American History Tellers - America's Anthem | 7

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord.” That’s the opening line of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” written by Julie Ward Howe in 1861. Over the years, it’s become something of an unofficial national anthem for all manner of political causes in the United States. Historian Richard Gamble joins us to talk about the song, its meaning, and its history in everything from The Civil War to The Civil Rights Movement.Read more: A Fiery Gospel: The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War.Support our show by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's April 3rd, 1968. It's just before 9 p.m. in the Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. The weather outside is unforgiving. But the heavy rain hasn't stopped the crowd. Thousands of citizens, students, local ministers, and protesters are packed wall to wall inside the temple.

These folks have gathered in support of Local 1733, the Memphis Sanitation Workers Union. A couple months back, in February, the sanitation workers went on strike after two of their men were killed on the job. They want better pay, better working conditions, better treatment. They want dignity. As the thunder claps and lightning strikes, tornado sirens begin to keen, but the crowd doesn't leave. They sing and clap and raise their hands to the sky. A young man and his wife stand

at the back of the gallery, waiting for the guest of honor to arrive, a guest who has marched with the sanitation workers and championed their cause. What's taking him so long? I don't know. Abernathy promised he'd be here. Well, then he will. But what if he doesn't show? He stood with us so far. He's not going to abandon us now. You can hardly blame him after what happened. A few days back, Peaceful March in Memphis turned to chaos. Downtown shops were looted, marchers were clubbed and tear gassed, and worst of all, a 16-year-old boy was killed.

Yeah, but the workers didn't start the violence. I know. It was the black power't start the violence. I know. It was the black power crowd, not us. That doesn't make it any safer for him to be here. I wouldn't blame him if he never came back to Memphis again. And just then, the door at the back of the gallery opens. A man enters the hall, his raincoat drenched, his hair wet from the storm.

Seeing him, the crowd erupts. The sanitation worker and his wife watch in awe as the man makes his way down the center aisle. Ralph Abernathy, a minister and civil rights activist, greets him at the front of the room. Abernathy takes the podium, makes a few remarks, and then introduces the guest of honor, the man everyone in the temple has been waiting to see. Dr. Martin Luther King. From the team behind American History Tellers comes a new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, intimate moments, and shocking scandals that shaped our nation. From the War of 1812 to Watergate,

available now wherever you get your books. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham,

and this is American History, students, and ministers, some 2,000 in all, braved the storm and crowded into the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee to hear Dr. King speak. That night, as the thunder rolled and the rain poured down outside, Dr. King preached about the strike. He recounted past victories in Montgomery, Selma, and Washington. The crowd was moved to tears as he quoted the Bible and told the story of the Good Samaritan. But there was something else on Dr. King's mind that night. Violence. King, no stranger to living under threat,

talked about the time he had been stabbed by a mentally ill woman, and the time his plane had to be checked for bombs and explosives. The final lines of what is now known as the mountaintop speech, the last speech King would ever make, are foreboding. I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter now. Because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people,

will get to the promised land. And so I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. The next day, while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Dr. King was shot and killed by a small-time criminal and confirmed racist named James Earl Ray. Dr. King's impact on the civil rights movement and the impact of his murder on the country is beyond measure. Though James Earl Ray's horrific act of violence stole an American hero long before his time, Dr. King's message of equality, justice, and nonviolence could never be erased by the bull of an assassin. Instead, his heroism and dedication to the cause of equality

live on. Today on this special episode of American History Tellers, we're going to talk about that last line of Dr. King's speech, Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. It's the opening line of a poem written by Julie Ward Howe in 1862 called The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The poem and song is everywhere in American life, sung at public schools and presidential inaugurations. It's the unofficial anthem for causes from the Civil Rights Movement to abolition to the Cold War and even the Spanish-American War. It's also the subject of a new book called A Fiery Gospel, The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War by Richard Gamble, a professor of history at

Hillsdale College in Missouri. Gamble has spent the last six years researching the origin of the song, its writer, her influences, and how it's been used and reused throughout American history. Richard Gamble joined me to talk about his book, The Hymn and Its Place in History. Here's our conversation. Dr. Gamble, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you, Lindsay. It's a pleasure to be with you. So let's start with the writer of the poem or song, Julie Ward Howe. She was from Massachusetts, and the lyrics are from a poem she published in 1862, right in the midst

of the Civil War. What do we know about her as a woman and as a writer? Sure. And it's the most natural thing in the world to associate her with Massachusetts, especially with the city of Boston. She knew the cultural world there, the literary world, the transcendentalist philosophers there in New England. But she was actually born 200 years ago in New York City. She's a New Yorker. Her father was a very prominent banker, and she grew up in a world of privilege, culture, wealth, a connected world with all kinds of famous people. And she had the very best education at home. Her father provided private tutors for her. She knew German. She knew French. She was publishing. By the time she was 16, 17 years old, she was writing essays and reviews in when she married a prominent reformer named Samuel Gridley Howe, and that's where she spent the rest of her life after the early 1840s. But the battle hymn was written on a trip to Washington, D.C. in 1861.

What was the purpose of the trip, and what did she see there? She had desired to see the front lines of the war for herself. The war had been underway for several months by that point. Fighting had been underway for several months. She was closely associated with the war governor of Massachusetts. Her husband was involved as part of a relief agency under the administration for the North. And she was very curious to see the soldiers for herself on the front lines. So she and a group of friends traveled to Washington, D.C. in the middle of November 1861. It was a long trip in those days, a long train trip. It took the better part of three or four days to get from Boston to D.C.,

and she spent a little more than a week there and toured the battlefields, toured hospitals, toured the Capitol building, and the dome of the Capitol building was under construction at that point. And it was on one of these excursions out to Northern Virginia, crossing the Potomac, when she encountered Union soldiers there, and in fact got caught up in a bit of a skirmish with Confederate soldiers. It was at that point that she experienced the war most directly, was inspired by these young men in uniform, got to talk with them. She was a bit shy in public, but she spoke to them. They sang songs together as she was traveling in her carriage and the soldiers marching alongside. And according to a story that she liked to tell, it was her own minister, a man named James Freeman

Clark from Boston, who was in the carriage with her, who said to her when the soldiers were singing the John Brown song, he said, you know, somebody should write better lyrics to that tune. I don't know if it exactly happened that way, but that's the way she told the story. And she went back to her hotel that night. She went to sleep and she woke up early the next morning with the rhythm of the John Brown song. That's the tune we still know for the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The rhythm of it, the cadences of it were in her mind early that morning before it was even light. She got out of bed, grabbed a piece of paper. She said that the kind of paper you can find in a hotel room. And she got a stub of a pencil and began writing out the lines of this poem, which had no name at this point.

Started writing out the lines of this poem before she forgot them. And before she knew it, she had several stanzas of what would become her battle hymn. So it was published as a poem then, later the next year. Was it always meant to be a song? That's an excellent question, because what gets overlooked is the familiar refrain, glory, glory, hallelujah, is not part of the poem anywhere. When it was first published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, one of the most important abolitionist periodicals in America. It was published there in their February 1861 issue, but it actually appeared in public a few weeks earlier than that. It appeared in newspapers across the country starting in January of 1861 with due credit given to the Atlantic Monthly.

And when it appeared in print, the five stanzas were there, but as I mentioned, not the words, not the glory, glory, hallelujah refrain. But it seems that people realized immediately that the rhythm of her poem would fit the John Brown song, especially since she has the phrase at the end of each stanza, some variation on the phrase, his truth is marching on, his day is marching on. And I imagine that countless people in the North realized immediately that this could be sung to the John Brown tune. And very shortly, music publishers in Boston started bringing out sheet music editions of this, which included the Glory Hallelujah refrain.

Well, let's talk a little bit about the music industry in 1862. Sheet music is the currency in which popular music happened at all. How did the average American consume popular music in the middle of the Civil War? An awful lot of Americans sang in their homes and in their churches and in community celebrations, patriotic celebrations, school celebrations. This was a time when music had to be made in the home, family by family, community by community. And the battle hymn very quickly appeared in hy revival songbooks.

It appeared in songbooks for soldiers in their encampments. It appeared in soldiers' magazines, newspapers. So it was taken up fairly quickly. In fact, I think the battle hymn was more popular during the war than Julia Ward Howe even knew. She didn't have the internet. She didn't have a Google alert set to let her know when somebody quoted the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It was only later in her career as a public speaker that she would hire a clipping service, an old-fashioned newspaper clipping service to send her reports that included stories that included the Battle Hymn of the Republic. And with our technology today, with things like newspapers.com and the New York Times digital database, we have a way to know

how widely distributed her poem was in songbooks, in newspapers, in magazines, far beyond what the poet herself was able to know. She was always very modest about its early success. She said she didn't have much hopes for it. But I think far more Americans knew this song and sang it as a battle anthem than she was aware of for many, many years. Well, let's get into the content of the poem itself. I'm sure most of us know it pretty well, but here's the most famous first verse. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He has trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword.

His truth is marching on. So let's just do some deconstruction of this. What is she talking about here? Yes, I'd be happy to. That's about my favorite thing to do, this kind of close analysis. I think what readers and your listeners in the modern world are less likely to notice about this song is how many allusions to the Bible it has, how many Old Testament references, New Testament references it draws from the prophet Isaiah, it draws from the apocalypse of St. John, the book of Revelation.

Now, certainly many people today are very familiar with that and would pick up on the metaphors and the word pictures she's playing with here. But I don't think we are as likely to notice that as an audience in 1862, a largely biblically literate public, people who memorize large sections of the Bible and would know exactly what she was doing here. But in that first verse you just quoted, it even uses archaic language that sounds like the old King James Version of the Bible, or sometimes called the Authorized Version of the Bible. It's, mine eyes have seen the glory.

But then we come to those really evocative words, the glory of the coming of the Lord. That is biblical language of judgment, of divine judgment, Old Testament and New Testament. Christians would have read this poem, sung this poem, and known that Julia Ward Howe was writing in some sense, whether literally or not, she was writing in some sense about the coming of God in judgment. So with the very first line, we have a poet interpreting the American Civil War in the most exalted or the most epic terms. That what is happening there on the battlefields of Virginia is somehow connected with God's judgment in history. And then that second line, trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, that might be unfamiliar to our ear, but that shows up in the prophet Isaiah, and it is repeated in the book of Revelation. That is another vivid image of divine justice. It is God himself who is trampling out those grapes and producing

that wine, that vintage, it says, of his wrath. And then we have fateful lightning, and then we have a terrible swift sword. This is stunning, stunning language that is meant to, as I said, to put the Civil War in the most dramatic terms. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into

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and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. The opening stanza immediately cements Howe's intent to make this poem a hymn. But when do we get into the politics of the age? When do we learn what the battle is about? Certainly, it's a very good question. As you move through the five stanzas, she originally wrote six stanzas, but she wanted only five printed and published.

As you move through, we encounter images that are more particular to this war. The second stanza speaks of watch fires, the circling camps, the soldiers being in the dews and damps, the dim and flaring lamps, all of this. The third stanza goes on to speak of a fiery gospel as reflected as glinting in the burnished rows of steel. So we have this much clearer battle imagery of actual soldiers in their encampments. It moves from there into language that continues to repeat, to revisit this theme of redemption. It is very much a redemptive song. It makes a connection back to Jesus and the promise of deliverance in the gospel that's happening in the third stanza there. As ye deal with my contemners, this is God the Father speaking here, the Lord speaking,

as ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal. Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel. And that takes us all the way back to the early chapters of Genesis with the curse on Adam and Eve and the serpent. And the serpent is told that he will be crushed by the heel of the Messiah. So she has so much happening at once in this poem. And if I could also mention what is not in this poem, I think that's also as important and one of the reasons why this poem turned out to be so durable. And I may be anticipating where you're going to go in future questions, and forgive me if I'm doing that. But this poem never uses the word civil war, word civil war. It never says the North.

It never says the South. Surprisingly, it never says slavery. So that's part of its ability to be repeated in generations ahead and to be applied to other circumstances. But as someone once said about this poem, Julia Ward Howe meant every word. She is portraying the Civil War as an apocalyptic event. She was an abolitionist, and certainly that informed her, the moral fury perhaps behind this poem. That's right. Can you characterize her view on abolitionism and her politics of the day? Yes.

She was an early abolitionist, outspoken. She and her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, for a couple of years in the 1850s, were actually editors of an abolitionist newspaper in Boston. She was responsible for the literary, cultural arts side of that newspaper. And she wrote about slavery, about abolition. She wrote essays for the Atlantic Monthly. She wrote, one of the things I discovered in the course of this project is that she was the author of some anonymous essays for the New York Tribune published right before the Civil War. And she took some pretty bold stands against slavery and promoted the union cause in the war. In fact, one of those articles that she published anonymously appeared just a couple of weeks

before she traveled to DC and was inspired to write her poem. So we have what I think, if I can speak immodestly for a moment, I think I'm providing now an unprecedented ability to reconstruct her world immediately surrounding this poem. She opposed slavery. She opposed the extension of slavery. She looked forward to the day when slavery would end in the United States. She actually had a global vision when all kinds of oppression would end and people of all sorts would be emancipated. She was active in the women's rights movement. She was not always as enlightened as we might wish when it came to questions of race. She said some very controversial things about the capacity of freed slaves for self-government,

believing it would take a very long time. But a unifying theme of her life for many, many decades, I would say, is the theme of emancipation. Emancipation from all kinds of restrictions in politics and society and economics. She saw herself as a spokesperson for sweeping emancipation. So this is the genesis then of the poem, the song. Yes. A moral impetus in the midst of America's perhaps most moral war. But the song in its rallying cry endures well past the Civil War. Even in Howe's own lifetime, she sees the resurrection of her song in another conflict. Absolutely. It's a fascinating part of the story.

And then we start bringing more characters into the story because her daughters, all of her daughters had one degree or another of literary careers. Some of them wrote extensively as adults. And they become part of this story because they reflected on the significance of the battle hymn for the Spanish-American War. They wrote essays about it and about why it was being sung again during the Spanish-American War. If you look at newspapers from April 1898, just as Congress is about to declare war, McKinley addresses Congress, Congress is debating the war declaration, newspapers across America start publishing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, often on the first page of their newspapers, without comment,

as if it's obvious, as if it's self-evident that America would start singing the battle hymn again. They don't comment on it. I have to speculate, but it seems to me that they saw it, editors of newspapers, politicians, saw it as a natural fit that America was now embarking on its next crusade, a crusade, a humanitarian crusade, a crusade to liberate Cuba from Spanish misrule, they would have said, to they don't know it yet, but the U.S. is going to end up in possession of the Philippine Islands. So for those who sang the battle hymn, interpreted, applied the battle hymn as a broad anthem for humanitarian causes, and it certainly had become that, it was natural for them to apply it to this new war. It was sung everywhere. More sheet music was printed that featured pictures of the Spanish American War on the cover and circulated the Battle Hymn of the Republic for a new war. And we even have the example of Mark Twain in a letter he wrote to his friend. He didn't publish this at the time, but in a letter he wrote to a friend,

he quickly sketched out a parody of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. And he said that it was the Battle Hymn of the Republic brought down to date instead of brought up to date. And I don't have much of it memorized, but he just excoriated America's thirst for empire and wrote this bitter satire of the hymn as his depiction of the real causes, the real base material causes of the Spanish-American War. But it doesn't end there. It keeps going on in America's wars.

Yeah, it is used again in World War I, in World War II, almost every conflict we've ever been in, it creeps up again. But do you think that it's something in its original form that was righteous in the Civil War that was co-opted in the Spanish-American War for the purposes of colonialism? I would find that a tempting conclusion or a tempting hypothesis. One of the problems there is that, and I wrestle with this, I wrestle with just how to explain this without exaggerating it. But it is correct to say that Julia Ward Howe herself was something of an imperialist. In fact, the London Times made that claim after her death in 1910 in an obituary for her, said that she was always an expansionist at heart. Now, I think we need to handle that judiciously, cautiously, but let me give you an example of something that she said in around 1900, maybe early 1901. And the context was the use of American Marines

in the Boxer Rebellion to protect American property and embassies in Beijing. At that point, she said she was asked to give some extemporaneous comments at a public meeting in Boston, I believe to honor some Civil War Union veterans. And she said that we, as a nation, we are now turning from the Old Testament of liberty for ourselves to the New Testament of liberty for all. And right there, and if you look at this in what she says in her journal and elsewhere, what her daughters are writing, there is something in Julia Ward Howe that desires a very active, muscular U.S. presence in the world. She's very close friends with Teddy Roosevelt. So it's a little difficult to say that the poem is being co-opted. Now, certainly the poem is being used in ways she would not recognize, probably to extremes that she would disavow. But nevertheless, there is something in Julia Ward Howe that is – there's a bit of an imperial temper there to her.

Four years after her death, World War I starts, and the song is yet again used to embolden and rally. How was it used in World War I? In World War I, the Battle Hymn of the Republic becomes what I call an international battle hymn. And that was being said of it at the time. In fact, some said that during the Spanish-American War, that the Battle Hymn of the Republic no longer belonged just to the United States. It actually belonged to everyone fighting for freedom everywhere. British authors took up that theme. Rudyard Kipling took up that theme already in the 1880s. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said this, writing about the breakthrough of the

Hindenburg Line in 1918, that it was if the Battle Hymn of the Republic was being played out again in front of him before his very eyes. And the British were very shrewd in their use of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It was during the First World War that they started using the Battle Hymn as an anthem to honor America. It became a signature anthem to honor America, American service in the war. And it became a way to mark, to celebrate the Anglo-American alliance. And it helped in some way, even the British themselves, to define the war. It started showing up in British songbooks. It started showing up in hymn books. To this day, I believe it is still in the Anglican hymn book of the Church of England.

I have sat in St. Paul's Cathedral on Thanksgiving Day in a service for Americans in the city, and the congregation sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic. So it's remarkable how popular this song remains and how closely it remains identified with the Anglo-American special relationship in the 20th century. How did Birkenstocks go from a German cobbler's passion project 250 years ago to the Barbie movie today? Who created that bottle of red Sriracha with a green top that's permanently living in your fridge?

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You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. Of course, the hem wasn't always used to rally military troops. It is an anthem of struggle and strife for freedom almost everywhere,

and in particular was used by Martin Luther King in his mountaintop speech. Yes. How was the anthem used in the Civil Rights Movement? That's certainly the most famous and the most important. And you're right that Martin Luther King Jr. used it repeatedly in his speeches, catchphrases from it. And in the rhythm, the way in which he brought the crowd along with him in statement and response in those speeches, he used the battle hymn a great deal. It shows up, if you do a newspaper search in the 1950s and 60s for the battle hymn, you find it appearing all over the South and even beyond in any number of peaceful protests, demonstrations, you find it in Alabama, Georgia. It's very common that groups together in protest, maybe at the Capitol building in Montgomery, they will start singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic as a signature song. And I believe that that use of the Battle Hymn of the Republic

would, I think we could interpret that use of it as the least ironic use of the Battle Hymn, because the Battle Hymn ends up being sung by all kinds of people that Julia Ward Howe didn't particularly like. She had very strong views. She did not like Mormons, for instance, and did not want them to flourish in America. And now the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings it all the time as its own signature anthem. But that's ironic because that's not something Julia Ward Howe pictured them doing. But its use in the civil rights movement is much closer to its original intention. What makes this song so powerful? That, I'm hesitating here. That is hard to answer. How does one poem from a war that produced many, many poems, how does one poem take hold of the public imagination? I don't think there's an easy answer for that. I think we can just watch it happen and maybe try to explain it along the way. In many ways, and maybe this will offend some people,

but this poem is not necessarily high art. It has its merits, but she never quite attained the level of real literary excellence in America among the poets of the mid-19th century. It's considered one of her finest poems, and I think that's true. But its power, I think, lies in its associations with the memories of wars. It lies at the sentimental level of American patriotism. It takes its place alongside America the Beautiful, the Star-Spangled Banner. It nearly became our national anthem in the early 20th century.

So it has a familiarity to it. Children sing it. We sing it in all kinds of contexts. I think all those reasons add up to its durability. But also, I doubt this poem would be as durable as it has become and remained if people actually connected its stanzas to the prophetic and apocalyptic sections of the Bible. I think to some degree, this poem is sung in ignorance. And the last verse is very popular because it's much more calm, sentimental. It speaks of Christ and the beauty of the lilies.

It speaks of his death and the need to die to make others free, and that's a very famous line. But the other stanzas, certainly the first three stanzas, but maybe the first four stanzas, but maybe the first four are violent, much more violent than we realize as we sing them. And I think that forgetfulness or that ignorance on the part of the general public, and that's not a criticism. We all sing things and recite things that we don't know the full meaning of. But I think that has kept this anthem very popular. There's little reflection on the actual content of the words.

That's an interesting thought, because your center of study might be on civil religion. Yes. So I'm interested in why you'd study this poem and perhaps also tell our audience what civil religion is. Right. I'm afraid the reason why the book exists is a pretty prosaic reason. I had a colleague who walked into my office, and he's the series editor for a new series about religion in American life, it's called. And he walked into my office and said, have you ever thought about writing a book on the

Battle Hymn of the Republic? So six or seven years later, there is now a book on the Battle Hymn of the Republic. But it does reflect my longstanding interest in civil religion, classes I teach, books I review, a lot of my writing of previous books of mine have been about civil religion. Civil religion in a nutshell, which is not easy to do, but in a nutshell, civil religion works in two ways. At one level, civil religion takes religious symbols and words. I'll use the example of the Bible. Civil religion in America takes the Bible, the words and the content of the Bible, and turns it to the purposes of the state,

and especially to the purposes of the wars waged by the nation. So it takes the religious and turns it and uses it for the purposes of the nation. And that's one of the things we see happening in the battle hymn. The other side of civil religion, which is a more common definition of civil religion, says that parts of our national experience, the symbols, let's say George Washington, the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell, certain slogans and phrases of the people by the people, the content, the symbolic content of our national life gets elevated to the place, to the function of a religion. These are the things that help bind us together as a people.

So that's the other meaning of civil religion. In practice, both of those go together. We find the same people encouraging civil religion or using civil religion who are doing both things simultaneously. And Americans get used to their sermons sounding like political speeches and their political speeches sounding like sermons. But when that happens, that's a manifestation of civil religion. Dr. Gamble, thank you so much for being on American History Tellers today. Lindsay, it has been an honor and a privilege.

That was my conversation with historian Richard Gamble. Check out his new book, A Fiery Gospel, The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Road to Righteous War. It's available for pre-order now. On our last special episode of American History Tellers, we ask you a question. If you could be an everyday person at some point in American history, which time period would you choose and why? We've got some good responses. Hello, my name is Tully. I'm a history teacher from Shreveport, Louisiana. The period that I would pick would be the 1920s. It's a great time in automobile history, along with the crazy economy and the progression of the social life as well.

Hi, my name is Sam. I'm calling from Princeton, New Jersey. If I could be anywhere in America at any time, it would have to be the late 60s. There were so many revolutions going on at this time. Hi, my name is Al. If I could be alive at any time in history, I'd want it to be the time period before and just after founding fathers put together the Constitution of the United States. So many people reference it and claim that we are not following it, no matter who you talk to.

So I would love to understand what they really intended and maybe help me to better understand whether we are indeed holding true to it or not. It seems like a lot of rhetoric. It's hard to know what the truth is. So I'd love to understand what they meant. Those were listeners Al McGovern from Naperville, Illinois, Sam Rosenfeld from Highland Park,

New Jersey, and Tully Covington, an eighth grade history teacher from Shreveport, Louisiana. We loved hearing from you. And if you haven't called in, please do. We're at 424-285-0548. Call to tell us which time period you would choose and why. Remember to include your name and where you were calling from. We might play your message on the show. Again, that's 424-285-0548. 424-285-0548. From Wondery, this is Episode 7 of The Great Depression from American History Tellers. On the next episode, President Woodrow Wilson's efforts to suppress America's growing anarchist movement brings the little-known, poorly-funded, and notoriously corrupt Bureau of Investigation into the national spotlight, and eventually launches the career of an ambitious young civil servant named Edgar Hoover. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free

on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Sound design by Derek Behrens. This episode is written by Bill Lasher. Edited by Dorian Marina. Edited and produced by Jenny Lauer Beckman. Produced by George Lavender. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis. Created by Hernán López for Wondery. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments,

mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that defined their journey, and the ideas that transformed the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation, and Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead.

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