President Barack Obama & Malcolm Gladwell: How Reconstruction Still Defines America

Malcolm sat down with President Barack Obama while making Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise for a conversation about history, progress, and why democracy is never a finished project. What makes Reconstruction one of the most misunderstood eras in American history, and why does it still have so much relevance today? Today, we’re sharing an extended version of their conversation. You can find the full series, Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reconstruction-the-unfinished-promise/id1892472472 or wherever you listen. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. When the Internet arrived, most people used it to look things up. Others saw what it could really do. The same is true with ChatGPT. ChatGPT work goes beyond answering questions. Give it a goal, plus things like notes, files, feedback, data, or project plans, and it can help create a brief analysis, deck outline, tracker, or workflow. You stay in control, reviewing the work and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode. Available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 0:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over

• 1:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Pushkin.

• 2:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  Was Reconstruction America's greatest missed opportunity? Or the beginning of a story that's still being written? When we were making Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, I sat down with President Barack Obama, and we had a conversation about the period after the Civil War, exploring why Reconstruction remains one of the most misunderstood chapters in American history. From Frederick Douglass and the Compromise of 1877, to voting rights, public education, and today's debates over democracy, the series examines how the past continues to echo in the present. It's a conversation about history, progress, and why democracy is never a finished project.

• 3:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  I hope you enjoy it and find it as interesting and as prescient as I did. You can find the full series, Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, on Audible or wherever you get podcasts.

• 3:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  Reconstruction is a slightly, it's not a tentative step. It is one step forward and then one like-

• 3:36Speaker 02

  A really big step back.

• 3:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  A really-

• 3:37Speaker 02

  A couple, several steps back.

• 3:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  A couple steps back. And it's the amount of violence and it's like, it's almost a second Civil War.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  What you see in the backlash to Reconstruction is the degree to which you never changed hearts and minds coming out of the Civil War.

• 4:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of the things that motivated this project was, the people don't talk about, Reconstruction is the great forgotten era in American history, and I'm still puzzled as to why.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think it's that puzzling. The mythology of America about us breaking away from the Crown, declaring our independence, all men are created equal, yeoman farmers, Walt Whitman, there's a whole narrative about who we are as Americans. And there's this inconvenient fact, which is that all this happened at the same time as you had a economy in the South based on slavery, chattel slavery.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  And a bloody war was fought to, in part, end slavery, maintain the Union. And then there was a reconciliation between North and South that essentially reinstated or preserved a caste system and a hierarchy that the country didn't want to acknowledge until, really, the Second Civil Rights Movement and the upheavals of the 60s. And so it's not surprising that the narratives that emerged in schoolbooks or in Hollywood

• 5:40Speaker 02

  movies were not focused on this glaring contradiction to how America understood itself and how it wanted to present itself to the world and also to its kids.

• 5:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  Is there a moment when real, when does real democracy begin in America? Is that a fair question?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  It is a fair question. I think it's important not to undersell the achievements of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence, a war against the Crown, the establishment of principles embodied in the Bill of Rights, the notion of citizenship as opposed to you are a subject, the notion of representative government as opposed to some hereditary monarchy or aristocracy,

• 6:43Speaker 02

  the breakup of a feudal understanding of how societies are organized. That's a big deal. That's a seminal moment in human history, and the American Revolution helps to accomplish that. And so you have a pretty radical experiment from the start in terms of, is it possible for people to organize themselves and through some representative mechanism have a voice

• 7:24Speaker 02

  in their collective lives? But what is absolutely true is that it is a partial democracy. And it's not just because Black people are not recognized as we, part of we the people. Women are just sort of the people because they don't get a chance to vote. Initially, men without property are not considered part of the decision-making process. You have a chamber, the Senate, in which there's no popular vote.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  And so there are a whole range of elements to what we would now consider to be a true democracy that are missing from that initial experiment. What makes Reconstruction so significant is in, out of the ashes of this horrific Civil War, you amend the Constitution and you begin to rebuild and reorganize how democracy

• 8:48Speaker 02

  is supposed to function in ways that fill some of those holes, fill some of those gaps, start resolving some of those contradictions that were there from the very beginning. The reason Reconstruction is such a fascinating story is here's a moment, the first real moment since the founding, in which this idea of perfecting the Union is attempted in a fairly significant way. And it peters out. It doesn't get all the way there.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  But what it does is it leaves all these embers. It leaves all these ideas and possibilities and points in certain directions that then allow future generations to draw on and inspires others. And it gives us a sense of how this process of perfecting the Union, of creating a true democracy, is not this static project where, okay, we got the words on the page, now it's done, but is rather this continuous exercise.

• 10:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  It makes me think sometimes that our expectations are too high. Like, I remember having a conversation with someone about segregation, about how the first generation and second generation results from integrating schools are disappointing. And there's one answer, which is to sort of wring your hands. The other answer is, well, why would you expect it to get better in 30 years? Why shouldn't we be asking these questions in 75 years? Like, these things take time, right? Maybe we should be interested in how the children and grandchildren of the people who first went to integrated schools, how they fare.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  I think you are exactly right that there's a way to look at Reconstruction that is shocked and despairing. And you say, oh, look what happens. You have this moment in which America might have gotten it all right, and then suddenly it all went to hell.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  And, and from our vantage point, that is the, the way I obviously see it, that's how you feel it, right? The, the incapacity for people in the South, white people in the South essentially to embrace this new possibility of a multiracial democracy. On the other hand, what we know of humans everywhere, what we know of human history is that this idea that a group of people have been utterly defeated in a savage, bloody war.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  And their entire lives have been upended and their conceptions of themselves and their status and their role in the world has been shattered. And the notion that they would suddenly go, oh, okay. And that this would be an easy process.

• 12:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  That you could complete in 10 or 15 or 20 years. Well, that defies everything we know about people.

• 12:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  And so what is remarkable to some degree, when I look at Reconstruction, is how radical the experiment was. The fact that you had essentially a northern occupying army backed by radical Republicans in Congress who are willing to consistently override the racist sentiments of Johnson,

• 13:20Speaker 02

  the president, and push through legislation and constitutional amendments that offer the promise of citizenship and equal rights to people who just three or four or five years earlier were slaves, or if they were freedmen, according to the Supreme Court under Dred Scott, did not enjoy any rights that white people were bound to respect. That's, you have the highest court in the land just a few years earlier saying, black

• 14:05Speaker 02

  people in America have no rights that the courts or black, or white people generally are bound to respect. And now suddenly you have a victorious union that is trying to impose on a big chunk of the population. We're entirely rewriting the rules of, of, of your relationship between a group of people, which by the way, we think of as a minority with respect to the entire US population,

• 14:48Speaker 02

  but in places like Mississippi and South Carolina were a majority. And throughout the South constituted 35, 40% of the population. And, and white folks are sitting there, they're aware how badly these people have been treated. They're aware of what they've done to them. They're harboring memories of, of the cruelties that have, have been perpetrated on these folks. And now suddenly they're seeing them in Congress and they're seeing them open up stores and

• 15:27Speaker 02

  they're on the streets and, and, and so in that sense, what, what I'm, I, I actually always think of Reconstruction as, yes, a tragedy, but also a hopeful sign.

• 15:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  A necessary tragedy.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  A necessary tragedy and, and one that, of course, it wasn't finished. Of course, it wasn't completed. It was inevitable that there was going to be this massive backlash and, and a violent one. And that in, in, in turn, you know, you'd then see an ongoing struggle that would continue for decades.

• 16:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Is there a case to be made that the, the, the intensity and the regularity of the backlashes that we see in American politics is something distinctive to our political culture and social culture?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  I, I would say that there is, there's been a lack of a full reckoning in the United States that makes these issues come up again and again and again. And that some societies at least have done a better job in looking at their past and saying, that, that did not work. And a national consensus has been built around, let's not do that again.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  As, as the boy said, the issue of the 20th century, he said at the time, was the color line. Turns out the issue of the 21st century is also the color line. It probably 22nd century, it, it, it may be. I don't know that it, I, I wouldn't say though, that it's unique to, to the United States. I mean, if you think about the experience of Indian democracy and, and you have partition and millions are killed and Muslims and Hindus in India are trying to figure out how to deal with this stuff.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  And now you have, you know, the rise of Hindu nationalism and struggles around that. Issues that once you thought were resolved in India. You look at Northern Ireland, the Good Friday agreements have held, but anytime you visit there, it's, it's always interesting as, as a African American to visit a place like Northern Ireland and you listen to the degree of segregation and continued bitterness, anger, suspicion between people that to our eyes look exactly the same.

• 18:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. They're living in an area the size of, it's like tiny.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yes. But, but there, the, the now self-imposed segregation that remains is as powerful as anything, you know, we would see here. And, and it's hard to understand, right? Because it's, it's not part of us.

• 18:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  There's a difference between, in that case, what you have are tentative steps. So you would say in Northern Ireland, there's no question that the country is much better off today than it was in, in 1975.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Well, as we would say about the United States, there's no question that you and I sitting here, having a conversation about Reconstruction would not have been happening in 1880.

• 19:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  But, but Reconstruction is, is, is a slightly, it's not a tentative step. It is one step forward and then one like.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  A really big step back. A couple, several steps back.

• 19:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Like the intensity of that is what's so, and it's the amount of violence and it's like, it's almost a second civil war.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Well, it, it, it is the, what, what you see in the backlash to Reconstruction is the degree to which you never changed hearts and minds coming out of the civil war. There, there, there wasn't this sort of.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Not just defeat militarily, but also a restructuring of the understanding that Southern whites had about what their privileges and rights were and how their society should be organized. And so they effectively retreated for a while. And then they waited out the federal government and waited until the occupation ended essentially. And then they reconstituted a version of their society that they preferred.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  And what this is where the role of history comes in. How Reconstruction was depicted, the stories that were told in schoolbooks and in Birth of a Nation about how terrible, you know, these ignorant black people suddenly taking over government and, you know, assaulting our women and running down our, you know, our economies and how we rested it back.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  The whole lost cause mythology, which we're even now still reckoning with because you have all these monuments to the valor of, you know, the Confederate soldiers, you know, the romance of Gone with the Wind. These are all things that we grew up in, but it had to do with a very specific cultural project, right? Which was to justify, solidify, rationalize the maintenance of the caste system. And that never fully went away.

• 22:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. I wonder, this is going to seem like a trivial suggestion, but I feel there's great importance to these symbolic things. Part of the problem is it is we say that the Civil War ended with, we think, we marked the end of the Civil War with the end of the initial military phase.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  Really, the Civil War ends in 1877 with the collapse of Reconstruction. If we thought about the war that way, then we understand it very differently.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Right. Because essentially what you have is an armistice.

• 22:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Essentially, what you have is in 1877 with the compromise that year, that's the real peace treaty.

• 23:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Between North and South.

• 23:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  And the North essentially says, okay, you guys are readmitted and fully redeemed. The Union's been saved, the initial project that Lincoln called for when he started, when he initiated the Civil War in the Face of Succession, right? That problem's been solved. Technically, slavery no longer exists. The Thirteenth Amendment survives. And otherwise, we're back to you guys run things how you want down there and we'll run things how we want up here.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  And that was the true peace treaty. And it obviously left black folks in the South extraordinarily vulnerable. And in part prompted the Great Migration and it shaped to, you know, our history. But you're absolutely right that what it did was to allow for this obfuscation, this erasure of what the stakes were and what the possibilities were.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  But that's what, that's how our culture was structured, as I said, to justify, to reconcile this glaring contradiction at the heart of our self-conception. And the degree to which these really hard questions were never fully processed, I think accounts for the reason why you can still get these fierce episodes of backlash.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Because they've never really been talked about, surfaced, resolved. There hasn't been both acknowledgement and accountability, which means there also hasn't been the possibilities of forgiveness and reconciliation. It all just washes around.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  And you stay in control. You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT. You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 26:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over

• 27:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 28:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  The compromise of 1877, I mean, it's such a Pontius Pilate moment. And it makes me wonder about the kind of psychology of the compromisers. I mean, it's weird because you just went through a dozen years ago, this unbelievably bloody conflict. I mean, you sacrificed hundreds of thousands of your countrymen's lives. You devastated the entire country. And then after 12 years passed, and you're like, well, you kind of shrugged, let's just...

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Never mind.

• 28:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  Never mind. It's like a never mind moment. It's like, they wash their hands and they say, you know, take, what is Pontius Pilate say? Take this from me? I've forgotten that. But like, I struggle to kind of understand what's going through the minds of those when they shrug.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  I think one of the things that is important to understand, we tend to look at all these issues through the lens of race entirely. And...

• 29:38Speaker 02

  The truth is, is that there are all these other factors that in the minds of these politicians at the time are just as important and as relevant and their notions of states' rights and there are notions of the limits and constraints on federal government power. And there are notions of commerce and money. And you know, all these things are happening in the midst of a really wildly unregulated, fluctuating

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Wild West economic atmosphere. You're getting these huge depressions and massive unemployment and there are debates about labor rights in the North as people are getting into factories. And there's agitation among workers for better working conditions and better wages. And, and so you have elites who have a whole host of interests. And

• 31:02Speaker 02

  some of them think how black people are being treated and how we restructure our democracy is of the highest priority. And other people are thinking, you know what? I, we need to stabilize the economy. And some are thinking, you know, I'm trying to build a railroad here and I need a deal with this other legislator. And some of them are thinking, we can't maintain taxes that are required in order for us to keep federal troops occupying these Confederate states in perpetuity.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Because we have other expenses. And, and so for us, looking back, we're saying to ourselves, what other issue was relevant? But for them at the time, it was one of the issues that was relevant. And I think that part of what also makes the compromise of 1877 so bitter in some cases, certainly for African Americans, when you know that history,

• 32:28Speaker 02

  is there is an echo across American history of at some point, even whites who are sympathetic to the cause of equality and, and human rights only being willing, willing to carry out that principle so far.

• 32:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. You know, in, going back to this question of how inadequately we have accounted for this period. If, if we're doing American history over again, not only do we say the Civil War ends in 1877, but Frederick Douglass is a founding father.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  He really is.

• 33:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  He really is.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  So I, I, I, you know, I, there is, and, and that's why it's so interesting to see today, this contest over what is the dominant narrative of America? And, you know, you have an administration that is trying to change, you know, the plaques at national monuments.

• 33:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Like they don't have enough on their hands.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. But, but it does speak to the power of stories. Right? There, there are figures that because they hold political office, because they are men, because they are white, because they are titans of industry. Because they hold traditional stations that we understand have power. We think of them as the history makers, right? And you have all these people who may not have occupied formal positions of power, who

• 34:32Speaker 02

  entirely shape or, or bend the, the course of our narrative.

• 34:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  And this is why I think he belongs in that kind of pantheon of founding father, that he sees the best.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  And he also is clear eyed about who we are and what we're capable of. And that's, if you read the Federalist Papers, that's what they are. They are, Madison is both, has a vision and he's also incredibly

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 35:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  He's aware of like, this thing could follow, you know, what's the favorite, what's the famous Ben Franklin? If, uh, we have a republic, if we can keep it.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  If we can keep it.

• 35:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Exactly. Same thing. It's this grand thing, but it's gonna be hard.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  And that's what Douglass understands. And, and, and that sensibility is what is, is what we want in our leaders. And it is a sensibility that we want our kids to learn from history. At least I do, right? And, and that is not some rosy eyed, you know, sanitized version of American history. But a clear eyed understanding of, yes, we,

• 35:56Speaker 02

  we stole land, we took land from previous occupants. America was built on violence and subjugation. And, and chicanery and confidence men and shenanigans and corruption. But it is also this amazing expression of human possibility. It is, Thomas Jefferson, yes, he had slaves and, not but, and he penned some of the most important words that were ever written

• 36:41Speaker 02

  in, in the annals of, of humanity. And, and then being able to maintain those two ideas at the same time is what both can inspire you to keep going and make the world and the country better and not sink in despair, but also to understand the challenges and, and the persistence that will be required to overcome those challenges if you want to get to where you, we want to go.

• 37:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  I want to go back to something that we skipped over that I've been thinking about though, as you were talking about. Is it, is it useful at all to wonder about what the country looks like if Reconstruction had not been defeated? Is that even a possibility?

• 37:37Speaker 02

  I think you can imagine scenarios in which somebody than, other than Andrew Johnson is Lincoln's vice president. Either Lincoln doesn't get shot, right? Booth misses. Or his vice president is somebody who is a wiser, more thoughtful leader.

• 38:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  We should briefly pause on what a disaster Andrew John, I mean, Andrew Johnson's like, he's like, it's like, it's really hard to find somebody as bad as that. And then there is some stiff competition of late.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  There is, just, just generally, but he's terrible. Right? He, he, he just, he's petty, he's small minded, he's a drunk. He is not particularly deft in handling his own party, the other party. And, and so he, he's a disaster. You can imagine a situation in which a better leader, a better statesman is working with a Republican Congress, being more strategic about how are we going to institutionalize both the Reconstruction

• 38:56Speaker 02

  legislation that's been passed? How do we make sure that the Freedmen Bureau efforts stick? How do we make sure that the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments are carried out effectively? What can we compromise? Because we know there's going to be resistance down there. What can't we compromise? You can imagine somebody working that through in a way that you did not end up with a, a violent, brutal reinstitution of

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Cast and the restrictions on black people's ability to just live their lives. And the lynchings and the horrors of that era. And had that process been less violent, even if it wasn't as quick as from modern standards, we would now judge. You know, let's say that there was there. There was enforcement, but there were still social codes about no racial mixing. Or we're not going to take on anti-macigenation laws.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Or you can picture something that ends up being more gradual, gentler. Not perfect, but ushering in maybe quicker. The kinds of changes that we would end up seeing come about in the in the 60s and the 70s. It would be less wrenching. But, you know, I mean, that's speculation. That's true about all of human history, right? I mean, there are all kinds of junctures and moments that we look at and say, if humans weren't so stupid, or so venal, or so greedy, or so cowardly, or ignorant,

• 41:03Speaker 02

  things could have been better.

• 41:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  There is this thing that like, it is so often the case that at pivotal moments in history, we're blessed with extraordinary leaders, right? We have FDR during the depression, England gets Churchill, you know, and we're like, in this era, we're two thirds of the way there. We have Douglas, we have Lincoln.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  And things.

• 41:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  And then, you know, the third leg of the stool is this, this.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it is always, it is a classic example of this debate about history and how much of it is determined by amazing individuals and how much of it is determined by just technological trends or societal trends that we have no control over. And I think this is a pretty clear example that it's both. It makes a big difference that Lincoln's not there post-war. There's no doubt.

• 42:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  How do you, curious about how you think about this, the kind of general project of multiracial democracy now? Like we're, you know, the, it's impossible to spend a lot of time thinking about reconstruction without reflecting on the present day, right? Because these issues are.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  But while they're still there, if somebody is asking, why is it relevant to talk about reconstruction? I have to describe for them the degree to which we're having the same arguments. The issues of how are we going to help the freed people who've been enslaved? What are we going to give them to allow them to have a go at life? What does real freedom mean? You trace that debate of 40 acres and a mule and

• 43:03Speaker 02

  public education, and you can trace it all the way through to debates about welfare and debates about now D E I. And, you know, do we as a society have an obligation to address past injustices that have been, you know, institutionalized or have left a legacy of poverty? So we're having that argument. When you look at issues of state versus federal power. And, you know, how do we protect the rights of all citizens?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Both against states that may be abusing the people who live there, but also against the federal government that at any point might decide it wants to bully people around. And those issues are still there. Obviously, more directly, we're having debates now about voting rights. And you got a Supreme Court that is systematically weakened in the possibilities of enforcing voting rights in our democracy. And we have a politics now that to at least one of our major parties has been captured by politics that is not that subtle

• 44:30Speaker 02

  about suggesting that we the people means a certain kind of people that, when you have the vice president, the current vice president making a speech that is basically a blood and soil version of we the people. That, you know, it matters who your parents were and how long they've been here. Despite him being married to an immigrant, a daughter of an immigrant himself. You know, that's echoes then ideas about who can be a citizen? Who belongs, who gets to make decisions?

• 45:14Speaker 02

  So all these issues are still being debated. Sometimes not as bluntly and explicitly as they have in the past, but they're still there. And what I would say, though, is in the same way that we were talking earlier about the Constitution and, you know, you get that equal protection language in the Constitution. And it may not be observed and we may be shocked and appalled by the gap between those words and the reality.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  And it may be frustrating that we have to file lawsuits to vindicate those words. But they still count. In that same way, I would argue that the progress that we've seen over your lifetime and mine in creating a multiracial democracy. That stuff sticks. And, you know, that's progress. And so I, I don't get cynical and look back.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  I don't subscribe to the idea that because this has always been a theme in America, because we will often be disappointed by how American society responds to racial discrimination and injustice. Because at any moment, you know, that kind of caste thinking can flare up and be dangerous and violent and cruel.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  That doesn't mean that we don't have evidence of that better version of America. We have evidence of it, we've seen it.

• 47:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  The example you gave is actually, is actually, I love the illustration of this. A hundred years ago, a vice president could not stand up and make a nativist argument if he was married to the daughter of an Indian immigrant. But today he can. So we move from malice to hypocrisy. That's progress.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  It is progress.

• 47:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  That is progress.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Listen, hypocrisy is progress. Because, because it means that you, you feel guilty enough to either lie to yourself or others.

• 48:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  And, you know, that is better than not even being able to even thinking about the idea that maybe you're doing something wrong.

• 48:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, my, my mother, you know, she used to always say, I think guilt's a highly underrated emotion. And, and, yeah, if I tell you to do something, you mentioned earlier, the rule of parenting. If I tell you to do something and you know it's wrong and you hide it and then you kind of try to do it anyway. But at least I know, I've planted the seed.

• 48:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  You set the standard.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  And that's part of what.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Part of the reason why I don't deem Reconstruction this complete failure, and somebody like an Eric Foner, who, a great historian, who resuscitated and reevaluated this story that Reconstruction had been an utter failure. One of the important points he makes is, all these seeds are planted, and not all of them grow. Some of them are dormant for a very long time, for decades.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  But, both you and I, and our kids, have benefited from the fruits of trees that were planted during Reconstruction. You were saying earlier that the Civil War doesn't end right in 1865. There continues to be resistance in the South. One of the best examples of something that was never taught in school were the Black Coats. And, I always used to assign this, when I was teaching constitutional law, I would actually, you can read them, they're still available, and you can see these laws that

• 50:04Speaker 02

  were passed by the Confederate states after having been defeated. And, they give you a sense of the degree to which the entire possibility for freed slaves to live, survive, have a trade, work, was just completely blocked, right? So, they would essentially say, if you want to practice a trade, you know, you have to pay a $10 tax if you...

• 50:46Speaker 02

  They would have vagrancy laws in them, where they said, if you don't have a job and you're just hanging out listlessly, then we, the state has the right to put you to work on a field, because you can't be a vagrant. Black folks can't practice a trade. They can't enter into contracts. Obviously, you can't serve as a witness, and you certainly can't serve on a jury. So, what happens is that the ability of these so-called freed people to function in any

• 51:26Speaker 02

  way, to not be entirely vulnerable to the old system, is completely blocked. And the reason, I guess that's important, is just, you were asking earlier about, how does things like the Compromise of 1877 happen? We so underestimate, I think, look, I'm not a materialist, I think ideas other than money and commerce matter, but the degree to which the economic underpinnings of the

• 52:04Speaker 02

  entire Southern economy had been based on slave labor, and the desperation with which elites, even post-war, are thinking, if we don't get that back, then the source of all of our wealth, economic power, status, will be undermined? That, I think, is something that oftentimes doesn't get talked about enough. So, that was one thing I wanted to say. And then the other thing I touched on, but I just want to emphasize, one of the things I love when you read about Reconstruction is these narratives about teachers starting

• 52:49Speaker 02

  schools, and how much Black folks understood literacy and education as integrally tied to freedom. That if I can read, if I can write, if I can do my arithmetic, that unlocks for me freedom and power, in ways that can't be taken away from me.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  And, the project of starting public schools, and you see these, we were talking about all these Black members of Congress and state legislatures, that the degree to which they thought, our number-one project here is, is, let's start a bunch of schools, to make sure that our people have a chance to learn how to read and write.

• 53:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's the one thing that the white majority couldn't constrain.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Learning.

• 53:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  We can lock this in our heads, and they understood that, and, you know, it becomes HBCUs, and, but it also influences generally this notion that then carries over to the broader society of public education, that citizenship, equality, power, all of that is tied to our ability to understand, and communicate, and analyze the societies that we're in.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  That's what gives us agency, and that's what gives us power. And I think, that's so important from my perspective, both to understand how, how much common sense these folks had coming out of subjugation, that they were paying attention. They had good instincts about what it was that they should be striving for, that what would make that, those words on paper, real. That was powerful.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  And, what it also reminds me is, today, the degree to which, not just the Black community, but Americans generally, will devalue education, the degree to which you start getting an anti-intellectualism in our culture and our politics, why that is contrary to citizenship, and equality, and power.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  And, you know, you want young people to understand, there's a reason why folks who had just been freed, they wanted land, so they could, you know, grow their own crops and feed themselves. They also wanted to be able to read. And so, you know, that's something that now is available to all of us. We should try it.

• 56:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  And part of the Reconstruction project is to populate politics with Black people. And, when, 100 and some odd years later, you're the only Black person in the Senate when you first elected.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, in 2004.

• 56:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  2004.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  And, I'm still, at that point, I was the only African-American out of 100 senators. In 2004. Yeah, so, it gives you a sense of how, how these issues that you talk about during Reconstruction, they don't entirely get resolved, even by the modern civil rights movement, etc.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Now, part of the Senate issue has to do with the inherent weirdness of our Senate system, right? Where Wyoming gets two senators, and California gets two senators, that it's not apportioned based on population, right? But, having said that, it's still pretty striking, that...

• 57:45Speaker 02

  You know, I was one African American. We had, there were two Latinos

• 57:52Speaker 02

  in, in the US Senate in 2005, when I was sworn in, 2006.

• 57:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  Did you have the sense that it was, that your election would make it easier for others to follow? Or that this was a kind of, that you were a token?

• 58:09Speaker 02

  That my election to the US Senate, I thought that it would be significant because Illinois is

• 58:22Speaker 02

  probably the most representative of the country demographically. It, it sort of matches America's overall racial makeup and even regional makeup. You know, it's urban, suburban, rural, north and south, right? Southern Illinois is closer to Kentucky than it is to Chicago. And, and so culturally are different. And so I thought that

• 58:53Speaker 02

  by me having been elected to the US Senate from a big

• 59:03Speaker 02

  state that wasn't, that, that had the same percentage of black folks as the country in general, at least sent a signal to other candidates who might be thinking about running in other states that they could, they could pull it off.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  And in fact, that's what happened. We, we started getting more African Americans in the US Senate. You know, I'm not suggesting that it wouldn't have happened anyway, had it not, you know, if it hadn't been me, it would have been somebody. But I, I think it signaled to the political system, to, to donors and political operatives, oh, just because if we have a talented black person,

• 59:52Speaker 02

  it turns out maybe they can win statewide. We, we don't have to assume that they can't win statewide, or that they're a risky candidate.

• 59:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  You know, we were talking, Edward Brooke from Massachusetts is the first post-Reconstruction, but he is a false start in a certain sense. He does not, you know, he's in the seventies.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  And then nothing happens for

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  For a long time.

• 1:00:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  For a long time.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Look, but the truth is, is that

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  the idea of

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  not only African Americans representing, having representation in Congress,

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  but the idea that African Americans could represent everybody,

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  that takes a long time. That first step, right? Which is the step that Reconstruction was about, was simply to say, can at least we be represented?

• 1:00:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  By some of our own?

• 1:00:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  And you get this huge surge of

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  black members of Congress and state legislatures and county commissions and et cetera.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  But that was always based on this notion that

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  we deserve to be, have a voice.

• 1:01:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of our own.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. It takes a bigger leap to then say, by the way, I could actually represent white people too, and I could represent Latinos. And I, I have enough empathy and understanding, and we have enough common concern and, and interests and aspirations that they can trust me to look out for their interests also. That, that requires a whole nother set of

• 1:01:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  of, of social changes that, you know, we don't end up seeing until the modern civil rights movement and the breakdown of, of Jim Crow.

• 1:02:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's funny because no one ever had, on the white side, ever had any trouble with the notion that a white person could represent everybody. The last thing you want to give up is this idea that I, that someone can speak for, for everyone.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's the last bastion of privilege.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Correct. Because now what you're really saying is that

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  we

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  that, that my story, my vision, my capacities are universal in some way. They're, they're not qualified. There's no asterisk to them. And then that takes some time, right? I mean, that, that requires social changes.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  It requires Jackie Robinson. And it requires Sidney Poitier. And it requires Jesse Owens. And it requires

• 1:03:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  Tom Bradley.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  John, exactly.

• 1:03:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  My favorite.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Yep. But they, you know, and, and it requires,

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  you know, Jesse Jackson and, and John Lewis. And, and, and so you get this over time,

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  a change in, in, in social attitudes.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  And, and part of what I think we learn from Reconstruction, the cautionary part of that is not assuming all that stuff is permanent. And that the battle is won at any given moment, right? It is an ongoing, constant contest between narratives

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  that are deeply rooted and, and some of which are not unique to America, right? The, the idea of caste, hierarchy, pecking order, status, that is not unique to America. Race is the dimension or, or the, the phenomenon around which our whole caste thinking gravitates. But it's not.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  That's something, that's, that was in the apple that, that Adam and Eve ate, right? That's part of our original sentence, is this idea of we're separate, we're better. And, and, but, but I think if, if we're mindful of, of

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  the fact that we have these warring ideas inside of us, in our cultures, in our politics,

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  then we can, we can choose a, a better story.

• 1:05:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  That moment when you were elected to the Senate, maybe that's the moment that Frederick Douglass is like, I'm finally happy.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. But then, you know, the fact that I, it was, I was in the minority and I couldn't get any bills through the Senate because of the filibuster. Then you'd have to have a whole conversation about how this mechanism called the filibuster, which was primarily used for defeating civil rights legislation and anti-lynching legislation and, and was the, the, the mechanism whereby Southern Democrats, Dixiecrats, were able to keep Jim Crow in place. How that became this honored, venerable tradition in the Senate

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  that blocks all kinds of progressive legislation.

• 1:05:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  We, there's got to be a point, poor Frederick is over 200 years old at this point. He, he just wants to get on with his life.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  He wants to go eat his applesauce.

• 1:06:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, he was. So maybe that's the moment he was like, okay, all right, all right.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  I'll take it.

• 1:06:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'll take it.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers, which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way. These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats and engaged in life-saving scientific research until they were told they no longer belonged. And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us? Get Blockers only at blockers.fm.