American History Tellers - Supreme Court Landmarks | The Outsize Power of the Supreme Court Today | 8

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

Throughout our series, we've seen how social movements and partisan politics helped influence the decisions of landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, and thus shape America itself. But how did the Supreme Court get so powerful when America's founders imagined a more limited role? Today, the idea of court-packing, first proposed by Roosevelt to push through his New Deal agenda, is back as a way to rein in the power of the Court. In this episode, Lindsay speaks with Rachel Shelden, an associate professor of history at Penn State and director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center about how the Court’s power has grown since its founding, and how politicians and presidents could use that to their advantage.For more on Rachel Shelden: https://history.la.psu.edu/directory/ras6620Support 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 February 2nd, 1937. You're a Republican senator from Idaho, and tonight you're in the East Room of the White House. President Franklin Roosevelt is entertaining dozens of the most important people in Washington for the annual Judiciary Dinner. Almost every member of the Supreme Court is here, hobnobbing with senators and socialites. You wander over to a corner where your friend, Congressman on the House Judiciary Committee, stands sipping an old-fashioned. As you approach, he raises his glass.

Well, this is quite an evening. The President sure seems to be in a good mood. Across the room, Roosevelt is holding court with Chief Justice Hughes. He should be. The man's entering his second term with the best showing in electoral college since James Monroe. And Monroe ran unopposed. Yes, well, he's riding high now, but wait till the court gets through with his agenda this time around.

You give your friend a wry smile and take a sip of your martini, setting it down on the gold-leaf grand piano beside you. If what happened over the National Recovery Act is any sign, the court won't stand for his overreach. Though I don't expect that to deter Roosevelt. I'm sure he thinks he has a mandate now to do whatever he pleases. The congressman nods and tips his drink in your direction again. Great speech last night, by the way. I guess they don't call you the Lion of Idaho for nothing. So I gather you think the rumors are true? Why, don't you?

Well, Roosevelt's arrogant, but I don't think he's stupid. Hard to imagine him squandering all this goodwill on a showdown with the court. Well, let's just say I wouldn't put anything past the man. But the public's on our side. The Supreme Court is sacrosanct. I just hope he remembers that. Well, by the looks of things tonight, it's hard to imagine him trying anything. Those two sure seem chummy. You follow your friend's gaze across the room. The President is deep in conversation

with Chief Justice Hughes, waving around his cigarette holder as he regales the judge with a story. Hughes, who's normally icy and imposing, is roaring with laughter at the President's joke. Roosevelt grins, and you catch a twinkle in his eye. Suddenly, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach. He reminds me of that Roman emperor, One who looked around his dinner table and laughed at the thought of how many of those heads would be rolling the next day. A friend raises his eyebrows. What do you mean? If you ask me, this is the last time we can expect to see the president sharing cocktails with the Chief Justice. I look over there and see nothing but a man about to go to war. 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.

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 Tellers. Our history, your story. In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was swept into a second term in a landslide election. But his triumph at the polls was dampened by his growing fear for the future of his New Deal agenda. The conservative-leaning Supreme Court had struck down a slew of New Deal laws. In Roosevelt's mind, the Court was preventing him from taking steps to rescue the nation from the Great Depression. And so Roosevelt, convinced that he had the voter's seal of approval, resolved to take radical action. He and his advisors devised a secret plan to expand the court with justices who would rule in favor of his agenda.

Just three days after hosting the Supreme Court justices at a lavish White House dinner, Roosevelt shocked the nation by proposing legislation that would allow him to appoint an additional justice for every judge over 70 who did not retire. He hoped this would allow him to expand the bench with six new justices. But the backlash to Roosevelt's plan was swift and fierce. Critics accused the president of packing the court in a blatant overreach of executive power. Roosevelt lost the votes he needed to pass the bill, and the legislation was eventually buried. Still, regarding the courts, Roosevelt later claimed that though he lost the battle,

he won the war. One conservative justice, Owen Roberts, switched his vote to uphold Roosevelt's New Deal, a reversal that became known as the switch in time that saved nine. But it was just one of the many unpredictable moments in the court's history. Walking us through some of those moments and the ways the Court has changed over time is our guest Rachel Sheldon. She's an Associate Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University and the author of Washington Brotherhood, Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War. Currently, she's exploring the political culture of the U.S. Supreme Court from the Jacksonian era to the 1890s. Rachel Sheldon, welcome to American History Tellers.

Thanks for having me. Throughout American history, there's been disagreement over what the role of the Supreme Court has over the laws of the land. It's certainly changed over the years. What was the idea behind the court at the nation's founding? So the court is really the least developed part of the Constitution. It's in Article 3, of course. It's the shortest description of part of the federal government. And the members of the Constitutional Convention were not as focused on the court as the other two branches of government. They spent less time on it. The original idea behind the court was to evaluate laws, federal laws and other laws that would come to them through appeals.

And so the first Congress in 1789 put together a bill that explained what the Supreme Court's structure would be. So in the Constitution, it only says that Congress can determine what the structure of the federal courts might be. There will be a Supreme Court and whatever courts Congress would be interested in creating. And so they create the court system in 1789, and they give the court some power over various kinds of federal questions, but not all. They do not give a full range of cases that we might see today. And they also have limitations on the court, right? So

there are some cases that can't even make it to the Supreme Court, some that stay in the Court of Appeals. So the original court is really, in some ways, an experiment because they are going to see how it develops. And in the early years, the members of the court were not necessarily committed to staying in those positions, not until we get John Marshall, who becomes as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the beginning of the 19th century, do we start to get more of a coherent court, a court where justices tend to stay quite a bit longer? So one of the tasks then of the early court is judicial review. But that's not really what we think of the court's role today.

That's exactly right. So judicial review as an idea had existed for some time, including during the colonial period before the United States formed. And it was the idea that the Supreme Court could evaluate laws for their constitutionality. And famously, we think of John Marshall as the one who really puts that idea into practice in Marbury v. Madison in 1803, but it had really been around before then. Judicial review, however, is not the same thing as what we think of today, which is really judicial supremacy. So judicial review says that the Supreme Court has the last word on ideas of constitutionality. And that's much closer to what we think of today, although, of course, it's always been contested. It's not something that everyone just accepts on its face.

When do you think the idea of judicial supremacy fully took hold? Well, I think it developed over time. It didn't really exist in the 19th century until towards the end ofth century, more justices began to promote that view, particularly under the Warren Court in the 1850s, in particular Cooper v. Aaron and some of their other cases. And that has only grown all the way up through the early part of the 21st century, where now it's almost a popular expectation that the Supreme Court gets to make the final determination. You mentioned that this shift happened as the courts viewed themselves as being above the fray of politics, but you wrote in the Washington Post that in the 19th century, the Supreme Court was openly political. Judges would often align with their party, and some even

had ghostwritten legislation. Why was that the norm at the time? So that's exactly right. One of the things to understand about the 19th century is that most Americans in this period, particularly after the 1820s, saw the Constitution as the purview of the people, the people at large. So the Constitution was in the arms of the people and they got to determine

what would be considered constitutional. And the Supreme Court could be a vehicle of that, but it was not the ultimate authority. And so the way that these folks worked out how to approach the Constitution was through political parties. So starting in the 1820s and 1830s, you get the explosion of the two-party system and mass participation in parties, mass voting. You get the highest voter turnout in American history throughout the 19th century, really from the 1840 election all the way to 1900. And so folks understand the role of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court as part of this broader partisan political conversation. And so justices operated

inside this partisan political conversation by working with partisan groups. And it's not quite like today because, of course, there were many different parties in the 19th century, not just Democrats and Republicans, and parties were constantly shifting. And so a party could have an alliance with a particular justice on the ground in terms of promoting his political viewpoint. And some of these justices even ran for president. And this wasn't considered outside the bounds of what was acceptable. Many justices ran for president. Many justices, or, you know, they were considered for president.

It wasn't quite like it is today, where they, you know, sort of openly say, I want to run for president. Many justices, or, you know, they were considered for president. It wasn't quite like it is today, where they, you know, sort of openly say, I want to run for president. A party would consider them as a nominee. And the reason this was possible is that justices were not engaging in this kind of behavior while sitting on the bench, right, while they were in the courtroom hearing cases and were expected to remain good judicial actors who took the law seriously. But outside the court's chambers, they had full range of participation in partisan politics. And so the fact that the court did not have a lot of power, they weren't in as much danger for mixing their partisan views with basic decisions in their cases. And so even though they behaved in these political ways,

we shouldn't think of them in a cynical way. They were still judges, and they still took their position seriously as judges. They just also participated in the political process. When thinking about reversals, certainly in the current space we live in, there are times when the court's complexion is viewed as perhaps hostile to the interests of the president or Congress or an overriding political movement. And one possible political response is to shrink or expand the size of the bench. What's the history of the changing number of justices? Yeah, so the 19th century featured all kinds of shifts in terms of the number of justices. We start with six justices in 1789, and that moves to seven in the early part of the 19th century of American society. As the country grows,

there's a need for more justices to cover this vast territory, but also because there are concerns about what the court is doing. And when the court begins to behave in ways that seem to go outside its purview in the 19th century, Congress reacts and the president reacts. And so that's part of what we get in the Civil War. There had been an extremely hostile Supreme Court to Republican ideas of anti-slavery at the end of the 1850s. And Abraham Lincoln, you know, really ignored the court. He ignored the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford. He did not believe that the determination that Black people could not be citizens or that Congress could not legislate slavery in the territories was rightly decided or that it was really part of the holding. And as a result, just ignored the decision. He did the

same with an early decision in the Supreme Court that Chief Justice Taney, who also issued the famous decision in Dred Scott, made in a case called Ex Parte Merriman, which he decided on circuit, which was about the president's right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. So, you know, the hostility between the Republicans and the Democrats meant that Lincoln himself was committed to shifting the complexion of the court. And he does this by nominating five different justices who are going to take over the court. And he does this by nominating five different justices who are going to take over the court. And so there's going to be a really important shift in the Civil War era from a strong Southern Democratic court to a strong Northern Republican court. So shifting the

complexion of the court was a big part of the 19th century experience. And again, in part because of the expansion of the country, and in part because of hostile politics and hostile ideology. There have also been many efforts to change the power of the court and to change the composition of the court in terms of what its ability to decide cases is. So there have been court packing proposals, but there have also been proposals that sound a lot like what we have today, which are things like, you know, you need a supermajority of the Supreme Court to decide constitutional questions, to try to get rid of these five-four decisions that have become so common. There were efforts to strip the Supreme Court of its jurisdiction over cases that had been

appealed by the state Supreme Courts. And those were proposals that existed throughout the 19th century and in the early 20th century by members of all parties. So, you know, the court was in some ways a political football in the 19th century. And certainly Congress reacted to the court's activities by, you know, determining whether to approve a president's nomination to the court. And that operated primarily on political axes. Here's another unintended consequence, right? We talked about Lincoln being someone who wanted to shift the court from primarily Southern Democrats to primarily

Northern Republican. But his concern during the Civil War itself was whether the court was going to uphold the war measures. He wanted to make sure that he won the war. But the consequence of that is that the folks that he nominates to the Supreme Court are really split on issues involving corporations and the idea of free markets and thinking aboutruction period tends to favor corporations, tends to be more sympathetic to corporations over labor. And Lincoln may or may not have approved of that, but that is an unintended consequence. And that is one of the reasons that the 14th Amendment is sort of kneecapped, because there's this desire to have greater autonomy for corporations. So in general, the court was viewed as a political institution that could be used in political ways, but that has started to change as it has become less appealing for folks to see changes in the court as anything other than cynical, right? So there are a lot of people who are unhappy with the ideas of Democrats to change

the complexion of the court now. And there were people who were unhappy about efforts to change the court during the Reagan years. So there's a degree to which people think that using the court as a political football is new and problematic, but it really existed all the way back into the early part of the Barbie movie today. Who created that bottle of red Sriracha with a green top that's permanently living in your fridge? Did you know that the Air Jordans were initially banned by the 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.

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I mean, even though the court has claimed to be above politics, it's not really true. When the court began to claim itself as being apolitical, particularly at the end of the 19th century and early 20th sense of how much they were involved in the political system. And this was, of course, true during the FDR years also. But I think a lot of this has to do with a shift in public opinion and the belief that politics is a dirty, nasty game and a bad thing. And so there's a sense that being outside of politics gives you much more credibility in terms of evaluating the Constitution. And so this is a posture that particularly this court under John Roberts has embraced. You know, John Roberts in his 2005 nomination hearing said justices are not politicians, they're umpires calling balls and strikes. And the idea that judges operate outside politics has given the court a lot of credibility. Public opinion polls say that the more the justices appear outside the political fray,

the more credibility they seem to have. But it's at odds with sort of the natural existence of things. And so Alito's, I want to call it a lecture to the Federalist Society, was much more within the realm of what justices used to do in sort of public fashion. It doesn't mean that it is accepted by the public at large. People are upset about it. They feel as though Justice Alito has moved outside the realm of what justices should do. And I think the difference here and what has made such an important impact on this conversation is just how much power the Supreme Court has. So when the court has less power, when the court is unable to evaluate constitutional questions as the final authority, political involvement is less important.

It means less to the conversation. But now that the Supreme Court has almost unlimited power to evaluate the Constitution, it appears very problematic to the public at large. I think it should be obvious, given that we describe justices as left or right or conservative or liberal, that they bring their political ideologies to them to the bench. But I'm wondering, how often are justices' actual legal leanings different from their decisions? There's the Warren court and the surprising outcome, perhaps, of Roe v. Wade when those justices were appointed by conservative presidents. What's the scoreboard on leaning against your bias? Part of the difficulty in that kind of categorization is that political parties and political movements are made up of lots of different opinions. And so you can have lots of people on one side of an issue who are, you know, all conservative or all Republican in one case, and they have

various ideas about other issues. So, you know, the justices, it's a little harder to tell now because most of the justices come from other court positions and they don't spend a long time writing about their political viewpoints ahead of time or their ideological viewpoints ahead of time like they might have in the 19th century. But they're going to come to these issues with different ideas because they come from different places and they have different experiences with their political movement, either conservative or Republican or liberal or Democrat. And so it's not actually that surprising that they are going to have different ideas when it comes to these kinds of cases. It doesn't so neatly fall between Democrat and Republican,

even though it's completely correct to say that they come from these political ideas and from these political groups. So I don't think there's anything wrong with saying you have a conservative justice or a liberal justice or even a Democratic justice and a Republican justice, as long as you acknowledge that these are parties made up of coalitions and the coalitions include people that have different kinds of ideas about the law. Well, speaking of different ideas about the law, precedent is a principle that's near and dear to the center of the court. But there are opportunities to reverse earlier decisions. The Plessy v. Ferguson decisions doctrine of separate but equal was reversed by Brown v. Board of Educations, stating that separate education facilities were inherently unequal.

Now, reversals of that sort aren't common, but what factors are at play when the Supreme Court decides to overturn or reverse decisions it previously held? That's a good question. I think a lot of factors are involved. Some have to do with the state of the country at the moment. You know, there's a degree now to which some justices and many really on the current Supreme Court say that they subscribe to an idea of original intent. But we are all products of our current context. And so reversing on a previous case does have a lot to do with where society is at that moment.

And that's definitely what happened with the Warren Court in thinking about Brown v Board of Education, American society had changed substantially by the time we got to the 1950s, in large part because of the efforts of Black Americans in trying to shift the conversation. And so they looked at Plessy versus Ferguson and saw it as wrong and reversed it as a result. I mean, justices make mistakes and they'll say that. They'll say that about their own views. Many of them are willing to say that I was wrong about this or I've changed my mind about this.

John Paul Stevens, who passed recently, was famous for doing that. So I think the shift happens in part because the court can get things wrong. And although precedent is important, considering what you might have gotten wrong in the past has been really important for shifting as times shift. I suppose most recently the controversy of packing the court was when FDR tried to do so to continue the legacy of the New Deal. Walk us through that moment of court controversy? Yeah. So Franklin Delano Rosenfeld is president and he's obviously putting through the really important elements of the New Deal. He is trying to make sure that they remain constitutional. And he's been dealing with a pretty hostile Supreme Court that has ruled against him in several cases. Five justices, including what were known as the Four Horsemen, were repeatedly

deciding against him. And so as a result, once FDR wins this landslide election in 1936, he says, okay, well, now I need to make sure that these laws that I am pushing through are deemed constitutional. And so he determines that he wants to pack the court, to add more justices to the court. And this is controversial. It is not super well received, but it does have the effect of getting people to look at the court as an institution that may need to protect itself. Now, the story goes that one of the justices decided to change his mind and go with the liberal justices to approve FDR's proposals as a result of his court packing plan. In reality, he'd already made that decision. He'd already changed his mind about some of this. But in our sort of historic memory, we often call this the switch in time that saved nine, in which this justice, this swing justice moved to the left.

And as a result, court packing was not necessary. The famous case is West Coast Hotel versus Parish in 1937. So the idea is that the court does consider its political circumstances while making its decisions. It thinks about how can we preserve our own power. You might compare that to something from this last year, you know, in the Supreme Court sessions in the spring of 2020, there were a number of really important cases that as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who had held the court together by coming to the middle, by making these decisions, as in the case of the Title VII cases or in DACA. These were really controversial cases. And rather than, you know, sticking to his conservative side, he came to the middle. And this helped save the institution of the court. He has less power now because there

has been this shift from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Amy Coney Barrett. But this is a similar kind of idea that institutionalism requires the court to pay attention to what's going on in the political moment. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder suspect, and you can't help but wonder what his true intentions were. I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery

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It has no authority to enforce any of its decisions. It is entirely a body of reputation. Now, in the modern age, we view it as the last word, but its power is really by fiat. How precarious of a situation is the court in right now? Well, I'm not sure it's in such a precarious position because Congress has given so much power to the court over the last 150 years that now it is very difficult to shift that power. First, you need an enormous amount of political will. So you have to have a Congress and a president who is willing to sign off on bills that limit the court's power or take back some of that power. But then you also have the problem where if Congress were to pass a bill where they said, we are going to strip the Supreme Court of, say, jurisdiction over cases related to health care, then someone would take that case to the Supreme Court. And then you have a situation in which the Supreme Court itself is evaluating

whether it should have that power or whether Congress can limit that power. And it's controversial. And at this point, we've reached this moment in which it is very hard to take that power back. That's not to say that Congress shouldn't try, but I think the court is in a pretty good position because so many Americans see it as a nonpolitical institution. And we'll see what happens with the justices and whether they push their political ideas more. Certainly Alito's speech was really affecting too many people, but it may just be him. Clarence Thomas's wife is very involved in politics, and that has always sort of popped up as an issue. But it has not become sort of the standard view that the court is political.

And so we'll have to see what members of the court decide to do and how Congress is able to react. Let's go through some possible scenarios that you touched on just then. So the Supreme Court has a power that has been given to it and is reluctant to relinquish, and it's hard for it to even be called to be relinquished. What are some actual possibilities that Congress or the president can use to rein in the power of the Supreme Court? So if Congress passed that law and the president signed it into law, Congress passed a bill and the president signs it into law, then, you know, someone who had standing might challenge the law in federal court

and it could go up to the Supreme Court to say, is it possible for Congress to write this into legislation? And then the Supreme Court would have to rule on that. And we don't know what the Supreme Court would do in that case. You know, you could speculate. One interesting thing about that is that when John Roberts worked in the executive

branch, he wrote a memo famously that said that he believed that Congress did have that power, but we don't know what exists now. That was when he was in the Justice Department and he was writing on behalf of the Justice Department and he was writing on behalf of the Justice Department. So we can speculate a little bit about what he thinks about that. But we don't know what the other justices might say. And so that might play out in a negative way for Congress, even if Congress wanted to implement that policy. I think another way that they could work on that particular issue would be to pass that kind of legislation and expand the court and hold hearings where they ask specifically,

do you think that a Supreme Court should be able to have the ultimate authority on the Constitution on every single piece of congressional legislation, or is jurisdiction stripping possible? So those are some possibilities. A lot of court commentators prefer jurisdiction stripping, I think, to court packing, but those things can work in concert. What other powers might Congress or the president wield? Well, they could take power away from the court over the federal court. So one thing that happened in the early part of the 20th century was that under the Taft chief justiceship, Taft was very involved in helping to create the power of the court and make the Supreme Court the overall body of the court. So the Supreme Court is sort of the organizational, and Congress could change that. So, I mean, there are a lot of

possibilities in terms of what Congress could approach. They could pass a blanket law denying the court jurisdiction over, you know, all cases relating to the Constitution in Congress, but it's very unlikely to happen. So, there's really no denying that American society has been vastly affected by the Supreme Court. But I'm curious, in looking back, what do you feel is the most important change to the Supreme Court in its history? Well, I think I would say two interlocking things. One is the idea of the court as apolitical. So accepting a court as a political entity was something that was important to the 19th century. It was part of the process of thinking about the role of the Supreme Court, not only as a legal body, but as part of the operation of the federal government. So the shift to trying to think about

the court as apolitical has really changed the way we understand what the justices should be. In the 19th century, most justices came from political positions before they came to the court. They came from Congress. They came from executive branch positions in the cabinet. They came from governorships. And so they had political bona fides before they came to the court. And now we don't do that at all. And it has really serious implications for the court's ability to understand how Congress works. It's not very common that these folks served in Congress. And so seeing what a bill looks like from the inside out is not as possible for them, with perhaps the exception

of one or two. The other thing that I think is really important that has shifted is, of course, the power of the court. And so, you know, when you have this political court in the 19th century, you have a court that is much more limited in its power. And by the time we get to the 21st century, we have a court that has this outsized power that is able to really influence the course of American society. And so those two things work together to give the court this incredible power under the mantle of non-partisanship or apolitical behavior. And I think that the court of the 21st century is a court that 19th century Americans would have been horrified by. They had no idea that the court could have this kind of power. They had no expectation that it would. So Thomas Jefferson

wrote that it's dangerous to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions. What do you think he meant? Who would be? And is it dangerous? Well, yeah. So Jefferson was really a proponent of something called departmentalism, which is the idea that in federal government, Congress and the president and the court each have purview over the Constitution in their area. So not one of them is the constitutional authority, but they all are the constitutional authority. And Jefferson's view of this was that, you know, the people rule, and so the people ought to have the ability to determine constitutionality through these other bodies. And so I do think Jefferson would have been really

appalled by the degree of power that the Supreme Court now holds. And in general, the Supreme Court has not been very favorable to democracy. Now, Jefferson himself had some skepticism of mass democracy and certainly didn't believe in women or people of color voting. But the degree to which he believed that the people ruled looks very different when the Supreme Court has this much power. Rachel Sheldon, thank you for speaking to me on American History Tellers.

Thanks so much for having me. That was my conversation with Rachel Sheldon. Rachel is an associate professor of American history at Pennsylvania State University. Next week on American History Tellers, in the early 20th century, coal was the fuel that powered American industry and drove staggering corporate wealth. But this black gold was extracted from the ground at a tremendous human cost, claiming hundreds of lives in mining disasters. Until, in 1912, a group of West Virginia miners fought back, rising up for their right to join a union, led by a labor leader authorities dubbed the most dangerous woman in America.

From Wondery, this is Episode 8 of Supreme Court Landmarks for 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 produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode was produced by Denise Guerra. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis. Created by Hernán López for Wondery.

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