Author Connor Towne O’Neill On the Battle to Shape History

On today’s episode, Ryan talks to a fellow Southern transplant, writer Conor Towne O’Neill. They nerd out over their mutual fascination with the ghosts of American history that linger in the South, and how their presence looms in the Confederate monuments that even now, unconscionably, still stand on American soil. Connor Towne O’Neill is an author and journalist based in Alabama. His new book, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy, follows the protests and battles that surrounded recent attempts to remove monuments to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. O’Neill has also written for New York magazine, Vulture, Slate, and the Village Voice. This episode is brought to you by Native. Native makes amazing, all-natural deodorants, and they have some great new holiday-themed scents to make this time of year more festive. Native is risk-free to try, too. Every product has free shipping within the US, and free 30 day returns and exchanges. With service like that, it’s easy to see why Native has over 14,000 5 star reviews. Visit NativeDeo.com/stoic or use promo code STOIC at checkout to receive 20% off your first order—and be sure to order by 12/7 to receive everything by Christmas. This episode is also brought to you by Optimize, the membership that guides you on the path to living right. Optimize offers services like Philosopher Notes, six-page condensed reviews of insightful nonfiction books like Epictetus’s Discourses, Ryan’s The Obstacle Is the Way, and more. Members also get access to 101 video Master Classes, each one an intensive taught by experts about a particular topic. Visit optimize.me/dailystoic and get your first fourteen days free, plus 10% off your membership with discount code STOIC.***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 Connor Towne O’Neill:Homepage: https://www.connortowneoneill.space/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/connortowne/Twitter: https://twitter.com/towneoneillSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living a good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Tyler Cowen, one of my favorite people in the whole world, he has this great line. He says sometimes in, at the beginning of his episodes, he says, "This is the interview that I want to have, not the interview that you want to have." And so, I, as I was telling my guests today, am a huge Civil War nerd. I am an adopted southerner. I'm fascinated by American history. I'm fascinated by moral complexity. You'll notice, that's why my books are filled with stories of Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lincoln, and William Tecumseh Sherman, and Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. So, it's just that this is the sea that I swim in. I'm fascinated by it. You know, I wrote my first book, walking

• 1:10Speaker 00

  up and down the very old city streets of New Orleans, riding the streetcar, working at the Library of Tulane. This is just a conversation I've been having and been fascinated with for a very long time. My guest today, Connor Towne O'Neill, is the author of a new book, which I loved, called "Down Along With That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning With Monument's Memory and the Legacy of White Supremacy." It's basically a book about, basically, Connor studies all these interesting Confederate statues, particularly monuments of Nathan Bedford Forrest, all throughout the South. And he uses that as a story to tell, sort of, the struggle with the monstrosity of slavery, the Jim Crow, the moral...

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Dilemma and haunted past of American history. And that's the thing I'm fascinated with. But you'll see, not just for its own sake, but I think it teaches us a lot about who and how we struggle with complexity and nuance. And as Upton Sinclair says, that, you know, the things we don't want to understand because our salary depends on us not understanding them. So this is a great book. Connor is a producer of the NPR podcast White Lies, which is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is graduate from Vassar. He earned an MFA from the University of Alabama. And he teaches now at Auburn University. It's a great book. You should check it out. This is a fascinating conversation, much more than you'll expect.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  And we end with a little digression about an ongoing controversy at Brown University. They're trying to pull down a statue of Marcus Aurelius. So the debate that happens in one place applies to another. Check out Connor's book, Down Along With That Devil's Bones. Fascinatingly cool title, if I must say so. It sounds like it'd be a great blues album or something, too. Down Along With That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning With Monument's Memory and the Legacy of White Supremacy. Connor Towne O'Neill, he told me this was his favorite interview he's done on the whole press tour, which I took to be high praise, and I think you'll like it. It sounds like it's been a busy, a busy year for you. You said, so you put out a book during a pandemic.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  You had a kid and you had to postpone your wedding.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, 2020 was shaping up to be a big year. And I suppose it was just in ways that I had no way of anticipating. So it's, so yeah, it turned into a courthouse wedding and then a week in the hospital that was totally locked down. I think I spent about cumulative 15 minutes outside during that week while I was meeting my daughter. And then now the book is out and, and, you know, what would be a book tour is, has been mostly just me sitting here and talking into this microphone.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  So you're telling me you didn't want to celebrate your lifelong commitment with your spouse by hosting a super spreader event? Is that what I'm hearing?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  That's right. That would have, I think that would have put a bit of a damper on, on the festivities. We had a, we had a very nice walk down to the courthouse and then cheers with a, shared a bottle of soda on the sidewalk afterwards.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  I was just reading in the news this morning that the I I'm also an adopted southerner like you. Austin is a sort of a weird mix of like the South and the not South, but the mayor of Austin was caught warning everyone in Austin to stay home and not go anywhere. And he did this from his vacation house in Cabos and Lucas, which he traveled to with his family after his daughter had a wedding, an outdoor wedding with 20 people, including out of town guests and an out of town photographer. So there's, you know, there's a, there's a loveliness to all this.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it really is revealing the fact that even, even people who, you know, maybe have, have good intentions, still sort of think like, this is a thing that's happening, but it's not something that might happen to me. It's like watching a movie, almost like watching, watching this happen to other people and, you know, expressing concern about it. But, but it, if it never sort of punctures your life in any real way, it does, I suppose it can feel like it's just something that happens to other people.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Well, what I, I, I first moved to the South, I guess this would have been in 2011. I moved to New Orleans and I was writing my first book and I felt, I like, I don't know, maybe I had this kind of idea of what the sort of writerly life would like, would be like. And, and there really wasn't a better place to write a book than, you know, somewhere like New Orleans where there's these big oak trees and I was living in a house built in the, you know, the, the early 1800s and, and you sort of, there's something really special about that sort of, it's like, almost that like, it's almost like history and humidity are going hand in hand. And there's, there's something to that, I feel like.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. It does. It, it seems to, it does seem to sort of hang in the air. I have, I have, I, I know what you're talking about there. There's a, there's a certain smell that you get in the winter here that has, I think has something to do with all the pine trees and in the, the way that the humidity sort of keeps the, the smell sort of lingering a little bit more. And I, I associate it so firmly with winter generally, but especially like, sort of like on, on long car trips with the, you know, reporting through the South and, and that particular smell is just so, so evocative.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  My favorite little thing about those trees is like, you know, you drive on, it never occurred to me, for instance, living in LA, going to college in LA, that like the 10 freeway that you're on, you can take all the way basically to the Atlantic Ocean. But when you sort of enter the South, like right when you sort of go through Beaumont, you enter Louisiana, to me, that's when you're, it's when you're fully entering the South. Texas is like half South, half not South.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  But as soon as you cross over the river into Louisiana, I feel like you're in the South. But I love those pine trees that are sort of along the highway. You see them along all the roads. My favorite thing when I first moved to the South was that. You know, you get this sense you're in this sort of thick wood. And then I forget how I saw it, but there was something, and you're like, oh, this like row of trees is like three trees deep. And then it's just like farms on the other side. You know, like there's this, there's this depth to the South. And I think this goes to your book, which I'm really excited to talk about. But there's also kind of a, I don't want to say a superficiality,

• 7:58Speaker 00

  but it's like you scratch the surface and it's not exactly what it seems.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, there's all number of things lurking under, lurking under the surface of something. I think that's definitely true, like in college towns too. You know, these big SEC schools all have this sort of facade, you know, the sort of pristine Greek revival buildings and the well manicured quad. But then there are these very strange and fascinating towns that are lurking sort of just past the campuses.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's it. You know, I grew up in Northern California, in Sacramento. So not even like the historic part of the suburbs of Sacramento. So not even like, you know, that sort of San Francisco vibe. But that was another thing. You it sort of hits you in the South is like even those expressions like the other side of the tracks. It's like, oh, that like vividly exists here. And it can kind of, you kind of feel it. I, you know, when the stuff with George Floyd happened in the middle of the year, I reread Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. And there's that scene where they're visiting what is like the Tuskegee Institute, basically.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  And, and you know, he takes the sort of the rich donor for like a ride, which he's not supposed to do.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  But it's just, it's your point about college towns. It's just like, it's like 500 yards outside the manicured lawns of the, of the institute is the real shit, basically.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, right. Exactly. Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting. You mentioned the, the, the, the wrong side of the tracks. So like you, I'm a transplant to the South. And when I moved to Tuscaloosa back in 2013, the, I moved into this, you know, sort of sprawling bungalow that was right on the train tracks, like abutted the train tracks. And I, I lived on the west end of Tuscaloosa, which is historically, you know, the sort of the, a, a, a black neighborhood. And, and it just became very clear like, oh, that, that, that train track is absolutely the dividing line.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  And, and, and, and yeah, I mean, I think that that was, that was a big lesson of, of moving here and certainly in, in reporting the book is that the, the issues that, that I'm wrestling with this book, I think are issues that are present across the country and are, you know, these Confederate monuments. Or one particular expression of them. But it does seem that that things float a little bit closer to the surface in the South, especially issues of race. And it's a little bit starker, like the contrast has been turned up a little bit more here.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember. So when we first moved to New Orleans, obviously, that was very different for us. And New Orleans is one of those cities where sort of everything is kind of stacked right on top of each other. It's like you're in the Garden District, but if you look down one of the streets, you can see not just projects, but you can see like the sirens in the project. And I remember when we moved to Austin, you know, we moved to the east side of Austin, which was 15 years ago, you know, you know, a totally different thing. Eight, nine years ago, when we moved here was still sort of in a, let's call it transition. But I remember sort of being very cautioned by people as we thought about moving there. And, and it was like, we're coming from New Orleans, like none of what you're hinting

• 11:43Speaker 00

  at actually bothers me and I like. And, but, but I remember sort of really, I was looking at the geography of the city as a, you know, totally foreign city to me, hadn't spent that much time there. And it was like, why did Austin expand in all these different areas? And yet there's this area that's like closer to downtown, closer to all the things I want than, than all these other places. Why is this, why is this the area that's only now, you know, gentrifying, to use that word? And it was like, oh, this was the segregated area of town. And, and I ended up meeting a guy named Richard Overton, who I've talked about before, who at that time was one of the oldest men in the world. And it's like, he built his house in the 40s.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  And it was like, this was the only place he could build his house. And so there's, I think there's also in the South, like, And we're going to talk about the Civil War. People think a lot of these things from the South are like the Civil War. That was a long time ago. And it's like, it wasn't a long time ago. It was the legacy of these things was up until very, very recently. And, you know, someone like Richard, who was, you know, forced to live in a historical, or sorry, in a segregated neighborhood. This is a guy born in 1906, who would have known many people who had survived slavery. Like, that's, that's one person's life.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Like, I, I, I got involved with the, there's a Civil War or a Confederate statue down the, down the, down the street from my office. I live in a town called Bastrop now. And, and when I was talking to people about it, I was like, I know you think this is a really long time ago, but this was put up before a guy I know, or sorry, was put up after a guy I know was born. Like, like, you gotta wrap your head around that.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not quite in living memory, but it's, it's sort of just outside, just, just outside of the reach of living memory, which is, which is close. And, and, you know, I think it's, you know, all of the, we're still living with, with, with so many of the, of the consequences of it. You know, there's a writer I really like, a guy named Wiley Cash, who has, he has this sort of theory of storytelling, where, you know, if you imagine a pond and someone were to throw a rock into the center of the pond, that, you know, the rock hits, you hear the water splash, and then the ripples come out.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And, and you want, you want whatever story you tell to have, to have a, a rich backstory, things lurking in the past that have, you know, sent ripples out. And, and you'll pick up the story with the ripples, but there's movement and there's backstory of that, of that rock hitting. And I think that we're, you know, we're on, we're just a ripple or two out from that, from that rock, you know, if the rock is a Civil War. I think we're very much still, still living in its wake.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I had Edward Ball on the podcast a few months ago. He wrote Life of a Klansman. And, you know, you, you get this, I think, one of the, as someone who's fascinated by the Civil War, and my books are filled with Civil War stories, you, one of the, one of the weird parts of the lost cause myth, and I'm in the middle of sort of deep dive into the Civil Rights Movement, is like, we've kind of told ourselves this story that these people who fought super, super hard to, you know, secede from the Union, to preserve slavery, they didn't just magically change their mind at the end of the war, right?

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Like, I read this book by Albion Towne, I'm sure I'm pronouncing it wrong, he was the, you know, a sort of a civil rights activist, he was one of the lawyers in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, he has this novel called The Fool's Errand about a Northerner moving to the South after the Civil War, he was a veteran, and anyways, he has this line in the book somewhere where he goes like, slave, like, he's like, "We know slavery's illegal, but we didn't, we're not admitting it was wrong," you know? And I think that that really changed how I started to understand the South. It was like, oh, yeah, of course, these people accepted at the point of a gun that a certain

• 16:13Speaker 00

  thing had changed, but it took several generations for them to change their mind about the morality of the way of life.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think what's, what becomes so revealing when you start to look at the documents, too, of the, the Civil War era, and maybe more tellingly, in the lead up to the Civil War era, you know, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, or, and, you know, any number of other people are really telling anyone who will listen in the lead up to the war, that this is not just explicitly about slavery, about maintaining a slave system and being able to expand it into the West, but that they are, in no uncertain terms, justifying that.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Physical and spiritual torture of the slave system. They're justifying that idea on the belief that the men and women that they're enslaving are inherently inferior, right? This is the stamped from the beginning line of Davis's. Or, you know, that in a, in a, in a, in a religious way, in a spiritual way, you know, their souls are inferior. And so even though Lincoln is gonna, gonna claim that every drop drawn by the lash will be replayed, will be repaid by the sword. The, the civil war really turns out to be a military victory, but not an ideological victory.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  And, and, and so that, that lie that they're using to justify slavery, this lie of white supremacy is gonna live on long after Appomattox.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's kind of a shame to the way we study the civil war. You know, either, either we study it very simplistically on one end, you know, as a war to free the slaves, or as a war of northern aggression, you know, or very, you know, it's almost like our newer narrative, this is be the sort of more the woke narrative is like, they were all racist, they were all terrible, Lincoln was a racist, Grant was a racist, you know, and there's truth to that. But what, to me, the, the old, it's, it's sort of the ultimate morality tale. It's this almost Shakespearean drama of, of how a society becomes corrupted by evil and how complicated and nuanced that evil is. Like, I think what's so fascinating, and maybe we don't talk about enough, I'd be

• 18:37Speaker 00

  curious your take, is like, when you read most of the founders talking about slavery, there's this, there's this, although they certainly profited from it and certainly were complicit in it, there is for the most part, uh, uh, like, a sense of, of conflictedness. There's a sort of a moral ambivalence about it. There, there's almost a resentment. I mean, in Jefferson, you get almost a resentment towards the British for bringing the institution here to begin with, and then, and then the way of life being so dependent on it. It's fascinating that in essentially a hundred years, less than a hundred years, let's call it 50 to 70 years.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  The institution manages, because the cognitive dissonance about it is so strong, you watch the same country go from, "We don't like this, we're going to gradually get rid of it, we know that it's somewhat hypocritical, given our stated ideals," to, "This is a good thing, it should be expanded. If you even dare question this institution, you're a traitor, and we're willing to destroy the country explicitly to preserve this institution, which we're not even morally conflicted about, but we now think is somehow a system of good." Do you know what I mean? It's a fascinating moral trajectory.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, right, but I think it's, I think it's, it's useful to think about how, even, even though that's what the, the constitution will enshrine, like, the, the convention and the, the, the points of view of the, of the framers, you know, they're not speaking with one voice, right? I mean, I think if, if abolitionists at the convention, or, you know, in the 18th century, were to, were to force the issue more then, you know, it might not have happened at all, right? Like, I think that that, I think, I think there was a, there was a vested interest even then, by, by, by many of the founding

• 20:46Speaker 01

  fathers, to, to go to the mat for slavery. And, and so you get compromises. I mean, all, all down the line, you can read the series of compromises, things like-

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Right, the Three Fists Compromise, that's what it's called.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  The, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Act, you know, the Missouri Compromise. I mean, basically, the, this, in, in, in, from, you know, through one lens, you can kind of read the era between-

• 21:15Speaker 01

  The Revolutionary War and the Civil War as a series of compromises about what what the country's going to do with about slavery. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. And I think that's what's interesting, too, is that I think you're right to point out how that it was not lost on them. What a contradiction. And really, to a certain extent, what a betrayal of the stated ideals of the country were. And I think when you come at it with that frame of mind, it really just goes to show how persuasive, how firmly people will cling to profits.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  I mean, that is what's underlying this and driving so much of this. I mean, it's one thing to say, to wonder, oh, you know, look into his heart and try and figure out if he's racist or not. I think what's more telling and more revealing is they had profits to protect. And that's going to be such a big motivator. And I think it's, you know, one way of reading the ideas of race that are driven by slavery and driven by this slave system in America is using race as a way of hoarding resources, a way of hoarding land, a way of hoarding opportunity, a way of hoarding wealth and affording some people a sense of, you know, a sense of psychological superiority.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  But at the end of the day, it's a way of protecting the interests of the wealthy.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess what I'm saying a little bit is like, I'm just curious in sort of how moral contradiction works in the individual, right? So like when Lincoln says, you know, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." He means like you can't be half-free, half-slave. And I think that's right. But I also think that's true. It's insidious how the mind works, right? The mind is not good at two conflicting beliefs, even if they're both true. And so we deceive ourselves with certainties or we fool ourselves, right? So I think It's like, you know, early on in the country, in someone like Jefferson, you have this sort

• 23:28Speaker 00

  of torn. It's like he knows it's wrong. He knows what's right. And then he looks at what the entire, his entire system and, and, and wealth is built upon and he, and he struggles with it, right? But that struggle can't exist very long in a human being. And so I think you watch a lot of these racial ideas get hardened in the American consciousness in that period, like from 1776 to, you know, let's say 1846. It's that period where instead of going, this is a contradiction, let's solve for the contradiction by, by eliminating

• 24:07Speaker 00

  the obvious evil. What you see is a good chunk of the country insidiously managed to convince themselves that what they're doing is not evil. And it's not only not evil, it's somehow heroic or glamorous or beautiful. Do you know what I mean? It's, it's the way that, it's like the way we manage to convince ourselves against what deep down we must know at some intuitive human level. We manage to convince ourselves so we don't have to give up what makes us money or what's easiest or, you know, I don't, it's like, they're like, I don't want to pick the cotton or, you know, process the sugarcane. And so

• 24:49Speaker 00

  they convince themselves that actually this is the way it has to be done.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. I, I think that's a great point. And, and, and, and it shows up, right? Like, well, we did, we did these, you know, this, this narrative that enslaved Africans are inherently inferior, right? A lesser species and, and Christians can sort of, you know, help them along. And, and, and that, that very sort of, that paternalistic justification, I think, is, is the way to square the circle.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's like the, the Upton Sinclair line. It's impossible to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it. And I think, you know, there's, it's like, there's a reason the North had, and Lincoln, I think, most empathetically understands this. Lincoln goes, well, you're able to see it because it's not as costly for you to see, right? Like, it doesn't really, but by, by the 1850s.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  It doesn't really cost Boston anything directly to say slavery is bad and shouldn't exist anywhere, although ironically, all their banks are capitalized by it and their, you know, the cotton they're trading is all like-

• 26:06Speaker 01

  And the majority of Northerners are against emancipation, even at the outbreak of the war.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's fa- well, this idea of profit getting in the way is interesting. I was thinking of this analogy. I heard a podcast where Ezra Klein was talking about, you know, what is the future going to think about, you know, our relationship with meat, right? Like, let's say in the future, all meat is grown in a laboratory. There's a scenario where it seems incredibly barbaric that we had factories that slaughtered animals that were raised, you know, exclusively for the purpose of being eaten, right?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  And, and, and that's going to seem very strange. And I was thinking about that. It's like, so I live on a, like a little farm out here in Texas. I don't have a ton of property, but I have some cows and, you know, every couple of months, we sell the babies and it's a thing. It doesn't make me money, but it, it's like, there's a tax benefit to it. It's a whole, it's a whole thing. The point being, I, I did something that at the time was totally legal, right? Like, I spent my life savings on a piece of property, on some animals. This is how I do it. I could see where someone, again, if you've already done the cognitive dissonance of convincing yourself that it's not evil,

• 27:21Speaker 00

  now you're, you're, now there's this political thing happening where you're, everything you, you, it's like you bought into a, a system where the following things were allowed, and now that's threatened. And on the other side, the people who are saying like, this shouldn't be allowed. Ryan, you can't have this farm. You gotta sell your cows. You're a monster for doing it. It doesn't cost them anything to say this because they, you know, they're not, they didn't put their li- so, so you can see how, you know, these sort of people bought into this whole system, then it felt like the rules were changing. And what I learned in Edward Ball's book too, was it became, there was this immense

• 28:04Speaker 00

  social pressure in the South to like buy Confederate currency and, and like, it's like, they, it's like they got caught up in a giant- Scam, basically, that benefited a very small percentage of the population. And then they couldn't get out of it without admitting

• 28:25Speaker 00

  that they were swindled. Do you know what I mean?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Right. Not just that they, right. I think that's right. Not that just, but not just that they were swindled, but that what they were embarked on a project that was barbaric.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that they were swindled and in being swindled, like, like, look, I don't think Hitler obviously swindled Germany, right? Like Hitler was a horrible human being, a demagogue who, who, you know, wound up a small percentage of the population that ends up forcibly, you know,

• 28:57Speaker 00

  overthrowing the democratic institution of the day. And then, you know, people sort of go along with that. But like, to admit that you were a supporter of that, that you were swindled, and then because you were swindled, you were complicit in the barbarism of that thing. I think that's just too much for the average person to bear.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, but I think that goes a long way to underscoring the really pernicious nature of American notions of race. Because I think, you know, the distinction to make, of course, is that it's, you know, you're not just invested in a business opportunity that, you know, you stand to gain or lose money in, but you're also getting, you're also afforded this sense of psychological superiority, right? So white southerners who were not slaveholders still had a vested interest in a worldview, in an organization of a society that kept them at a higher peg in the hierarchy.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  And, you know, this is what W. E. B. Du Bois calls the wages of whiteness. So that you are, it's not solely, though in large part it is, a monetary thing, a financial thing. It is also, at the same time, this psychological thing. So that one might take up arms to protect the South and defend the right to hold slaves, even if you yourself didn't hold slaves, because that system was built on a broader organization of society that would benefit you.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Well, that goes to me. I think one of the interesting parts of the book is that you sort of note, and it's a distinction I hadn't really thought about before, but it's like you have Robert E. Lee on the one hand, and Robert E. Lee is the sort of the apotheosis of the Confederacy. He's not even living in the same universe as Nathan Bedford Forrest. Like, they would not have been social friends in any universe, except in the war, right? Even though Nathan Bedford Forrest becomes sort of rich, it's like Bedford Forrest is the populist sort of slave owner general, and Robert E. Lee is the patrician, you know, sort of, maybe even wrestling a little bit internally with the ethics of slavery. But

• 31:23Speaker 00

  there is this diversity in the sort of common cause there that gets brushed over.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, right, so Forrest is sort of new money. You know, he was born into sort of dirt floor poverty. His family owned some property, but so he wasn't, you know, sort of lowest of the low. But, but yeah, I mean, he born, born pretty poor, scrappy childhood, and becomes, by some counts, one of the richest men in the South by the outbreak of the war, by being a slave trader. So he is, he is this new money thing. And you're right, the patricians would sort of, the southern gentleman, or, you know, plantation owners even, would turn their nose up at that. You know, it was, you were sort of too, you were too implicated in the system, even if everyone else was

• 32:12Speaker 01

  taking part of it, too. But yeah, right. So, and it's not just the southern gentleman thing, but, but Lee goes to West Point, as a lot of the generals, North and South, had. Forrest hardly went to school at all. You know, he's, he's, he's not unlettered, but he's not, you know, he's not, he's certain by no means well-read, or, you know, prolific in his writings, in his letters. So, so yeah, I mean, he does have this, this more blue collar edge to him. You know, one of his biographers calls him a natural man, the most man in the world. He, this, you know, I mean, it does fit, you know, with, you know, there are sort of obvious echoes in the present, this disdain for expertise.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  And, you know, a love for a more, like you say, kind of populist, grittier, somewhat, somewhat gauche figure.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  No, and I want to get to the statues in a second, but I think, because I read, I think, the biography you used in your book, I'm forgetting who it's by, but the, sort of the classic biography.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jack Hurst, Jack Hurst's biography.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. When I read that, I couldn't escape the conclusion that he was just a fucking psychopath. Like, like, wasn't, like, was not even, like, I mean, he, like, killed, he, like, killed several of his own soldiers in duels and, like, was a slave, like, was, there's a big difference between being a slave owner and a slave trader.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Especially then, when it's, you know, is illegal in some, you know, to some degree. Like, I mean, he was a, he was a murderous, asocial, like, animal, basically, from my reading.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that he, you would not have, you would not have wanted to, to get on the wrong side of him or get close to him, really. I mean, I think he was just, yeah, volatile, violent, depraved.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  But, yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  You know, and I actually start the book, you know, after, after a bit of an introduction to sort of set up what this book is about, I started with this scene of him laid on in the war, pacing, his cavalry troop is in camp and he's pacing around, almost kind of into a trance, it just kind of hypnotizes himself by walking, and one of his soldiers comes up to him to just, you know, to talk to him about something, and he just punches him without, without breaking stride, just knocks him unconscious with a single blow.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  That's what a psychopath was.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I, so I, you know, I very much wanted to, you know, like, you know, there's the Hurst biography, there's a number of other biographies, I wanted to avoid sort of the pitfalls of one version of what this book could have been, which is much more biographical about Forrest, but I did want to give a sort of biographical snippet right at the beginning of the book, just to cast that shadow, like, this is, this is who that, this is who this guy was.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  It's so fascinating to like, like, it's, it's really a, I'm cursing a lot of this episode. It's really kind of a mindfuck, the way that like, okay, so if you ask your average person who doesn't know much about the Civil War, you know, Nathan Bedford Forrest, maybe they know he's this cavalry commander, or maybe they know, they've seen the statues of him from the South, but then it's like, and what about Sherman? And they're like, well, Sherman's a monster, you know? And, and it's like, you're like, how did you manage to take a guy who was actually successful in the Civil War, and was strategically, you know, sort of brilliant, and actually managed to pull the thing off, and, and does so, I mean, war

• 35:54Speaker 00

  is hell, as he says, Sherman's a hero of mine, you know, sort of says war is hell, but, but for the most part, you know, is, you know, not, not guilty of these heinous war crimes, the way that someone like Forrest is. And then Forrest somehow manages to, because of the lost cause mythology, get statues all over the South. I mean, it's, it's very strange how, and I think this goes to the cognitive dissonance, the way that people were managed to, can be convinced afterwards that up is down, and down is up, and good is bad, and bad is good. It's like, you have to really read like, dozens of books and really dig into this to like, to come close to the truth.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think it, it, it points up how so much of what we take for being history is really more memory, right? So Sherman, in the South, Sherman is thought of for, you know, his march to the sea, that, that total war approach, you know, the generations of Southerners, white Southerners, anyway.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  You know, raising, raising kids to shake their fist at Sherman, that bastard who, you know, burnt our crops. And then turning a blind eye to everything that Forrest was implicated in, but, you know, admire his heroics and, and his, his shrewd.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Military tactics. Yeah, I mean, and but but of course, that's what memory does, right? Memory is ideological. Memory is about reinforcing certain certain tenants of our identity and not taking a more comprehensive or complicated and contradictory more comprehensive and complex view of things because we would we would then stumble into contradictions about our identities, about our communities, you know, and so it's easier than to avoid it, to avoid the alienation that would come if we really tangled with it.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  And then when we get into the statues, which is, you know, obviously a big focus of the book, and I think this sort of a hot button issue. To me, what's so interesting is it's sort of like there's kind of two motivations to me of the statues. The first is the sort of cognitive dissonance we're talking about. So instead of having to own that we fell for the greatest swindle of all time, you know, that you sided with in, like Grant says in his memoirs, like of all the wars that have ever been fought, the cause of the Confederacy may be the worst thing that anyone has ever fought for.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  And it's true. I mean, like, you know, you could argue that the the revolution in 76 is morally complex. The the revolution in in 61 is very black and white, right? Like, there's one reason the South is doing what it's doing. And so instead of owning that, instead of disavowing it, you know, instead of learning from it, you get this cognitive dissonance of like, they were heroes, they were defending their homeland, you know, they were, you know, all this nonsense. That's like 50% of it. And then the other 50% of it gets darker, if it could get darker, you know, as the decades pass, which is, we're

• 39:08Speaker 00

  putting up these monuments to intimidate and suppress and essentially as an exercise of raw political power.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think they are, one way of thinking about the to further that second point, one way of thinking about these monuments are they're they're the sort of other side of the coin of All of the images that are coming out of that time meant to demean black Americans, right? Whether that's minstrelty, whether that's the way black characters are depicted in films like Birth of a Nation or Gone with the Wind, to massively successive Cornerstones of Hollywood, all of the illustrations, the Sambo-type, the watermelon, all of those debasing, dehumanizing caricatures that fix.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Henry Louis Gates has a great book on this, Stony of the Road.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  So good.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  And the argument, it's amazing. And the argument there is that that fixes sort of deep into the psyche, into the nerve endings of Americans, this sense of a black inferiority. And I think the heroism enshrined in these Confederate monuments is the other side of that coin. So here are the heroes and here are the sort of subhuman, second-class citizens of our society that we're intimidating with these statues.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  What's fascinating to me about the psychology of it, so the monument down the street from my office, it was put up in 1905. You can read the newspaper article that says, "This is a monument to the greatness of the white sold South," and blah, blah, blah. There wasn't even a Civil War battle in Bastrop, Texas. But there definitely were veterans from here. And I think a few different Confederate generals came from here. Anyway, what was fascinating to me, so there starts to be discussion about moving it. I ended up donating, I put up $10,000 so we could move the statue, and it was sort of kicked off this discussion. And I went to some of the city hall meetings. What was like, what you and I are talking about seems really straightforward to me, right? The logic of why the statues went

• 41:23Speaker 00

  up, the logic of the war. And it's like, okay, so 115 years ago, some people did this thing for those reasons, right? And I can wrap my head around those reasons. I mean, I think they're insane, but I can understand the sort of twisted psychological logic and bias that created it, right? What was fascinating and confusing to me, and you opened the book sort of talking to a woman who's like, standing in front of the statue, was like, And when one of the, there was like a rally where people went to, you know, talk about why they should bring it down. And it's like, a handful of people got up really

• 42:04Speaker 00

  early that morning and staked out chairs in front of this monument, essentially becoming a human shield for it, even though it was a peaceful protest.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  And it was like, I guess what I'm so baffled and fascinated by, and find nearly unbelievable, is that 115 years later, someone with essentially no dog in the fight would look at it and go, "I'm picking that side." You know what I mean?

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think at a certain level, it's about control, right? And, and a sense that the, the world that you grew up in, and the worldview that you grew up with feels natural and feels right. And often, when they get challenged, it feels very personal. And it feels like, you know, the, the thing that your granddaddy loved, the thing that you were taught was, you know, admirable, the bravery of the soldier, you know, magical thinking about that aside, it, it, the consequence of it is, is, is not

• 43:23Speaker 01

  diminished by the fact that it's magical thinking, right? And so, when, when, when, when it's threatened, it's a sense of, the world that I know, and my status in the world that I know, is now under threat. And, and people are willing to defend that, even, even if it means defending symbols of a, of a, a cause, a society, a system that is abhorrent to a lot of people.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  No, that's a great point. Paul Graham, the technology investor, he had this essay many years ago called Keep Your Identity Small. And he had this line, and he's like, the more things you identify with, the stupider you are. Like, you become stupid when you identify with things, right? And I think what he meant is like, if you call yourself a Republican, if you call yourself a Democrat, if you call yourself a communist, if you call yourself a whatever, when you pick labels, or you associate your identity with a thing, you immediately kind of become very fragile and in a way become very vulnerable, because you can't change, you can't adjust, right? And, yeah, it struck me watching these people

• 44:34Speaker 00

  sort of get up and make these, you know, preposterous defenses of the thing. Like, I can't even, I can't even recall, but they were like, it was so silly, like, just demonstrably untrue. You know, like, a bad assumption built on top of a bad assumption, bad assumption leading to a silly conclusion, right? And you're like, I think it goes to your point, which is like, yeah, if you think because you love your grandfather and your grandfather loved this, and you can't possibly see yourself as questioning your grandfather, and you're like, if you can't embrace the complexity of like, good people do bad things, and bad people do good things, and nothing is, you know, like, if you, as soon as you become

• 45:19Speaker 00

  a fan of a thing, it makes it really hard for you to adjust.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, right. Because it's, it's, it's, it's an in-group thing, right? You, you have these markers of identity. And this is, I mean, this is how collective memory works, right? Is that it's, you, you buy into, you don't even buy into it, because it's happening often subconsciously. So you're not, sometimes not even making the choice to buy into it, but it's, it's the water that you're swimming in, it's the family you grew up in, it's the church you were, you were raised in, it's the, the community that you live in. There are certain ideas and memories and perspectives on the past and the past's role in your present that

• 46:00Speaker 01

  You you sort of take for granted, but but shape your consciousness and shape your identity. And and because it it forms your sense of identity, opting out of it, or challenge opting out of it means opting out of an identity, a loss of identity. And and often, as some, you know, a scholar of a scholar of collective memory, Erica Afflebaum writes, like, you, you sometimes can't even hear a challenge to it because of that cognitive dissonance. It will just, it will just sort of ping off you and and not almost not register. And and the great Robert Penn Warren talked about white Southerners having to

• 46:44Speaker 01

  experience a kind of symbolic rebirth, they that they had to die in a way, and is sort of their their worldview had to die to be able to live in, live in a South and live with a worldview of the South that rejected segregation.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a great Walker Percy line where he was like, you know, there's lots of things special about the Southern way of life. Black people not being either the same restaurant as you is not what it is. You know what I mean?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  But it, yeah, it's like, so you identify as a Southerner, it makes you really vulnerable because now you can't accept that there are bad Southerners. Like, I know Robert Penn Warren wrote this essay, I think it became a book, too, where it's like in the 60s or the 70s, in response to some of the backlash about civil rights, like, the South, the Southern senators, like, reinstate Jefferson, they give Jefferson Davis his citizenship back.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, in his hometown.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you're just like, what the fuck? Like, this is like, we could, you could, you could, you could look at all the moral ambiguity about the Civil War that you want. But like, this dude sucked. Like, not only did the cause that he supports sucked, but like, he sucked at it, too. That was like, the craziest part. And you're just like, oh, yeah, you, you're on Team South, and that's forcing you to, that's not for, but that's compelling you, instead of having to reckon with that, it's compelling you to. Go deeper, deeper, deeper into the mud of it.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, but and often then, but with the when you when you do have to double down on it, or when you do have to push really hard on it, it kind of it exposes the cracks in in the project, right? So I spent a lot of time writing about and reporting in Selma and because of this this statue of Forrest that's in Selma. And, you know, his admirers, this group called the Friends of Forrest, put as one of his monikers on the under the statue, on the pedestal of the statue, Defender of Selma. But the Battle of Selma lasted all of like, two hours and wasn't much of a fight, and Forrest lost it. And yet, you, you know, you, you revere him just for sort of passing through your town. Well, I think he's revered

• 49:04Speaker 01

  for for other reasons that maybe they didn't, you know, carve into the granite of that pedestal. But but at least publicly, they're talking about these reasons that are are pretty insignificant or minor.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Well, no, I remember I was in New Orleans finishing up one of my books when they they took down the statue of Robert E. Lee. And Lee Circle is an iconic, it's actually, it's like, you know, it's an incredible, they call it Lee Circle, the monument itself is incredible. Like, it's this tall statue in the middle of town. It's a roundabout. And I remember watching it come down. And, and, and, you know, these people are complaining about it, or, you know, contentious. It's like, guys, Robert E. Lee has never was never even went to New Orleans. Like, like, literally never stepped foot in the town. He's not from there. He did a crappy job defending it as the strategist. Like, it's like, he has nothing to do with your town. But again, you get sort of morally conflicted. And I

• 49:59Speaker 00

  think, you know, we're kind of being condescending here, sort of laughing at this. But I think it affects smart people, too. I remember after Charlottesville, I watched an interview with John Kelly, who's a smart person, and, you know, is an American, you know, longtime member of the armed forces, like, you know, whatever you think of his politics, like, you know, he lost his son in in in the War on Terror. And you, I watched him.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  It's like because he was on Team Republican and because he was on sort of Team Army, let's say, or, you know, where, where there's been unfortunately a bit of a cult as far as the, the, the Southern cause over the couple hundred years or 150 years. It, it was, he was like, you know, I'm just saying like, maybe the Civil War didn't have to happen. Maybe there could have been more compromises. That was like, you know, he was like that. Remember, and I was like, dude, there are several seminal moments in American history called the compromise of, there's the three-fist compromise, there's the compromise of this, the compromise of that, the, the Missouri compromise. It's like, if you, if you, if you look at history with any sort of dispassionate view, you're

• 51:10Speaker 00

  like, wow, the North continually compromised with the slaveholding class. And what happened was this moving of the goalpost, this sort of aggression, like the aggression, aggressive expansion of slavery that, that causes civil war. But like, when you get on that team, all of a sudden you end up twisting events to fit this sort of perverse narrative.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that there's, I think there's, there's the, there's the individual psychological motivations here that, that we've been talking about. I think there are also, there are policy motivations too, though, because I think if you, if you are to, if you are to sort of look at the ledger, if you really are to, to lay out all of the ways in which the, the project of the Confederacy was wrong, all of the ways in which the, the American system leading up to that, you know, the, the Confederacy being an, an extension of, of an American project before that. But then all of the ways after the war ends, whether that's, you know, Jim Crow, whether that's convict leasing, whether that's who

• 52:17Speaker 01

  is eligible for the Social Security Act, whether that's who, who qualifies for the GI Bill, for FHA-backed loans. I mean, in all of these ways, the, the pernicious systems that maintain the, the racial hierarchy of this country play on hardly interrupted, you know, briefly interrupted by Reconstruction, but then it's, it's back to business afterwards. So if you, if you, from the present, if you are to square up to the, the totality of, of the wrong of American slavery. And the the the lie of white supremacy told to justify it, then you you're so much closer,

• 53:00Speaker 01

  you're all the you're all the more closer than to building consensus for policies in the present that might address the racial wealth gap, or the gap in who has access to good healthcare, you know, or all of these ways in which there's still there there still is this second-class citizenship in America. And so I think there's a there's a political interest, too, in in in in people who don't want to support big progressive legislation in in in thinking about the Civil War in a particular way, which is to say, thinking about the Civil War in a way that makes no claim on the present. Because

• 53:42Speaker 01

  once you start to do that, it it it becomes almost morally imperative to do something to address a 10 to 1 racial wealth gap, right?

• 53:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, it's it's the funhouse mirroring of the lost causes. It's like, I the more I've read and studied it, it's it you start to go, okay, like, look, not a good chunk of the North was, you know, not particularly interested in abolishing slavery, sort of happened as a byproduct of it, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, there there was a line Churchill said of the Marshall Plan, that it was the most unsordid act in world history, right? That the United States did this magnificent, magnanimous thing that it didn't have to do. But but you could argue that that Reconstruction is the most unsordid act in American history,

• 54:37Speaker 00

  right? Like, we passed the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments, we we we send teams of people to educate the slaves, we we rewrite the constitutions in all these states, like... And and instead of it being a mo like it, obviously, it doesn't end up working. But instead of it being the high watermark of, you know, the American experiment where we almost did it, you know, it it's the average, I mean, myself included, like, you you get this sense because it's not really taught in school. And then what you do hear about it is the sort of denigration of it. You you not only see it, you not only don't see it as an unsordid act, it's like one, it's it's sort of, you see it as one, like a shameful,

• 55:21Speaker 00

  odious part of American history. And so it's it's it's really, it's, I don't know, it's it's, it'd be like if we looked at, you know, America's response to the Great Depression as like, one of the most shameful events of her history or something. You're just like, what? How did? How did? How did that get flipped upside down?

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think that's right. But and but again, it's part of part of that project of of of denigrating, the project of reconstruction is is part of the lost cause myth as well to to impugn black leadership, essentially, that these were, you know, incompetent, corrupt people who, you know, ran ran their cities or counties or states into the ground. And and and and so the re-imposition of, you know, or the the return of ex confederates to power after reconstruction is undermined, feels inevitable, feels right. And that there was this spell in the lost cause view, there was this spell of, you know, like corruption

• 56:23Speaker 01

  and and, you know, only to reinforce this idea that they're second class citizens.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Well, one last thing on this, and then I wanted to, I have an interesting thing to close with with you. But isn't it, and I guess this is semi rhetorical, I'm trying not to get too political, but isn't it? Isn't it interesting that that energy, that sort of gaslighting energy, that like sort of toxic, like, almost antisocial aggression, like the the the zero sumness? Isn't it fast? Like, the thing that could take reconstruction?

• 57:02Speaker 00

  You know, again, being a beautiful, you know, pure thing and turn it into a nasty thing. And I actually was just reading a civil rights book and Kennedy, as he's trying to integrate like University of Mississippi or something, and he's dealing with the insanity of Mississippi's governor, he goes, man, it really makes me question some of the things I learned from my Harvard professors about reconstruction. And it's like, he looks at it for a second and then he looks away, you know, like he can't quite come to terms with it.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  But I guess what I'm saying is like, isn't it fascinating that that energy is still with us and in some sense, like ascendant culturally right now?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, Reverend William Barber calls the moment that we're in the third reconstruction, although maybe, you know, that was, that's a phrase of his from 2015. Maybe we're in like the third redemption now.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  But, but yeah, I mean,

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Or the neo Confederacy.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  If you want to put the negative spin on it.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think, of course, the movement, the civil rights movement being the second, second reconstruction then, for those keeping score at home. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's something we'll keep, we'll keep wrestling with until there aren't, you can't, until we live in a society in which you can't, you're unable to predict outcomes based on, you know, your zip code, essentially, you know?

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  I think, I think there are so many inequities that are still with us that have its roots in, I mean, not just in the Civil War, long before the Civil War, but, but its roots in this, you know, frankly psychotic idea of race that we have in America. And I, and I think, you know, it's, we'll, we'll, we'll have a fourth one if, you know, if we, if we keep.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Building society along these lines that are inherently unequal.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, look, like, the, the, the police brutality, policing, systemic racism, these things are, are complicated. There's data. It, it, that, I can get why some people are having trouble wrapping their head around it. But, you know, when you watch that video of, of, of Armand Arbery.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Be chased down by a group of white guys in a truck with a Confederate flag on it, and shoot him down in cold blood, calling him, you know, the N word. You go, oh, the past, as Faulkner said, the past i- is not only not dead, like, the past is not dead, it's still with us. And that energy is real. And it's, it's not, it's not the majority energy, but it's, it's there cursing, coursing through certain people's veins.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's chilling. That video is, I, it is horrifying in so many ways. Partly, it's horrifying because it does feel like it, it touches on, it, that could have been a video shot at any point over the course of American history and that it's happening now. It's, it's just, yeah, I mean, terrifying. Yeah. So, I don't know. I mean, I think, I think one of the important things to, to underline, though, too, is that, like, if some, some people want to argue, right, that the, that the past is past, or that, oh, these are just statues, like, who cares about them. But I think that

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  the statues are a way of doing some, making an intervention into American collective memory and saying, no, no, no, no, no. The story that we've been telling ourselves, to a greater or lesser degree, whether we're in the North or the South, that, that, you know, as, as the phrase goes, the half has never been told, that, that American history is far more terrifying than, than we'd like to think. And, and then, that, that, that it continues to shape our present in so many ways. And so, to make active interventions into American society to try and address those things, isn't giving a false leg up, or, or, you know,

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Giving, you know, cutting the line and giving to, you know, giving handouts, but it's instead a way of making some portion of a redress to these longstanding and often violently enforced inequities in this country that break down by race.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, when Steve Jobs took back over off, over Apple, he said something like, "One of the ways to get back on track is for us to remember who our heroes are." And, you know, and that, that's where the, you know, the famous thing, different ad comes from, I think, or, you know, the, the, it's sort of who, who are we lionizing, right? Like, who, who are we about? And I think that, to me, is a big part of this statue discussion. It's like, this, this is, this is the best of us? Like, this is the memory we're honoring? You know, like, I, I want to remember the, the people that, that did something. Like, you go, "Oh, you wouldn't understand. It's a product of your time." Sure, I'll, I'll concede that argument, but that's not what I want to be

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  celebrating 150 years later. I want to, I want to celebrate the people who were able to do that extraordinarily difficult thing and see beyond, you know, the moment of their time. So, so speaking of which, I'd be curious, because I think it pertains, and I, as someone who's talked about this Confederate statue stuff quite a bit, one of the thing, one of the rejoinders I get from people go, "Well, you know, you talk about Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius was a slaveholder. Should we take down the statues of Marcus Aurelius?" And I go, "Look, first off, all the Marcus Aurelius statues are in Italy. It's not really, you know." And I, I have a good response. I mean, my response is like, "Look, if Marcus Aurelius waged a war that explicitly for the, the expansion of slavery that, that

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  killed, you know, a half a million people and destroyed the empire, you know, maybe he wouldn't be worth putting a statue up of." But what I think is interesting is I was actually just reading, there is a big debate right now at Brown University where, in the early 1900s, an industrialist paid to put up a statue of Marcus Aurelius.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Certain students are petitioning for it to come down because it's a symbol of colonialism. Uh, which, you know, I find to be a bit, I mean, sure, the Romans were imperialists in the like literal sense 2000 years ago. It's not quite the same as, you know, King Leopold's ghost, but what do you, as you think about these monuments, I think one of the, one of the arguments people use to like, not have to have it is you go, well, where do you stop? Or what about this or that? As you've wrestled with that, have you come to any clarity about it?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, well, I don't know clarity, but, but I think that I, I'm all for, let's, let's hit the slopes, you know, like, let's have.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  The slippery slope, you mean?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, like, let's, let's, let's have these debates, you know, where does it stop? Well, let's, let's figure it out on a case by case basis, you know, it's, we don't have to, we don't have to make some, you know, statute decree across the board. Uh, you know, it's, it seems like it's what's, what started with a referendum on Confederate monuments, which I think it, we, we haven't reached consensus on, but I think at, at this point, I think a lot, a lot of people have, have come to see them as wrong and to, to a greater lesser extent can understand why they're wrong. Of course, not across the board, but you know, the debate in the summer of 2015 is way different than the debate on

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Confederate monuments is now. Uh, you know, if I were to go on a radio show, uh, you know, I'm on this press tour right now. If I were to go on a radio show in the fall of 2015, it would have been a very sort of both sides debate. Now it's, it's all, it's mostly consensus, um, you know, at least on the sorts of public radio type shows that, that, that I'm going on. But, and now it seems like, you know, well, where does it stop? What about, what about Jefferson? What about Washington? And, and so I think it's, I think it's totally fine to have a referendum on the meaning of Jefferson and Washington's legacy in the present. I, I think that's actually healthy, you know, especially

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  in a moment where we, the, the prevailing idea on our country's highest court is that the, you know, the, the founders, uh,

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Did know, you know, did know wrong and everything that they've written is how we should. We can't apart from what was in their mind at the time. You know, I think having a more complicated and nuanced view of who they were and what their legacy is, I think is important, you know, whether or not the debates about their monuments get us there or not. I think it's an opportunity to introduce some nuance to their memory. And I think let's just keep taking it on a case by case basis. I mean, you know, with figures further in the past and figures, maybe, you know, like Aurelius,

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  who is not a figure of America, maybe that gets harder, a little bit foggier.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  But I think for the most part, like it's not necessarily, I don't think of it as much as a slippery slope and more of just like a chance to have referendums on our past consistently. I think we should be doing that anyway. I think that's what a healthy society does. So, you know, maybe, maybe some statues come down, maybe some stay up. But, but if there's an active and consistent reevaluation of the meaning of this country's past, I think, I think on some that's, that's a good thing. I think that's a healthy thing.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  No, and I think it's a good debate to have. And also I think maybe it says something about where we are as a society that we seem to only be able to have this discussion in the negative, right? Like, who should we take down? Instead of who should we be putting statues of up, right? Like, like that, that they just put up an Eisenhower memorial in, in Washington DC. It took like 30 years and it was like horrendously over budget. It's like we're, we're not even up to world, like we're at World War II as far as celebrating like heroes, you know? Like, it's, it's interesting that, I guess it goes to the point about how polarized

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  and sort of in our own bubbles we are, that we can't as a society go like, who are our heroes? Who should we honor? Who do we want to put up? You said you just had a young, you have, you have a baby. It's like, who do you want your baby to walk to school looking up at? And it can't, it shouldn't just be the absence of bad people.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's, that's, that's a tricky question. I mean, I think in some ways I'm, I'm drawn to other, other kinds of, of, of, of public history and, and, and public art, things that aren't just about the individual and, and getting, and getting away from the kind of, uh, uh, like great men of history, uh, point of view that, that, that these statues come from. Um, and, and, and, you know, I think there are some, there are some examples with, that are more sort of communal, community-based, you know, more sort of people's history, uh, installations. Uh, but I mean, I think, again, it may be that it's back to that Walker, that great Walker Percy quote that you, that you mentioned, you know, there's no shortage, there are amazing southern, southern heroes, um, you know, that, that, that we could have, uh, statues to, you know, and, and we, we started off this conversation thinking about the, you know, the, the fights in the, the 1960s at, at universities, statues of the people who, you know, had, had the courage and bravery and to.

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Where's the James Meredith statue?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  Or James Hood. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, I, I, I get your point about the statues. You're right. Like, uh, some of the monuments they've put up about lynching or memorials, I think those are all an important part of it too. But I think there's, there is something to a statue. And I think that's why you were drawn to them yourself.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  There's the, the Longfellow poem is the, the lives of great men remind us we can make our lives sublime and, you know, leave our footprints in the sands of time. I think there is something about like, this person earned that. Could I do something like that? I think you, you want to put your heroes up for display. It's just. Who are our heroes? We've got to figure that out.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think it's it's a complicated, it's a complicated question. But but maybe then, you know, let's, let's try it. Let's put some heroes up, but then welcome, but then welcome the referendum when it comes, which it seems, you know, given, given, like you say, given the polarized nature of American political debate, the referendum seems inevitable. But but to welcome it, right, that like, we don't need to have a fixed or, you know, one dimensional views of these people from our past. You know, there's a great Nell Irving Painter line, who was a professor at Princeton, and she was involved in the debates that Princeton had about about Woodrow Wilson, and then that sort of public honorific of Wilson.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  And she says, you know, we keep writing history because we keep asking new questions.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  And I think that that's a, you know, I think, yeah, let's, let's try it. Let's, you know, put, put up some new statues to new people. And when, if and when referendums come, let's have them. And if only just to keep a healthy and complicated sense of who people are, right? Because that's the thing is we, the, as important as statues are, you know, and I love that Longfellow quote, as important as they are and as useful as they are in some ways, they, one of the, the follies that they might lead us to is that they're, they are one dimensional and not the complicated human beings that of course they were. So, yeah, so they, let's, let's, they can, these, these debates can keep us honest, you know?

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  Connor, thanks so much. I love the book. Super important. And also, you, you mentioned Nell Painter. Her book, Old in Art School, is incredible, if you haven't read it.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I haven't. I'll look for that, though.

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  Awesome. All right. Talk soon.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Great. Thanks, Ryan. Really enjoyed it.

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

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