Edward Ball, Southern Writer, on the Ghosts of Our Collective Past

Ryan talks with writer Edward Ball about what has animated the racism of the past and present, the distinction between responsibility and accountability for horrific deeds, and how to reckon with the darkest parts of American history. Edward Ball is an author who writes about history and race. His most recent book, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy, discusses Ball’s great-grandfather, a white supremacist in New Orleans during Reconstruction. Ball has written for The Village Voice and other publications and has taught at Yale and SUNY. Get Life of a Klansman: https://geni.us/sICwkNThis episode is brought to you by Neuro. Neuro makes mints and gums that help you retain focus and clarity wherever you go. Made with a proprietary blend of caffeine, L-theanine, and other focus-building compounds, Neuro’s products are great for anyone who needs help focusing in these trying times. Try out Neuro’s gums and mints at getneuro.com—and use discount code STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order. This episode is also brought to you by Trends. Trends is the ultimate online community for entrepreneurs and business aficionados who want to know the latest news about business trends and analysis. It features articles from the most knowledgeable people, interviews with movers and shakers, and a private community of like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest insights from Trends. Visit trends.co/stoic to start your two-week trial for just one dollar.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Edward Ball:Homepage: https://www.edwardball.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I mentioned it a couple of times here recently. I was talking about a Confederate statue that you pass on the way into my office where I write my books and I record this podcast. And I don't know if I mentioned this, but I saw sort of both sides jostling about it. It's like one side wanted it down because they found it to be deeply offensive that you have to walk past a monument to the people who enslaved their ancestors on your way into court or to see your local representatives, to sit in the city council and all of that. And then, on the other hand, there was people who'd grown up in this town their whole life, and they didn't want to see something that had always been there just disappear. And so, I ended up approaching some of the activists.

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  And I said, "Look, like, how much do you think this is going to cost to move this thing? Not destroy it, but move it." And the number was, you know, they weren't sure, but it was between $10,000 and $20,000. And I said, "You know what? I can afford that." And I offered to put in $10,000 to move the statue. And anyways, there's a couple of city council meetings about it and some protests. And I was there for all of them. And I wasn't sure what was going to happen. You know, it's just an offer. But, you know, there's been so much bad stuff happening. It seems like the system is so breaking down or dysfunctional or hopelessly gridlocked. The system worked. The people protested. They made their thoughts clear to their local representatives. And look, if you want more analysis from me on why I think these statues should come down, we have a great YouTube video about this, about the Stoics and statues.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  We've done some emails about it. So we won't get into that here. Anyways, I thought it was amazing that the county commissioner, basically they're called judges in the counties of Texas, he says, "Look, the city council voted to give this spot to the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910. We're gonna do the right decision. We're gonna take it away." He said, "We're gonna put it to a vote," and then all the commissioners got to vote. And he said, "This could be ending my political career." He's a Republican, and not everyone's supporting it going. They voted to remove the statue, and it's going to go. And because of the donation I made, it's gonna be done with private funds. And so I'm just, again, I think there's a lot to be discouraged about, but what's encouraging is when the system works, right?

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  People made their feelings heard, representatives listened, and then private funds did the rest of the work. And so, to me, I love celebrating wins. I think this is a win. I think the reason the statue has to come down, as I talk about, and you can read some articles about it, but like, my friend, Richard Overton, who was at one point the oldest man in the world, he was five years old when this statue went up, or four years old when the statue went up. So it's historical, yes, but it's recent shameful history. This was put up as part of a campaign to disenfranchise, to solidify a myth about what

• 3:46Ryan Holiday?

  the Civil War was, and about what was right and fair here in the modern world. And what they were trying to rationalize and justify was depriving African-Americans of their constitutionally assured rights. That's why the statue's going up 50 years after the Civil War, right? I have a great-grandfather who fought on the German side of World War II. If today someone started saying, "Hey, we should put up a statue to those veterans," everyone would see what that was about. They'd think it's a neo-Nazi movement. So anyways, this is all to connect to my guest today, one of the best books I've read in a very long time, "Life of a Klansman: A Family History of White Supremacy" by Edward Ball.

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  Edward Ball is a great writer. Many years ago, he wrote a book called Slaves in the Family. So on his father's side, there was a plantation family that owned many, many slaves in South Carolina. And then on his mother's side, they go way, way back, all the way to French immigrants in New Orleans. They were a wealthy family. They sort of fall down the social hierarchy, but always owned slaves through that. And he explores not just their role in the Civil War, but he explores the less explored than what comes after, which is Reconstruction, the birth of the white supremacy movement in America, the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, which has all sorts of very real implications in American history.

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  As Edward says in the interview, the Justice Department in the United States was formed in a response to the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. You know, today, the Ku Klux Klan might just be some old fat guys in robes walking around, but in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s, all the way up through the 1910s, it was a murderous terrorist organization that killed hundreds of people. Edward tells the story of a sickening massacre of 200 African Americans in New Orleans, right down the street, as it happens, from where I lived in New Orleans. And in fact, he and I were talking right after we finished the interview. But like where I wrote, trust me, I'm lying, and where I wrote A Good Chunk of the Obstacle is the Way,

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  is just a few blocks from, New Orleans is a small town, just a few blocks from where Constant Lecorn, if I'm sure pronouncing it incorrectly, the main character of Life of a Klansman, happened to live. And we walked, you know, I would go on walks and think about things as I was writing. These are the same streets that a man who participated in multiple massacres, both in the Civil War and after the Civil War, of innocent black people, that's where he lived. And not just lived in some sort of shame or infamy, but as a well-regarded citizen, as a hero to some people. And Edward talks about how this was a guy that he heard in part of the oral tradition of his family.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  Like, this guy's son was his mother's grandfather, and his mother remembers him growing up. So we talk about how distant history is, but then also how recent it is, how incomprehensible it is, but then how Urgent it is that we do comprehend it and we connect this to some Stoic themes. But primarily, look, the reason we're talking about this is because of the four Stoic virtues. What is the most important? Sure, courage is important, moderation is important, wisdom is important, but justice, the theme of doing right. And Marcus Aurelius, 2,000 years ago, despite the slavery of his time, was talking about equality under the law, freedom of speech, rulers that respect the rights of their citizens.

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  So this is a long tradition that the Stoics have been on. We haven't been perfect, but we've been trying to get better. And I allude to it briefly, but Walker Percy, one of my favorite fiction writers, is part of a famous Southern family in Greenville, Mississippi, and they're sort of known as the Southern Stoics. What do they do in the early 1900s? They are integral in running the Klan out of their town because they sought for what it is, travesty of justice, even despite their, you know, sort of acceptance of some racist views and probably took it for granted that certain races were inferior to other races. They still, you know, resisted what was a tyrannical terrorist organization. I think it's worth studying. It'll open your mind. It's a great book, Life of a Klansman, A Family History of White Supremacy by Edward Ball.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  And if you're interested about anything about this Confederate monument relocation in Bastrop County, where I write, where I spend a good deal of my time, you can check out the Bastrop Confederate Monument Relocation Fund dot org, or you probably just Google Bastrop County Confederate Statue. There's a K-View article and a CBS Austin article. I posted about it on my Instagram if you want to check it out. If you want to make a small donation, I'm sure they could use a little bit more. They're almost there. Anyways, I think this is important. I urge you to bear with me to listen to it. It's a fascinating interview. You can tell I really like the book, strongly recommending it. It will open your mind and a conversation I was very much looking forward to, and I can't wait for you to listen to it.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  I thought we'd start with one of my favorite lines in the book, and I think it's something people have trouble maybe wrapping their head around, but as someone who writes about history, I always find it fascinating. You say, "None of this is long ago when you think about it." Talk me through how recent the things you're talking about in this book actually are.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yes, this book tells the story of a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the years after the Civil War, Reconstruction. And if you think about it, it's your grandparents' grandparents who lived in those days. And 150 years is more than one lifetime, but it's nearly within reach of oral tradition. And a lot of folks have family tradition that reaches back that far. My father's generation, my mother and father's generation, knew a number of African-Americans

• 9:54Speaker 01

  who were formerly enslaved in their towns in the South, New Orleans in my mother's case, Charleston, South Carolina in my father's. So, it's not that long ago.

• 10:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you mentioned that your mother remembered her grandfather or grandmother, who was the son of the Klansmen that the book is about.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Oh, that's right. Yeah, sure. No, my mother did not know the Klansmen-

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  -who died in the late 1800s, but she lived with, as a child, his son, and was quite familiar with the family story through him. So, as I said, oral tradition skips down through the generations, and we all have some of it. This just happens to be our families.

• 10:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, what's interesting is that it is so recent, and then on the other hand, it's so incomprehensibly different. And I don't just mean the racism and the violence, but it strikes me that- Just the, and you do a good job of this in the book, trying to sort of humanize the various characters, but just how prevalent death was and how incomprehensible that is to us in the modern world. I wondered what effect, like, if we think about slavery and racism and, and, and not the, even the racism of today, but the sort of violent murderous racism of the time you talk about, it, we, I think you could see that as a, it's a, it's

• 11:38Ryan Holiday?

  not just an empathy problem, but these are people who have sort of walled off a part of themselves, right? And I, or have hardened to such a degree that they're, they're able to sort of inflict this grievous pain on other people. When I think about history, one of the things that I think isn't fully explained, that I'd be curious your perspective on, how much of just the prevalence of death and loss and pain contributed to an environment where people were able to numb themselves to the, the injury that they were obviously doing to other people?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  It's an interesting conjecture psychologically. The Klansman and his wife that I write about has nine children, five of whom died before adulthood. And thousands of people were dying in New Orleans and Louisiana from yellow fever every year or from cholera. And it's true that death was woven into life far more than it is in our own lifetime. Possibly today during the pandemic, we understand something of the presence of death as a companion

• 12:59Speaker 01

  in life. And I think that immediate and accidental and unpredicted suffering was part of the life experience of tens of millions of Americans in the late 1800s. Possibly that helps, if you like the word, helps Klansmen and other violent white supremacists to

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Suppress their own empathy and execute acts of violence. But it's not as though this kind of psychological maneuver is something relegated to the past. I mean, today, when white supremacy has flowed back into the public square, there are increasing numbers of people who are able to carry out acts of violence in ways that are breathtaking.

• 14:01Ryan Holiday?

  Where does that come from? Where, where, where? I mean, I know, obviously, it comes from a place of hate, but there seems to be this line that some people like, like, there seems to be this line, like, when you think about Constant in the book, not to skip ahead, but like, I mean, there's hate. And then, I mean, it's hard not to describe him as a mass murderer. I mean, he participated in war crimes as a Civil War soldier, and then participated in multiple, as you detail in the book, multiple events of not just like he got in a fight with one person of the other race, but like, but real massacres of, of, in some cases, unarmed people.

• 14:41Ryan Holiday?

  Where does, where does it become possible to drive your car into a crowd of protesters? Like, how does someone get radicalized to such a degree?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  I, I don't have a 25-word answer to that question. I think that the combustionable, the compound of anger and resentment and loss comes together in such a way to activate violence and rage in some people and not others. The, the mystery is, the enigma is, if a million people are experiencing loss and resentment,

• 15:33Speaker 01

  which one of them or which 500 of them are activated to execute violence against their neighbors? How it happens, I don't know. I can only... Draw up a list of the precipitating incidents in the life of this one man, Constantin de Korn, that seemed to edge him towards rage and marauding. But I don't know what precisely is the chemical combination.

• 16:08Ryan Holiday?

  You wrestle with that in the book, and I found that sort of refreshing and haunting. And obviously, your other book, Slays in the Family, does the same thing. I was reading an interview you'd done a long time ago where you were talking about the distinction between responsibility and accountability. I'd be curious to hear that from you. And also, what is our obligation to this somewhat recent, but also distant past? Because I think a lot of people say to themselves, it was a long time ago. It wasn't my ancestors, or they say, it wasn't me. Why should I? There's so much going on right now. Why should I care about that?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Right. Well, white supremacy is part of the founding principle of our country, and it prevails for 150 years. And then, at about the time of Reconstruction, after the Civil War ends, whites are challenged for the first time in their dominion over society. And the Klan arise in a campaign to reestablish whites' dominion over all of society. And they succeed. So what I think of is this.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  It is easy to say that these people have nothing to do with us. But in some distant and mediated way, the fighting that Klansmen undertake on behalf of the white tribe.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Of which 140 million of us, 100, no, maybe 280 million of us are members, on behalf of that tribe succeeds and clears additional space for their descendants to live in comfort and security and in possession of resources. So I believe that to be accountable is to recognize that these ideologies of supremacy and of violence have something to do with our own, as white people, position in the United States.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Whether or not our ancestors came from the deep south, whether or not our ancestors came through Ellis Island or in some other way rose through the ranks of the classes. That's an acknowledgement that's not easy to make, but it is part of coming to terms with some of the deep conflicts in our society that are unfolding now in new forms.

• 19:08Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny, there seems to be a reluctance to wrestle with the uncomfortableness of it and the violence of it and the pervasiveness of it. And then ironically, as other people have discussions about, hey, you know, like in Texas, up until very recently, there's a plaque inside the Capitol that, you know, sort of emphatically states that the Civil War is not about slavery. And of course, there's Confederate monuments all over Texas. And I wrote my first book, Living in New Orleans, so I'm very familiar with them. You go behind Canal Place and you can see the Liberty Monument. It was tucked behind a parking garage for many years. So even though those stuff is there, people are reluctant to reckon with it.

• 19:52Ryan Holiday?

  And then as other people say, hey, let's get rid of this stuff to make a statement about the future, somehow that same group of people says, but you're erasing history. What is that?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yes, that's hypocrisy, I think.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  The the truth is that we select and repress our national memories depending on how well they serve us today. There's a there are acts of intentional forgetting made by the hundreds every decade and every generation. And the acts of, let's say, extermination, if you like, against native people are selectively censored from memory. And the

• 20:48Speaker 01

  long lifetime of of acts of violence towards African Americans, the whole culture of lynching that was part of the the was was the keystone of the racial order in the deep south. These things are censored and removed from remembrance. So there are ways that we want the past to serve us. The past is not a foreign country. The past is useful, and we make use of it depending on how it's how it flatters us and enhances our position in in daily life.

• 21:30Ryan Holiday?

  What what struck me about your book, what I think it's important is a lot of people, even people who have begun to do some wrestling with this stuff, they sort of go, okay, slavery ends with the Civil War. And what I think has been and it's been part of my journey is I've studied Reconstruction because I feel like it's not a particularly well discussed part of American history. It's sort of this idea of like, okay, we they the North wins the Civil War, they put in place all these laws, they pass the 13, 14th Amendment, they try the Freedmen's bureaus, the Reconstruction, eventually it ends. And then, hey, the South passes laws and then segregation becomes the norm of the day. I think what's what gets

• 22:13Ryan Holiday?

  lost in that story because it, one, it's not an overnight thing, it happens over a period of years. Is, is, and I'd be curious your take on this, but like, so black people were briefly able to vote and briefly held elected office and, and those amendments were temporarily the law of the land. I think people have trouble wrapping their head around how, how did it change from one to the other? What was the means by which black people were, were redisenfranchised? And, and to me, the primary theme of your book, your primary answer to that question is that was done through violence, like profound, breathtaking, horrible violence

• 22:54Ryan Holiday?

  up and down the United States that, that one by one broke the spirit of the country that had been trying to go in the right direction. It was a reign of terror, really, is what the Klan was and, and really homegrown terrorism.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Right. Well, it's, it's true that the Ku Klux Klan invented the first form of American terrorism, white terror. And it unfolded over 10 to 15 years in the years after the Civil War. The way that black folks who were becoming entrepreneurs and craftsmen, who were becoming politicians, who were becoming educated during Reconstruction, the way that black folks as a group, and we're talking about four million to five million people

• 23:54Speaker 01

  in the late 1800s in the 11 states of the former Confederacy, the way they were returned to destitution was by the burning of black schools, by the burning of black villages, by targeted acts of assassination conducted against black politicians, by people firebombing the businesses of black shopkeepers.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  And this campaign went on for about a decade. And it took the federal government by surprise, made Congress weary of the experiments in black empowerment that Reconstruction was trying to attempt to achieve. Congress decides in 1875 that we have to call an end to this. In 1876, the Union Army is withdrawn from the Deep South. And all of those mixed-race governments, those interracial governments, are folded and

• 25:13Speaker 01

  white-dominated, white-exclusive systems of power come into being. So by 1880 or so, the South is, once again, returned to a caste society that is severely and rigidly separate. One more word, if you don't mind. These violent campaigns don't end. They return periodically in what they used to call "race riots," which are effectively white terror acted out against entire black towns.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  In Tulsa in 1921, in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, in Rosewood, Florida, and I think it's 1919, in riots of breathtaking bloodiness throughout the teens, the 19-teens.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  So these are things that are selectively unremembered, as we were talking about.

• 26:26Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that's what I was gonna say. We have this idea of the lost cause sort of being that the Civil War was fought over slavery, but it really feels like the lost cause is actually was so successful that we don't even realize how long it goes on because not only, yeah, even that we're calling these events race riots, when in fact, they were sort of acts of terror inflicted on communities. But I mean, I've lived in New Orleans and I wondered if you could tell the story really briefly, but the horrifying race riot that you described, where basically people were run into a building and then the building

• 27:04Ryan Holiday?

  was lit on fire and shot at and hundreds of people died. I lived like blocks from there. I never heard a single thing about it, never saw a single plaque about it, is in no way part of the history of the city really at all.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yes, it was an important event, something called the Mechanics Institute massacre. It takes place in July 1866, which is a year after the Civil War comes to an end. Fifty thousand Louisianians come home from the Confederate armies, some 25,000 of them to New Orleans, and these are men who are discouraged and disappointed and often resentful. They notice that many hundreds of thousands of black people are now no longer enslaved.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  They're in the city. They are starting work. They are independent. And there develops this immediate kind of hostility of white working men towards black working women and men. In July 1866, there was a rally at this place called the Mechanics Institute to agitate for the right for black men to vote, which had not yet been extended.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  And hundreds of black folks gather and inside and outside of this building. The mayor of the city, who's white, sends the police and the fire departments to this rally. The fire departments, interestingly, are the breeding ground for the Ku Klux Klan. They are full of former Confederate soldiers, including my great grandfather, Constantin Le Corne, who joins a fire brigade called Home Hook and Ladder. And these fire department brigades show up at this rally and with their clubs and their guns and the police.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  And two hours later, there are two hundred black people dead in the street, their bodies scattered across paving stones. And it's a disaster that shocks Congress into action. And it's this event that causes Congress to pass the Reconstruction Acts that eventually give the vote to black men and divide the South into separate military units. In any case, Constantin Le Corne, it appears, the circumstantial evidence is that my great

• 30:04Speaker 01

  grandfather participated in this massacre, which is a painful and horrifying thing for me to contemplate even today. And no one is arrested, except for a handful of black folks who are arrested for riots, curiously, but no white people are brought to justice for this event. And it sort of signals, it's the opening volley of the decade-long campaign of violence that the Ku Klux Klan carries out throughout the South.

• 30:42Ryan Holiday?

  When you think about the story that we tell ourselves about these things, I mean, obviously, I think it's very important that your work is sort of pointing the focus at it. And, you know, there's been a clear denial of it. I mean, the fact I didn't even know that this happened. I mean, I walked down the street that this happened on to record my first audiobook. And so I'm thinking about that. And at the same time, it strikes me that, that, not that the story we tell ourselves as a society about this period is right, but it strikes me, there's also a version of the story that we don't tell, which is that there was a good chunk of Americans who sort of heroically were like the congressman that passed that act, that pushed for the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments,

• 31:26Ryan Holiday?

  that it strikes me, and I just finished, and I'm terrible with names, but Albion Torje, I think, is that how you pronounce it, the, his novel about reconstruction, it seems like not only have we obscured all the awful people that did these awful things, but we've also obscured that there was a good part of the country that was trying to do the wrong thing. It's like, the good, the good guys won the civil war, but then they lost, if they lost the second civil war after, which was, albeit less overtly violent, sort of a cold war that eventually ends in kind of a surrender. But maybe we also don't do

• 32:09Ryan Holiday?

  enough to celebrate the people who were horrified by this and tried valiantly to enforce the rule of law amongst what was essentially unrepentant enemy combatants. Like, you have that old rebel soldier song in the book, where they were like, yeah, slavery was made illegal, but slavery, you can't convince me that slavery is wrong. That's sort of what I took the attitude of a lot of these characters to be.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yes, it's it's true, there there are, I'd say, uh, ten percent of white southerners who in this period are trying to transform the social relationships of their time. At this period, the Democrats are the dominant monopoly party in the deep south, and they are the racist party. The Republicans are a very marginal um party in the south, and they are the so-called progressive party.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  It's the Republicans who bring Abraham Lincoln to the White House, and the Republicans who win the Civil War against the old South. You know, but one doesn't want to romanticize either side of this conflict. The abolitionists during this slave period were not popular folks in the North among white folks. They were uh considered eccentrics, they were considered fanatics by other white folks. Uh, and it was this group of people who laid the foundation for white liberalism that stretches down to our own time.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Um, and there are uh a number of uh heroes who are uh trying to re-engineer the caste society in in those days, and we, I mean, we can't forget them. Uh, but they do lose, as you say, the the the North wins the war but loses the battle in the end. No, that's the North wins the battle but loses the war, I think. In the end.

• 34:32Ryan Holiday?

  Grant has always been a hero of mine and I've written about him in a number of my books. I thought, and you present it pretty unflinchingly in the book, the strangest thing is you have basically the most determined guy of the Civil War, the one general who never gave up, who, who, you know, faced insurmountable odds, basically wins the Civil War through perseverance, which had been the main, you know, trait that the Union had lacked. And then he becomes president. And I thought what was so tragic and such a, such a what could have been is that it's Grant who eventually is sort of the one who gives up on Reconstruction.

• 35:16Ryan Holiday?

  It's like he fights it in his first term and by the end of his second term, he just, is it just that he realizes that it's an impossible fight and he can't possibly change these people? Or is it that he doesn't care?

• 35:29Speaker 01

  I don't know enough about the interior life of Ulysses Grant to say whether he didn't care. I suspect that he was exhausted by the fighting that's going on. It's reproduced in the halls of Congress at his doorstep. And I think that he did care. He did have some affection for African Americans. He did want the South to reconstruct and make a place at the table for African Americans

• 36:10Speaker 01

  to share in the, you know, in the bounty of the, you know, the American economy. And he was exhausted by the, by the fight. And as I said, as we've said, the, the marauding campaigns of the Ku Klux were spread throughout the South. And so every couple of weeks, there is another episode of horror that is, is printed up in the newspapers in, in the North. It is Grant, you have to remember, who sets up the Justice Department.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  He's the one who originates the Department of Justice as an attempt.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  To suppress the Ku Klux Klan. That was the initial charge of the Department of Justice. And the department, its first set of cases is in South Carolina, the so-called Ku Klux Klan cases, in which, you know, a couple thousand people are arrested and prosecuted for violating the acts of Congress designed to suppress them. And many of them end up in jail. So Grant is, it's a sad, it's a sad turn of events when he finally says, I can't do

• 37:40Speaker 01

  this anymore. Let's let the white folks have what they want.

• 37:46Ryan Holiday?

  To me, and to me, that's kind of the lesson to take from this as we're seeing some of this, these resurgent disturbing groups, these hate groups, you know, claw their way back into the public consciousness or splash themselves against the headlines. It's almost like you're fighting a guerrilla movement where their goal is not to beat you. Their goal is not to become the majority. I think what they want is exactly that reaction that Grant had. They're trying to generate a collapse of will, to fray the collective so that you go, whatever, just do what you want. You know, isn't that sort of, that's sort of what the segregation movement was about. I don't think anyone thought, hey, we're

• 38:30Ryan Holiday?

  going to be able to keep this forever. You know, it was, it was, how can we just stall for more time? How can we just be so unpleasant, so difficult that they'll, for the most part, leave us alone? It's sort of like the, you know, what evil needs is good people to do nothing. It needs, it needs the good guys to throw in the towel.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Yes, that's an interesting speculation. I mean, the white supremacist militias of today number in the hundreds, and they're spread and scattered through the northwest and the southwest and the and the south. And I I think that if insofar as there is a network, it is online, a community that is constructed online. It's not so much a militarized unit or organization like the white militias of the Reconstruction period. And this is

• 39:35Speaker 01

  is definitely a kind of self-regarding, separate community. And it may be that there's there's something of a in-your-face kind of defiance that is is is unstrategic, but has the ultimate effect of of of demoralizing the federal government and and the rest of us, who will soon grow tired of of hearing of the complaints of the of the white nationalist fragmented minority.

• 40:14Ryan Holiday?

  My last sort of question for you, this is where I think your work sort of ends up connecting with mine. There, obviously, I write about ancient philosophy, particularly Stoicism. There was this sort of like the Percy family in Mississippi, who was sort of the the most well-regarded of the of the Southern Stoics. They were somewhat known as resistors of the Klan. They drive the Klan out of Greenville, yet also do some racist things in the in the Great Flood. There is this weird, how much of this, I'm curious, how much of this slave owner class, white supremacy mentality seemed to originate almost from this like fantasy that they were

• 40:57Ryan Holiday?

  living in Greece or Rome, you know, like there, there seemed to be, you know, like even Thomas Jefferson would go, well, Roman slavery was worse than our slavery, seemed to be this weird, almost fantasy world that the, the, the South was living in. And they were kind of distorting all these symbols and philosophies to rationalize what they're doing, not just Christianity, but it strikes me that they all sort of saw themselves as, as like the, the inheritors of, of these ancient empires. And that's why it was okay for them to treat people this way.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  I would think that on the contrary, the fascination with the ancient world emerges somewhat late in the slave period, in the 1830s, around the time that the archaeological discoveries are being hauled out of Egypt and, and Greece is, is being pillaged by English trophy hunters and the time that Greek Revival architecture enters into the deep South. And prior to that, I think there was much less of a fascination with, with

• 42:18Speaker 01

  the ancient world. And so my view is that the, the remembrance of, of Athens and Sparta is kind of butter on the toast. It's a way of, of gracing the, the economic reality of, of slave empire and making it into something.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Uh, digestible. Uh, it's part of the, you know, ideological justification for enslavement, which takes many forms. So I, I think it's only skin deep. The, uh, the fascinating, it does linger, you know, long after the Civil War, when they dis- um, by their lights, the disfranchised class of white landowners, by their lights, people whose wealth had been taken away by, um, the end of slavery. Uh, 50% of the wealth of enslaved, uh, of slaveholders

• 43:23Speaker 01

  was in human property. The disfranchised class make, takes great pains to, um, depict itself as part of a, a, a wronged aristocracy. And that's, and so you get some of that, um, as, as you call it, stoical, stoical.

• 43:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Um, right. Self, self-regard. Um, but I think it has economic, um, causes beneath it.

• 43:53Ryan Holiday?

  No, I agree. I don't, it doesn't seem rooted in reality. It's almost the opposite. Like there's this letter that Jefferson wrote where he's, he's sort of trying to rationalize slavery. And he says, you know, look at Roman, look at Roman slavery. And he's like, you know, and at least in Rome, you know, the slaves were smart. You know, he's like, where is the black Epictetus? Who's someone I write about, right? Whereas, and it's like, well, Epictetus wasn't, it wasn't punishable by death to teach a slave to read and write in ancient Rome. In fact, the slaves were tutors and teachers and, and often, you know, sort of held significant offices or positions of power. The, the, the slavery that comes to America is, is almost unprecedented in how

• 44:35Ryan Holiday?

  sort of deranged and pseudo-scientific the logic of it is. At least it's like, it's almost at least the Roman, uh, slavery was just openly about power of one person over another. The, the South somehow manages to convince itself that it's doing people a favor.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a very different labor system that the United States makes use of, and so-called chattel slavery, where people are bought and sold like animals. It's quite different from slaveries of previous empires. And we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that it had anything to do with the enslavement of Greece and Rome. So, much is still to be learned about this time.

• 45:35Ryan Holiday?

  No, and you're right. And look, I think your book is a really important entry point into that for people. And as you, because you've gone on this journey now with two books, looking at, I guess, the ancestors on your father's side and the ancestors on your mother's side. As far as the average American or the average person, you know, like, obviously, the Dutch are implicated in the slave trade, the English are implicated in the slave trade, the French are implicated in it. If you're someone who wants to wrestle or explore, not your guilt, but your, you know, your accountability for this, where do you suggest they start, other than your book, which I would also, I would certainly recommend they start with?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Well, family history is, is a golden highway into history with a capital H. If you look at what your own family got up to, it's tremendously rewarding. And you start by asking the oldest people in your family to talk about the folks that they knew when they were children. And that allows you to begin to reconstruct a kind of genealogy that leads you further into the past.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  You know, one thing that I would point out is that about, about one half of white Americans have at least one ancestor who Participated in the Ku Klux Klan in the past, in some generation. About 140 million people, 50% of the white population can claim to have had a Klansman in the family. But most of us do not know that. It can be found out with a little bit of effort, a little bit of digging, and I recommend it.

• 47:31Ryan Holiday?

  I do as well, and I would say, as hopefully this episode will run before the election, as you somewhat shockingly point out in the intro of the book, that 140 million Americans happens to include the father of the President of the United States.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  That's right, yes. The father of the 45th Presidents was a Klansman who was arrested in a hood, in a robe, in 1927 in Queens, New York, at a rally for rampaging in a mob beating. And so it's quite close. And as we started our conversation, these things are not that far in the past.

• 48:18Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  In fact, sometimes they're next door to you.

• 48:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes, they are. Edward, thank you so much.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 48:29Ryan Holiday?

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