American History Tellers - Rebellion in the Early Republic - How Early American Revolts Shaped Today’s Protests | 7

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

In 1799, the U.S. government imposed a new tax on houses, land, and slaves to fund an expanded military. A man named John Fries led Pennsylvania Dutch farmers in protest of the law. What became known as Fries’ Rebellion was the third major tax revolt in the nation’s short history. But President Adams quashed Fries’ Rebellion with military force—a response widely viewed as an overreaction. The protesters went on to help usher Adams out of office. Their actions proved that Americans could challenge their government without resorting to violence, and that popular dissent could exist within the rule of law…affirming a tradition of protest that exists now. On today’s episode, we hear from Pulitzer winning historian and legal scholar Edward J. Larson. Larson is a history professor and the Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. He is also author of the new book “Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership” (William Morrow, 2020).Larson takes us into a deeper dive into how the early American rebellions were resolved, and what that era of our nation’s history can teach us about how the government handles pushback from citizens now.Additional books by Edward J. Larson:“The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783-1789” (William Morrow, 2015)“A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800” (Free Press, 2008)Support us 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 March, 1799. You're in a tavern in Milford Township, Pennsylvania, 45 miles north of Philadelphia. You're a federal tax assessor, and you're exhausted after riding around the area all day trying to collect a new tax on real estate. Already, people are refusing to pay. You're hoping that if you can just explain the tax, maybe you can diffuse tensions.

So inside this crowded tavern, you stand to try and make your case. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. If I can have everyone's attention, please, please. I said good afternoon. Thank you. Thank you. I am the principal tax assessor for this county. And I'm here to inform you about the various provisions of the new tax law. I'm sure you'll all come to understand that it's really quite reasonable. You're about to continue with your speech when the door opens and a dozen men stride into the tavern.

One of them is carrying a flag with the word liberty emblazoned across it. And all at once, the patrons start talking again. This doesn't look promising, but you're determined to do your job. You take a deep breath and press on. If you would all just listen, I'm sure you will be reassured about the fairness of this tax. Please. You look down at the piece of parchment in your hand and begin to read the law aloud. Section one. The Federalists have no right to make such a law. This is government oppression, no better than the British crown. The man who interrupted you pushes through the crowd to stand just a few feet away.

He's wearing a tattered old Continental Army uniform, and he's looking at you with utter disgust. Sir, if you would just let me explain the law. You're cheating us. I know you are. I'll bet all the money you collect from us. You throw up your arms in frustration at the accusation. I can assure you, I'm doing no such thing. I'm here to administer the law. Well, we don't want any of your damn laws. I'll never submit to having my house taxed. That's preposterous. It's my house. As citizens of this country, I'm afraid you just don't have a choice. Well, we'll see about that. The room is seething with anger.

Your meeting is turning into a protest. You know you're not able to be able to change their minds today, so you push through the crowd to leave. You just hope this doesn't escalate into a full-fledged revolt. You're not sure the country can take any more bloodshed. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with.

Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. Follow Kill List wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. Five years after the Whiskey Rebellion unleashed terror in western Pennsylvania, a new rebellion against federal taxes erupted 300 miles to the east. In 1799, the U.S. government imposed a new tax on houses, land, and slaves to fund an expanded military.

A man named John Fries led Pennsylvania Dutch farmers in protest to the law. What became known as Fries' Rebellion was the third major tax revolt in the nation's short history. John Fries had marched west with the army that suppressed the Whiskey Rebels. He and his neighbors learned crucial lessons from the failure of the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays' Rebellion. This time, not a single shot was fired. The farmers acted with tremendous restraint, using non-violent protest to petition their representatives. They focused their opposition on the law, President John Adams, and the Federalist Party, not on the authority of the U.S. government itself.

Nonetheless, President Adams quashed Free's rebellion with military force, a response widely viewed as an overreaction, one that might have cost him re-election. The protesters' actions proved that Americans could challenge their government without resorting to violence, and that popular dissent could exist within the rule of law, affirming a tradition of protest that exists to this day. In today's episode, we take a deeper dive into how the early American rebellions were resolved and what that era of our nation's history can teach us about how the government handles pushback from citizens today. For more on that, I'm speaking with Pulitzer-winning historian and legal scholar Edward J. Larson. Larson is a history professor and Hugh and Hazel Darling Chair in Law at

Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. He is also author of the new book, Franklin and Washington, The Founding Partnership. Here's our conversation. Ed Larson, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you for having me. Now, you've written several books on America in the late 18th century and the unrest that was prevalent at the time. But what is something that most of us don't realize about the issues that people were facing in this era in America? As you know, we get a pretty rosy picture presented in our general history about the revolutionary era, but it was a lot tougher than generally presented. One of the things was when we're talking about

when the revolution ended, the enormous economic collapse, the depression that fell on to the now newly independent states without those states having the capability to deal with that economic recession or depression. Now, the causes were obvious in retrospect. We'd had all that pent-up spending during the war. We had benefited from tariff protection before the war. And now after the war, people went on a spending spree and nobody take our dollars. So all of our gold went over to Europe or even to Asia to buy goods. But nobody buy our goods because they had tariff walls against our country. We were no longer within any empire's trading system, and we were on our own. And so they could build walls against us.

But because of the way, you know, the post-revolutionary settlement was, there was no central government that could impose tariffs against foreign goods. And therefore, we were a wide open market. The result was an economic collapse throughout the colonies, which limited economic opportunity just when people had the greatest hopes that with the Revolution I, we would have paradise. Second also was the closure of the frontier. Because there was no central government, there was no army. There was no way to open the frontier. The British still, contrary to the Treaty of Paris, they retained their troops in the forts in the Northwest Territories, in the Ohio country, as it were. Plus, the Native Americans weren't about ready to step aside voluntarily.

So we had no way to protect the frontier, which was under technically the domain of the central government. And the frontier for America had always been our safety valve. That, just when they were hoping for good times, didn't get them. I mean, the American Revolution was probably the one thing that Americans banded together for, their independence. After 1776, or the victory thereafter, they didn't have the same common cause. Splintering began immediately. What were some of the first divides that emerged in our country at that time? Lindsay, that's a great observation because the economic collapse simply accelerated and made worse this splintering. Part of the splintering was, of course, economic. We'd always had rich and poor people in America. That had been the way.

But there were people who thought during the revolution that somehow things would be better after it. And so the poor built up their hopes. And of course, many of the poorer people served in the military. That's who, by the end of the war, most of the troops were from the lower classes. They had high hopes. And when the war ended and peace returned, you had that restoration of some people doing quite well and some people crashing down into poverty that was only made worse because of the slaves. Many slaves thought that somehow the revolution would include them. They heard the rhetoric, and it didn't seem to play out. There was some freeing of slaves in Virginia, but for the most part, the old slave and free separation was reinforced, which made it even more frustrating for many of the slaves because their hopes were frustrated. And it wasn't just slave and free, but it was also white and black. After the revolution with some increasing freeing of slaves in places like Virginia and the ending of slavery in the

North, there became an institutionalized divide, sort of a, to put it in much later terms, a Jim Crow-type apartheid separate in the North and more so in Virginia, where they actually passed laws saying that all the freed slaves had to leave Virginia. So there was an institutionalizing of white and black, yet during the revolution, there had been actually quite a few black soldiers in the revolution. The free African Americans in places like Massachusetts and Rhode Island made up a significant minority of the militia, and suddenly their hope. So what we had was a splintering along rich, poor, slave-free, Black, white, Native American that was aggravated by the frustrated hopes of the revolution, and you lay on top of that, that led to the partisan divide. More than anything, the splintering happened along the

developments of political parties. We never really had political parties in America. Maybe a few states, there was some sense of political parties in Pennsylvania and New York before the revolution. But after the revolution, during the run-up to the Constitutional Convention, and especially after it, there is a growing partisan split as these different interest groups, farmers versus urban folks, craftsmen versus business owners, rich, poor, immigrants and non-immigrants banded together into political parties that we'd never seen before, which the people at the Constitutional Convention, people like George Washington, never anticipated the rise of partisan politics that caused, that was the manifestation of

this splintering you're talking about. Well, let's talk about George Washington. He faced pretty much a perfect storm of ingredients for uprising, an economic collapse, a lowered prosperity, widening of income gaps, dashed hopes from the fight for independence, and then a tax on whiskey to try to pay for the debt of the war. This Whiskey Rebellion, the refusal to pay the tax, and violently even, was the first big crisis in Washington's presidency. How do you think it changed him as a president and leader of our country?

The Whiskey Rebellion was a frustrating experience for Washington. Washington, like others, hoped for this Republican virtue and that people would continue to pull together as they had pulled together during the revolution. The Whiskey Rebellion, as you note, had lots of causes. Part of it was to bring the frontier under control, since much of the whiskey was made on the frontier because you couldn't get the grain to market from the frontier. So distilling it into whiskey made it more transportable. Also, Hamilton's economic program, Alexander Hamilton's economic program, had called for

the federal government absorbing all the state debt from the revolution, which made that huge debt that had to be paid off that you're talking about. And so there went the tax on whiskey. Also, the whiskey, of course, would be taxed because it would fall on people who had less political clout. It wasn't the wealthy people, the bankers, the people that Hamilton traditionally aligned himself with. And so here was a, as you're describing it, it was a class revolution. It was frontier versus the coast. It was the poor laboring white people versus the more elites. And so Washington was put on charge of an army, as you noted, the largest army he'd ever led, bigger than the army during any time of the revolution, put up there by Hamilton and sent off to quell this rebellion. And frankly,

it embarrassed Washington once he got out there. It reconnected him with the common man, as it were. He had this association when he was a frontier surveyor. He was always part of the elite, but he had this working relationship. He didn't live in an ivory tower because of his time on the frontier. He knew these common people, as he might call them, and he reconnected with them. And when he did, just as originally, he both sympathized with them and he distrusted them. You can see in his letters when he went out to the frontier, both before the revolution and immediately after the revolution, and now when he goes out with the Whiskey Rebellion, he really sympathizes with these people, and he ends up pardoning those that he captures, but he also distrusts them. He distrusts their ignorance. He distrusts the fact that they're

not like him, disciplined, who made something of himself by practicing virtue and by working hard. It also sensitized him to the level of opposition, that there was a growing partisan divide. And I think it helped influence first, ultimately, his decision not to stay in office indefinitely, but also when he does leave to call for an end of partisanship, that partisanship is going to destroy the country. So he has sort of, I would say, a mixed reaction. It deepens him in the sense that it reacquaints him with what Americans are facing, but he also increases his distrust of whether democracy can really work. That distrust of democracy was already in place in America, certainly before Washington became

president, because, of course, there was no president prior to him. There was no constitution. We were working under the Articles of Confederation, which proved to have some major flaws. And this brings me to Shays' Rebellion. Tell us about that revolt's role in ratifying the Constitution that we have now today. Shays' Rebellion played an essential role. When you look back, historians suggest that it will maybe not be as significant as we think it is because it wasn't as big as some people portrayed it. But it was huge. If you look at the letters by people like Madison and Washington and even Benjamin Franklin, you can see that this revolution, the way it was portrayed to them and

the press, well, I guess to put it in the vernacular, scared the bejesus out of them, that here they saw former soldiers, former officers in the American Revolution, rising up, overthrowing the local tax collectors, the local mortgage, the local banks, the local courthouses to stop the foreclosures of their farms, which they viewed as, these people like Washington, viewed as an assault on basic property rights put in place by democratically elected governments. fear that the states couldn't handle this sort of revolt and the need, therefore, to have a stronger central government that could maintain liberty, but also property rights. Because for many of these people like Washington, their property rights were an essential part of liberty. And then they would compare it with states like Rhode Island, which seemed to them to be knuckling to the debtors and forgiving debts or producing a radically inflated currency,

which has the same effect as nullifying debts. And so you combine with the reaction in Massachusetts with the actions in Rhode Island, and it drove people to believe, many people, that we need a strong central government that can act as a governor over all this, control interstate commerce, control the money supply, have a force able to go in and deal with these situations, centralize these issues. And instead of having each state deal with these economic problems alone, have one central government that could put tariffs on foreign goods, control international commerce, but also have total control over interstate commerce. When you put those things together, Shays' Rebellion had a tremendous psychological effect nationwide throughout the country that both propelled the meeting of the Constitutional Convention.

It's the one thing that made sure that George Washington showed up at the convention. And without him there, it wouldn't have worked and then helped push ratification. 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 the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary

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NBA? We'll explore all that and more in The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy. This is Nick. This is Jack. And we've covered over a thousand episodes of pop business news stories on our daily podcast. We've identified the most viral products of all time. And their wild origin stories that you had no idea about.

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and the First Amendment. The First Amendment is clear that people can assemble peacefully. Protest certainly is an American institution. How do you think those exercising First Amendment rights now and throughout history and these rebellions are similar and different? How have these rebellions, Shays and Whiskey, informed our government's handling of pushback from civilians today? were American events. Now, originally, the First Amendment didn't apply to the states. It only applied to the states in the 20th century. So those rights of assembly and free press, those were just guaranteed by the First Amendment against the central government.

So individual states had to deal with these developments on their own and could pass their own laws. But we see through these popular local revolts, and we give a lot of attention to Shays' Rebellion, but there were similar risings of the regulators, as they were usually called, to stop foreclosures. They happened in Virginia. They happened in North Carolina. They happened in other places as well with similar causes. And they teach us that citizens in a republic do have more power to push against their government than they would in a monarchy or in a theocracy or in a military dictatorship. That republics tend to be more responsive to revolts, whether they be revolts at the ballot box or riots in the streets or against the draft or against other activities. They tend to be more responsive unless they go too far and cause a counter reaction. But generally, the American Republican government, as with the Shays' Rebellion, would be a good example of that. You have that shock, the same king. You're not stuck with the same pope.

You're not stuck with the same military dictator. You can have an outlet where this steam can go off and then you can adjust and elect a new leader such as Massachusetts getting rid of Bowdoin and replacing him with John Hancock. And that new person now has, or that new senators or the new governors, the new president, whatever it is, it happened the same thing with the reaction against the hard-handed policies of John Adams with the election of 1800. In could come Thomas

Jefferson and free all the people who had been arrested by the Alien and Sedition Acts and have a reaction to it. So the American system developed an ability to absorb those shocks and turn those revolts or riots into constructive resolutions that ended up coming up with a peaceful, quasi-democratic, quasi-Republican compromise that allowed us to muddle ahead. These shocks, of course, have happened throughout our American history. There's a constant pendulum swing of action and reaction, but also of unity and then partisanship. These adjustments, these reactions are part of what moves history, American history forward. Can you share some examples of other shocks throughout history and how this pendulum has

moved? The American people, we see in their reaction to Shays' Rebellion, we see in their reaction to the Whiskey Rebellion, which at first was really harsh and then backed off. The tax was dealt with, same way with the early movements of Southern states for nullifying the tariffs that ended up being a predecessor to the Civil War. There, the tariff was lowered. We're able to sort of react for the most part. A great example would be the Great Depression. Here, Hoover tried a very firm reaction, and the American people pulled back and elected a Democratic Congress in 1930 elections, and then in 1932 elected Roosevelt, who came up with a new set of plans. The reaction to the earlier pandemic with the Spanish flu and the repression following World War I led to a repudiation of Wilson. The Democrats first lost the Senate in the middle of the pandemic and the House of Representatives in the middle of the Spanish flu pandemic. And then two years later, in a return to normalcy, Harding beat the Democratic candidate who was trying to follow Wilson. So we have this sort of reaction, this absorbing of these shocks that happen throughout. And what you see through it all, I think, is that American peoples, we tend to be a pretty pragmatic people. We're a pretty practical people. That is, we're not that ideological. We don't look for doctrinaire solutions. We look for pragmatic sort of solutions. We're sort of living to the future. We are somewhat distrusting of our

leaders and experts. We sort of want to work it out one day at a time. Now, the one danger is that that tends to make us very short-sighted. We look toward dealing with the immediate problems immediately. And maybe we overlook long-term problems. So it makes us probably more able to deal with a pandemic in a pragmatic way once we get used to it, more able to deal with the shock of a Shays' Rebellion and come up with the pragmatic compromise. But maybe if there's an existential threat like climate change that's a long way off, it doesn't put us in a very good role to deal with that sort of problem. Changing topics a little bit, in our series, we also talked about the rebellions which probably had the best cause, the slave revolts. We also talked about how the Haitian Revolution instilled fear in white Americans about slave

uprisings on American shores. What happened in Haiti and how did it influence the outcome of Gabriel's Rebellion, for instance, and how Virginians responded to the rebellion? The rebellion in Haiti was a sort of a, what was your card, fire bell in the night? I think that was a phrase later used. Haiti was the most prosperous European colony in the Americas at the time. By the 1780s, 1790s, it was a sugar colony. It was France's sugar colony, enormous wealth. Sugar was as gold was before, and the gold was to the Spanish empire as oil is today, and we fight wars over oil, or at least we did until the collapse of the oil price a few

weeks ago. With sugar, white gold was an enormous sense of wealth. It's almost amazing to look back, to look at the percentage of the British and French foreign economy for their empires that came from their sugar colonies. One reason America was able to win the revolution is when France joined our side, England had to shift most of their troops down to the Caribbean to defend their sugar colonies because they cared a lot more about whether they could hold on to Barbados than whether they could hold on to Massachusetts because it was worth more. And so when the French Revolution broke out with its tremendous ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, coupled with the collapse that the reign of terror in France brought and the collapse of

French power and the French military, well, that was a breeding ground for revolution in Haiti because Haiti had become so concentrated on producing sugar, an enormous percentage, 90% or more of their people were black slaves producing this sugar with a very small level of incredibly wealthy colonists, French colonists living atop this seething mass of enslaved humanity. So you compare that with any place in America, because that's the comparison that you're getting at. South Carolina, what, maybe two-thirds of the people were enslaved blacks and one-third white. Virginia, maybe 50-50, maybe 40% enslaved blacks, 60% whites.

You're dealing with that sort of percentages. In Haiti, it was much higher, 90%. And then you had the collapse of the French power, their ability to project the military power over onto Haiti. And then the ideals and dreams roused up among the enslaved Africans with these ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity. And so you get an explosion. And the result is this huge, huge majority of black people are able to violently overthrow their masters, kill many of them, drive them out, recapture Haiti. And when the French, the weakened French, try to reinstate power, they fail. They send troops over and it fails. So Haiti successfully

revolts in the shadow of the American Revolution. Now, this naturally is widely publicized in America, and it's publicized in a partisan way. It gets into the partisan politics. Well, you can look at the newspaper, the partisan newspapers back then, and those trying to cater to a certain class of fear that people had, they would portray the incredible violence in Haiti and the inability of the rebels when they took over due to lack of education and resources to institute much of a very stable government. And it was presented one way, but on the other side, you had people looking toward America being a model and bringing revolution. And you had a growing number of abolitionists in America who looked hopefully at what was happening in Haiti.

And so that increased the divide. And because of the success of the revolution in Haiti, suddenly white slave owners in places like Virginia and the Carolinas and Georgia, they said, my, it worked there. It might work here. This may be an inspiration for our slaves to rise up, and it may show that we're not able to break them down. And that helped cause, when Prosser's Rebellion came or things like that, that fed a violent reaction that wanted to nip this in the bud. Of course, Gabriel's Rebellion was put down and its participants held to account. This is perhaps an interesting point in American pragmatic politics, because the reprisals, though there was violence, were not as brutal or complete as they could have been. What do you think was the reasoning behind the decisions that led to

the reaction to Gabriel's Rebellion? Well, with Gabriel's Rebellion in particular, of course, it was nipped in the bud in the sense that because of the timing of the rainstorm and they looked back, they caught it because some members got cold feet and talked ahead of time. And they were able to, Governor Monroe was able to act quickly. They were able to suppress it before it actually led to a uprising. And the fact that some of the possible participants then turned on it, and it was a slave, another slave that turned in, Gabriel Prosser, it was other slaves that talked. That led to a general sense that, look, we need to maintain slavery. We've got to be firm in our dealing with the rebels, but we also must deal with it in a way that seems in some way fair and appropriate to the situation.

So the fact that it was caught when it was caught and the way it was caught and the role freed blacks played in it, the way it was interpreted, there was a firm closure, but also one that they thought that the white leaders in Virginia who tried to deal with this in a manner that they could return back to the previous situation and didn't move into a situation where you would need constant arms suppression of this massive slave population that Virginia had. Further, one interesting aspect that often gets overlooked about Gabriel's Rebellion is that it occurred during an election cycle. It occurred during the election of 1800, and that was an election that pit Jefferson against Adams. It was expected to be a very close election, and it was a very partisan election.

Gabriel's Rebellion played into it in complicated ways. Virginia was, of course, strongly backing Jefferson and his party. Monroe was a key, Governor Monroe was a key supporter of Jefferson. Madison, of course, was his campaign manager, as it were. And the other side was John Adams. Now, John Adams, the Federalist candidate, of course, John Adams was the only person who signed the Declaration of Independence who never owned slaves. He was not a supporter of slavery. And his party, which was rooted in the North,

tended to be, to the extent this was possible, tended to be more abolitionist, more opposed to slavery, and had been criticizing Jefferson as a slave owner. He was a slave owner. Adams isn't a slave owner. That was part of the partisan divide. So now you see a revolution happening right in the middle of it. And so in dealing with it, the Federalist Party, the party of John Adams, was playing, well, look where Jefferson's policies are getting to. There was already talk about Jefferson and his relationship with his own being a slave owner and his relationship with slaves. That was already a matter of conversation. And so it was very consciously thought, and you can read it in the record, Monroe was talking with Madison and talking

with Jefferson, how can we bring this down in a way, if we bring it down too violently, the North will play this up. The Federalists will play this up. Get the immigrants, because a key part of Jefferson's coalition was the immigrants in the North. They were his hope to take New York and to take Pennsylvania. And these people didn't like slavery. And it turns out that the key to Jefferson's victory are New York and Pennsylvania, because he has to win when he lost four years ago. So if there had been too violent a suppression of the blacks in Virginia, it would play into Federalist hands. And so they consciously tried to make a reaction that was enough to stop the revolt and discourage slaves from revolting again and free blacks from

revolting again, but not enough to alienate the immigrants and other groups that were part of the Jeffersonian coalition in the North. Dracula, the ancient vampire who terrorizes Victorian London. Blood and garlic, bats and crucifixes. Even if you haven't read the book, you think you know the story. One of the incredible things about Dracula is that not only is it this wonderful snapshot of the 19th century, but it also has so much resonance today. The vampire doesn't cast a reflection in a mirror. So when we look in the mirror, the only thing we see is our own monstrous abilities. From the host and producer of American History Tellers and History Daily comes the new podcast, The Real History of Dracula.

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And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition, wherever you get your books. So returning to rebellion in general, throughout American history, we understand the difference, nominally at least, between rebellion and protest. We haven't seen an armed rebellion in quite a long time, certainly not of the scale that America saw early in its years. But I was wondering if you could perhaps give us a definitional difference between rebellion and protest and why perhaps we remain a protesting nation, but not a rebellious one. There's a continuum between a revolution and a gathering and assembly to protest. And all through American history, we can see things along that continuum. And so you look back in the 1960s, well, what

about the disturbances? And there were more than disturbances. Disturbances in Watts, in Los Angeles, or in Detroit, or in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic Convention, or go back to the time of the Depression, and we'll look at the protests that would lead in violence in some cases by the veterans' marches or the large groups of people living in Hoovervilles around the country. You look, go back further and look at the draft riots during the Civil War, or even the draft riots and the reaction to the draft in World War I. But the Civil War was the most dramatic. And so these things fall on a continuum, running from pitched revolt to localized disturbances

to simply people such as happening now gathering at their state capitals in groups beyond the officially accepted size protesting the closures of businesses and the lockdown. One of the factors is none of those have become national. They remain regional, whether it be the draft riots during the Civil War were mostly in New York, or even the civil rights uprisings, they would be in certain cities like Detroit or Los Angeles, but not nationwide at the same time. But in a deeper sense, this is the nature of the American political system, the pragmatic nature of the American people, that we have shock absorbers, that then we have elections. Then people can channel their concerns to electing a new government,

a new mayor, a new city council, a new governor, a new senator. And by being able to re-challenge our protests into distinct political parties that absorb some of the concerns, maybe some of the civil rights concerns or maybe some of the law and order concerns or maybe some of the concerns about the draft and absorb them into their policies. So we go from an internationalist country, as we were under Wilson, to an isolationist country, as we were under Harding, to deal with the disturbances that were coming up during the end of the First World War. We end up having these shock absorbers that deal with these concerns, maybe only half a loaf, maybe only partway, but enough to calm the waters and allow us to move ahead in sort of that pragmatic one day at a time, maybe short-sighted, but ultimately workable fashion that has become characteristic of the American people. Well, Ed Larson, thanks so much for speaking with me today. Oh, it's been an honor. I've truly enjoyed being on your show. Thank you for your questions. That was my conversation with Edward J. Larson, history professor and Hugh and Hazel Darling

chair-in-law at Pepperdine University. Larson's authored at least three books, The Return of George Washington, Uniting the States 1783 to 1789, A Magnificent Catastrophe, The Tumultuous Election of 1800, and his newest, Franklin and Washington, The Founding Partnership. You can find links to these books in the episode description. Next on American History Tellers, on December 7th, 1941, hundreds of Japanese warplanes rained death and destruction down on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The sneak attack shocked the nation and drew it into World War II. The U.S. had been ravaged by the Great Depression.

Mobilizing the country for war would require unprecedented government intervention in industry, the economy, and American lives. In our next two-part series, we'll look back at the home front during World War II and how the crisis sparked new opportunities, challenges, and questions about what it meant to be a patriot and an American during a time of crisis. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. 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. This episode was produced by Audrey Ngo. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis. Created by Hernan Lopez for Wondery. Are you in trouble with the law? Need a lawyer who will fight like hell to keep you out of jail?

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