We’ve Been Here Before | Season 9 Opener
Welcome back to another season on 15-Minute History! This year, the United States is celebrating its 250th birthday, and Joe and I want to share in the festivities by looking at some of our country’s greatest achievements, special moments, and deepest tragedies. We are going to try not to go over already-trodden ground, but there may be some overlap with earlier episodes from the last eight seasons. We will also avoid focusing on current events—unless we can bring some historical context to them. There are plenty of those podcasts out there, and we want to center on America’s past this season, not its present.
Except for today. The wild events of this summer, the past year, and really the last decade are ripe for a conversation. Escalating political violence, unending culture clashes, and simmering rage across the political and ideological aisles can make one wonder if the country is headed toward disaster. I cannot say how this will end—and I’ll throw a shoe at Joe if he asks me a “what if”—but I might be able to bring you some context: we’ve been here before. America is ten years into what is known as a “political realignment,” and since politics and culture are so intertwined, it seems like everything is in flux. This is our sixth realignment, and each shares three common traits: an angry segment of society demanding change, new political issues arising that one or both major parties ignore, and incidents of violence. Minor though important shifts happened in the 1820s and 1930s, but I want to focus on the three earth-shaking realignments (in reverse chronological order) of the 1960s, 1890s, and 1850s.
Race, Gender, and the Welfare State
Our most seasoned listeners may recall the turmoil America endured during the 1960s, and most of you probably know the basics: the civil rights and feminist movements, a countercultural shift embodied in the “hippies,” and assassination of three political figures in eight years. The roots of this realignment began in the 1940s. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition of special interest groups and the promise of government action in the economy had dragged the opposition Republican Party leftward. Dwight Eisenhower’s domestic policies were more like those of his former commander-in-chief than his fellow Republicans of the Roaring Twenties. The country was prospering after the Korean War’s end—despite the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union—and on the surface, America seemed to be doing just fine.
But deep within the national psyche, there burned a resentment against the “Leave it to Beaver,” mom-dad-two-point-five-kids American stereotype. The great injustice of segregation festered in the South decades since its revival under Woodrow Wilson. Many women who had worked tirelessly to help the Allies win the Second World War now resented their diminished roles as mothers and housewives. And young Americans, the baby boomers now labeled “teenagers,” chafed at expectations placed on them by parents, teachers, and society at large. As is the case in each political realignment, the party that seized upon these issues and spoke for the disadvantaged would receive millions of votes.
In 1960, it was the Democrats, specifically Senator John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Blacks, women, and teenagers heard his message of hope and change, and the political and cultural shift was quick. Thousands of fresh-faced college graduates came to Washington to work for the new administration. Civil rights activists who had labored under barbarous treatment by Southern cops and politicians found allies on both sides of the aisle. Women like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem mobilized activists to push for equal rights. And new technology like television and large-scale concerts transformed American pop culture. The backlash came quickly: segregationists blocking civil rights legislation and using firehoses and police dogs on peaceful protestors, bigoted rhetoric about the role of women, and stodgy commentators wailing about women’s clothes, men’s haircuts, and the Beatles. But this shift was irreversible for the time being. Amidst the outpouring of grief after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory a year later on a promise of more “Great Society” welfare programs. In 1972, the Republican Richard Nixon won an even bigger victory by appealing to Kennedy-Johnson voters, promising to expand the welfare state even further, and harnessing young voters’ desires to end the Vietnam War. Neither party was going back to the 1950s.
And here we come to tragic instances of political violence, sadly far more common in the 1960s than in our other realignments. High-profile assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Dr. Martin Luther King recall horrific scenes of recent times. So does the street violence that erupted across American cities after Dr. King’s death, as well as the protests-turned-riots at Kent State University in 1970 and the Chicago Democratic National Convention two years earlier. This points to the first of three great lessons of every political realignment: inaction breeds violence. And I don’t mean inaction on the part of security details or law enforcement; I mean inaction by the parties in power. Change always begets change, and once activists see society moving, they start pushing for more. The Vietnam War provides a perfect example here. Democrats under President Johnson had forced us into the war, and the backlash drove him out of the 1968 election. Into the breach stepped Robert F. Kennedy, the most anti-war figure in his party. When he died in June, the party selected Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a nominally pro-war candidate who had not competed in a single primary, over Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the new darling of the anti-war left. Having been denied a chance to choose their candidate, some Democrats chose violence, and Chicago’s streets became war zones between police and protesters. The lesson here is clear: inaction breeds violence.
The First Populists
The Republican Party had dominated American politics since the Civil War, with only Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms in 1884 and 1892 breaking their grip on power. The shift that came about in the late 1890s was the result of a single party that had been in power for decades failing to take note of serious changes in America. The Gilded Age that followed Reconstruction saw the rise of immense monopolies led by some of America’s wealthiest men—alternatively known as “titans of industry” or “robber-barons” depending on your politics. Some offered high-quality goods at lower prices than competitors, while others tended to squash their rivals and break up attempts by workers to unionize.
As I said a moment ago, change begets change. America began making progress toward solving serious problems like child labor, low wages, and public health and safety during the Gilded Age. Progressives on all sides hoped the government would do more to improve Americans’ lives, but neither major party seemed interested. They either turned a blind eye to monopolists busting unions and crushing competitors or else participated it at local and state levels.
Two small third parties formed to demand more progressive change. The Greenback Party opposed monopolies and wanted the government to move America off the gold standard. Printing more fiat money, Greenback supporters thought, would help farmers by increasing demand and prices, as well as making debts easier to pay down with inflated currency. The larger Populist Party also stood against monopolies and ran on platforms of using federal authority to empower labor union organizers, protect striking workers, regulate prices in certain industries, and impose an income tax. Regardless of how one feels about these policies’ merits, each reflects a problem in American society at that time: people thought the government were indifferent to their needs. Politicians in Washington were interested only in protecting their monopolist friends—or so these populists believed.
The shifts in politics took longer at the turn of the 20th century than sixty years later. President William McKinley crushed the pro-Greenback Democrat William Jennings Bryan twice in 1896 and 1900, but his vice president Theodore Roosevelt was firmly anti-monopoly. Roosevelt’s presidency saw the first nationwide business regulation, and his two successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, began the process of inflating the money supply and shifting away from the gold standard.
There was less political violence in these days, but like in the 1960s, it did include the assassination of a president. As inaction breeds violence, so does indifference. Anarchist groups were springing up across the West at the turn of the century, driven both by radical ideologies and the perceived indifference of government to citizens’ concerns. Some anarchists simply withdrew from society onto communes (much like those of the 1960s-era hippies), but others wrote that anarchists ought to bring governments down by force. One of these was Emma Goldman, a Russian-born immigrant to the United States who wrote and spoke openly of assassinating industrial monopolists—something we saw in America within the last year—as well as their political protectors. Her writings inspired another anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, to take action. He initially planned to murder some monopoly capitalists but in the end chose an even greater target. On September 6, 1901, Czolgosz shot William McKinley as the president reached to shake his hand at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. McKinley died eight days later, and the assassin went to the electric chair in October after a swift but fair trial. Theodore Roosevelt used the public outpouring of grief to begin addressing some of the inequities of American life that had driven Czolgosz to murder his predecessor. Indifference had bred violence in the young assassin’s heart, and Roosevelt’s actions showed that his government cared for the American people.
Slavery
Our third political realignment came as a result of the monstrous crime of slavery. A part of American society for generations, no one in the decades before this shift could—or would address its inhumanity or the crying outrage it gave to the words “all men are created equal.” The Democratic Party, founded in the mid-1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, stood avowedly for slavery in every election up to 1864, and their Whig opponents simply ignored it and hoped the wolf would pass by the door. Meanwhile, abolitionist sentiments spreading from New England soon joined with other anti-slavery movements. The Free Soilers took a middle path of blocking slavery’s extension into new territories while letting it remain in the South. And “manumissionists” worked to encourage Southerners to free their slaves; some even bought these poor souls and then freed them. But in the halls of power in Washington, as on the plantations of the Deep South, pleas for freedom fell on deaf ears.
The political compromises over slavery only added fuel to these movements, showing opponents that the pro-slavery arguments were more about racial supremacy than economic necessity (since you couldn’t grow cotton in Texas). So did the voices of freed or runaway slaves like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, whose stories of brutal treatment moved most who heard them. But abolitionists needed more to reach their goal. They had to make their countrymen understand slavery’s injustice. Americans had to see it with their own eyes, not simply hear speeches or read about it in abolitionist newspapers like The Liberator. The 1851 Fugitive Slave Act showed thousands of Americans the real injustice of slavery: the greed in slave-catchers’ eyes as the terror in those of their quarries. So did Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe that sold three hundred thousand copies in just its first year. As the Northern public slowly turned, Democrats dug in and the Whigs remained silent.
The congressional midterm elections of 1854 should have been a typical affair. President Franklin Pierce’s Democrats would likely increase their majority—or so everyone thought. In Jackson, MI, a group calling themselves “Republicans” formed a new party with one goal: to unite all opponents of slavery under one banner. In just a few months, the party’s message spread like wildfire. They won a large number of congressional seats in 1854, came a close second in the 1856 presidential election, took control of the House of Representatives in 1858, and won the presidency under Abraham Lincoln’s leadership in 1860. With each Republican victory, pro-slavery Democrats grew more desperate.
Violence was already breaking out across the country as a reaction to slavery’s injustice. The plantations grew more brutal as masters vented their anger on helpless victims. In Kansas, a “dress rehearsal” for civil war erupted over allegations of voter fraud for a territorial constitution, and a congressman attacked and beat a U.S. senator in the Capitol after the victim gave a fiery abolitionist speech. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford led Northerners to believe that secession from the Union was the only solution to the crisis, and the Union began to fray. In 1859, the Kansan John Brown, his hands already stained with the blood of pro-slavery Americans, seemed to confirm the South’s worst fears about abolitionists when he raided an Army depot in Maryland to seize weapons and spark a slave rebellion. The attack failed thanks to the work of troops led by Colonel Robert E. Lee, U.S. Army, and Brown was executed for his crimes. But with both sides pulling away from one another, a breach was inevitable.
What caused the Civil War? The inaction of political leaders too cowardly, blind, or cold-hearted to end slavery. The indifference of most white Americans, North and South, to the suffering of their black countrymen on the plantations. And the injustice of slavery’s existence in the “land of the free” that cried out as a debt to be paid—which it was with the blood of over a million Americans killed or maimed, white and black alike.
The Social Media Shift
Yes, it’s time to talk about social media. America got through each of its political realignments for one very simple reason: when they ended, both sides came together again. It took time, especially after the Civil War, but our political leaders eventually realized they needed to work together to move the country forward. Even today, as bad as it may occasionally seem, I think we could do that again. But there is one new factor that is making reconciliation between opponents infinitely more difficult.
Joe has often said on this podcast that social media is a mirror, that it shows us ourselves and reflects our biases rather than informs us about other people. I’d add to those wise words that social media is a rearview mirror. It allows us to forever look back at what others have said and remember how much we hated their words. It makes it far more difficult to move on and, dare I say, forgive. Political passions bring out the best and worst in us in equal measure. We’ve all said and done things in our past that we regret and wish we could change. But the constant drumbeat of “You said that horrible thing” and holding the past against ideological opponents forever makes reconciliation impossible. If America is to move beyond its current political troubles, what we really need is less cancel culture (now embraced by those who opposed it like five minutes ago) and more conversation culture. That is what this season on 15-Minute History is really about.
