mean about that but what they really ultimately want is the privatization of Social Security and Medicare or public lands all the rest and they want to do a whole series of radical policy changes that we probably don't have time for but the key thing to know is they also want to lock those changes into constitutional amendments both at the state level and the federal level for actually pushing toward a constitutional convention which we have not seen in this country since 1787. To achieve what the donor class would like to achieve and cannot achieve through the regular political process and they've actually been extremely successful in gaining control of state governments they now have full control over 25 states both houses of the legislature and the governorship and they're using those states to in a sense kind of trap the Fed. Government and prevent the federal government from enacting workable progressive reforms as they did with the Affordable Care Act with not accepting Medicaid expansion so it's pretty radical vision it's extremely strategic and I argue in the book that you can't understand the strategy or its code without understanding the ideas of this guy James McKinley Buchanan Nancy you made the statement that quote Both my research and my observations as a citizen lead me to believe American democracy is in peril Can you talk a bit about that and is that why you wrote this wonderful book. Yes I feel like I'm in some ways you know it's all of what I've been saying kind of points to that conclusion that our democracy is in peril and you know you can see this in many ways I mean I live in North Carolina now one of the states that has been a laboratory for this and it has just been utterly radically transformed by this cause and we could also point to things that we haven't talked about yet like the extreme voter suppression bills which they also want to lock into the Constitution at a constitutional convention voter suppression extreme gerrymandering refusal to abide by customary procedures in terms of transparency unfold this closure and proper hearings and so forth it is just such a radical vision and you know I don't know maybe some of your listeners will think that I am you know Chicken Little or something you know and that it couldn't possibly be that bad and there I just have to say that I was as I was researching this book so often I would just discover another wing of this deeper set of connections and literally feel nausea you know as I was going through the sources or you know going through these Web sites and just at the scope of this thing it is huge and it is very determined is a very strategic and I don't think people on the left adequately understand that at all there's too much mocking of Trump's tweets and his foibles and his intelligence and so forth when this thing is really really moving forward and moving forward at an incredible pace in his administration while people are focused on his tweets and again his foibles So yes I absolutely wrote this book as I did in the way that I did in the speed that I did because I really believe that we are at one of those forks in the roads that will determine what kind of society we will be 1st the next several generations it is in my mind a can to the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Great Depression of the 1930 s. To the. Struggles of the 1960 s. You know whether the forces who believe in robust and inclusive democracy will come through this stronger or whether those who believe in restricting the electorate that them ocracy is a danger to private property and that we need more actually harsh government whether they will succeed is we can't know right now it will all depend on what people do but I will say the single most important lesson that I hope that people take from reading my book is that this cause this Koch backed libertarian cause is doing what it's doing in the ways that it's doing it because they know they know from repeated experience that they will never persuade a majority of their views and so they have to go at it in the sideway what Coke is called the technology. Of transformation and I think that if the bass majority of Americans understood what this cause wants and if they understand what it wants and they reactivate their kind of civic institutions turn off their electronics and commit to the political process that I think that this cause will be defeated because again it is a small minority but it's an extremely wealthy and determined and illogical minority we've been speaking with Nancy McLean Professor Duke who wrote the terrific book Democracy in chains the deep history of the radical right stealth plan for America Nancy I can't tell you how grateful Heidi and I are for your good work on this and we're so pleased to be able to interview you I want to ask you about Gloria Steinem had observed after Trump was elected and put all these people into cabinet positions these far right people she said that he found a fox for every chicken coop is a brilliant cook and that's certainly true and I wanted your reaction to the nature of the cabinet and how it relates to the Koch project. Yes that is just a perfect quote and vintage vintage Steinem and it really captures the situation there is actually less light I think between the coke operations and the trumpet ministration than we've been led to believe at the very minimum he is looking to them for so many of his top appointments the people who are in pivotal places come out of these could not out of the mainstream of the Republican Party to the extent that there is a mainstream anymore but what they would call the Republican establishment but rather out of these Coakley operations which I said you know there are now you know dozens and dozens of these but there are some particularly key ones and those key ones have supplied many of Trump's senior leaders by one researcher's calculation about 70 percent of Trump senior appointees come from these Koch operations are veterans of it so that's a pretty stunning figure for what was once a kind of a marginal part of the political spectrum but they include certainly Mike Pence his vice presidential candidate who's deeply rooted in in these operations they include Mark short who has his the White House liaison to Congress who's a key pivot person for legislation and he actually comes out of Freedom Partners which was the you know is the big dark money operation that the Koch you know donor network that the Koch's have run so he knows very well what the donors want and presumably can convey that to Congress who will Scott Pruitt at the e.p.a. Is deeply you know involved has been deeply involved in these Coke operations and particularly their you know fossil fuel protection work and in efforts to prevent any action on climate change even month Mike Pompei o. The head of the c.e.o. Comes out of these Kansas operations certainly Kris Kobach who's directing the new voter suppression effort I mean the list just goes on and on it is really really striking how many key people in Mick Mulvaney the budget director. Is another one so this is really an administration that is in many ways I would say other than perhaps the president himself a dream administration for the coax to achieve their agenda Oh and you mentioned Steve Bannon before and his desire to as he puts it deconstruct the administrative state there will somebody who represents that project in the Scalia school of law at George Mason now may Raul was just named to a key agency that most citizens won't pay attention to but is extremely important for regulation and that is the Office of Information and regular Regulatory Affairs Oh Ira So yes there is definitely a fox provide presiding over every chicken coop now I bet you the boss we didn't even talk about her Nancy speaking of dark money a number of the reviewers have placed your book as the companion to Jane Mayer's dark money do you think this is accurate. Well I'm honored by the comparison Jane Myra has done hugely important work as a journalist for the American people and 1st drawing our attention to the Koch brothers and her articles for The New Yorker some years ago she wrote a brilliant article about my own state North Carolina called state for sale that focused on the copartner Art Pope who has led the effort within North Carolina and her book is terrific at just you know showing readers that money trail and all of the things that it is funding so I'm honored to be in in that company and I see my work as providing the story of the ideas behind this effort and how they have evolved over time and also helping people to understand the mid century Southern roots of all of this that really the dream vision of this cause is in a sense to take us back to mid century Virginia I say minus the segregation and mid century Virginia was the most oligarchic state in the country with extreme voter suppression extreme gerrymandering you know of parsimony. This provision for public needs despite its wealth starving public school system etc etc etc So I have the story of the ideas and also of the legal angle which is all important to understanding this and also what the ultimate endgame of these ideas is so so yes I have been many many in fact many ordinary readers are connecting to Mayor and in their their communications and I'm I'm flattered by the connection Nancy your book Democracy on chained has become an intellectual flashpoint and you've been subjected to a torrent of abuse for that for example I understand that Jonah Goldberg a senior editor at The National Review threaten to you writing that you should worry about the quote libertarian super posse on my ass What is the method of operation of the right wingers who are going after you. Yeah it's very interesting you know I actually predicted in the book I said you know and in the later chapters and I pointed to the case of Jane Mayer and climate scientists who have brought inconvenient truth to the public for this cause and been subjected to various efforts to smear them so you know it's all I felt that it was predictable and that I should anticipate it because this is how this cause plays and their willingness to abuse power is part of my thesis so it's a sense they're kind of firming it but still it is pretty pretty stunning to see how deeply the contemporary right has degraded our public discourse you know and in quotes like the one that you read you know coming from the senior editor of a you know widely read publication and it's also kind of shocking how intellectually irresponsible so many are in the sense that most of the people who started critique my book by their own admission had not read the book. Or if they had read something they'd found one piece that they might know about to try to you know. Impugn my credibility so to be honest I don't I don't really take them that seriously I think they're proving to the American people the thesis that I argue in the book about how anti-democratic this cause is and I'm much more engaged with the real readers who have responded so well to the book and to the you know various kinds of mainstream publications from the Atlantic to the Guardian to slate to New Republic to I can't even keep track of the halter net you know many many others have actually there reviewers have read the book engage the book and been excited by it and those are the people I really care to reach to talk with Nancy James Buchanan actually traveled to Chile after the military coup 973 to advise general Augusta opium issues military dictatorship after the show and military with the instigation and aid. From the American government overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist Salvador Allende Buchanan helped with suggestions on the economy and how and how the dictatorships constitution could be changed so that it would make it very hard to abolish some of the clauses in the Constitution that enshrined private property to the far right Republicans today want to change the American Constitution. Yes I believe that they do and yeah it's very interesting Buchanan it would be canon when Milton Friedman went you know that the Nixon administration was still in power in the Nixon administration had aided in the coup by the time that James Buchanan went Pinochet had carried out his people had carried out an assassination in the streets of Washington d.c. As an international pariah you know the news of the brutality of the dictatorship had had become common knowledge and it was and that point in 1980 that you can and went to advise on this new constitution with which the dictatorship could get the radical changes that it wanted it had affected while under a military hunta So it could get those radical changes perpetuated after a transition to civilian rule which the whole international community was was pushing for so Buchanan's contribution was arguably much more permanent and lasting and chilling in my mind. In any event yes the perceived success that the right enjoyed in Chile and particularly again this neo liberal if you want to call them right I call them the property supremacy you can think about them in different ways but they. Were pleased by what happened until a and that is absolutely what they're trying to bring to the United States and frankly to other parts of the world as well Buchanan said at one point that no constitution in the world protected the rights of the minority and but he always by that he was really meant the wealthy minority adequately and by that Jeff that measure all constitute existing constitutions are failures now you could think about that no place in the world captures your ideal so so this is like a radical utopian libertarian right but because of this billionaire power that is behind it in its capacity to hire you know literally thousands of operatives to move this agenda it is on the verge of radically transforming our institutions and our legal system so yes they have invested mightily in shape. In June the law through the various you know the kind of law and economics programs to undermine the case for regulation through constitutional. Investing and constitutional scholars who would want to bring us back to you know what legal scholars would call the Lochner era what I also remember is the Plessy era a time of extreme dominance of capital and extreme suppression of democracy and they are beginning to achieve that bit by bit around the country they're Try and there again they're talking about putting you know voter id in the federal constitution putting the balanced budget amendments in the federal constitution so as to undermine you know programs like Social Security and Medicare you can just go on I mean they have at least 10 different amendments that they want to get through if they get this constitutional convention and because of their control over state so many state governments you know while the eyes of the left were focused on Washington and various personalities because of that structural power and they are by their own lights close to success I think that the other alarming success they've had is with in the legal system and the cause is that they're getting appointed the last one yes you Neal Gore such but if you face track vets. Who are really in trouble and tonight just add Michel that that was actually a product of the Federalist Society room yes Dieudonne for decades conservative to have them placed in judicial positions and higher up positions and you won't be surprised to know at this point that Koch was an early founder of that Yes right yes and has funded the Institute for Justice and a lot of these organizations that seem so marginal in their legal thinking I think many legal scholars don't take them seriously but again because of the power they've achieved in the fact that they've been able to get cases to the Supreme Court and score some significant victories they. They are really important watch and another thing actually that I think is important for people to know is that it is Coke led libertarian cause has also politicized is also working to politicize judicial elections and to pump on the hurt of amounts of cash into state judicial races to ensure that the state courts sign off on the radical changes that they're making in policies in states like again my own North Carolina so. Again this is highly strategic it is very well thought out there are people playing a long game with a very frightening end game and it behooves all of us to understand it as best we can i want to ask you on a personal note if we might How did you get to political and how would you define your politics. Well I got political I was you know I was born in 159 and so I was a child you know when the Civil Rights Movement was on television and the war in Vietnam was on television and I was a reader and so I was always you know moved by things but the 1st activism was in college when apartheid was in place in South Africa and there was an anti-apartheid movement on campuses and that was the 1st thing that really made me wake up and say wow. I need to do something so I've always you know been a progressive person I believe in democracy deeply I believe in fairness and that keeps me going and connecting to people who are also working for those things through writing this book has just been a source of joy and I can't tell you how many great people in the trenches or who are starting to pay attention to politics who hadn't before and who are reading the book and writing to me how how energizing that is I feel like there's there's a great. Kind of weariness in America right now I think with people having felt bullied and having felt like their system is changing and it's not responsive and they don't understand why and as they start to understand what's happening and why more and more people are finding ways to get involved and to try to challenge this and to reverse this and so so that's just been really exciting to me I just love to see grassroots leadership and people finding their voices that's very sustaining for me very moving Nancy Nancy McLean has written a wonderful book which we heartily recommend you called democracy in Shane's the deep history of the radical right stuff plan for America Nancy's just a tremendous contribution you've made how do you are grateful to you and we love this interview and we wish you all the luck are you going to be on tour how do people get in touch with you so that we can know if if you're speaking somewhere and people come out and hear you thank you so much it is that such a pleasure to talk. You guys you have such an amazing show if people go to the penguin Random House Book page for democracy in chains they'll see a little orange logo that says on tour and the tourist spots are starting to be put in there and it's not a full listing at you know so if you don't see your city represented you could contact the press or contact me and see if anything is being organized there but at this point I'd say we have a couple dozen. Venue's in places in the works and so hopefully I'll get to an area where I can talk to some of your wonderful listeners Nancy it's been an honor to have you on Congratulations on a truly remarkable and timely book Democracy and Jane thank you so much Heidi and thank you Michel interviews we take care bye bye. This is a line that a lot of disorder dot archive programs can link many of the to discuss. The 2 ski geese a full a study was a biomedical clinical study conducted by the Us public health service for 4 decades between 19321972 Its purpose was to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men in Alabama under the guise of receiving free health care from the government. It collaborated with the historically black to ski University in Alabama investigators unrolled a total of $600.00 impoverished African-American sharecroppers from Macon County Alabama of these men $399.00 had previously contract and civil as before the study began and 200 in one did not have the disease they were given free medical care Beals and free burial insurance for participating in the experiment after cure for syphilis was discovered in penicillin the study still continued without informing the men that they would never be treated according to the Centers for Disease Control the subjects were told they were being treated for quote bad blood a local term for various illnesses that include syphilis anemia and fatigue Joining us to talk about the study and its aftermath is Professor Susan rever be Susan is McLean professor emeritus in the history of ideas and a professor emeritus of women's and gender studies at Wellesley College she's editor of the book Tuskegee truths and author of The Prize winning book examining to ski the infamous syphilis study and its legacy Susan welcome to Law and Disorder Thank you. Susan how do you describe the Tuskegee syphilis study to those who haven't heard of it it was the longest running study in American history between 1032 and 72 that involved United States Public Health Service watching but not intending to treat nearly 400 African-American and with late stage syphilis and 200 men who were at the controls the study went on for 40 years and was stopped only when pressure was put on by the media about the study itself. I understand that some of the men fall they were being treated for rheumatism or bad stomachs and in addition to free meals and physicals they were offered free burial insurance they were told it was a secret experiment to study the progression of deadly venereal disease without treatment it sounds to us like a criminal conspiracy by the government. It does from our perspective now and in lots of ways what you describe is exactly what happened and then were told that they were being treated quote unquote for their bad blood they were even told that a spinal tap for example was quote special treatment but in the context of that time period it wasn't that the link the difference between an experiment and treatment sometimes wasn't clear to people think about it even now when we say you are in a clinical use the term clinical trial now we don't say medical experiment but in fact that's exactly what a clinical trial really is. And by $947.00 penicillin had actually become this treatment for syphilis shouldn't the doctors have ended this study at that point yes except that here's what's happening at that point they feel like this is going to be the last group of people who probably would be untreated and they want to hold on to their subjects' to see what happened long term so and the other thing was that at that point penicillin to treatment for early stage syphilis they're not so sure it wouldn't work if you had the complications of the advanced complications of the disease these can be either neurological that is you can really just have part of your brain you know way or it can be cardiovascular and at that point kind of someone wouldn't help so I think that's how they rationalized not giving the penicillin to the men but in all it should have of course been stopped it should never been started but it certainly should have been stopped by the late forty's this is not a violation of the credit growth that you should do any harm Well the if you think about that the graphic goes it's about an individual doctor to an individual patient this is not an individual doctor with an individual patient this is a scientist with subjects so that's where I think those kind of questions don't come into play in quite the same way these men were not seen as patients per se they were seen as subjects and that's really different Susan I understand that in 972 there was a leaked to an Associated Press reporter Jean Heller and July of that year her story appeared on the front page of The New York Times revealing as we've discussed that men had been deliberately been left untreated for 4 decades did that whistle blowing result in any changes in u.s. Law or regulation Yes I mean want to think that's interesting about the study 1st of all is that it was never hidden away there were 13 published reports about the so. The problem is the men were referred to as volunteers so it would be hard to know that they were not that they didn't know about what was going on and there were attempts by other health people to try to stop the study over the years not just the health worker who gave the information to Gene Heller but it's only when it makes it publicly into the newspaper that the pressure gets put on the c.d.c. To stop the study and it along with other studies that were being exposed in this time helped push us to get what's called the Belmont Report and then a series of rules around how subjects are supposed to be treated in research studies so to ski becomes kind of the final straw that breaks the back and partly what changes here is that people start to realize that it isn't just sort of like the bad doctor off somewhere on an island but it's the way in which we do science and research itself that needs to be questioned and watched what about the experiment going out and in Alabama and what about the obvious racist aspects right well that's partly what makes it so powerful is that there was an assumption that we're still fighting for example that white and black people. Have diseases differently in their bodies that somehow race is in fact not a skin tone but in fact deeper into the body so there was in the sumption in the thirty's that black people white people manifested the late stages of this disease differently and so that was part of what was going on and they did it there because of that interest and also because they had frankly what they thought would be a large population they could do science on and one of the docs who did the study in fact said in that interview in the ninety's in the 1990 s. Well if we had found this much disease in West Virginia hillbillies we would have done it on them too. Susan can you talk a bit about the lawsuit what happened I understand that there was a class action lawsuit and settlement. Right so what happens is that Fred Gray who is this is a famed civil rights attorney who had been Rosa Parks his attorney in Montgomery during the Montgomery bus boycott and Fred has offices both in Montgomery and in to ski there only 40 miles apart so one of the men in the study who had worked with Fred in other cases who was in the study went to see him and said Can't we sue them for this so there was a lawsuit called Pollard versus us that started in $273.00 and ended in $74.00 and the government settled out of court before it went on trial and each of the men in the study who had been positive got something like $35000.00 and each of the controls or their family members got $10000.00 so it settled for about $10000000.00 which in today's terms is not still very much money but that's what they could get at that point and because so many the men were older grey and everybody else felt like they should just settle and take what they could get at that point in time and then what happened was as the money sat you know in an interest bearing account to try and find all the family members who could get money for a great spent decades tracing down all the family members who could possibly get money there were thousands of them and you had to find them and so eventually the interest was given out and what's happening right now is there's a little bit of money left I think for people who weren't found so maybe there's $100000.00 left at most and the question has come up now is what to do with that money right I saw a piece in The New York Times recently saying that I guess some people were filing claims that money but also a local museum I think rightly so so this is so Fred Gray who was the men's attorney and his daughter started a museum called the Tuskegee multicultural and human rights and civil rights museum and an old bank building right off the main square and in the building he has panels about the history of Macon County but he also. Has on the floor all the names of all the men engraved in and it's a kind of museum to remind people what happened in Macon County what happened to them in so Fred asked the judge Myron Thompson to give the last of the money to his museum to try to honor you know the men and their history some of the family members who are sort of organized thinks I think the money should still go to the family members but given that there are thousands of people who could get that money divided by $100000.00 means you know maybe everybody's going to get you know $50.00 at most you know 100 dollars I mean that's nothing to sneeze at but it's not exactly like there's millions of dollars left so at the moment it's in the hands of a man a Myron Thompson who's the day judge in that area says and I'm curious if you wouldn't mind sharing on a personal note how did you come to be in business so you write as a nice northern white Jewish girl like you doing in Alabama. So I'm a historian of nursing and medicine and in the early ninety's in the 1996 floating around looking for another project I had finished my bigger book and I got to see this play called Miss Evers' boys which is a fictionalization of the study and the central character in the play the misquote Evers is actually a woman name Eunice Rivers Lori who was African-American nurse who's the go between the men in to speak in the Public Health Service and she's in the study for the whole 40 years and she's a fascinating character if you want to think about what happened to her and why did she keep doing this why didn't she stop it herself and so I thought I would write a book about rivers and I went down to Tuskegee to look at some information there just wasn't enough to do a book but the story just captured me that there was already a book a wonderful book by Jim Jones called bad blood that existed but I got really interested in how the story becomes a metaphor and. Evils into American culture so what I ended up doing was 2 books an edited book of primary documents on the study and then a book called examining Tuskegee the infamous syphilis study and its legacy and I looked at both what happened who was involved and then how it travels metaphorically really and symbolically into American culture we want to ask you Susan what if anything is Jeff Sessions relationship to this so I think so here's the interesting So Jeff Sessions was obviously an Alabama senator he and Fred Gray who is the attorney who wants the money in his museum served in the state legislature I'm sure together they clearly know each other I found online a letter that Fred Gray had written when sessions began the attorney general graduating him so I don't know what the micro politics of this are when the state wants happen now is evidently the Justice Department has said no if the money should go to Fred's Gray's museum or to the families it's done already and the money should revert back to the federal government and that's where it stands at the moment in terms of the court so who knows what the relationship is between sessions and gray and if there's some back story here I don't know it I don't know what it is but there's got to be a back story somewhere floating around here in 90 $97.00 then President Bill Clinton issued an apology to what were at that time the 8 remaining survivors of the experiment do you think that this chapter in history is adequately represented in the history books here not enough yet I think is that. You know 1907 is not so long ago for people like me I mean I was involved in making sure that I was actually at the White House for that and I was one part of the group that made that apology happen but all the men are now have all passed so have their wives but they're still children and. Grandchildren and cousins in the area and there's a meeting that happens every year or so the story still is very much part of the lure of Macon County and the county that Tuskegee thing and it floats to the African-American community as a kind of metaphor and it showed up for example on a Saturday Night Live skit near where Kid Thompson is playing a patient and it one point he and you Laurie is playing the his wife and at one point the doctor Roberson some kind of experimental treatment and they both look at each other and say we know what this is to just be they start yelling but my students for example increasingly have no idea what it was so you know these things don't stay in people's minds I think it will be interesting to see whether it continues to be remembered for what it symbolizes and what we should be doing how did you get political and how would you describe your politics. So I am I was at Cornell in the sixty's I'm a child of the Vietnam era the civil rights movement I worked in the civil rights movement I worked in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference I worked for team in Chicago in the sixty's I worked in the civil rights movement in New York so I've been a political person since I was 19 and this story you know what I'm a medical story and by a graduate training and this story because it captures so much about racism about class about how we do medicine is in fact a bigger story about American politics and American medicine and American racism and so I just it just really can you know you have to fall in love with your project and I worked on this for more than 2 decades so you know when I saw it with the people there too I mean I was privileged to get to know some of the men but and their wives before they passed and it was an honor to have been in their lives and I promised them I did a talk once and at the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in notice Olga Alabama just outside of Tuskegee and I said to them look the stuff. He went on for 40 years and your relatives were in a medical desert and I promise you at Passover Jews are supposed to tell the story of their and slay of their family at the enslavement of the Jews to their children year after year and I promise you that the medical enslavement of your families will not be forgotten that I will continue to tell the story this is a river b. I heard about you and knew about you for ever met you and I remember vividly the day I met you you were giving a talk at the Columbia Melman School of Public Health right about a doctor named Alan Berkman who had recently died and Alan was a dear friend of mine and it turns out of yours and I know now that that you're working on something about it all and I wanted you to to talk a little bit about what that yes so I decided this next project so Burkeman at the end of his life was an internationally known aids physician and organizer and responsible for really saving I think millions of lives in Southern Africa because he helped to fight to get anti-retrovirals into those countries but before that he'd been involved in a political group in New York and he had spent he's only the 2nd doctor we think in u.s. History to be arrested for assessor eed to murder after the fact because he gave medical care to the woman who was involved in the torturous Brinks expropriation a robbery in 1901 that was done by the Black Liberation Army people so he did 8 years of hard time he got sick and almost died in prison and the story I thought of his life really captured me partly because I knew him as a young boy and then we were at Cornell together and I was actually organizing draft card burning my last year and I was thrown out and Allen was president of his fraternity and playing football so the trajectory that he took for Says the one that I took is not what one would have expected 50 years ago and so I just got interested in what he did and what it meant in that. Time period to really see yourself as not only just an ally to a black liberation movement but a real coconspirator as it were to it as well so isn't just to go back for a 2nd before we let you go I want to ask about the research process that when you went through when you were writing the book. What was it like you did you get good response from institutions or persons that you interviewed Yeah Pete I mean people it was people were really anxious mostly to talk about mean some people and to ski didn't want to talk about it because you know I mean how much would you like to really talk about your I mean how do you interview me a long time to interview one of the men like I thought well how do I call this guy up he doesn't know me and I say Hi I'd like to talk to you about how you got syphilis and then got screwed by your government I mean how do you make that phone call. I just couldn't it took a long time for me to figure out how to go talk to them. But and the people at c.d.c. Were interesting and I got to be actually good friends with a number of the people at c.d.c. Who were just willing to really some of them anyway to really rethink what happened and to think about what are the institutional factors that make this kind of study happen so I felt like I learned a lot about the doing of science and medicine in the process and hopefully help people think about how even the good guys can really make a terrible mistake and I think that's the way to think about this Susan we are so glad that you have done this and dedicated so many years in my moralizing much of this chapter in our history and it's been really delightful to have you on Law and Disorder so thank you I feel like it was an honor to get to know these people and to help get some restitution in some ways for their sacrifices. Thank you so much we'll ask you back when you finish I understand you're almost done when I finish the book on Dr Dale and Brooke. Well I'm up to chapter 12 but it's going to take a lot of editing it's too long so call me in about a year and a year and. I hope I hope or spirit you before that Ok thank you for your time I think. You want to hear long disorder again go to Law and Disorder. On the Web You should also go along disorder radio based. Shortwave reporters now fresher than ever I'm a. Catch the radio news interviews from around the world on Friday afternoon at 530 listening globally act locally a short way from now right here on news that I 30 pm here at the my. Greetings This is Eddie from the vinyl Frank dear and this is the place of the free .