Dan Snow's History Hit - History Legends: Eric Foner

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

Eric Foner joined me on the podcast to talk about Reconstruction, the attempt to reimagine the American Republic following the Civil War.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. What a week we're having a history hit. The Christmas Truce film is out on the TV tv channel it is getting lots and lots of people watching lots of people subscribing i'm so proud of it

basically i'm sorry to bang on about this all the time but i started the history hit tv channel three years ago with the promise to you guys that i would make it as good as as a real history channel as as a proper it would be a proper history show. And you backed me and the team and you subscribed and you have meant that now we have produced something of I think the highest possible quality. Some of the world's best historians, extraordinary dramatic reconstruction. It is just a gorgeous looking film.

It contains new research. We've got new, particularly on the German side, lots of new sources about the Christmas truce. I couldn't be happier. It's just the most amazing amazing thing i'm so happy lots of people are watching it thank you so everyone's got in touch about it um we are going to have the audio christmas truce with extended interviews of those historians and lots and lots of those sources we're going to be playing that over the next two days here on this stream please listen to those podcasts about that extraordinary christmas in 1914 when some,

not all, but some of the Germans, Belgians, Indians, French and British that were fighting on the Western Front put down their weapons, sang to each other, sang Christmas carols, shared Christmas treats, climbed out of their trenches and hung out, hung out on a frozen no man's land bathed in winter sun it was an event that captured the imagination of global publics both then and ever since and i'm really really proud of the whole team at history hit for putting this remarkable program together and these remarkable podcasts listen to them for the next two days on this feed we've got a busy program going all through christmas lots of wonderful historians big subjects hope you can enjoy it today is certainly no different we've got the legendary historian Eric Foner on the podcast he's won every single award available to American historians he's been given pretty much

every single position as far as I can make it out that an American historian can be appointed or elected to such as the president of the American Historical Association. He's been named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for Humanities. He's taught at Oxford, Cambridge. He's taught in Moscow. He's won the Pulitzer Prize and every other prize out there. He's got honorary doctorates. He spent most of his life teaching at Columbia University while writing some of his remarkable books. He came on the podcast to talk about the period of history that he has spent most time working in, which is Reconstruction, which people are talking about a lot now, which is the attempt really to reimagine the American Republic

following the Civil War. Many of the things that happened in that period, many decisions taken, decisions not taken, are central to understanding the character of America today. Its economy, its political geography, its troubled racial relations, right through to the present. He's a wonderful historian and it is a great way to sort of begin to finish up 2020 by talking to one of the greats. If you want to go and watch The Christmas Truce,

all of our other documentaries, we've got hundreds of documentaries on historyhit.tv. It's our digital history channel. Like Netflix for history, you just go over there, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and then you're all set. It's kind of last minute, but if you need to gift, you need to buy some Christmas presents, holiday gifts, you can still do so because you just go over to historyhit.tv and you can gift subscriptions to that wonderful, wonderful history fan in your life. But in the meantime, everyone, here is Eric Foner. Enjoy.

Eric, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. I'm very happy to be here, certainly. You've had such a long and varied career, but Reconstruction feels like it looms very large for you. Does that still have the interest and excitement that it did when you wrote some of your well-known books? Well, you know, I'm retired now as a professor, so my excitement level may have dimmed a little bit. But I would continue to think and believe that understanding reconstruction is absolutely necessary for Americans and others. If you want to be an intelligent citizen in this country, if you want to know how we got to where we are today in terms of race relations, you have to know something about

reconstruction. And reconstruction is, you know, part of our lives today. I mean, the issues of reconstruction, who should be a citizen, who should have the right to vote, these are still being debated and fought over right now. The Supreme Court, every session, handles questions arising out of the constitutional amendments of Reconstruction. So, yeah, I continue to find it fascinating. Now, when I began writing on Reconstruction, there was much less interest in it and much less literature. Now there's a whole new couple of generations of younger scholars who have produced very important work. So that's great. I don't want to be the only one working on Reconstruction. That's for sure.

Would you go as far as to say that the US, the experiment, the republic experiment was refounded in those years following the Civil War? Yeah, well, that was the idea. And, you know, my most recent book is called The Second Founding, which is trying, the title tries to make that point, that what happened in Reconstruction was not just a minor adjustment to an existing system, but really, particularly with the constitutional amendments, really changing the Constitution and therefore changing the whole Republican experiment, as you say, trying to create for the first time in our

history a biracial nation of equals, a biracial nation where everybody enjoyed the same rights. That had not existed before the Civil War, obviously, since slavery was such a powerful force. So this was a utopian experiment in a way. It succeeded in some ways. It did not succeed in many other ways. But it laid the foundation for, you know, struggles in the 20th century, the civil rights movement, which was sometimes called the Second Reconstruction. And even things like Black Lives Matter today somehow relate back to the Reconstruction era. Let's just quickly summarize really what they were trying to achieve during Reconstruction. The South, the southern states were effectively occupied by the federal army. What was the political agenda that Lincoln and his successor attempted to pursue? Well, Lincoln, I would leave out of this because Lincoln was killed

just at the beginning of Reconstruction. And he did not leave a plan or a blueprint, or maybe more to the point, he left a number of plans. If you say, what was Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction? I would say, well, really, he didn't have a single one. He was an experimenter. He wanted to see what happened. But the basic point is this. The Civil War ends. The basic point is this. The Civil War ends. The Confederacy is defeated. The 11 states that had seceded are now back in the Union.

And 4 million slaves are now free. And the fundamental question facing American society was what's going to be the status of these 4 million people? What does it mean to be a free person in America? What rights come with that status? Are they going to be citizens? Are they going to have the right to vote? Are they going to have the same civil rights as white Americans? Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, was deeply racist. He couldn't have cared less about the rights of black people. He set up new governments in the South, which were for whites only. Blacks had virtually no rights at all. Obviously they're free, but he said,

"'Well, go back to work on the plantations "'and you'll get a little pay and that's it. "'Other than that, Reconstruction is over.'" Blacks themselves thought this was a far too limited definition of the freedom that they had acquired. They wanted full political, civil equality. And there were many in the North who agreed with them that, you know, putting them back into a condition sort of like slavery would make the Civil War pointless in the

end. And so you had this gigantic political battle between Andrew Johnson and the Republicans who dominated Congress. And the result of that was the rewriting of the laws, the creation of the first national civil rights law to make black people citizens and to give them equal civil rights. Then the right to vote comes for black men. New governments are set up in the South. The ones created by Andrew Johnson are sort of chucked out. And you have this experiment called radical reconstruction, where African Americans, for the first time, are part of the body politic. Over 2,000, I think, African American

men held some kind of public office during reconstruction. But this stimulated a terrible backlash, groups like the Ku Klux Klan and others. The U.S. Army was demobilized very quickly. The South was not under occupied rule very long. And you almost had a continuation of the Civil War. At first, President Grant, who comes in after Johnson, sends troops into the South again to crush the Klan. But as time goes on, the violence kind of undermines these Reconstruction governments, and Northerners begin to lose interest in this whole question of racial equality. And by 1877, we usually date it that way, the Reconstruction governments are ended and the whole experiment of biracial democracy

has pretty much come to an end. But the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, created legal equality for black people, and then gave black men the right to vote, they remained and they are the foundation on which the struggle for racial equality is built in the 20th and now even into the 21st centuries. We've been hearing a lot this fall about the disputed election of 1876. That obviously, that very close election,

contested election ended up with a a corrupt bargain in which the democrats accepted the victory of the republicans as long as it effectively ended reconstruction do you see the reconstruction coming to an end because of that is that luck one of those moments in history of contingency and like or was reconstruction already doomed because of the gigantic backlash among among the southern planter economy? Well, as you say, we've heard a lot about the disputed election of 1876 lately, because our recent election in some ways is still being disputed by President Trump. Although most people who are awake and see what happened know that it's not disputed that Biden was elected. But of course, that's still being adjudicated in a way. But, you know,

I think there are always contingencies in history. The problem, the challenge to historians is to avoid the notion that whatever happens is inevitable. After something happens, it is inevitable. It happened. But, you know, so you can write a very clear narrative to why Reconstruction was doomed to fail, why it was abandoned. But that kind of ignores the contingencies that were in existence at any point. It's possible to imagine the North being more determined in protecting the rights of black people. It's possible to imagine white southerners accepting some of the progress that have been made in Reconstruction.

I'm not, I don't want to spin out an alternative history here, but yeah, but your question is certainly legitimate. The fact is, support for Reconstruction was waning during the 1870s. So the disputed election and the bargain of 1877, which ends Reconstruction, you know, one can, it was on the way. I mean, there were, it didn't, it wasn't just one moment. It was the end of a trajectory which had been happening for several years. But on the other hand, there's always another hand when you talk to historians, I'm sure. On the other hand, maybe that date is really a little misleading anyway. Black people continued to vote in the South for another generation in many areas.

They continued to vote in the South for another generation in many areas. They continued to hold offices. There was a kind of a twilight zone after 1877 where people weren't quite sure what the new situation of race relations would be in the South. That isn't clear until maybe around 1900 when what we call the Jim Crow system is really put in place. The right to vote is taken away. Any semblance of legal equality is taken away in the South. The constitutional amendments are pretty much abrogated

in the South with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, which is something worth thinking about today when you have a conservative Supreme Court, historically its interest in protecting the rights of the most vulnerable is not very strong. But so, you know, the end of Redestruction is also a kind of a drawn out process. It's not just one moment when people say, OK, Redestruction's over. That makes this a complicated, but I think very interesting and dramatic piece, story of a piece of our history. It's fascinating watching the struggle for among some communities to register voters to

have to overcome blocks that are placed in the way of voting, whether it's signature matching or the requisite number of polling places or drop boxes in certain neighborhoods and communities. requisite number of polling places or drop boxes in certain neighborhoods and communities. How much of that is buried deep in this period of Reconstruction and Jim Crow? Oh, it's very deeply embedded. One of the problems of Reconstruction is that the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave black men the right to vote, has weaknesses which then racists exploited. The 15th Amendment says, I'm paraphrasing, states cannot deny people the right to vote because of race. They can't just pass a law saying, hey, black people can't vote. The courts would overturn that. In the 1880s, 90s, it was literacy tests, poll taxes,

understanding clauses. Those don't mention race. The states will say, well, the registrar will only register to vote people of good character. Well, it turns out they only think white people are of good character, but there's no mention of race in that law. And the Supreme Court over time will say, well, we can't judge the motive. It doesn't say anything about race here. So it's okay. The Supreme Court stood back while the black vote was just eliminated throughout the South.

Now today you get the same thing, you know, voter ID laws, limiting the places that people can vote, things like that. Voter suppression. Again, it doesn't mention race. If Georgia just said, well, we're chucking all these people off the voter rolls because they're black, that would be a violation of the 15th Amendment. But when they say we're throwing them all off because, I don't know, they didn't quite turn up on the properly, their signature is a little off and that kind of thing. Can you really prove it's because of race? At least in the old days, like in the 1890s, Southern white legislators, when they passed these laws, they said explicitly, we're doing this to get rid of the black vote. That's the whole point here, folks. They have the courage of their convictions. They don't say that anymore because they know the courts will not accept

it. So they just say, oh, no, we're just trying to prevent voter fraud here. Voter fraud is where too many people, black people, vote. That's a fraud. So the weakness of the..., now the radical Republicans wanted a stronger amendment. Now, of course, they weren't willing to give women the right to vote. So at that point, it's just men, but they wanted to think saying all male citizens, 21 years of age, have the right to vote, a positive right to vote. But that did not, that didn't have enough support to get through the Congress. So you get this negative law amendment. You can't deny someone the right to vote because of race. But that opens the door. And even today is the point today is that throughout our history, there's always been strong movements saying too many people are voting. We don't want so many people to vote. We don't encourage people to vote.

You know, in the United States, election day is not a holiday. You have to go to work on election day as well as figuring out how to vote. In many countries, it's a holiday. And many places encourage people to vote here. We erect barriers to their voting. It's amazing how many people continue to go out and vote despite the barriers that are created. Long lines, waiting, machines that don't work, all that kind of thing. Our democracy has a very ambivalent feeling about people voting. It's democracy,

but we don't want too many people voting. You're listening to Eric Foner on History Hit. We've got more coming after this. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. It sounds to me that you are less surprised by the re-emergence of whether it's nationalism, whether it's ethnic nationalism, whether it's problems with democracy and the franchise. You knowack obama was telling us all a few years ago at the path of the course of history runs to the etc etc it sounds to me that with your incredibly illustrious current history now

this has taken you by surprise i think the more you know about our history the less surprised you are the this white nationalism this idea that only white people are really the true, genuine Americans, is deeply rooted in our history. In other words, that's not the only strand. You might almost say there's a constant battle between the idea in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal, etc., and the reality of a white-oriented conception. Now, that comes out of slavery. It shouldn't be surprising. This country was, if you go way back to the very beginning of colonization, we have been a slave society much longer than we've been a free society. If you date 1619 to 1865, you know, that's 250 years, more or less, of slavery. And we've had 150 years of no slavery.

So we're still trying to catch up to have an equal. Slavery embedded this racial definition of Americanism into our society. The high or low point was the Dred Scott decision of 1857 where the Supreme Court said only white people can be citizens. Black people just can't be Americans. They're not covered by the Constitution. Even free ones, slaves, okay, what about the half a million free blacks at that time? Nope, they're not really American citizens. Why? They're not white. That's part of our history, and one shouldn't be surprised when politicians try to,

you know, strike electoral gold by whipping up this kind of racist view. You know, President Trump, how did he become well-known not as a TV celebrity but as a person in politics? It was by denying, you know, the birth of that, denying that President Obama was the legitimate president, was a citizen of the United States. You know, that wasn't something that Trump made up at that moment. That was a deep he's tapping into something deep in American political culture.

So that hasn't taken you by surprise, as has the attempt to ignore, if not overturn the presidential election taken you by surprise? I mean, is that the terrible word of 2020 unprecedented and historians are saying all over the world that almost none of this stuff's unprecedented. But that that feels the response of President Trump to the election defeat. Does it feel like a departure to you? of President Trump to the election defeat. Does it feel like a departure to you? It has surprised me. I thought that he would complain for a few days, nothing surprising about that, a week, and then say, all right, we lost, folks. You know, that's not such a surprising thing. But Trump is sui generis. Trump does not play by the rules, as we all know.

Trump doesn't believe in rules. Trump is an play by the rules, as we all know. Trump doesn't believe in rules. Trump is an egomaniac. Everything revolves around Trump. And, you know, he cannot accept. Washington Post, I think, ran a little article, or the New York Times. You know, Trump is now the thing he most disdains, a loser. Trump always calls people he doesn't like. He's a loser. He's a loser.

That's, you know, Trump, the whole world is a battle between winners and losers. And now Trump is a loser, but he is unwilling to accept the fact that he has lost. And apparently he's already planning to run again in 2024. We're going to have four years of Trump running for reelection, which will be an annoyance to the Biden administration, no doubt, and to anyone who would like to read the newspaper or see TV and not see Trump all the time, you know. But he can't accept. So, yeah, I am surprised at the length of time that this completely baseless charge of electoral fraud has been going. And also how few Republicans are willing to just step up and say, you know, I voted for Trump, but he lost.

What's the big deal in an election? Somebody wins and somebody loses. Why should that be a big problem? Most Republicans are petrified of Trump. The reason is that Trump has a very, very strong personal following among the Republican Party. conspirations in the Republican Party cannot go against Trump because Trump will then whip up this so-called base against them. So you have silence. How many Republican senators have said, well, Joe Biden is the president-elect? Very, very few. How many Republican governors have said that? Very, very few. They're all silent. They're all petrified. And this does surprise me. So maybe I have been a little too optimistic about the depth of commitment to democracy in this country. We've had four years of the Constitution and the norms that surround it and are entwined with it, being tested, being stress tested. What have the last four years taught you, if anything, about the country that you have

studied your whole life? You know, I think it has reinforced my skepticism about a set of ideas that are very deeply rooted in our country, or at least the notion that these ideas are deeply rooted is part of our public consciousness. In other words, the idea that the United States is a bastion of democracy, a symbol of liberty, you know, this notion of American exceptionalism that we represent well you know Lincoln said the best the last best hope of man

we're not just like any other country we're different we are exceptional everybody else ought to be like us of course if that happened we wouldn't be exceptional anymore but let's leave that to the side and therefore we have the right to promote Of course, if that happened, we wouldn't be exceptional anymore, but let's leave that to the side. And therefore, we have the right to promote democracy all over the world, spread democracy by example or by invasion or other ways.

But the notion that that is what our political culture is, really, people who understand American history must realize that is a very partial view. We have this other notion of a white America, of an America that does not ground itself on liberty and equality for all. That's also deeply rooted. So, you know, we are learning now that the last four years and this whole election dispute has demonstrated that we are not exactly what propagandists have claimed that we are. We have claimed the right over years and years and years to monitor the elections of other countries, right? The American presidents frequently put out these statements. American presidents frequently put out these statements. This election in Belarus was a fraud. Or this election in Latin America was good.

It was a true democratic election. Who's going to come and monitor our elections? Should we bring in some guys from Belarus to decide who won the American? We're just another country in the world. That's my basic point. We have the same flaws, the same aspirations as many other countries, but we have to get down off our high horse a little bit. And one of the things that Trump and then this dispute has shown, we don't have the right to lecture other countries on how democratic they are or aren't. We just don't have that right, given what's happened in our country for the last four or five years. What about as individuals, you and your colleagues? Does the republic need its historians now?

You know, I think historians are often trapped in this idea of American exceptionalism. And I'm always when I was teaching, I used to always tell my students, try to get that out of your head. It's so ingrained in our culture. It's so it's so much what we learn in school when we're growing up. It's hard to get rid of even when you, even when you logically say this makes no sense. It was built in in the Cold War. I mean, really, of course, Lincoln and others talked about this way back in Jefferson, where the empire of liberty were different from all other empires, the British of their empire, but it's oppressive.

Ours is an empire devoted to liberty. Not so fast. But it's built in, it was exacerbated or magnified by the Cold War, where we were the representatives of freedom and the other side, the Russians, the communists represented tyranny. And that dichotomy is very powerful as propaganda, but it doesn't really give you much of an analysis of the complications of the world. So yeah, I think historians, but of course, the study of American history is very, very different now.

And of course, Trump himself, you know, a couple of months ago, Trump complained that American historians are undermining the confidence in our country. They're undermining the patriotism of young Americans. In fact, he set up a whole commission, which I presume will be disbanded now, to think about ways of promoting a patriotic view of American history, more statues of great leaders. I'm sure statues of Trump are on his mind. You know, that kind of thing. Now, most historians don't take this seriously in the slightest. And we don't want the federal government mandating how we write and think and research about American history. But yeah, so historians have to be candid and honest about both the pros and the cons of American history, not just offering a patriotic celebration. Okay, so last question. As a man who has won every award in history writing, you're president of the Society of American Historians, you're president of the American Historical Association. Where is Donald Trump in the old list of presidents?

where is donald trump in the old list of presidents i used to think that andrew johnson the president who came after lincoln was the worst president in american history and he certainly had every flaw you can imagine he was deeply racist he could not deal with congress he had no sense of public sentiment he could not deal with the crisis of the end of the after the Civil War. But Trump has given Johnson a run for his money. I think it's now a he's a contender for the spot at the top or the bottom of the list of the worst presidents. So, yeah, I think this is one area where we may say Trump is really a winner. What a time to be alive. Thank you so much, Eric Fenton, for coming on the podcast.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm always happy to talk about history with you, Dan. That's really kind. Thank you. You better be careful what you wish for, sir. We'll call you back one day. Yeah, okay. Okay. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms,

but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour. Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the

ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.