July 6, 2022 • 22 mins
In the relatively short history of the United States, certain events irrevocably altered the direction of the nation and signaled the dramatic start of a new historical reality. Some took the form of groundbreaking political and philosophical concepts; some were dramatic military victories and defeats. What all of these turning points had in common is that they forever changed the character of America.
Edward O’Donnell is a professor of history at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of several books, including Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age. O’Donnell also has curated several major museum exhibits on American history and appeared in several historical documentaries.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
History is not about the past, or it's not just
about the past. History is about us here and now,
this room, the electricity in this room, the social relations
we have with each other. Why some people are poor,
why some people are rich, why some people have all
the advantages, why some people don't. All of that is
determined by history. The science of happiness, Appreciating modern painting,
(00:24):
dilemmas of modern medicine, Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War,
The artistic genius of Nicole Angelin. When intuition fed American
The psychology of One Day University. The most acclaimed and
(00:45):
popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi,
I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn. So history is not just
about the past. History is about now. And the more
we understand history in that sense, the more it can
actually work for us. History isn't just supposed to be
a fun story. History is Edward T. O'Donnell and my
(01:08):
title of my lectures, turning Points in American newspeople think
about the the fight over the Confederate flag. You know,
that's just not some abstract fight. That's a real issue
that has a lot to do with what's going on
right now in the United States. So often history is
thought of as as dates and great leaders, usually men.
(01:30):
You approach it a different way, Yeah, I mean, I
think that you can't get past dates. You have to
know where you are in time and all in certain
people like Andrew Carnegie, or Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
They're all very very important people. But history probably understood,
you know, it encompasses all of society, and so I
always say that the people that make history are often
great leaders, but it's also often legions of nameless, faceless
(01:52):
people that want to push for change. So millions of
enslaved people saying we do not want to be slaves anymore,
millions of workers who say we don't want to work
sixteen hours a day, millions of women who want the
right to vote. They you know, we don't know most
of their names, but they're the ones who organize and
move history in a different direction. Some of your turning points,
are they huge events that we all know? Are? Are
(02:14):
they sometimes a little bit obscure? And then you explain
why they're so important? Yeah, Well, I try to peg
them to events. Often I'll start with the Declaration of independence,
which is not an unknown event obviously. But what I
do is, I would say it's incumbent upon me to
make this tell you more than what you know. Not
just that the Declaration Independence gains us our independence and
it's this sacred document, but what does it actually means?
(02:36):
We delve into that. People are often unaware exactly what
the document actually was. But the declaration is essentially a
declaration of war. And the first part that we love,
you know, the declaration that you know defines all these
great values that was sort of considered fluff. The key
part was the last two thirds where we said we
(02:58):
are breaking away from a great Britain for these reasons.
He has, he has, he has. The king has done
all these terrible things to us. He sent troops, he's
tax us to death, he's dissolved our legislatures. He has,
he has, he has. That's the key part that we
need to explain to the world. But Jefferson does put
that flowery philosophical treatise at the beginning, and that, as
(03:19):
we'll see, we'll have legs. It's not this great declaration
of human rights, but it becomes that and it has
power decades and now centuries beyond its original creation and
that so we delve into how this, you know, the
how a document like that can have a life that nobody,
including Jefferson himself, could have ever expected. Yeah, talk about that,
because some of that declaration is a litany of somewhat
(03:39):
grumpy complaints against the boss, right, George the third of England.
It's kind of interesting. When the declaration was was issued
in seventeen seventy six, the more important part was the
back end, the two thirds, where it just says he
has tax us into starvation, he has sent armies to
plunder us. Today it's just the opposite. Nobody can really remember,
other than historians, the back two thirds about he has,
he has, he has, and they focus primarily on, you know,
(04:01):
we hold these truths to be self evident and all
of those beautiful statements of human rights, of universal truths
and so forth. What fires you up, what keeps you going?
Why do you do this? Well? I think it has
to do with the idea that I mean, I find
history fascinating and interesting in and of itself, but I
think history also has a way of helping us understand
the world that we live in. If we look around
(04:22):
us and think about what do we value in this country.
We value our democracy, we value our democratic institutions. We
value certain ideas about human rights and equal protection before
the law and all that. You know, there's a long
on list. That's just the beginning. And I always point
out that these things, it's really history tells us these
things did not fall from the sky. These things are
not you know, chiseled on a gold tablet somewhere way
(04:43):
back when. These are things that are the product of struggle.
Every generation of Americans said to make their democracy and
the republic what it is. So these you can't take
these things for granted, And that prompts one to appreciate
that struggle, but also to look around and say, what
are the what are the compelling struggles right now? So
unless us we're aware of our past, we can't build
(05:03):
a better present. Right the past tells us that democracy
requires work, requires attention, requires struggle. And if we get
lulled into thinking that it's a kind of a wind
up machine that was designed in the seventeen seventies and
seventeen eighties and then just turned on and that we
just live in this democracy, that is a dangerous not
on it's false, but a really dangerous idea about how
(05:24):
democracy works. Are there any surprising moments in these lectures
that you've given for one day university? Absolutely? And I
think a lot of what I'm doing is reminding people
of stuff they've learned in the past, just sort of
familiarizing them with things, and then also showing things they
may not have gotten when they first encountered this history.
That say, the Declaration of Independence, to see how powerful
(05:45):
it is, way beyond seventeen seventy six that it has.
This it's a document invoked over and over again by
various groups. Here's Elizabeth Katy Stantond. She forms convenes the
Women's Rights Convention eighteen forty eight Seneca Falls, New York.
You know, takes the Declaration of Independence kind of heretical
and rewrites it as a feminist manifesto and writes right
at the very beginning that all men and women are
(06:08):
created equal. And then of course labor parties take it
and use it. You can buy a book of a
hundred Declarations of Independence that are all rewritten in this manner.
So this is the Workingmen's Party and Da da da dada,
for the full benefit of their labor right. They change
the words where they need the words changed. Martin Luther King,
and it's famous. I have a dream speech. And of course,
(06:29):
how many of you've ever read the Declaration of Independence
of Vietnam written by guy named Ho Chi Minh. It
starts with these words all men are created equal, They
are endowed by their creator with certain I mean this
is a document that has global significance. You make a
controversial argument that the cause of the Civil War was
not states rights, it was slavery. Right, that's not controversial.
(06:54):
It's controversy among people who don't really understand the thing.
And I don't mean that in a paternalistic way. If
you took at was in American historians who studied the
nineteenth century and said what's the cause of the Civil War?
Nine of them would say slavery was the cause of
the Civil War. This when people say states rights, it
drives historians crazy because we've been teaching this for decades now.
It's in all of the books we write, it's in
(07:15):
all the lectures we give, it's in all the presentations.
It's about slavery, or if you want to get particularly
say it is about states rights. It's about a single
states right to own people as property. That's what it's
fundamentally about. If I was a doctor and I was
talking to a one day university or group and I said,
you all know what to do when you get the
flu right, and I turned to the audience and everybody
(07:36):
says bleeding. You know, we've cut and bleed people. That's
what that's that's that's the solution to it's It's the
equivalent where I say to people, you know what the
cause of the Civil War was, and they say states rights.
It's like, no, that's oversimplified. And it's also a self
serving story that we know. The reason that is a
popular idea is that it was made popular after the
Civil War by people who wanted to change the meaning
(07:57):
of the Civil War and change what it was all about.
So it's not as an accident that people say it.
It's actually in a successful job done by people in
the decades after the Civil War to changed the narrative.
Another thing which is far from obvious and fascinating in
your lecture is when you talk about America's attitude towards
the military, which has changed hugely um or even in
(08:22):
recent decades. Yeah, I think that's there is another good
example of the surprises when you tell people. So you know,
up until the nineteen fifties, it was absolutely understood that
we had to have a tiny military. The Founding Fathers
did not believe in a strong military. What did the
Founding fathers believe in? Almost no military? Because they understood
things very clearly. They said, looking at world history, how
(08:43):
do you get a Caesar? Later on, how do you
get a Napoleon? Their generals they have an army. And
when you have a huge army, you have a huge
base of power that is going to be abused. So
in our Republican playbook, we always said small, small, small military,
build it up, tear it down, build it up, tear
it down, build it up. World War Two we begin
(09:05):
tearing it down, the biggest war ever. And in nineteen
fifty five years after the war, the Korean War begins,
we re engage and we never stop. That's when we
get two million soldiers and six hundred ships. That's that's
only seven years ago. That's a new thing. And they
looked back to Roman history that they had clear, vivid
examples in their minds of that's what it's supposed to be.
(09:26):
And think about when George Washington, his his ideal that
he followed was of Cincinnatis the citizen soldier. He was
put down his plow, go off and fight a war,
and immediately leave back to civilian life. And then he
gets called into the presidency and he serves two terms
and he says, I'm out of here because we can't have,
you know, perpetual government by one person, particularly one person
with the military background. What is the single biggest misconception
(09:50):
that people have about American history or about a moment
in American history which in their view is completely different
from the reality. This is a big, big question. So
I think probably the notion that the founders created something
that was perfect and that it we just need to
(10:12):
figure out what they had in mind. And that's a
really comforting idea. Originalism is a really comforting, wonderful idea,
but it's it's divorced from reality. The founders themselves always
used My favorite expression in studying history, in American history
is they always said this republican experiment. They say this
over and over again. When you read the speeches of Jefferson,
of Madison, of Lincoln, they keep saying this Republican experiment
(10:35):
will rise or fall on the basis of this. You know,
they invoke this idea, and but what do they mean
by experiment? They mean it wasn't perfect. It was a
It was a thing that's set in motion by brilliant
but fallible people, knowing that it was not perfect and
that it would have to be adjusted, and that it
would move through time. You know, the founders could never
conceive of the Industrial revolution, just to give you one example,
(10:55):
and so that there's an understanding that through time we
are going to have to make adjustments, have to figure
out what is it? What does free speech mean in
a in an era of mass media, which simply didn't
exist in the in the founding period? What does the
Second Amendment mean in an era of mass production of
firearms and much more powerful firearms? What does you know?
Freedom of assembly? What do all these things mean? Uh?
(11:17):
In our you know, in the future. So the idea
that the Founder has created something that was perfect and
unchangeable and that all we need to do is figure
out what that is. That's a great fallacy. When you're
up on that stage firing people up, what's your favorite
turning point to tell? Ah, that's a good question. The
(11:37):
one that gets I think people scratching their head the most.
Just when I talk about what I call the reformulation
in the in the late nineteenth century, we see all
the tremendous benefits of the Industrial Revolution, but we don't
have any institutions and any ways of dealing with all
the downside of it and all the turmoil that this
is creating. So it's creating a lot of gold and
a lot of wealth, and a lot of new technology,
but it's also creating mass poverty and huge strikes and
(12:00):
all kinds of problems and great concerns about the you know,
the fate of the republic. And the founders didn't didn't
give us a plan for it because they couldn't have
even imagined you know, us steel. They couldn't have imagined
John D. Rockefeller and these in this kind of world
that they're building, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin. All their traditional notion
of the way the politics worked was that power is
the great threat to liberty. So that's why power is
(12:21):
inherently evil. People possess it, they'll abuse it. The biggest
power in the world in seventeen eighty is the state.
Any government is always big so we as self conscious
Republican citizens, will keep our state, our our governments small.
That's why Jefferson says, the government that governs least governs best.
That's the idea, right, it's a it's a it's not
about low taxes. I mean, it is about that to
(12:43):
some of you, But it's about power. Power is inherently dangerous,
So we need to keep governments small so that we
don't have tyranny. Well, in the progressive notion around nineteen hundred,
people are beginning to rethink this because where is the power?
Power is still the number one threat to Republican government,
So that part's true, But where is the power? The
President United States? Is this big compared to John D. Rockefeller,
(13:06):
And Rockefeller is not an elected official. Rockefeller is separate
from democracy, separate from our Republican institutions. And so that's
the essence of it saying power is a problem and
we need to reign in that power to save liberty. Right, So,
the state, which we've used to fear is actually now,
(13:27):
you know, the lesser of two evils. We need to
build up the state, build up the government to give
it some powers to protect us, to protect against abuse,
to protect and also to work on benefiting the common good.
And so people in the progressive era, but as people
in the Gilded Age, and these are labor leaders, these
are intellectuals, these are politicians, and they're coming out from
many different angles. But by the early twentieth century, there's
(13:48):
an emerging consensus that the founders didn't give us ways
of dealing this or specific ways, but they gave us
the tools. They gave us our democracy, they gave us
an amendment process, they gave us ways of thinking about
what is most important. And the progressive air sees this
great advance of policies that greatly enhanced the common good,
greatly enhanced the well being of the average citizen. And
(14:10):
they don't undo, they don't destroy industrial capitalism. They don't
nationalize our steel industry, but they just rein it in
a little bit, you know, put up some guardrails so
that the capitalist engine can roar and do all the
things that does for us, but with some boundaries in
some ways, which so that workers in a steel mill
work eight to ten hours, not sixteen hours. They work
and they earn a reasonable wage that means they can
(14:33):
feed their family and not going to get rich. So
there's ways in which we can do this while keeping
the benefits of that kind of an economy, but also
creating systems and creating institutions and practices that benefit the whole.
We're living in a time of great change now, much
of which has been brought about by the revolution in technology.
(14:55):
I know your lecture is called the five turning Points,
but do you feel there's a sixth unfolding right now? Well,
when I do the five turning points, a fifth one
is the invention of the person computer, the dawn of
the digital age. So I do emphasize this idea that
we are living in a dramatic turning point moment and
we can't exactly figure out what it is, but it's
clear by any measure the unleashing of digital technology beginning
(15:16):
with the personal computer in the seventies, and what's that
opened up, and how it's dramatically transformed our world in
ways it's almost impossible to enumerate them. Your cell phones
and computer, your your refrigerator is now a computer, your
car has a computer. I mean it's hard to even imagine,
hard to even see what that definition is. And so
this digital revolution, not just the computer but then when
you think about expensively out into the whole universe of
(15:39):
digital technology, the Internet and all of that, when you
start stitching all that together, this is a true revolution.
Computer technology changes absolutely everything because it's in everything. It
changes communications. If you have a children or grandchildren, you
have a fourteen year old, how often does a fourteen
year old talk on the phone. They don't talk on
(16:01):
the phone. They think of talking on the phone as
like writing on with a piece of chalk on a slate.
They think. They literally will tell you it's weird. I
don't want to say, Well, what are you going to
meet up with Julie? I don't know. She hasn't answered
my text. Well, you know, there's another button on that phone.
You can just like push it and and Julie's voice
will come out of the end of that thing, and um,
you could say, speak to her, and then she can
(16:22):
speak back to you. In like fourteen seconds, we can
solve this whole thing. So it's changed the way we
relate to each other. And and also hard to know
what the impact is going to be fifty years from now,
what we're gonna look back and say about it exactly.
I mean, if you and this is true of most
breakthrough technologies. When the telegraph was was created back in
the eighteen forties and then spread nationally, people said, this
(16:44):
is great. We can get we can get crop prices
and a little bit of news back and forth and
low and behold it. You know, it dramatically transforms our
economy and our way of understanding each other. It shrinks
the country in our conception of ourselves. We can find
out about outbreak of cholera in New Orleans in a
in a matter of minute, and we can eventually send
signals under the water of the Atlantic Ocean when we
get a you know, a telegraph cable across there in
(17:06):
the eighteen sixties. So it has, I mean one a
great example of just to give you all human history,
up to the invention of the telegraph, the fastest way
to deliver a message was a galloping horse. That's true
in the days of Alexander, it's two in the days
of George Washington and everything in between. And then the
along comes the telegraph and you can send something instantly,
you know, through time. And if you think about the
(17:26):
War of eighteen twelve, we were trying to get stay
out of war in eighteen twelve and finally decided that
British depredations against our shipping meant we need to declare
war against them, So we send a declaration of war
across the Atlantic Ocean to them. They have already dispatched
a ship with a list of concessions that they're going
to make about scaling back their problem. So these two
ships pass each other, one saying we're going to back off.
(17:48):
You don't need to declare war. The other ship has
already literally already sailed as far as that goes, saying
we've declared war. Yeah, And at the back end of
the War of eighteen twelve, the same thing happens. Dandrew
Jackson wins the Battle of New Orleans after the war
or is literally over, but he hasn't been notified that
it's over. So it's an interesting thing to see how
technology has impacts and implications way beyond what we think
it's going to be useful for. So what do you
(18:09):
think people get from a live lecture that they don't
get perhaps by watching a video or reading a book
or looking at a website. Well, I mean, certainly there's
something about the live presentation that's different from others where
they can just even how you use pauses, how you
you leave people hanging, or you have ways of double
(18:30):
reversing on something like if I'm talking about, you know,
the eighteen fifties and the coming of the Civil War,
and I say, you know what States writes the cause
of the Civil War, and I've always causes a bit
of a you know, ruffle in the crowd, and I say,
don't answer that, because you're not gonna upset me. And
ultimately we point out that, you know, the Fugitive Slave
Act of eighteen fifty was the single greatest invocation of
federal power over state power to enforced slavery, to uphold
(18:52):
and protect slavery, and saying, so Southerners, you know, like
states rights, but they only liked it some of the time.
They liked federal power a lot of the time when
it served their interests. So ways you can kind of
you know, you always you literally see people almost scratching
their head, you know, when they when they say, oh
my gosh, I hadn't I hadn't thought of that. You know,
what do you hope that people will take away as
(19:13):
a result of being at your lecture? A lot of
things I think the operative thing is that history isn't
just some interesting stuff from the past, interesting people, interesting events,
properly understood and properly taught. You know, the power of
history gives us insights into how we can understand our
own problems in our own world. History doesn't give us
lessons per se or a script to follow, but it
(19:34):
does tell us how we got to where we are.
You know, there's that famous quotation by James Baldwin that
you know, history isn't merely about the past. It's actually
the great force of history is that it's you know,
it's with us now. We all carry history with us,
and so with that insight, history is incredibly beneficial. It
is interesting, it's fun to read about battles and read
about famous people, but it's also has to have that
(19:55):
that element that speaks to us now. There are many people,
and I know a few of them, who think we're screwed,
who think that America is really in a rough point
of its history right now. One of the lessons I
took away from your lecture was there have been many
other perilous moments when people may have felt in similar
(20:20):
ways to today. Well, I agree. In one of my
little maxims is that history keeps you sane because everybody
in all kinds of different areas is always thinking, oh that,
you know, we're losing our republican soul. Where you know
kids today and you know, and they're really upset about
all the things that are happening in their in their society,
and it's really beneficial to understand to no history, because
history tells you that people in nineteen seventy thought the
(20:40):
country was absolutely collapsing. People in the three absolutely convinced
that the country was collapsing before their very eyes. And
that was during the depression, during the Great Depression. And
people in eighteen sixty two said, not only none, as
the country metaphorically falling apart, it is literally falling apart
in a civil war that is going to destroy the
lives of almost a uh, you know, a million people
(21:01):
and untold millions in wealth and so forth. But Americans
have found ways to, whether you know, push through those
problems and devise solutions to them or or things that
ameliorate those problems. So history keeps you saying, because you
realize right that times are tough, but I have no choice.
I'm living in this era. My children are they going
to live in this era, my grandchildren gonna live in
(21:22):
this country. I need to we need to find ways
to ameliorate and or remedy the problems that that plague us,
just like people have done in the past against great odds.
Edward O'Donnell, thanks very much. All right, thank you, it's
my pleasure. Thanks for listening. Sign up on our website
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(21:44):
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History is not about the past, or it's not just
about the past. History is about us here and now,
this room, the electricity in this room, the social relations
we have with each other. Why some people are poor,
why some people are rich, why some people have all
the advantages, why some people don't. All of that is
determined by history. The science of happiness, Appreciating modern painting,
(00:24):
dilemmas of modern medicine, Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War,
The artistic genius of Nicole Angelin. When intuition fed American
The psychology of One Day University. The most acclaimed and
(00:45):
popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi,
I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn. So history is not just
about the past. History is about now. And the more
we understand history in that sense, the more it can
actually work for us. History isn't just supposed to be
a fun story. History is Edward T. O'Donnell and my
(01:08):
title of my lectures, turning Points in American newspeople think
about the the fight over the Confederate flag. You know,
that's just not some abstract fight. That's a real issue
that has a lot to do with what's going on
right now in the United States. So often history is
thought of as as dates and great leaders, usually men.
(01:30):
You approach it a different way, Yeah, I mean, I
think that you can't get past dates. You have to
know where you are in time and all in certain
people like Andrew Carnegie, or Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
They're all very very important people. But history probably understood,
you know, it encompasses all of society, and so I
always say that the people that make history are often
great leaders, but it's also often legions of nameless, faceless
(01:52):
people that want to push for change. So millions of
enslaved people saying we do not want to be slaves anymore,
millions of workers who say we don't want to work
sixteen hours a day, millions of women who want the
right to vote. They you know, we don't know most
of their names, but they're the ones who organize and
move history in a different direction. Some of your turning points,
are they huge events that we all know? Are? Are
(02:14):
they sometimes a little bit obscure? And then you explain
why they're so important? Yeah, Well, I try to peg
them to events. Often I'll start with the Declaration of independence,
which is not an unknown event obviously. But what I
do is, I would say it's incumbent upon me to
make this tell you more than what you know. Not
just that the Declaration Independence gains us our independence and
it's this sacred document, but what does it actually means?
(02:36):
We delve into that. People are often unaware exactly what
the document actually was. But the declaration is essentially a
declaration of war. And the first part that we love,
you know, the declaration that you know defines all these
great values that was sort of considered fluff. The key
part was the last two thirds where we said we
(02:58):
are breaking away from a great Britain for these reasons.
He has, he has, he has. The king has done
all these terrible things to us. He sent troops, he's
tax us to death, he's dissolved our legislatures. He has,
he has, he has. That's the key part that we
need to explain to the world. But Jefferson does put
that flowery philosophical treatise at the beginning, and that, as
(03:19):
we'll see, we'll have legs. It's not this great declaration
of human rights, but it becomes that and it has
power decades and now centuries beyond its original creation and
that so we delve into how this, you know, the
how a document like that can have a life that nobody,
including Jefferson himself, could have ever expected. Yeah, talk about that,
because some of that declaration is a litany of somewhat
(03:39):
grumpy complaints against the boss, right, George the third of England.
It's kind of interesting. When the declaration was was issued
in seventeen seventy six, the more important part was the
back end, the two thirds, where it just says he
has tax us into starvation, he has sent armies to
plunder us. Today it's just the opposite. Nobody can really remember,
other than historians, the back two thirds about he has,
he has, he has, and they focus primarily on, you know,
(04:01):
we hold these truths to be self evident and all
of those beautiful statements of human rights, of universal truths
and so forth. What fires you up, what keeps you going?
Why do you do this? Well? I think it has
to do with the idea that I mean, I find
history fascinating and interesting in and of itself, but I
think history also has a way of helping us understand
the world that we live in. If we look around
(04:22):
us and think about what do we value in this country.
We value our democracy, we value our democratic institutions. We
value certain ideas about human rights and equal protection before
the law and all that. You know, there's a long
on list. That's just the beginning. And I always point
out that these things, it's really history tells us these
things did not fall from the sky. These things are
not you know, chiseled on a gold tablet somewhere way
(04:43):
back when. These are things that are the product of struggle.
Every generation of Americans said to make their democracy and
the republic what it is. So these you can't take
these things for granted, And that prompts one to appreciate
that struggle, but also to look around and say, what
are the what are the compelling struggles right now? So
unless us we're aware of our past, we can't build
(05:03):
a better present. Right the past tells us that democracy
requires work, requires attention, requires struggle. And if we get
lulled into thinking that it's a kind of a wind
up machine that was designed in the seventeen seventies and
seventeen eighties and then just turned on and that we
just live in this democracy, that is a dangerous not
on it's false, but a really dangerous idea about how
(05:24):
democracy works. Are there any surprising moments in these lectures
that you've given for one day university? Absolutely? And I
think a lot of what I'm doing is reminding people
of stuff they've learned in the past, just sort of
familiarizing them with things, and then also showing things they
may not have gotten when they first encountered this history.
That say, the Declaration of Independence, to see how powerful
(05:45):
it is, way beyond seventeen seventy six that it has.
This it's a document invoked over and over again by
various groups. Here's Elizabeth Katy Stantond. She forms convenes the
Women's Rights Convention eighteen forty eight Seneca Falls, New York.
You know, takes the Declaration of Independence kind of heretical
and rewrites it as a feminist manifesto and writes right
at the very beginning that all men and women are
(06:08):
created equal. And then of course labor parties take it
and use it. You can buy a book of a
hundred Declarations of Independence that are all rewritten in this manner.
So this is the Workingmen's Party and Da da da dada,
for the full benefit of their labor right. They change
the words where they need the words changed. Martin Luther King,
and it's famous. I have a dream speech. And of course,
(06:29):
how many of you've ever read the Declaration of Independence
of Vietnam written by guy named Ho Chi Minh. It
starts with these words all men are created equal, They
are endowed by their creator with certain I mean this
is a document that has global significance. You make a
controversial argument that the cause of the Civil War was
not states rights, it was slavery. Right, that's not controversial.
(06:54):
It's controversy among people who don't really understand the thing.
And I don't mean that in a paternalistic way. If
you took at was in American historians who studied the
nineteenth century and said what's the cause of the Civil War?
Nine of them would say slavery was the cause of
the Civil War. This when people say states rights, it
drives historians crazy because we've been teaching this for decades now.
It's in all of the books we write, it's in
(07:15):
all the lectures we give, it's in all the presentations.
It's about slavery, or if you want to get particularly
say it is about states rights. It's about a single
states right to own people as property. That's what it's
fundamentally about. If I was a doctor and I was
talking to a one day university or group and I said,
you all know what to do when you get the
flu right, and I turned to the audience and everybody
(07:36):
says bleeding. You know, we've cut and bleed people. That's
what that's that's that's the solution to it's It's the
equivalent where I say to people, you know what the
cause of the Civil War was, and they say states rights.
It's like, no, that's oversimplified. And it's also a self
serving story that we know. The reason that is a
popular idea is that it was made popular after the
Civil War by people who wanted to change the meaning
(07:57):
of the Civil War and change what it was all about.
So it's not as an accident that people say it.
It's actually in a successful job done by people in
the decades after the Civil War to changed the narrative.
Another thing which is far from obvious and fascinating in
your lecture is when you talk about America's attitude towards
the military, which has changed hugely um or even in
(08:22):
recent decades. Yeah, I think that's there is another good
example of the surprises when you tell people. So you know,
up until the nineteen fifties, it was absolutely understood that
we had to have a tiny military. The Founding Fathers
did not believe in a strong military. What did the
Founding fathers believe in? Almost no military? Because they understood
things very clearly. They said, looking at world history, how
(08:43):
do you get a Caesar? Later on, how do you
get a Napoleon? Their generals they have an army. And
when you have a huge army, you have a huge
base of power that is going to be abused. So
in our Republican playbook, we always said small, small, small military,
build it up, tear it down, build it up, tear
it down, build it up. World War Two we begin
(09:05):
tearing it down, the biggest war ever. And in nineteen
fifty five years after the war, the Korean War begins,
we re engage and we never stop. That's when we
get two million soldiers and six hundred ships. That's that's
only seven years ago. That's a new thing. And they
looked back to Roman history that they had clear, vivid
examples in their minds of that's what it's supposed to be.
(09:26):
And think about when George Washington, his his ideal that
he followed was of Cincinnatis the citizen soldier. He was
put down his plow, go off and fight a war,
and immediately leave back to civilian life. And then he
gets called into the presidency and he serves two terms
and he says, I'm out of here because we can't have,
you know, perpetual government by one person, particularly one person
with the military background. What is the single biggest misconception
(09:50):
that people have about American history or about a moment
in American history which in their view is completely different
from the reality. This is a big, big question. So
I think probably the notion that the founders created something
that was perfect and that it we just need to
(10:12):
figure out what they had in mind. And that's a
really comforting idea. Originalism is a really comforting, wonderful idea,
but it's it's divorced from reality. The founders themselves always
used My favorite expression in studying history, in American history
is they always said this republican experiment. They say this
over and over again. When you read the speeches of Jefferson,
of Madison, of Lincoln, they keep saying this Republican experiment
(10:35):
will rise or fall on the basis of this. You know,
they invoke this idea, and but what do they mean
by experiment? They mean it wasn't perfect. It was a
It was a thing that's set in motion by brilliant
but fallible people, knowing that it was not perfect and
that it would have to be adjusted, and that it
would move through time. You know, the founders could never
conceive of the Industrial revolution, just to give you one example,
(10:55):
and so that there's an understanding that through time we
are going to have to make adjustments, have to figure
out what is it? What does free speech mean in
a in an era of mass media, which simply didn't
exist in the in the founding period? What does the
Second Amendment mean in an era of mass production of
firearms and much more powerful firearms? What does you know?
Freedom of assembly? What do all these things mean? Uh?
(11:17):
In our you know, in the future. So the idea
that the Founder has created something that was perfect and
unchangeable and that all we need to do is figure
out what that is. That's a great fallacy. When you're
up on that stage firing people up, what's your favorite
turning point to tell? Ah, that's a good question. The
(11:37):
one that gets I think people scratching their head the most.
Just when I talk about what I call the reformulation
in the in the late nineteenth century, we see all
the tremendous benefits of the Industrial Revolution, but we don't
have any institutions and any ways of dealing with all
the downside of it and all the turmoil that this
is creating. So it's creating a lot of gold and
a lot of wealth, and a lot of new technology,
but it's also creating mass poverty and huge strikes and
(12:00):
all kinds of problems and great concerns about the you know,
the fate of the republic. And the founders didn't didn't
give us a plan for it because they couldn't have
even imagined you know, us steel. They couldn't have imagined
John D. Rockefeller and these in this kind of world
that they're building, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin. All their traditional notion
of the way the politics worked was that power is
the great threat to liberty. So that's why power is
(12:21):
inherently evil. People possess it, they'll abuse it. The biggest
power in the world in seventeen eighty is the state.
Any government is always big so we as self conscious
Republican citizens, will keep our state, our our governments small.
That's why Jefferson says, the government that governs least governs best.
That's the idea, right, it's a it's a it's not
about low taxes. I mean, it is about that to
(12:43):
some of you, But it's about power. Power is inherently dangerous,
So we need to keep governments small so that we
don't have tyranny. Well, in the progressive notion around nineteen hundred,
people are beginning to rethink this because where is the power?
Power is still the number one threat to Republican government,
So that part's true, But where is the power? The
President United States? Is this big compared to John D. Rockefeller,
(13:06):
And Rockefeller is not an elected official. Rockefeller is separate
from democracy, separate from our Republican institutions. And so that's
the essence of it saying power is a problem and
we need to reign in that power to save liberty. Right, So,
the state, which we've used to fear is actually now,
(13:27):
you know, the lesser of two evils. We need to
build up the state, build up the government to give
it some powers to protect us, to protect against abuse,
to protect and also to work on benefiting the common good.
And so people in the progressive era, but as people
in the Gilded Age, and these are labor leaders, these
are intellectuals, these are politicians, and they're coming out from
many different angles. But by the early twentieth century, there's
(13:48):
an emerging consensus that the founders didn't give us ways
of dealing this or specific ways, but they gave us
the tools. They gave us our democracy, they gave us
an amendment process, they gave us ways of thinking about
what is most important. And the progressive air sees this
great advance of policies that greatly enhanced the common good,
greatly enhanced the well being of the average citizen. And
(14:10):
they don't undo, they don't destroy industrial capitalism. They don't
nationalize our steel industry, but they just rein it in
a little bit, you know, put up some guardrails so
that the capitalist engine can roar and do all the
things that does for us, but with some boundaries in
some ways, which so that workers in a steel mill
work eight to ten hours, not sixteen hours. They work
and they earn a reasonable wage that means they can
(14:33):
feed their family and not going to get rich. So
there's ways in which we can do this while keeping
the benefits of that kind of an economy, but also
creating systems and creating institutions and practices that benefit the whole.
We're living in a time of great change now, much
of which has been brought about by the revolution in technology.
(14:55):
I know your lecture is called the five turning Points,
but do you feel there's a sixth unfolding right now? Well,
when I do the five turning points, a fifth one
is the invention of the person computer, the dawn of
the digital age. So I do emphasize this idea that
we are living in a dramatic turning point moment and
we can't exactly figure out what it is, but it's
clear by any measure the unleashing of digital technology beginning
(15:16):
with the personal computer in the seventies, and what's that
opened up, and how it's dramatically transformed our world in
ways it's almost impossible to enumerate them. Your cell phones
and computer, your your refrigerator is now a computer, your
car has a computer. I mean it's hard to even imagine,
hard to even see what that definition is. And so
this digital revolution, not just the computer but then when
you think about expensively out into the whole universe of
(15:39):
digital technology, the Internet and all of that, when you
start stitching all that together, this is a true revolution.
Computer technology changes absolutely everything because it's in everything. It
changes communications. If you have a children or grandchildren, you
have a fourteen year old, how often does a fourteen
year old talk on the phone. They don't talk on
(16:01):
the phone. They think of talking on the phone as
like writing on with a piece of chalk on a slate.
They think. They literally will tell you it's weird. I
don't want to say, Well, what are you going to
meet up with Julie? I don't know. She hasn't answered
my text. Well, you know, there's another button on that phone.
You can just like push it and and Julie's voice
will come out of the end of that thing, and um,
you could say, speak to her, and then she can
(16:22):
speak back to you. In like fourteen seconds, we can
solve this whole thing. So it's changed the way we
relate to each other. And and also hard to know
what the impact is going to be fifty years from now,
what we're gonna look back and say about it exactly.
I mean, if you and this is true of most
breakthrough technologies. When the telegraph was was created back in
the eighteen forties and then spread nationally, people said, this
(16:44):
is great. We can get we can get crop prices
and a little bit of news back and forth and
low and behold it. You know, it dramatically transforms our
economy and our way of understanding each other. It shrinks
the country in our conception of ourselves. We can find
out about outbreak of cholera in New Orleans in a
in a matter of minute, and we can eventually send
signals under the water of the Atlantic Ocean when we
get a you know, a telegraph cable across there in
(17:06):
the eighteen sixties. So it has, I mean one a
great example of just to give you all human history,
up to the invention of the telegraph, the fastest way
to deliver a message was a galloping horse. That's true
in the days of Alexander, it's two in the days
of George Washington and everything in between. And then the
along comes the telegraph and you can send something instantly,
you know, through time. And if you think about the
(17:26):
War of eighteen twelve, we were trying to get stay
out of war in eighteen twelve and finally decided that
British depredations against our shipping meant we need to declare
war against them, So we send a declaration of war
across the Atlantic Ocean to them. They have already dispatched
a ship with a list of concessions that they're going
to make about scaling back their problem. So these two
ships pass each other, one saying we're going to back off.
(17:48):
You don't need to declare war. The other ship has
already literally already sailed as far as that goes, saying
we've declared war. Yeah, And at the back end of
the War of eighteen twelve, the same thing happens. Dandrew
Jackson wins the Battle of New Orleans after the war
or is literally over, but he hasn't been notified that
it's over. So it's an interesting thing to see how
technology has impacts and implications way beyond what we think
it's going to be useful for. So what do you
(18:09):
think people get from a live lecture that they don't
get perhaps by watching a video or reading a book
or looking at a website. Well, I mean, certainly there's
something about the live presentation that's different from others where
they can just even how you use pauses, how you
you leave people hanging, or you have ways of double
(18:30):
reversing on something like if I'm talking about, you know,
the eighteen fifties and the coming of the Civil War,
and I say, you know what States writes the cause
of the Civil War, and I've always causes a bit
of a you know, ruffle in the crowd, and I say,
don't answer that, because you're not gonna upset me. And
ultimately we point out that, you know, the Fugitive Slave
Act of eighteen fifty was the single greatest invocation of
federal power over state power to enforced slavery, to uphold
(18:52):
and protect slavery, and saying, so Southerners, you know, like
states rights, but they only liked it some of the time.
They liked federal power a lot of the time when
it served their interests. So ways you can kind of
you know, you always you literally see people almost scratching
their head, you know, when they when they say, oh
my gosh, I hadn't I hadn't thought of that. You know,
what do you hope that people will take away as
(19:13):
a result of being at your lecture? A lot of
things I think the operative thing is that history isn't
just some interesting stuff from the past, interesting people, interesting events,
properly understood and properly taught. You know, the power of
history gives us insights into how we can understand our
own problems in our own world. History doesn't give us
lessons per se or a script to follow, but it
(19:34):
does tell us how we got to where we are.
You know, there's that famous quotation by James Baldwin that
you know, history isn't merely about the past. It's actually
the great force of history is that it's you know,
it's with us now. We all carry history with us,
and so with that insight, history is incredibly beneficial. It
is interesting, it's fun to read about battles and read
about famous people, but it's also has to have that
(19:55):
that element that speaks to us now. There are many people,
and I know a few of them, who think we're screwed,
who think that America is really in a rough point
of its history right now. One of the lessons I
took away from your lecture was there have been many
other perilous moments when people may have felt in similar
(20:20):
ways to today. Well, I agree. In one of my
little maxims is that history keeps you sane because everybody
in all kinds of different areas is always thinking, oh that,
you know, we're losing our republican soul. Where you know
kids today and you know, and they're really upset about
all the things that are happening in their in their society,
and it's really beneficial to understand to no history, because
history tells you that people in nineteen seventy thought the
(20:40):
country was absolutely collapsing. People in the three absolutely convinced
that the country was collapsing before their very eyes. And
that was during the depression, during the Great Depression. And
people in eighteen sixty two said, not only none, as
the country metaphorically falling apart, it is literally falling apart
in a civil war that is going to destroy the
lives of almost a uh, you know, a million people
(21:01):
and untold millions in wealth and so forth. But Americans
have found ways to, whether you know, push through those
problems and devise solutions to them or or things that
ameliorate those problems. So history keeps you saying, because you
realize right that times are tough, but I have no choice.
I'm living in this era. My children are they going
to live in this era, my grandchildren gonna live in
(21:22):
this country. I need to we need to find ways
to ameliorate and or remedy the problems that that plague us,
just like people have done in the past against great odds.
Edward O'Donnell, thanks very much. All right, thank you, it's
my pleasure. Thanks for listening. Sign up on our website
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