Ideas - Unpacking the contradictions in America's ideals

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

What has become of the America that has for so long been held up as a shining example of ideals? In conversation at the 2026 Aspen Ideas Festival, documentary maker Ken Burns and American scholar and author Eddie Glaude unpack the vexed contradictions at the heart of American democracy, from the founding of the Republic in 1776 until today.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled. After all the awkwardness, disasters, and family drama, Mark Critch, is finally graduating. Maybe it's about not settling for the way things are, but making your own way. No, it's both jobs. And to move forward, he must hold on to what matters most. Don't give up on your dreams. Say goodbye to a Canadian comedy we've grown up with. Son of a Critch, the final season.

Stream now on CBC Jam. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Canadians and Americans have always had their differences. In fact, a core part of the Canadian identity is precisely not being American. We mostly got along, though, and thought we knew our neighbors pretty well. But many Canadians now feel affronted and outraged and puzzled, wondering what exactly has become of the United States since the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA.

Many Americans are wondering the very same thing, especially given the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a document synonymous with the highest ideals of democracy. The American experiment was a central theme of the 26th edition of the Aspen Ideas Festival, held by the Aspen Institute in Colorado. This episode of Ideas features two conversations from the festival. First, Ken Burns talking about the tensions and contradictions at the very heart of America's founding. Burns is, of course, a world-renowned filmmaker, best known for his documentaries such as the Civil War, Jazz, Baseball,

and more recently, the American Revolution. He joined CNN host and author Farid Zakar. to address the question of just how revolutionary the American Revolution really was. I made a film 40 years ago on the history of the Statue of Liberty. It's designed and fabricated by a French sculptor Bartoldi in Paris, and it towers over on the Rudich-Cazel, the rooftops of Paris. And Victor Hugo, just a couple moments from his death, comes to visit it. And he looks at Bartolti, he looks at the statue, he looks at back of Bartoldi,

and he says the idea, it is everything. And what we have in the American Revolution is the introduction into the blood system of the human race, this notion of liberty and freedom. It is true that we can parse it in a purely political or social context and say, well, it didn't really do this, it didn't advance, it was more of the same.

It's going to be the model, including the French Revolution, model for revolutions for the next 200-plus years. It is, as the scholar Jane Kaminsky says in our film, it's about possibility. And I think that's the thing that is most interesting about the revolution. It is opening a door that will never, ever be shut again. In the first sentence of the declaration, we say, one people. It's really new.

One people. We begin the next sentence with we. These are new concepts. And we are still trying. And in that second sentence ends with the pursuit of happiness. The key word is not happiness. We can debate, happy to talk about what it means, but it's the pursuit. We're a nation in the process of becoming 11 years later at the constitutional convention, we say in the prologue, a more perfect union. So we have built into this, this sense that we are expecting to change, we're expecting to innovate, we're expecting to be better, we're expecting to be unsatisfied.

And that's, I think, the key that distinguishes this, that the first time in history of people who, and admittedly white men on the East Coast, of the United States who are new things, citizens and not subjects. So let's talk about that reality. We think of it is an anti-colonial uprising. But in fact, as you point out, with regard to the expansion of the American Empire against other European powers and most importantly against Native Americans, the founding fathers actually were the colonialists. George Washington, while he is trying to figure out how to free himself from the shackles

of the British is busy making land deals to confiscate land from Native Americans all the way west as far west as he can go. Well before the revolution, he's doing that. Many so-called, you know, recent immigrants and people want to flood across the Appalachians and just take Indian land. I think we have to understand that if we try to see this in a binary terms, we're going to be frustrated by the American Revolution, it is a lot of different things. And it is for revolution.

it's also a bloody civil war. There are people there. It's not the tyrant 3,000 miles away, imposing its tyranny on us. Us means at least 20%, 25% in some areas, much more of people who are understandably loyalist. We have among us 20% of the population that are enslaved and free African Americans. We have Native Americans who have assimilated, who are trying to coexist within the borders of the 13 colonies. We have all of those native nations. So you get an A, I guess, in schools, we hope not anymore if you just say taxes and representation. But in point of fact, it's about Indian land. That's the biggest thing. The first big, uh-oh, in the relations between the British colonies in North America, the 13 and the mainland. They have 13 much more profitable

colonies in the Caribbean, profitable because Jamaica and Barbados are 90% enslaved people, and that's, that's the engine of profit for the bit. It's all sugar. They're making tons of money, and they're not going to end that. And there's slavery is legal in all 13 of the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia. The most profitable, if you can call it that, are Virginia and South Carolina. It's the civil war. It's a global war because you're competing. The British have just won what we call the French and Indian war, and the rest of the world calls the Seven Years War. They are the most far-flung empire on earth and unable to protect its colonists. The treasury is depleted. And so they've said you can't cross the Appalachians. And that really upsets the ordinary,

who's going over and wants to have land of their own, but it's really disturbing the Patrick Henry's and the George Washington's and Benjamin Franklin's who've been speculating, surveying and speculating and believe they own Native American lines. The biggest way to... Just pause on that for a second, because what you're saying is the British were in this sense anti-imperial. No. They were saying to the...

If they had prevailed, they would have taken the whole continent, and we'd be speaking with a funny accent. They think we do speak with a funny accent. That's their problem. They don't understand. But the key to it, and what your question is for it, is so important to understand, that it is so many different things. They did not meet in Philadelphia at the Eastern Seaboard Congress. They did not appoint George Washington the head of the Eastern Seaboard Army.

They called it the Continental Congress, and they called it the Continental Army. everyone had dreams of empire. Everybody was interested in our revolution may be the fifth global war over the prize of North America and prize means Indian land. They knew that California was out there and they wanted it.

And they were going to get it. So you think the British were just temporarily it was a truce with the Indians if they had won this war they were a moon. But they promised them we will not expect. They're out of breath and out of money and out of men. And so they say we can't protect our own people

from crossing over, so please stop. And that's the beginning. And then later on, because of that depleted treasury, they're seeking various forms of taxation to sort of balance the thing. You ought to be responsible for your own defense. We want to tax your stamps. Well, that didn't work out.

Well, we want to tax your T. And we know how that works out. So you say it's a revolution about ideas. What do you think the principal ideas are? And I want you to get to this point about the pursuit of happiness because it is the most debated phrase in that second line. It's the one that John Locke talked about property, not happiness.

In earlier drafts, it wasn't the pursuit of property, just property, life, liberty and property. Tell us why you think it ended up where it did. Well, at its basis, this sort of disagreement between Englishmen over their rights. The colonists don't feel they have representation. They want to go Indian land and take it. They don't understand. We don't have representatives in Parliament. How is this? But in the course of the arguments, because we're in the middle of the enliaments, And this is an enlightenment that is in full bloom in Britain as well. And in Scotland and, of course, the French have contributed a repressive monarchy quite different than the British monarchy. So these ideas are there. And so all of a sudden, these arguments break into natural rights. Once the cat is out of the bag, when you say we hold these truths, he first said, sacred and undeniable, he being Jefferson. And it was changed to self-evident. And in a way, if you think about it, there's nothing self-evident, except this new philosophical idea that we had natural rights and

the sanctity of the individual in relationship to nature and nature's God, as they would say. This is a big deal, not just politically. And I'm so sorry that the conversation always stays kind of in a narrow political or sociological and not in a spiritual dimension, being awakened to the possibility of the spirit within us. So the phrase goes on and it says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Lots of Americans would very much prefer this to be the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things. And what they meant was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. And the key word, as I suggested, is pursuit. A few phrases later, Jefferson says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while

evils are sufferable. It just means that the history of the human race has been heretofore, mostly about the subjugation of people, that they're accepting authoritarian rule, and they're willing to suffer the evils while they're sufferable, and they do, and that what this new thing is going to require a kind of hypervigilant individual who's seeking to improve themselves to make them closer to, as many of the founders, Diaz felt, was a disinterested God that made you different, and they weren't going to anthropomorphize it. It was the supreme architect of the universe, so divine providence, something like this that meant that our obligation was to actually climb towards that person. And at the same time, you had been given

this gift of citizenship, which is entirely new, of Adams, the great worrier, is always fretting. He says, is there too much ambition or avarice, too much lust for profit? I worry, is there enough virtue to create a republic? So the whole thing of happiness is not the pleasure-seeking happiness, but one that comes from self-improvement and making yourself more virtue. They're reaching across the dark ages to the classical tradition and bringing up all of these Greek ideas of perfection. So I've always thought that they rejected, in a sense, the idea of using property in that phrase. I mean, in a way, it's more about the pursuit of fulfillment or even the pursuit of virtue. Yes.

Right? Yeah, but I think it's interesting. I spent a long time in my own thinking being distracted by, ah, you didn't say John Locke, life, liberty, and property. These are property owners. This is at the beginning of this revolution. It's important that we... No, they like property. It's just not the central dynamic of this revolution.

I think they're realizing that something can happen, something new. I mean, when you said it's a symbolic start of the American Revolution, they've been fighting in earnest for 15 months, 14 months, while Jefferson is writing it. April 1775 at Lexington and Concord. They still think maybe there's a way that we can convince Parliament to help us out that see their way. an independency, as it's often called, is not on everyone's mind, certainly not in the spring of 75 on George Washington's mind.

But in early 76 in January 9th, Thomas Payne and Englishman publishes Common Sense the most important political track in American history. And he's basically just saying, he's literally saying, not since the time of Noah, do we have a chance to sort of make things new, that we could create an asylum for mankind. And there's something about the corruption and the familiarity, the old religious wars, the avarice, the ambition of the old world. And this sort of what they say is this kind of blank slate of natural possibilities here. And it's going to create an American catechism in which Emerson and Thore and Whitman are going to fill up with the sense of all of these things, all of the contradictions. This is Whitman, you know, do I have contrary? Yes, I contain multitudes. This is the idea that we are so many things,

and this responsibility of the individual citizen, not just to govern themselves, to participate in a collective thing, but to understand the difference between individual and collective freedoms, what I want versus what we need, and how to also proceed, and I will say, in a spiritual dimension of how you have a possibility of a new relationship to whatever your God it might be.

It seems to me at this point that this was kind of an ongoing process, that the most important word there is pursuit, not happiness, is very important when you think of it in these terms. We now think of the founding fathers as these demigods, and whatever they said, we worship. If you look at drug policy, oh, you know, how should we deal with marijuana? People say, what did James Madison think? And, you know, it seems that what I'm struck by is how they viewed their ideas as so malleable in that they write the Constitution and almost instantly they enact 10 amendments to the Constitution, which constitute now what we regard is among the most important parts of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. They changed it, you know, months after they wrote it.

It's not changing it. What they're doing is they're expanding it. So with the exception of Gouverner Morris's relatively poetic preamble to the Constitution, the rest is boilerplate. It's IKEA, you know, instructions. There's not poetry here. It's functional. It's an operating manual, you know. You know, and Article 1 is the legislative. So I think if the founders come back, they go, wow, you made it 250 years? And what? You're yielding to the executive? That's Article 2.

Biggest surprise to the founding fathers today would be to see the imperial presidency. Yeah, exactly. The president was meant to execute the laws that Congress. So we have a—Hamilton's anxious about it. He thinks, what if someone mounts the hobby horse of popularity, he says, and creates chaos. No man is above the law. They're trying to reverse engineer for an authority. Jefferson, trapped in Paris, is writing to Madison, saying,

what if someone should lose an election but pretend false votes and reap the whirlwind? Reap the whirlwind. Reap the whirlwind. So I think you're absolutely right. I think we have to see this in those malleable terms. But the Bill of Rights, I mean, what we have in the revolution, I think we've got this superficial, sanitized kind of Madison Avenue, bloodless, gallant story of the revolution, which isn't really true.

This is in a horrible bloody. You could say as proportionally bloody as our civil war, which we accept all the violence and the 20th century wars, but not the violence of our revolution. I think in part because we think the big ideas in Philadelphia in 76 and 11 years later at the Constitutional Convention will be diminished. They're not. They're made even more impressive.

So the Bill of Rights is a way of saying, we've sort of delivered this operating system, but we now need these things to say why we fought, right? And remember what the first. one is. Everybody says, freedom of the press. You go, yeah, that's number two of a three-part thing. Well, it's ability to redress grievances. That's number three. Number one is that the Congress will make no establishment of a religion. We were going to liberate ourselves from the tyranny, from the drag, from the anchor that all of these established religions had placed on the states. They'd seen

what was happening. And all of these things represented an attempt to add something to the Constitution that would give it the practical satisfaction for the people who did the fighting and dying, who weren't originally part of the equation. When you begin to set off this thing, this is an aristocrat, this is what we'd say was an elite. These were the people who were going to run things. The most important thing, I think, with regard to the founders, and our writer, Jeff Ward, who I've worked with for 45 years, said it really beautifully the other day. He said, if we see those founders as perfect, then they're untouched. because we know deeply how flawed we are and that we presume in their perfection that we can't

ever equal them. So our job as artists and as storytellers is to try to remind us of the humanity. George Washington is the indispensable human being in this, but he owns 577 other human beings as the writer Rick Atkinson said, you can't square that circle and you cannot. He makes really lousy tactical decisions in the battlefield and loses the biggest. battle in size of the revolution at Long Island not protecting his left flank, does the same thing a few months later at Brandywine, not protecting his right flank. You know, there's problems. He risks his life. If he's killed, the thing is over. He's the glue that holds it together, as Annette, Gordon Reed says in our film. But he picks subordinate talent, unafraid of this. Nathaniel Green and

Benedict Arnold are much better battlefield generals than he is. And he knows it, and he's okay with it. He defers to Congress. He exhibits unbelievable humility all his life. And he keeps the country together. He convinces somebody from New Hampshire and somebody from Georgia. They're now a one thing. They're not from separate countries. And he understands his and more than anything else at the height of his military power. He instantly resigns his commission. And at the height of his political power, he resigns that. So if you can have a dimensional Washington who is flawed like us, then we have access to him. And then we can. in our own ideas and in our own inspirations, in our own sense of our own possibilities, both personal and collective,

towards the better part of that. And I think what happens is you watch the history of the United States progress. You have people who have focused, the Declaration is not universally in everybody's mind. Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, others resurrected, reached back and resurrected the Declaration and Jefferson. the poetry and the meaning of this document, which we're going to celebrate, which is beyond important in all of human history.

You know, it's sponsored some nice things, but we go back and we look at the way we brought this document and Jefferson back and put it. So when the Gettysburg Address is happening, he's saying, and nobody says four score and seven years, unless you're asking your audience to sort of settle down and think about something, He's giving them the power that every great rhetorician does is, here you be the author of this too. Four score and seven years ago. That's not the constitutional convention.

That's not the beginning of the government in 1789. That's Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence in 76. And that means that Gettysburg Address is 2.0. We really do mean it. So your first question, yep, things continue to the same, but they didn't continue the same. The second that door was opened, though it was four score in nine years, 13th Amendment, 144 inexcusably long years before women get to vote.

But it's going to happen. And that door will never be shut, and it never works out for tyrants, no matter how pernicious and bad they are. It doesn't work out for them. And in a sense, it's a sort of logical consequence of the ideas set forth. And the biggest logical consequence, of course, in the 19th century is the abolition of slavery. and in order to do it, you had to fight bloody civil war, extraordinarily difficult. And then comes Lincoln with his second inaugural.

Can I just say something? You jumped us ahead to slavery appropriately. Let us remember that the American Revolution, we interviewed Bernard Bayland at 98 years old. He passed away at 101, 102. Balin said that before the Civil War, slavery was not a big argument. People had made cases, he said, about the evils and had articulated. But when the revolution came, and you said all men are created equal, that you had planters using the words that the British were imposing a slavery on them, the hypocrisy of it rose to the fore.

And there was never a moment when the number one issue in the United States was not slavery. And George Washington knew what was wrong. Thomas Jefferson knew it was wrong. And so we have a country that is heading inexorably toward this moment, which has the fury and the righteousness of an Old Testament God saying, you know, you are a lot. want to keep this up, we will keep this up. And every drop of blood drawn by the lash will be met by one drawn by the sword. We're here to do this.

He knows the war is about to end. But he's willing to do it. And then he pivots to this gracious New Testament kind of with malice towards none. Those are two of the greatest sentences that I've ever come across. Lincoln is in some ways, I think, the greatest American prose stylist of the 19th century. And 18th and 21st. All right. Because he sees us.

Just like the founders, they're fighting this impossible war with zero chance of success, but they're always talking about the millions yet unborn, as John Adams said. They're talking about you and me. And that is an amazingly poignant thing in the middle of these long odds. They understand that this fight, this word liberty, has not just a personal application to themselves, but it has an application for all time. And this is what makes the resonance of the revolution. I don't know if you remember the wonderful Gary Will's book about...

And he talks about the two greatest influences on Lincoln were the Bible and Shakespeare. And you can feel that in that second and order. Do we have better, you know, things even under this. In some ways, I would say the 19th century at that moment is a very important one because Lincoln and Mark Twain almost define a new American way of speaking. Oh, you're absolutely right. I mean, Hemingway said all American literature begins with Huck Finn. at that moment when a black human being is a real person

when Huck decides not to turn him in. He's written up the letter that's going to say to the people who are searching for Jim where he is. And then he thinks about Jim loves his people the way we love Arne. And that, you know, he's stayed up and calls me honey and such like things. And he looks and he's been told, you know, if he does this, he's going to go to hell.

And so he looks at Jim and he looks at the letter. He tears up the letter. And he said, okay, then I guess I'll go to hell. And this is the beginning of American. And it's this non-deferential, much more straightforward way of writing than the kind of fancy, poit-to-dy. Who said Lincoln and Twain wrote with the bark on. It sounded like us. And if you hear Twain on James Venomar Cooper, who's trying desperately to sound like an English writer, it's devastating.

You don't want to be James Fenimore Cooper. Now, we want to be something else. We want to move to another great American who defined America and American music, Louis Armstrong. The Bible says, in the beginning is the word. we are so convinced that words are the primary agency. And yet, all the other art forms, when they die and go to heaven, aspire to be music. It is the only art form, as Winton Marcellus said, that's invisible. It's the only art for you could hear two notes, and it will change things.

And so we can begin to broaden our notion of ideas that aren't existing in a kind of strict kind of dialectic and are in something that actually expands our notion of what truth might be. So Louis Armstrong is the most important person in music. I didn't say jazz in the 20th century. Sorry, Igor. He is to music, what Einstein is to physics and what the right brothers are to travel. He invents, for lack of a better word, what the critic Gary Giddens called Modern Time,

playing before or after the note. And in the early days of swing music, they didn't call it that. They called it orchestrated Armstrong. Duke Ellington saw him playing in Times Square and said, I want this person on every instrument. And he spent the next five decades trying to assemble something. And then he took singing and revolutionized it. And if you could talk to Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald or Billy Holiday,

and I did talk to Tony Bennett, they would say that it all begins with the way he sang. That are all American singing and the much the way you're talking in the 19th century about Lincoln and Twain changed. And so I think we broaden our idea of words and the power of ideas. The history of who we are is the history of ideas, but their ideas born in many, many places and many kinds of circumstances. And I think if we can have a capacious and generous sense of them that we can open our heart to the way in which someone like Lewis Armstrong, who is away from the streets of New Orleans, to be able to

transform our lives. I mean, if you said, Ken, who do you want to have at dinner, Abraham Lincoln or Louis Armstrong? I'd say, can I have both? Ken Burns. Thank you. And I'd say the same. Let's have them both to dinner. That was filmmaker Ken Burns, whose 2025 PBS documentary series was called The American Revolution. He was in conversation with CNN host and award-winning journalist Farid Zakaria. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. My name is Siyya, and I live in the most beautiful place on earth.

Seven months ago, I blew up my life, and a lot has shifted since then. Everyone is moving forward. I'm still working on that. And that's me. Welcome to Ice Cove. Where are the penguins? That's Antarctica. We're the other one.

of North. Stream now on CBC Gem. For all its soaring rhetoric about liberty and equality, the United States Declaration of Independence was riddled with contradictions that have reverberated through 250 years of American history. The biggest contradiction was the institution of slavery in a republic that made freedom its central article of faith.

Eddie Glaude is an acclaimed author and distinguished professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. And at the 26 Aspen Ideas Festival, he spoke with classical pianist Laura Downs, about the ways in which racism and the legacies of slavery perverted the ideals America was founded on and shaped its culture, especially its musical culture. Their conversation opened with a discussion of Amazing Grace, a song written in 1772 by John Newton, a British slave trader turned abolitionist. You know, amazing grace captures the tension,

the contradictions of this place. A kind of cry for grace because of the sin of slavery, the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade, the tempest that had him cry out for God's mercy and forgiveness. And who sent it in that moment? Not the folks in the bowels of the ship, but the man who made a fortune selling those folk. And then to pull that thread from then to the first African-American president

singing Amazing Grace at Mother Bethel in light of that violence. So we see in this moment that song that belongs to all of us, right, the vexed beginnings of this fragile experiment. That song, I mean, it's, I think it's the most recorded song in American history. There are thousands of recordings in the Library of Congress. I mean, you could name your favorites than I could too, maybe Aretha. But amazing, Grace had sounded like everyone along the way. It has sounded like, you know, every musical tradition and every cultural tradition and every generation.

and it just seems to surface whenever we need its message. Yeah, because we're all crying out for grace. Yeah. And it seems that speaks to something fundamental about this human journey. Yeah. Yeah, the possibility of redemption. The possibility of redemption. And America's longing for redemption.

I keep thinking about that moment in Jefferson's notes where he's worried about God's punishment for the sin of slavery. There is a kind of hint that I can imagine the deist reaching for Newton's amazing grace because he knows of the sins that shadow his efforts. And so I think that's why we're attracted to it because we're so, so complicated and contradictory. Your book, America, USA, kind of breaks down these 250 years in 50-year segments. So we're going to play a new game that I just invented, called nerd trivia, because what I know about 250 years of American history, I know through music.

And you've investigated the bigger stories around that music. So I want to give to you some examples of what was happening in music in America at each of those 50-year touch points. And then have you fill in the backstory of why, why America sounded the way it did. So 1776, they're signing the Declaration of Independence. But then we get to 1826. And what I find when I look at 1826 when this country is celebrating is 50 years, it's at Minstall Street. It's just starting. And of course, that's coming from Afro-Aribian and African-American musical traditions. And black music was very present in social life. The fiddlers at dances and all of that music was really making itself heard and felt throughout the culture. And the other thing that's really interesting about it is this is the beginning already of what you might call the, entertainment industry. Because when blackface minstrel street gets going, it starts touring. And it becomes one of our first entertainment exports that we're calling specifically American. And of course,

it's based on, you know, these terrible racist stereotypes, but it's what we are sending overseas. Yeah. And you don't, you got to get to wrap your mind around that, right? That this place, which is supposedly a beacon of freedom, you know, John Adams is. purportedly to have said to King George, we will not be your Negroes. So at the moment he's given voice to an understanding of freedom is predicated on an intimate knowledge of unfreedom. And so here you have the country's first form of mass entertainment, really kind of staging a deep anxiety about who and what it is. Because it wasn't black folk performing in the minstrels. It's white folk corked up as black folk.

If you ever get a chance to read Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act, the novelist who wrote Invisible Man, he gives a wonderful reading of this complex psychology of the country that produces this form of theater, where these stereotypes are performed to kind of reveal in so many ways the contradictions. I keep going back to contradictions. The contradictions at the heart of the project itself. And sonically and performatively, it shows up. across the landscape. What do you make of the sound that comes out of this contradictory space? It's really complicated because it is at the root musically of so much else. So black musicians,

you know, have really reclaimed this moment now as the roots of what would so quickly develop. I also think it's fascinating that we hadn't developed any kind of a sound that we could call specifically American yet, except for this. So we're really relying on those African influences to make a sound that we're proud of, and yet to put it in such a twisted context. Yeah, so when you read Emerson's The American Scholar, he's worried about this place that's still an apprenticeship to Europe. It hasn't really understood its uniqueness,

the uniqueness of its landscape, the uniqueness of its language, the uniqueness of who we are. He's longing for us to reach for the specificity of who we can be as a country And guess what? It's actually taking shape on the lower registers, the lower frequencies, among those very people who are bought and sold as chattel, the folk who haunt the experiment from the very beginning. We have to begin to ask ourselves, what's at the core of who we are?

Why haven't we yet discovered who we are as Americans? Because, as you know, the through, as you just let the through line, in some ways, ways, you know, that blue note deposited at the heart of the country comes from those folk and others who bear the burden of this place. Okay. Next. 1876, this was an interesting thing. So the Jubilee singers at Fisk University did an international tour.

They were in the midst of, I think, five years of touring because the university, and maybe you can tell us more about the origins of the university, but it was already suffering and in threat of being shut down. So they're touring internationally to raise money to keep the school open. And they're taking with them spirituals to Europe and across America. And I think it's one of the first large-scale attempts to sort of legitimize those songs to bring those songs into an American canon. And it's very successful. I mean, they were met with warm response everywhere they went.

They raised the money. They came back home triumphant. But can you set the stage a little bit for that? and what was happening at Fitz. Sure. So we need to understand schools like Fisk and Morehouse and Spelman and Howard as these institutions that come into being as a result of radical reconstruction. So this is the carnage of the Civil War that left 600,000 plus dead on land and sea. You have these folk who are coming, these missionary moms, as DeBois described them, making their way to the South, engaging in this hard work of how do we transform these folk who were once chattel into people who could bear the

burdens of citizenship. And so these institutions became critical spaces. Now, what's important about 1876 is that the logic that led to their formation is being assaulted. This is the moment of the actual murder of reconstruction, not its collapse. This is the moment in 1874, Cofax, Louisiana, extraordinary violence. The moment in July 4th of Vicksburg, extraordinary violence, Hamburg, South Carolina, you have literal coup. political coups, the Mississippi plan, which involved a violent assault on black voters to disenfranchise them, began to be applied across the South, even as some of those southern states were still under occupation. So 1876, there's this moment of crisis.

How will these folks survive? The Fis Jubilee singers take the sorrow songs and they render them in such a way that it becomes palatable, acceptable. They translate it into an idiot. But what's interesting, though, is that they're performing on stages in the United States of people who are capitulating to the murder of reconstruction. You can, how can I put this? You can cry your crocodile tears as someone sings, weighed in the water on stage as you support the institutionalization of Jim Crow outside.

So what do we see in this moment, but in this embrace sentimentality. And part of what I write about in the book about this period is the relationship between sentimentality and white rage, right? That somehow America's divided soul, this sense that the country has this double consciousness that it imagines itself as a beacon of freedom on the one hand and as a white republic on the other.

And you can't hold those two commitments together without contradiction, without depositing a kind of magic. at the heart of the country, and the only way you can finesse it is to believe that white folk possess freedom to give and to take away. And so we find ourselves in this cycle of sentimentality and rage. What can we do for you? And then when the demand for justice continues, rage ensues. And so the spirituals for me are embraced from the vantage point of sentimentality, the sound that comes with that too. Okay, but...

But... To me, the sound is also a sound of dignity. It's a sound of affirmation. It's a sound of insistence on heritage and lineage. So, it's another contradiction, perhaps. But between the makers of that music, the proponents of that music and the hearers of that music, what is that relationship through the music?

It all depends on who you're centering. Even though we bear the brunt of the country's contradictions, even though I am a child of Mississippi, And I have had to grow up with the wounds that come with that experience, even though I am an inheritor of all that has made me possible. We have never been passive in relation to it. We've always spoken back. We've always kind of given, even if it's a cry, a moan.

Cornell West used to do this when he was teaching. He would say there's the moaning, M-O-A-N. There's the morning. M-O-1. you are in I-N-G. And then there's the morning, M-O-R-N-I-N-G. And that kind of movement constitutes, you know, the sound that is found in those spirituals

that constitute the epigraphs the boys is the souls of black folk. Yeah. Because this is when music starts moving very fast, right? From 1876 through the Harlem Renaissance, what happens to music, what happens to black music and the claiming of black music, is so rapid. I mean, obviously, it's so intrinsically tied in with everything else that's happening,

but I feel like the balance of preservation shifts a bit. Yeah, we're trying to make sense of this. Country has doubled down on itself as a white republic and the violence that comes in tow. It's unimaginable. Rayford Logan, the historian out of Washington, D.C. calls it the nadir the lowest point in African-American history. They're lynching us, strange fruit and popular trees. You think about Red Summer of 1919, before you even get there, 1915, the founding, the rebirth of the clan. It's the age of jazz, of course. But what are we trying to do? We're trying to find resources to imagine possibility in the face of the country's contradictions. 1926 is the 150th anniversary of the nation.

The clan is at his height in terms of his power. It claims as its seminal achievement, the Johnson Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which set the national quotas. Wait, I have a story about this. Go ahead and tell it. 1924 is when George Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue. So two years ago, I did a project looking at that 100 years.

and, you know, just sort of looking at Gershwin's place in the jazz age, and what was Gershwin's America, and what was he calling the musical kaleidoscope of America, and what are all these sounds that he's hearing in New York City and trying to integrate into this piece. So I was trying to put together, you know, a lot of materials about this, and I found this old newsreel from 1924, and also, yes, Johnson Reed Act, and he's celebrating the melting pot at the same time that this legislation is being passed. It is also excluding him, by the way. So I find this old footage and I was just trying to look for charming images of flappers and things like this to show this musical environment that gave birth this piece. But I could not avoid the clan because it was all cut together so quickly that I literally physically could not exclude these huge clan rallies and marches from this picturesque look of New York City in 1924, you know, champagne and jazz.

And it was really such a physical experience of what. that moment felt like. Yeah, only the United States could call it the roaring 20s after the Spanish flu of 19. After the horrors of the rich sum of 1919, the clan is doing all that it's doing. You know, the clan claimed that if it wasn't for them, Calvin Coolidge wouldn't have been elected. Congressman Johnson was from the state of Washington. He was actually a member of the clan. Senator Reid represented the state of Pennsylvania, which had 250,000 clan.

members in the state. Six percent of the nation of white America belonged to the clan. So much so that at the 150th anniversary of the nation in Philadelphia at the exposition, the clan was approved to hold its annual convention on the grounds of the celebration of the 150th. They were going to celebrate the flag and burn across at the same time. So what is the music in this moment? What are black folk trying to do? What's the country? Listen. listening to the Charleston? I thought, what's going on in this moment? Because remember, this is the decade of the 20s. Tulsa's in this decade. There's all kinds of carnage happening here. So what is the musical landscape giving us? And it's also 1921 and it's shuffle along on Broadway.

And it's, you know, this huge craze for black music. And it's Langston Hughes saying, this is the beginning of the Renaissance. And it's all of this energy and it's migration. It's all these people finding each other in Chicago and Harlem and that kind of flowering that we can't, we can't regret that. Oh, but it's also the kind of tension that makes this place swing. It's the seasoning that gives America its taste, right? Its rhythm, it's pacing. It's in the contradiction. It's in that blue note at the heart of the country. Yeah. We were talking last night a little bit about rag time, ragged time. I think that's really the beginning. And you can use that very metaphorically. Everything's a little bit off-kilter, a little off-step, you know. Contradictions

are living in the music. Absolutely. But, you know, that's where possibility is also found. If you really want to figure out who we are, if we're honest, open up our ears and hear and listen. 1926 is interesting because it really is, you know, the Great American Songbook is being born. And there's so much black music feeding into that. And also recordings are starting. So Louis Armstrong is recording Jelly Roll Morton. This sound is going out into the world. Yeah.

And I'm just thinking it's also the period in which Hitler's looking to the United States as an example. It's also in a period in which nativism is rampant. American imperial ambition is tied to its violence with regards to Jim Crow in the south and across the Midwest. It's also bound up with these oligarchs who've seized. power, it will crash in 29. All of this is happening at once. But so unsettling, you've described it in a way, Laura, is our refusal to tell the truth about what's happening. We lie. And then we retreat into fantasy and myth because we want to hold on to adolescence and innocence instead of growing the hell up. And my God, you could draw a through line.

And from that to our current malaise. 1976. I was a kid, yeah. It was very patriotic. There were a lot of fireworks. And it was so commercialized. It was so kitsy. You could buy a red, white, and blue whoopee cushion.

The Bicentennial bore the burden of a nation that was deeply skeptical about itself. There was, of course, Watergate, Saigon, Black, Black, power, the women's movement, the radicalization of the student movement. The country seemed to be coming a part of the scenes. And so the bicentennial bore the burden of articulating a kind of consensus, a sense of national unity rooted in this idea. But it's also, I talked to Ladi bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian, he said, this is really the commemorations of white ethnic America. Remember the ones in the 1920. these European immigrants were considered infestations coming from Esho countries in Europe,

the Swar the Italians, those suspicious Irish folk who were loyal to the Pope but not to the country, Jews, globalist, they wouldn't use that language, but you know what I mean, the financiers and the like. Now their children or grandchildren are claiming the revolution as their own and engaging in interesting responses to efforts to desegregate schools in places like Boston. So it's a very interesting moment. Sonically, how does that evidence itself? It's a really segregated time in pop culture. I was looking at the bison, the official celebrations.

It was the Beach Boys. It was the Eagles. It was Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, performing in a Statue of Liberty costume. This is very white music. But it was also a huge year in black music. It was Stevie Wonder songs in the Key of Life. It was one of the most, for me, transformative performances that exist in recorded form. It's Nina Simone in Montreux, that performance of I Wish I knew how it would feel to be free,

which is like it's the 20th century in one performance. It's one of her most electrifying moments. In Questlove's book, Music is History, he has this beautiful, title for the chapter on 1976. He says, having two parties, how you unlock history, depends on which key you use. Come on.

Absolutely. And you know, whenever, to my earbar, whenever I hear exaggerated claims of American unity, they're usually happening in a period of intense disunity. We posit cohesion in order to hide the royal

chaos underneath it all. You know, President Ford actually, I can't believe I just didn't vote President Ford. President Ford was the first president to acknowledge Black History Month in 1976 because Negro History Week, which was founded in 1926, became Black History Month in 1976. And so you have for the first time in these commemorations, not an effort to disappear black people, but to absorb them into the American story, to be. make our story a part of the ongoing work towards a more perfect union.

But it came with costs. Okay, well, here we are. 2026, what do you think? Lord have his mercy, Jesus. Well, I can tell you one thing about music and musicians. Nobody's having any of it. These bicentennial celebrations are going to be very quiet on the musical front. You know, the first sentence of my book is a very controversial one.

He says, I do not love America and I never have, especially now. What I'm trying to do with that first sentence, is hold off the idolatry of the state. Those of you who've read Johanna Arant, you know she's deeply suspicious of loyalty to groups and abstractions. It's also announcing that I'm starting from a different place than my hero, James Baldwin. And it's also beginning with wound What happened to me as a kid growing up in Mississippi

When some man, my dad moved us from one side of town to the other I'm playing with my Tonka truck And I have a new friend I imagine him blonde and blue-eyed or red-haired And green-eyed I can't remember But his dad came out and screamed stop playing with that N-word I had to pick up my truck And go inside

and then my parents had to get to work to teach me how to survive this place. And so I'm always wondering, how is it that you expect me to love this place? Because if I express how I truly feel, if I tell the story as we've been telling it, you're going to have to confront you. You're going to have to hear a different sound in your ear. And so here we are in the 250th, and the only thing I could say to myself is that they've done this shit again. It's not an abstraction. We have to raise our babies in this.

So every time a court order comes down and the man who called these people said that these people were eating pets, these people who were saying that these districts are racist and, We can gut the Voting Rights Act. Every time that happens, our baby's got to come inside. And we've got to teach them how to survive the place. In the 250th year of the country, we're here. It's a semi-ssequentennial blues. Yeah.

All of these contradictions, all of this ugliness and untruths, you know, I spent many years digging in American music to find that truth and to find the many songs and stories and voices that have been conveniently erased by history and bringing them back. And even though the circumstances around the creation of this music are so difficult to contemplate, I feel like the music is an ultimate triumph. And I have this feeling that that is one of the things that can pull us along or push us along or maybe define this next chapter. If we really listen to what we've been able to do in certain creative, expressive ways,

it's a lesson to what we could do elsewhere. True. Ellison's protagonist in The Invisible Man says, On the lower frequencies I speak for you, in the messiness of American life lies the grandness and grandeur of who we are. Maybe if we finally make a choice and be a beacon of freedom and not a white republic, if we can finally make a choice, it's a moral choice. Freedom doesn't belong to you.

I'm not a charitable enterprise. Never was. If we can begin to leave behind some of this stuff and sit in what we've created together, then maybe we can open up the possibility of being different. But I will say this, the promise of America always on the road to a more perfect union, the promise of the founding has secured our hubris. It's made us think that no matter our choices we can survive, I don't know who we're going to be on the other side of this madness.

But I do know that we have to grow up in our music, or resources for that, it seems to me. That was Eddie Glaude, distinguished professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, in conversation with classical pianist Laura Downs at the 26 Aspen Ideas Festival. Special thanks to Jonathan Pervez at the Aspen Institute.

This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Our website is cbc.cais.com. And you can find us on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.