How the south won the civil war oligarchy, democracy, and the continuing fight for the soul of amerca. I am joanne freeman, a professor of history and american studies at yale university, and this afternoon i have the pleasure of being in conversation with heather about her book and other matters political. This program is being produced by the brooklyn Historic Society which is been a cultural hub for civic dialogue and command outreach for over 150 years. Thats some real history. Her book has gotten a lot of critical praise, for example, the Washington Post writes, Heather Cox Richardson a professor of history at Boston College explains goldwater crusade and the trajectory of modern conservatism in her masterful book. I kind of book that sheds light and was perhaps the most important Political Coalition of the 20th century. And Publishers Weekly says richardson and emphasizes the prevalence province of racism and sexism and inequality in other parts of the country during and following the civil war, she marshals above of evidence to support the books provocative title. Conservatives will cry foul but liberal readers would be persuaded by this lucid jeremiah. Im really, really excited to dig in your but first i want to invite those of you out there in a were listening to share your questions for heather, and you can do that by typing into the q a box i think you all see at the bottom of your screen. We will take as many as again in the second part of the program of these as whole of last about an hour. Now its my great pleasure to introduce Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College, author of six books about american politics and writer of the very popular newsletter, letters from americans. Welcome, heather. Thank you, joanne. I was trying to and meet myself. I want to start by thanking first brooklyn Historic Society for doing this, but also to say to people watching, im incredibly excited about this because this is the first time weve been able to do our own history thing together. I have asked her to open this way up beyond my book and now to talk about her new book as well, the field of blood but to talk about how the past speaks to the current moment and to talk at whats going on in american politics today. We will talk about my book and we will talk about her book but will also talk about the first moment. The fact we limited to an hour thank you for giving it a shot. Im excited to be here. Its will be fun. Let me start with innocence was an obvious question but is probably want a lot of people are wondering about now. Even in just the two little bit ive read about responses to your book, they use words like provocative, timely. I want to stop asking, how is at you came to write this book . What brought you to it given how timely it is . Of course you never know its going to be timely and you start writing but one of the things i study is i used to call the zeitgeist. Id be politics all the time nsa how i people thinking about things . Ill explain later how, where i came to end up on that, but what happened was when i was writing my last book, the history of the Republican Party, when i read goldwater, i was cops make because its so similar to james Henry Hammons mosul speechmaking 50 in which he talks about how really government is best if its run by a few good people and the government cant get involved in things because that will be unconstitutional and going to destroy certain peoples liberty. They use that word a lot and they were very, very, very similar. I had never seen the comparison. One owe five netbook i was also teaching and is teaching betrayal of tears, the 1830 movement, the pushing out of the native americans out of the southeast into oklahoma. I was in steeped that particular week in the congressional conversations about why it was a good thing for the indians to lose their land and the force understand the march in which some of them died and why this happened to be, why congress had to do this the white to good thing for the indians. That happen to be the same weight as some Football Player, i dont remember which one, but some Football Player was caught on a video writing his girlfriend out of an elevator by her hair. I dont member any of the characters involved what hit me about those things was the language was the exact same. The same excuse for this man dragging his girlfriend out of an elevator by her hair, she wasnt listening to him. It was for the good. All those things. The same thing as reading in congress about why the indians deserve to be pushed into oklahoma. This all said to me there was something about the day, now, that echoed all the power struggles in the past, and what i wanted to get you was what created those power struggles and had into any moment today that sounded so much like the confederates had sounded, like delete confederates sound in 1850s . That reinforces to my mind what i decide was it has a lot to do with language. With this book is about is how language creates power structures and societies permits certain people to take power. That to me one of the reasons im so excited about this is that to me speaks the much to what you did in the field of blood talk about the field of emotion have the coming of the civil war which you focus more in the early part than i did really had to do with emotion. How did you end up writing that book . Well, youre right that in the sense although the book is about physical violence in the u. S. Congress and the logic of it and the impact of it, what struck me when i begin that book was i knew it would be about congress. And it would be about violence. I didnt know how much violence there was but the language that people were throwing around and the response to the language even just in the historical record, you could see how in the case of my book, they were really strategically and deliberately using language to intimidate or silence or manipulate people who disagreed with them, and light of work. It really relied on emotion. Intimidation is something that often works. Fear or humiliation are things that if youre in congress and performing before national audience, if you want you can manipulate that and reshape what someone is able to do. Along the same lines of what youre talking about but i was really interested in doing in my book was looking at the real dynamics was going on in congress and how that was shaping politics overall. Use the word bullying again and again and again. It is bowling behavior. What an argument is the way rolling take shape, police that he initially, the way bullying take shape is through language. The way you put things, we say things. Nowadays we talk about gas lighting but really what youre doing is youre shaping a worldview that the use of language to establish dominance over somebody else, to bully them. It is astonishing to me the parallels between the past, the 1850s, not all the past because we dont always do it but the 1850s and where we are now. For sure. I think about that all the time. Even just the realm of bullying, because what bullying is about and the reason why its particularly effective in politics is because you dont have to exert force. You have to make clear that you could exert force if you want to. Its about the threat. If youre a bully you are suggesting you could do really ugly things. If you wanted to it you have to do them. You just have to be sure that the person being bullied understands that and will respond to that. Its a brilliant way to manipulate people, and when it works it really works. I need you to do me a favor now. [laughing] the threat that, ill do that but a need you to do me a favor though. Exactly. I could do this to you, or i could do something to you, or we could get along. Yes, as long as you do what i want you to do. Yes. Now, what an example in your book, one of the things i think we both share in her book is this fascination with language and the power of language and the ways in which we take it for granted but its such a force of shaping politics. What is an instance in your book of a moment when it really struck you that language in and of itself was having a shaping influence . There are two places it really shows up. Its kind of everywhere if you think about it. One of the reason more people dont study it is its very hard to say this matters. Because you cant quantify. We all know it matters. Someone said to me once, when my earlier books, you never quantified how this talk was aboard. I said understand i didnt do that, but can you stand the right now, this wouldve been in the 80s i guess maybe the 90s, can you stand the right now, Rush Limbaugh doesnt matter . Of course the matters we can measure it. Does that mean we shouldnt study at . The places that jumped out at me were in 1954 i really, cracks me up your the 19 fate for professor because so much happened in 1954. In 1954 right after joe mccarthy goes, crashes and burns in the Army Mccarthy hearings because people once and for all actually see him. They dont just kidding. Its not just the language but they actually see him, and rather than saying hes a crusader for anticommunism and look at him and say hes a thug, a bully and we dont want any part of the. After that short after that, William Buckley junior and his brother come out with a book mccarthy and his enemy. In that they say mccarthy might even run around edges but he was right. We conservatives, Movement Conservatism was not ever really traditional conservatism. It was about a commitment to undo new deal and we are seeing a play out right now. They write this book and they say we conservatives have to stand against what the call liberalism. By liberalism they made everybody else. Payment all the democrats, all the eisenhower republicans this is a time 1954 when eisenhower republicanism looks terrific. Were getting the interstate highways, the g. I. Bill putting everybody into middleclass jobs. That everybody thats an exaggeration of people of color especially didnt do as much for people of color but a lot of people i grew up with who wouldve been probably not even skilled workers because of the g. I. Bill vaulted into middleclass as engineers auris printers or any number of things they could do without education which is not attainable for them during the depression. In this moment william f. Buckley and his brother fight this book and they say we conservatives are stand against all you. Thats basically nobody else. They do Something Interesting in that but because thats for the first time when they capitalize conservatism and liberal. People just talked to john about we are all liberals. A literary critic says you cant talk about liberalism because they thought what is a liberal. They met in this general we believe government has multiply rightly business in providing a social statement and for voting infrastructure. Republicans and democrats are driven a gizmo which parts of the more important. Everybody thought of themselves as liberal. They capitalize it and they say these guys are essentially like the communist party in china. They are a party, a curveball that is take over america and that powerful construction and at the time it was this, the book itself was not terribly well received. People are like really, mccarthy is a good guy . It does get a lot of attention but by now the idea of being a liberal, remember in the 80s people started to call it the l word. Now dont call them the l word. Now its this epithet and you can see that being constructive. That was one moment, and other moment was in the 1990s, Newt GingrichPolitical Action committee literally, they were in charge of, they were kind of, they were the coaches for the new republicans, the newly elected republicans that kind of socialism into the Republican Party. What they do is they circulate a document with all the words they should use when you talk about democrats. Those are words like trader and lazy and special interest and angry and all these really negative words. Republicans, traditional republicans that they then are labeled rinos, republicans in name only. Again, very powerful language. You could literally see them using language to divide the country in two and to label half of it as negative and half of it as positive. So it really, those were the two touchstones for me. But im trying to remember, you talked about a similar touchstone, i think, in feel the blood, didnt you . Well, certainly what youre describing is a what i talk about too, and the she scenariou just described with language is a group of people creating a new we by creating a them. Yeah. So its fascinating, just capitalizing those words helps to suggest that theres an it there, right in that conservatives and liberalism are not just words, theyre capitalized. And the power of that is, you know, in a way, doesnt even necessarily have awareness. It becomes it just by looking at it. That really gets back to power of language in politics because if youre really effective at that skill, then youre basically finding a way not just to create an us and a them, but to plug people into assumptions and emotions that are going to play well for you, right . Because words are like a direct drill, they can be, right into emotions, responses, right into things that you arent necessarily going to process, right . And so one example actually in my first book, and its, you know which is called affairs of honor, by the way. I loved it. Oh, thank you. Affairs of honor in the new republic. Whats interesting in part, you know, one of the factors of democracy and the vulnerabilities of democracy is how important language is because democracy is about negotiating powers which is about persuasion. So by definition its more formidable and flexibility, and that can be used for good and bad. But so all the way back to the beginning of the republic theyre playing these kinds of games with words. And even in the government theres a Federalist Party in the 1790s is, in a sense, more elitist and more big money driven and discomfited by democracy, and theres a letter from the federalist that talks about if you go out and give a speech in front of the public and anyone uses the word aristocrat, youre done. So many other things, thats why theres privilege and elitism and the moral of rights. Theres a cascade of things from that one word that ten years earlier didnt are that baggage attached to it. In a sense the same thing which is the intense power that Something Like a word can have and the ways in which that shapes power in politics. Well, in late 20th and early 21st century the word was taxes. Another great moment where polls said people were not actually that concerned about taxes by the 1980s, but if you talk about taxes, it conjured up this idea that somehow the taxes of hard working white people were going to go into the pockets of lazy people of color and feminists. And you and we even have a conversation by one of the political operatives, lee atwater, who talks about it. And he says, you know, in by 1968 you cant use racial epithets, although he uses it in this quotation, says you cant really go out and say vote for me or youre going to have to deal with this. He says so we generalized it. We started talking about busing. People knew what you were talking about. Then he said you could take one more step back and you Start Talking about taxes, and people are like, oh, yeah. Like, i care about taxes. When you talk about taxes, it is not, you know, you write it down on the paper, you study it in congress. It is not carrying the baggage of, you know, this long history of American Fear of an underclass redistributing wealth. But the reality is by 980 when 1980 when americans hear republican politicians swearing they will never raise taxes and that democrats want to take money from the makers and give it to the takers, it is absolutely copedded racial coded racial language. So all you have to do is so to make sure we dont have have social welfare regulations is to say do you want your taxes raised . And there you go. 150 years of American History is right on the table is that threeletter word. And deploying it is the key to a certain kind of politics. And its so deceptive because its so seedy, right . And we see that all the time now. Someone will phrase something, and youll see on social media people will say dog whistle, thats a dog whistle. And other people are say, no, its not, its probably x, y or z,. [laughter] and no, it isnt. It shows the power of that kind of attack. And it also is a diversion because you can say thats not what i meant. I remember when people started using what we knew as the okay symbol as a white power symbol. Right. And i remember the first time i read that thinking, no, ive been doing that my whole life. And by the time you start seeing it in all these places, youre like, my god, youre right. That is a dog whistle. But theres a period of am by ambiguity where if you said it was the a white power symbol, especially older people, you people are social justice warriors. And that was deployed in such a way that it was doubly powerful. Not only were you calling your people to you, but anybody who called you out on it then had uninvolved people saying, no, youre being paranoid. Which, again, is one of the ways language works. These days we talk about gaslighting. Thats exactly how gaslighting works. Right. Just as youre saying, this ambiguity that this mean okay or something else, in that early period if you say, oh, no, it means more, by some logic to some people youve declared your loyalty to them. Just by asking a question which buys right into the us and them creation thats shaping politics. And when i was working on my book, the degree to which people at the time understood the kind of power. In the late 1850s when, you know, were moving up to purge the civil war, i found a lot of members of congress and actually others outside of congress saying it to each other over and over again, we have to control our words. Which is a striking thing to hear if youre talking about people in intense crisis and worried about if the union is going the collapse, and theyre saying watch your words. Thats a testimony to what power and an emotional power they can have on a high level and on a popular level as well. Theres one southerner in that late period who refers to words being spoken as missiles.