Book republican populist spiro agnew and the analysts of america. They compare to president donald trump. The center for the study of democracy at st. Marys college of maryland hosted this event. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you. I appreciate that. Im tuajuanda jordan, president of st. Marys college of maryland, the National Public honors college. It always makes me smile to say that. Im delighted to welcome you to this afternoons discussion with authors of republican populists, spiro agnew and the origins of Donald Trumps america. The centers are joint initiative of the college of st. Marys city, the site of the capital. The centers goal is to promote understanding of democratic values, traditions and institutions through the exploration of contemporary and historical issues. Dr. Antonio uges, junior, is the director of the center. He joins us this afternoon. Thank you, tony, for being here. Charlie musgrove, chair of the department of history here at the college is also here this afternoon. Our History Department at st. Marys college is pretty active, offering many opportunities for research and studying abroad. Courses and programs in this Department Help our students develop a deeper understanding of themselves, their culture and humanity in general. Thank you, charlie, for being here this afternoon. And now i would like to introduce our guests. Charles j. Holden. I know. I sounds so incredibly official. Chuck is a professor of history here at st. Marys college of maryland. He is the author of the new Southern UniversityAcademic Freedom and liberal at unc. And Zach Messitte is president of college in wisconsin and politics and government. He is coeditor of understanding the global community. He was also the very first director for the center for democracy here at st. Marys college. Welcome back. Thank you. Zach has been the president since 2012 and has remained engaged through both the study of the center of democracy and his peter, judge Peter Messitte and susan messitte, welcome susan, who both have a home north of campus. The messittes are a family of service. Susan served as the Colleges Foundation for directors. Zach and chuck, professor of history at appleton wisconsin, wrote republican populist spiro agnew and the origin of Donald Trumps america. As most of you know, spiro agnew was Vice President under president Richard Nixon. Agnew resigned from office in 1973. I was just a child then. You can tell, right . After pleading no contest to a tax evasion charge. Incidentally, agnew was also marylands 55th governor, serving from 1967 to 1969. Published by the university of virginia press, republican populist is described as a fascinating political portrait of agnew from his preVice President ial career through the scandal driven fall from office and beyond. The book explores agnews role as one of the Founding Fathers of the modern Republican Party, a gop that represents the silent majority. The publisher further notes that in order to understand the current internal struggles of the Republican Party, we need to fully appreciate agnew, known as a populist everyman and prototypical middleclass striver who was one of the first proponents of what would become the ideology of Donald Trumps gop, end quote. President messitte and professor holden are here with us this afternoon to celebrate the publication of their new book and to share with us some insights about agnew and the modern Republican Party, how we got to where we are today. Thank you both for sharing your insights with st. Marys college and the broader local community. Without further ado, i ask you to join me in welcomes Charles Holden and Zach Messitte. [ applause ] thank you, president jordan. First, let me just say how beautiful campus looks and this building in particular. When i first came to st. Marys, i was in this building. It looked a lot different then. This is just absolutely spectacular. What an honor that the center has a nice suite of offices in this space. Its really stunning. And thank you antonio, as well, for hosting and for being the director of the center. It, again, is such an honor to be here since this was the first job i had in higher education. Indulge me for a minute. I want to talk a little bit about the center before we get going because it plays a big role in why chuck and i decided to write this book along with jerry. So, 17 years ago, a group of faculty administrators, staff from the college, as well as members of the community got together to create a center that would promote civil discourse about democracy. It was based on marylands history. What were the lessons that we could learn from marylands history that told us about current events. It was a great idea and it still is today. Im so thrilled that it continues forward. This job i had from 2002 to 2007 was a job that i loved. It was organizing discussions between students, faculty, policy makers, diplomats, historians, journalists on a range of topics that were important to marylanders and were important to americans. And that mission, of course, is more important today than ever before. And so as i look out in the audience today, i see former colleagues, friends, mentors, a lot of people that i admired as a junior faculty member here, and i want to recognize a few of them briefly. Professor Michael Caine of the Political Science department followed me as the director, and he and i cowrote the grant that permanently funded the center and its operations. Hes been a great advocate for discussions and civil dialogue from the beginning and hes someone ive admired and looked up to. Helen and tom doherty are not here oh, yes they are here. I wanted to recognize them. Helen was a longtime member of the Sociology Department here at st. Marys. She and tom put forward their time, intellect and their treasure to make sure the center was possible. And i want to thank them all for all theyve done for me and for the college and the center. They are still a big part of why they are here today. So, i thank them. There are lots of other people i could call out. But i just want to name two others who are not here because they passed away in recent year. But their presence looms very large. The first is jay frank rayley. Those who are students here see his portrait in the great hall. He was in the Maryland Legislature in the 1960s. He was also a great friend of the center. He knew spiro agnew personally. We spent a lot of hours together at the roost, which some of you will remember, and at lindas cafe talking about politics and history. I think he would be very pleased by this book and our talk here today since he loved the state and its history so much. And again, his commit tonight the center and word and indeed as a state is critical. The other person i would like to recognize is ben bradley. Ben was one of the founders of the center, and it was our great good fortune to get to know him. When i was the centers director, i was the person whos supposed to organize the bradley lecture in journalism here at the college. I know you all are having your bradley lecture later this week and its terrific that jason is going to be here. Thats a great person. But the bradley lecture more or less was a call that i would make to bannon. And he would say who do you want to have. So, i would run through all the great names in american journalism. And ben would choose one and they would come. So, we would come these people would come down to the college and we would go to his house just across the river here at port bellow and talk with him. Thats where the idea for this book was born. The speaker was Richard Cohen who was the bureau chief of the state house correspondent in annapolis in 1973 when spiro agnew resigned. And chuck and i got to spend a great evening at port bellow after a talk about maryland politics. We laughed a lot that evening. In fact, one of the things thats indelible that stays in my mind is Richard Cohen said to ben bradley, now i cant remember whether you said this or whether jason said this, but it doesnt matter, its all the same. Youre one in the same. I thought what i agreat line because its true. So, we talked a lot that night about agnew. And chuck and i realized that no one had done a real look at his legacy in more than 30 years. At the time we wrote an occasional paper about it for the center for democracy, and we started researching a book. We spent a lot of time going through his papers at the university of maryland. We were some of the first people looking at it. And then of course in 2016, donald trump was elected president and we realized that agnew, among others, was really more than an obscure Vice President and Baltimore County executive and maryland governor. He had a direct line to where the Republican Party had ended up. And so much like the mission of the center, we saw a lesson from marylands history in contemporary politics. So, in the spring of 2016, the american Political Science association pulled scholars to name the worse Vice President in the last half century. The consensus choice was easy, spiro agnew. We disagree. Richard nixons selection proved to be one of the most underrated consequential decisions in modern american politics and it still reverberates a half century later. Agnews policy contributions during his five years in office were limited. But thats not why he was chosen. Instead, he took on the Important Role of reshaping the trajectory of the Republican Party. His suburban middle class image, mixed with his sharpedge antielite political style launched his rise from a county executive in maryland to being a heart beat away from the presidency. This is very important. In 1960, spiro agnew ran for Circuit Court judge in Baltimore County and lost. Eight years later, he was Vice President of the United States. Our book is not a biography. We place agnew within the context of the changing nature of the Republican Party over the past century. This is important. Here im going to pick up a little bit of what our third author talks about in the chapters that he authored. Much of the 20th century, the Republican Party was the party of wall street, country clubs, prep school white males who went to Ivy League Schools and worked for banks. Its not the party of the common man. While the base was not there among the plain folks the small towns and rural midwest, the partys power center were blamed for the great depression. During the president ial campaign, almost half the contributions to the Republican National committee came from the banking and the brokerage centers. The republican president ial candidate that year, kansas governor alf landon, ran on fiscal responsibility, and government derent ralism. He was crushed by Franklin Roosevelt and the new deal which employed the interventionist state, government spending, bureaucracy and prolabor policies to win an Electoral College for fdr. And the democrats, they won every state except for maine and vermont. Roosevelt situated the forgotten man at the heart of his political appeal. His position and that of democrats in general was that the Republican Party bore the responsibility for the forgotten mans plight. Republicans of the 1920s to the image of the business man is the exemplar of American Progress and prosperity, they were on the wrong side of an elemental shift after the stock market crash in october 1929 and the on set of the great depression. Roosevelt, a working class supporter, declared is the only man we had in the white house would understand my boss is a son of a bitch. What changed between the 1920s and 1960s . How did the party of the coolidge and hoover become the party of the White Working Class. How did those who started out as democrats change affiliation and change roles in the space of half a century. Agnews story, we believe, helps illuminate this turn around. Now im going to turn to chuck to talk about it. Thank you, zach. I will cover two of the points our book makes. First that agnews combative style predates his time as nixons Vice President. And second ill discuss his overlooked success in recruiting white southerners to switch to the Republican Party in the late 60s and early 70s. Agnew was born in 1918, son of a greek immigrant father. Like so many others of his generation, his path led him out of the city and into the 1950s and 60s middle class. Agnew was a world war ii veteran. He fought at the battle of the bulge. He was called sleeping on ice for a week. He finished his law degree by going to night school at the university of baltimore at the time the school wasnt accredited. He moved out of the suburbs to Baltimore County after the war and lived the middle class live. He belonged to the pta, father of four children, husband to his stayathome wife judy. For relaxation and entertainment, he played golf. He was a huge fan of the baltimore colts and loved playing pingpong. One of his many admirerslikened himself to agnew as the conservative hardworking middle class reasonably poor people. Or as Richard Nixon calls them, the silent majority. And what we see in agnew is that on the outside, the experience looked very comfort able. Tv in the living room. Air conditioning. Two cars in the garage. For many of these middle class strivers, life felt precarious and unstable. As the sociologist William White wrote at the time, in the dawning middle class world of consumerism, somewhere, white writes, somewhere lies the good life. But it vanishes as quickly as one finds it. Agnew himself in the early 60s said the following. In our homes, we are bombarded with demands. Watch this show, read that book, listen to this program, attend that meeting, go to this lecture, take that course, join this club, play with the children, mow the lawn, fix the screen. The list seems endless. It was, he added, its no wonder we feel harassed and frustrated. We barely have time to think. So, in response this is key for our view of agnew. In his political career then, spiro agnew offered moral clarity and utter certainty. He must be right. Hes so certain. That struck a cord with this nervous middle class of the 1960s. But the certainty carried with it a corollary that if things didnt go agnews way there must have been trickery and underhandedness involved. Agnew in the late 50s sat on the baltimore board of appeals, dealing with zoning disputes. Thats a really important position in a place like baltimore. 1961, Baltimore County council decided not to reappoint agnew to the board. While ago gnnew blamed partisan for his removal, which was probably the case, he also portrayed himself as the victim of darker forces, whereas he was the agrieved warrior for justice against the local elite. He hemmed to that conspiracy and charged that an underground campaign had been waged against him. It really wasnt very underground at all. The local Democratic Power structure, he boasted, was and im quoting afraid they cant control me, but, he said, im not going to lie down and take it. And the final meeting where his removal was made official, people nearly came to blows over the decision. In this episode, agnew, despite his always calm exterior, showed an early ability to stir passions, to get under peoples skin, and to excite those who relished his lashing out at the elite. He was already making a name for himself as a straightshooting politician, developing the art of attacking opponents verbally, but then claiming he was just calmly, rationally, telling it like it is. And his suburban middle class supporters in Baltimore County loved it. The tragic days of early april 1968 with the urban unrest after Martin Luther kings assassination then launched agnews career at the highest level. Following kings murder, agnew met with africanamerican leaders as the froess build into day three. Around 100 africanamerican leaders gathered for what they thought would be a dialogue with the governor. Instead, agnew attacked his audience for having failed to push back against the radicalism against the group. Consider the optics of this meeting, surrounded by the Baltimore City police commissioner, who is white, the head of the Maryland National guard, also white, and the head of the maryland state police, also white, agnew literally pointed at his audience and charged that it was, quote, the silence of most of you here today in the face of those radicals that led to baltimores unrest. Now, he said, parts of our cities lie in ruins. He continued. You know who lit the fires. They were not lit in honor of your great fallen leader, nor were they lit from an overwhelming sense of frustration and despair. Rather, ag