The Daily Stoic - Adam Hochschild on Our Obligation to the Common Good pt. 2

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

In the second of a two-part interview, Ryan speaks with one of the great non-fiction writers and historians of our time, Adam Hochschild, about his classic 1986 memoir Half The Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, the impetus for his latest book American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, and the process that Adam went through to improve his relationship with his father, and more. Adam Hochschild is an American author, journalist, historian, and lecturer. He has written 11 books, including the highly regarded and influential King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains. He has written for the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, Granta, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. He has received many awards for his writing, including the Duff Cooper Prize and the Mark Lynton History Award for King Leopold’s Ghost, and the California Book Awards Gold Medal and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for Bury the Chains. Adam graduated from Harvard in 1963, and he holds honorary degrees from Curry College and the University of St. Andrews.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. Something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have. Here on the weekend when you have a

little bit more space when things have slowed down be sure to take some time to think to go for a walk to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday.

Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. This is part two of a two part episode we talked with Adam Haaschild earlier. His book, Barry the Chains, about the the freeing of the slaves, the abolition movement, ending of the slave trade. Absolutely must read core idea in this stoke principle of justice. Well, most people don't know that Adam wrote a very brilliant memoir. One I enjoyed quite a bit called Half the Way Home, a Memoir of Father and Son. And when I read it, I almost broke down in tears. It was just an absolutely beautiful book.

It reminded me of this great essay that Kafka wrote called Letter to the Father. It's about basically a young son struggling with a sort of an overbearing stern distant father and reckoning with this. They're trying to get closer, speaking very different languages, having very different experiences. It's not an abusive relationship by any means, but there is something, some gap that they struggle to close. And it's a haunting moving memory.

I absolutely loved it. So when I read that, that's when I reached out to Adam and asked if he'd want to come on the podcast and talk about both those two books. And that's when he let me know that he had a third book that had just come out. And he asked if I would like to read that and talk to him about that book.

And I said, are you kidding? Absolutely. That new book is called American Midnight, the Great War of Violent Peace and Democracies Forgotten Crisis about World War I, about this period of the Woodrow Wilson presidency, America is on the brink, it feels like the social fabric is falling apart.

There's violence in the streets, there's a reactionary anti-immigrant movement, an anti-immigrant movement, a race movement, there's conflict in every conceivable way. Adam says it's our trumpiest period aside from the one that we're currently in. I think that's right. So I talked about that new book with him and his classic memoir, which I cannot recommend enough on I'm going to start carrying the pain of porch, half the way home, a memoir, a father and son. This is the second part of our in-depth conversation.

I really enjoyed talking to him. I could have talked to him for another hour or more. I'm going to read more of his stuff and hopefully have him on the podcast again. But I'll just let you get right to the episode now. This was a great conversation. Thank you, Adam. And check out his books. And I'll talk to you all soon.

I just think about my issues with my own parents. I was also struck by when you grow up and you realize that your parents were married to each other and they had a relationship and a dynamic as two people who met and brought a person into the world, right? You tend to think of your parents as these special people. When really they're just two people who met on the street who are totally unqualified to do this thing that is having kids as we all are, right? And you're this sort of dynamic where your mother was so in love with and relentlessly supportive

of your father and probably totally ignorant of the strain or pain that his worldview or approach had on you, not realizing even that she was sort of tacitly endorsing all of it. I found that to be very interesting in the book. Yeah, I think that's a not unfamiliar pattern because I've certainly run into many people who said there was something similar in their own lives. My mother, who was not a career woman, didn't have a job really,

was extremely loving. And I felt loved me unconditionally. And that's a wonderful feeling for a kid to have. She loved my father unconditionally too. So when she sensed that there was some tension between us or that I seemed to be little fearful of him, and I think it's impossible that she would not sense that there was some tension between us or that I seem to be a little fearful of him, and I think it's impossible that she would not sense that. She tried to better it just by telling me what a wonderful man he was, which of course

didn't help that much because that made me feel all the more guilty for feeling fearful or apprehensive around him. So again, she had very good intentions, but I don't think it was the right way to go about it. Well, I think one of the cautionary tales of the book is, and perhaps this is somewhat addressed by, you know, the changing of gender roles and the equalization of things,

or the closer to equalization of things, but it struck me as a reminder to all parents of the power that you have over your children implicitly intrinsically by nature of who you are and needing to be quite sensitive to the effect that that power has over a child. So what you think is a sarcastic remark or a rolling of the eyes or a bit of feedback or whatever,

lands so heavily on a nine year old or a six year old, there is 17 year old, who is trying to figure out who they are in this world, that a sort of a sensitivity to, and that's a sensitivity, but a profound empathy for the person on the other side of these things, that they are so much smaller and less secure and less confident than you are, and needing to be cognizant of that. This struck me as a takeaway from the book. Yeah, I think, yeah, we often forget as parents

that when we speak to children, especially small children, we're speaking through a loudspeaker that kind of magnifies the effect of our words and that any kind of criticism or disapproval is often felt much more heavily than it was then it was intended. Well, especially as the child, as they get older and they seek an unconventional path in life, what you talk about, like it's already so scary to decide to be a writer or a creative or to not go into a safe, dependable profession. And so, you know, parents think, oh, well, I'm just,

I just want you to think about this concern or that concern or I'm just looking out for you. I'm just worried about you. But you don't realize how, how shaky the foundation, the person is on as they are deciding to do this or that thing. I dropped out of college when I was 19 and I think my parents were quite worried I would end up under a bridge somewhere, which as I get older and now a parent myself I relate to. But I also, if I could go back and I'd say, I was also worried about ending up under a bridge somewhere. I didn't need anyone to tell me how dangerous what I was doing was. I needed someone to tell me that, you know, if it did go to shit, I wouldn't end up under a bridge somewhere.

Right. You know, you need what you need is support not someone shouting out, be careful. You're going to hurt yourself. Yeah, yeah. Also, I think my father was, you know, he grew up and thrived in a world of business executives, senators, governors, influential people, foundation presidents, influential people, politically. This was the world he knew. This was the world he imagined a place for me in it. And when

I took a different path, it was really upsetting to him. But at the same time, he and my mother both sort of were ideologically liberals and you know read all the proper child rearing books that said you should let your child discover his talent and do whatever he is most talented at. This came into conflict with the son that my father had always imagined. And in a sense, I think the son of the mother had imagined it too. So when I would say, well, I really do like writing, and I feel that's what I'm good at. My father would say, well, yes, but I think you'd be really much more talented in running an organization or something like that. Well, in a sense, this is where your two books are connected in that you sort of detail in the book, this awakening that you have. You sort of grow up.

Your father's relatively progressive and open-minded and certainly not some reactionary entrenched elitist, but you had this slow realization that the world you grew up in was not normal and not particularly fair or just, and that there were assumptions that people had made that were not predicated on, you know, maybe the values that you purported to have. And you sort of went around and traveled and saw some of these places that as a child, you'd taken for granted, but then as an adult, you realized, hey, this zinc mine in Africa is inherently exploitative or racist or these number of things. You ended up questioning the paradigm that you grew up in, which as we were talking about is one of the hardest things for people to do.

Yeah. I think in a way I benefited from a way growing up in setting that really showed me something about how the world economy worked. I grew up in the United States. I had a very comfortable life. My parents were able to afford to send me to college. We had a very comfortable estate. We lived on in the summertime

and at the Adirondackons in upstate New York. And then my father at one point made what may have been the mistake of taking me with him on a business trip to Africa where he visited the compromise that the company he worked for on Sherazim. And I began to realize that all of these lovely things I've enjoyed all my life, you know, the motorbikes on the lake, the college education, everything else, were paid for by the labor of African compromising minors, working far under the earth in very hot, damp,

often dangerous conditions, and just being paid a few shillings a day for it. And that showed me something about how the world worked. It gave me a lens through which to look at this extremely unequal world that we live in. And I think that combined with the fact that I came of age politically in the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement was undergoing a huge revival. I became a part of it. My then girlfriend, now wife and I were briefly civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. I got very drawn into the movement against the Vietnam War. And when I finally under the Freedom of Information Act managed to get my FBI files and CIA files, I found there were more than 100 pages of surveillance reports on me.

Some of which included mention of my father because he actually also was opposed to the war. So, ironically, in this big issue that most divided people from their parents in the 1960s and 1970s, the war in Vietnam, we were on the same side. Yeah, I was writing about this where there's this moment after the Orosevelle is elected to the state legislator, Sharon York, He's asked to vote on this cigar maker's bill. And it's the first time in his life that he has just a couple blocks south and visits these tenements that the cigar makers are living in. And it's his, although he'd had a, you know, again, a relatively liberal, open-minded, charitable family, he's still lived in this cocoon of privilege and convenience, and he is forced to look at how the other half lives. And once he sees it,

I think, as all of us are forced to do, we have a choice. Do we turn away from it and pretend it doesn't exist, or do we decide to dedicate ourselves either completely or partially to doing something about it? Yeah, yeah. So I was grateful to be exposed to all those things growing up. And I have a lot to be grateful for in terms of the scope of my early life. Difficult as it may have been to resolve the mall and it took me a long time to do it. I certainly got to see a great deal of the world and a great deal of the world that was

beyond the little slice of it that I'd spent most of my time in. So, talk to me about freedom summer. That must have been an incredible experience. It was. This was the summer of 1964, when the Civil Rights Movement has revived in a big way for the preceding couple of years. Freedom writers getting on buses, going through the south, walking in groups of young white and black people together, to eat at bus station cafeterias, often getting beaten up by local thugs, and vigilantes arrested.

And finally, I guess the principal organizer, a man named Robert Moses, excuse me, who died recently, a remarkable human being, had the inspiration, feeling that the country was not going to take the civil rights movement seriously, until white people as well as black were taken to the south and saw the saw the indignities that black Americans have to go through every day. So they recruited a thousand young people, almost all white, almost all from the north, to spend the summer in Mississippi. A number of them got beaten up. Three people were killed, two white guys from New York and a local Mississippi guy that they were working with.

Goodman Schwerner and Cheney. And it's sort of focused the nature, the attention of the country on this state that was picked because it was the most reactionary in terms of segregation rights for black people and so on. Nothing happened to me. I was very lucky. I was just there a few weeks. But some weeks after we left, the house where I and the other volunteers had lived, the

bank was actually blown up by the dynamite bomb. Luckily no one was hurt, but it was a reminder that the people, the carloads of young white kids who used to drive by the house shouting slurs at night had returned with something more powerful and just words. Well, as we go back and try to understand those 12 people in that print shop who got outraged and stayed outraged about other people's rights, in a sense, that's what Freedom Summer was about. I mean, it makes sense why Bob Moses was motivated to deal with those things, right? But why a thousand white kids from the North would be willing to put themselves in that kind of danger, it goes to that fundamentally beautiful thing that we are sometimes capable of, where we care about other people's rights.

That's right. And we just, we have to do that on a worldwide scale right now. We have to do it as we wrestle with the problem of global warming. As we wrestle with the problem of autocrats all over the world doing horrible things. I'm moved and pleased when I drive through various communities in the United States right now and see all the Ukrainian flags out. That's showing we have the ability to empathize with other people who are suffering something quite terrible right now. I wish there was a flag that we could display that showed our compassion and outrage of the fact that a third of Pakistan is under water because of floods caused by global warming. What about a million people who died most of them needlessly of a virus, you know, over

the last three years? That is the other, our inability to get, it's like our greatest moments are when we get outraged on behalf of other people's rights. And some of our most shameful moments, whether we're looking at the response to COVID or you're looking at, you know, that it took what 30 odd years or 40 odd years to pass for the Senate to ratify the the UN treaty against genocide. You know, like our most shameful moments are when we see something and we say, that doesn't affect me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there is a deep, deep streak of that doesn't affect me in American light. We're here, we've got oceans on either side of us,

the rest of the world doesn't really touch us. Let's keep it that way. But of course, we are part of a larger world. In many, many ways, we're united by the climate we live in, by the practices that we do. We are connected with everyone else and we can never forget that. It strikes me that your father's generation,

or not even generation, but your father, the archetype of your father is increasingly a bygone figure the archetype of your father is increasingly a bygone figure in that the wealthier one seems to be, the more privileged one seems to be, the more ensconced one seems to be in power or society or status or class, it almost goes with an increased indifference to what those other like like when I look at the political movement of our time, I see almost a reactionary rejection of even the impulse to care about other people. We call it virtue. like we even have a a a a derisive term for it, we call it virtue signaling to care about other people or to express care about other people's rights or principles or ideals. Well, I'm all for signaling virtue. Of course. And for acting on it. Yes, they're not exclusive,

but but you can't have one without the other. That's true. That's true. They're not exclusive, but you can't have one without the other. That's true. That's true. Yeah. But it, but it, it strikes me as sort of sad. And I, I see this in my, my father and many of his peers. Obviously, my father's probably about your age, maybe a little younger. But I, I, I struggle with what feels like a, a betrayal of the values that they taught me as a kid, all the things

that they told me were important about America, right? So to grow up, my father telling me what's great about America is immigrants, what's great about America is the way that we've struggled to address things like civil rights and segregation, you know, what might, my, all the values of, of, of what conservatism once embraced, and obviously there were problems with it, but once embraced compared to what it stands for now, or the things it's willing to accept now in order to achieve political power. I think a lot of people my age, we saw this politically, we saw it during the pandemic, but there is this kind of,

yeah, almost a betrayal of the things that our parents told us were important. Yes, certainly. And we see it very clearly, when it comes to elections, you know, when there are people, you know, denying that the results of elections. And so what's more basic than that? You know, who?

How, your father did seem consistent in the sense, and you probably a great gift that you didn't have this big conflict over Vietnam, the way that I imagine many of his peers had with their children. But yeah, I have struggled to figure out how to reconcile the person that I thought my parents were and then who they become as they've gotten older. Well, you're not alone, Ryan. I mean, there are people all over the country

who I think are wrestling with similar things. And what makes it all a more painful is sometimes the people who believe the most outrageous things, you know, that George Soros is pulling strings that connect to ballot boxes in Pennsylvania and all kinds of crazy stuff like that. Sometimes people believe the most outrageous things have been kind and warm and generous in their personal lives. Yes. kind and warm and generous in their personal lives. Yes.

And, you know, it's, they're hard things to put together, but that's true. I've learned a lot traveling with my wife, Arley, who has for the last 10 years studied front-footers, or earlier on people who later became trump-foot voters in Louisiana, now in Eastern Kentucky. And, you know, I've met some of these folks.

They visited us. We've visited them. They're people who have parts of gold that who believe all kinds of things that I think are complete nonsense about the state of the world of the workings of American democracy. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the

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this neighbor we live on this dirt road. And there's no homeowners association. It's a collective community of neighbors who have to take care of this road if it is drivable and I watch, you know, one of my neighbors who Every time it rains is out there taking care of the road. He's not getting any money for it. He does collect money from the other neighbors for which he is a it. He does collect money from the other neighbors for which he is a a perfect steward. And then I also drive by, you know, the Let's Go brand in flag that he has from the flagpole. And you go, how do you reconcile these two things? And it is so vexing to watch someone get sucked into something that is so contrary to their values. Yeah, and we have to honor the decent sides of these people at the same time as we're appalled by the, you know, the things they believe politically.

And at the same time, and this is the hard part, when we find it almost impossible to talk about those political disagreements. Because if somebody is really convinced that COVID shot you have is Bill Gates implanting a microchip in your arm or something that's gonna send signals or is really convinced, like Marjorie Taylor agreeing

that their satellite rays, some kind of Jewish conspiracy of satellite rays that are affecting voting systems, you can't talk somebody out of that stuff. You still have to relate to them as a human being, but those things are not subject to rational argument. Well, your wife wrote strangers in their own land, right? That's right, that's right.

And I think the premise of, it is at least intellectually helpful to understand that it's coming from a place of fear and instability and vulnerability as opposed to somewhere else. As I think the great civil rights leaders wanted us to understand that the southerners who were acting so abominably were doing so from a similar place of fear and uncertainty

and what happens when your world feels like it's changing beneath your feet. That doesn't make it right, but you can understand it. Yeah. Yeah. I think understanding you have to have that understanding and let it at least partially enable you to talk to people, partially build a relationship on the human qualities that you can agree on. And then maybe there's some hope that they will take a little more seriously the things that you believe. Or maybe there isn't, but we still, you know, this guy with the Let's Go brand and flag is still your neighbor.

And you still have to relate to him as your neighbor. And to find some basis of communication there, even admitting that there are other things that you'll never agree on. Yeah, it's it's certainly challenging, I think, as we, as you wrestle with. with the understanding, and I think this is maybe what America is going through as a whole, and you go, you talk about in the book, though, which is realizing that your childhood or your history was not quite so idyllic as you thought, or it wasn't fully as clean as you thought it was. And there is a paint. Some people can face that and come to terms with it and be made better for it. And other people have to retreat further into the illusions that we're so comforting when they were young. Yes, yes, that's true. Yeah, well, you must have quite a few neighbors that you have these kinds of sense of differences with. I do, I do.

I do. It's a reminder though, it's helpful at least not to live in a bubble where I don't know this is absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, because we most of us do live in bubbles of where I don't know this is even happening. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, because we most of us do live in bubbles of one sort or another. Yes. And from rural Texas originally?

No, I'm from Northern California. Oh, all the more. Bravo for moving to rural Texas. Well, you know, it's in this struggle, too. I think a lot of people that have moved to these different cities over the last five or 10 years in my generation as they've, you know, sought cheaper housing or different opportunities or whatever is, is this sense that, oh, this place isn't maybe fully what I thought it was. Maybe there's a darkness to this idyllic little place that I'm in.

And then you're faced with the question of, do I leave and go back to a bubble where everyone thinks and acts like me? Or do you stay and try to be the values that you think that that place should have more of? Well, Bravo, do you for staying here? Well, thank you. And I know we've been at this a while. So I want to switch to the new book, which I found fascinating American midnight. I read a quote a few years ago about George Washington, which is basically the

more you study George Washington, the more you admire him, right? So that doesn't totally hold up because you learn you see the ads that he put out to to capture his his escape slaves and you know, you think a little bit less of them, but generally it's true the more you learn about Washington the more you admire him. I have found the exact opposite is true with Woodrow Wilson. That was certainly my case too. Wilson was a very complicated and interesting and paradoxical man. Not somebody that I loathe or hate. It's hard to have that feeling about him, but I'm fascinated by his contradictions. He was a great idealist in many ways. He was the last president of the progressive era when it came to the graduated income tax, child labor laws, regulating business, and so forth.

He was all for that. And then his great idealistic project was the League of Nations, where the countries of the world would gather around a table and talk out their differences instead of going to war. And the United States would be sort of the leading force there, and war would be forever gone from the face of the earth. In fact, I don't think it would have worked that way. Any more than the UN has been

able to stop war since it was formed in 1945. But, you know, nobody can dispute that it's better for countries to talk than to fight. And Wilson's dedication to that cause shortened his life because he embarked on a speaking tour promoting the league when he was in Hill of Health and a month into it He suffered the first of several near fatal strokes that shortened his life At the same time as all this this very idealistic man well-spoken author of a dozen books former college president, the college professor most of his life books, former college president, the college professor most of his life, resided over the greatest assault on civil liberties in 20th century American history and showed no concern about it. Under his rule, and this is a part of our history that at least in my high school American

history textbook, we never learned much of anything about. There was a period of four years, 1917 through early 1921, where we had press censorship on a huge scale in this country. We had vigilante violence that was actually encouraged and sponsored by the Justice Department. We had political imprisonment during those four years. Roughly 1,000 Americans were sent to jail for a year or more, and a much larger number for shorter periods, solely for things that they wrote or said. And all this was under Wilson's watch. So that's the period that I wanted to try to bring a life at American

did night. Well, it's interesting. We tend to think of history as this sort of, some of the injustices of history as being these things that were just not questioned. For instance, let's say segregation or racism or Jim Crow. But that's, you know, not actually what the Wilson presidency was. Wilson, the Wilson presidency was in some ways the restoration of those injustices. Do you know what I mean? Wilson wasn't just this guy that woke up in a world and he didn't question it. That's sort of one form of injustice. What I think so appalling and forces you to reckon with Wilson in a different way was his establishment of some of those ideas proactively, right? Like to go back to the 1780s, you have Clarkson and these others fighting for the elimination of slavery. And we forget that Napoleon, for instance,

reintroduces slavery into the French empire. And a single individual can make such a negative difference, too. Yeah. Wilson was the first southerner elected president since the Civil War. He had been governor of New Jersey, but he had been born in Virginia, grown up there in Georgia.

And he was very much a white southerner in his way of thinking. And in his two terms in power, he rolled back the amount of black employment in the federal government. He re-segregated departments where there had been a certain amount of desegregation. As a historian, he took a startlingly benign view of slavery.

Uh, and when the worst racial violence in the 20th century, uh, killed something approaching a thousand Americans, we'll never know the exact number in the summer of 1919. He said virtually nothing about it. So this was also something that made that a very dark period in American life. Yeah, he Yeah, he was complicit and guilty in the The the lost cause mythology and then the sort of white supremacy that, you know, the vestiges of the vestiges of which are still with us today, you know, he is so largely responsible

for their resurgence in the 20th century. In the period you talk about in the book, it's not just the war and labor that are battling for their, you know, battling it out in the little, the literal battlefield in the battle of ideas, but this idea of sort of white supremacy in a and a caste society in America, you know, that's being fought for in this moment also. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, it would have been hard for a president, a much better president to make huge progress on civil rights in that era, but Wilson certainly rolled things backward in that respect. There's no doubt about it. Yes. Yeah, theater Roosevelt wasn't perfect and had so many of his own racist problematic

ideas, but seems to be at least on the same page about, you know, what the values and principles of America were supposed to be, even if he didn't always live up to them. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So when you look at this period of, I go, when I study history, I am often have one of two reactions. One, I realize how bad the past was, and I get very nervous about where things are

and where they're going. The other is I look at how terrible the past was, and I go, oh yeah, it's always been this way. I can relax, not relax, but I can, I can, when I have a larger, more expansive view, I'm able to contextualize things better and realize not just that progress is possible, like with someone like Clarkson

and some of the movements we're talking about. But also that when we idealize the past, we do the present in injustice because we're assuming that it's somehow worse than it was before. We're not really aware. Like, you just look at the year 1968, you look at the unrest, you look at the violence, you look at the injustice, you look at the fact they were also dealing with an influenza epidemic that killed 200,000 people and you go, oh, I understand 2020 and 2021 a little bit better now, we're doing okay, right? When you look at these, when you look at this particular period in

American history that you're writing about in American Midnight, how does it help you contextualize the present? Well, I was drawn to this period because it seemed to me the trumpiest period in American life before Trump. Yeah. Vigilante violence on a huge scale. And as I mentioned, the largest of these vigilante groups, something called the American Protective League, was chartered by the Justice Department. They went around beating up anti-war demonstrators,

doing citizens arrests by the tens of thousands of young men who might be avoiding the draft and so on. Also, under new names after this group was dissolved, the same people, you know, took part as strikebreakers in assaulting steel workers and other workers who were on strike. So there was this vigilante violence, there were things that Trump would have liked to have done, like putting large numbers of people in prison, people who criticized him, but wasn't able to, you know, in 2016, his followers chanted about Hillary Clinton, locker up, locker up, locker up. Well, they didn't locker up, but Woodrow Wilson actually did lock up one of his opponents,

Eugene Dems, the socialist candidate for president, who won 6% of the popular vote in 1912, and he locked up close to a thousand people, other people as well. Trump would have liked to have centered the media in a huge way. He wasn't able to, but Woodrow Wilson and his administration did. Press censorship was authorized by Congress, which gave the Postmaster General the ability to declare a publication unnailable through the US mail. And this was at a time when anything other than a daily newspaper that is a weekly, a monthly, a journal of opinion, most of the foreign language press, they depended on the mail to reach their subscribers.

But hundreds of new paper magazines for BAND, some 75 were forced out of business entirely. So I look at this period of repression and I think should we worry that something the same or worse is coming down the pike now, or should we feel relieved that it came to an end which means that we can get out of the pickle that we seem to be in right now. And I feel a little of both. I do worry that if the elections now and in 2024 put in power, people who challenge the results and elections themselves, there is no limit to what they will do about censorship or anything else. There's no limit.

If you, the moment you sort of question the actual workings of democracy and send thugs into disrupt the counting of votes, things like that. There's no limit. But it's interesting, right? Because we, for instance, one of the concerns now is the sort of collapse of the rule of law, right? We're making a mockery of the legal system. But then you read about some of the things you're talking about in the book and you go,

rule of law, what a pleasant fiction, right? You're point about the questioning of elections. Yeah, sure, it's very problematic after a free and fair election when one does not like the results to question it and try to overturn it. But, you know, up until the summer that you were in the south, there just weren't free and fair elections in half the United States, right? They weren't trying to overturn them afterwards because they'd fixed them before they could happen. Yeah, black people could not vote in the south. That's true. So I sometimes think about, you know, how much of what we are worried about happening

today, if one tenth of what happened in the past was happening today, we'd lose our minds. Yeah. That's true, but I still think we shouldn't let our guard down, But I still think we shouldn't let our guard down, because there are a lot of terrible things that could happen in Mexico. Back at the period I wrote about an American midnight this pretty roughly a hundred years ago, I do think there's some aspects of it that are not completely that good.

I do think there's some aspects of it that are not politically that good. I think that for all of us there is a greater respect for the Bill of Rights today than there was a hundred years ago in this country. Actually one of the organizations that's helped forge that, the American Civil Liberties Union, actually came into being an early period under a different name as an organization supporting conscientious objectors. And I think they've helped establish a greater appreciation of civil liberties, the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment today, then existed a century ago. I also think that, again, for all its faults and some appalling recent decisions, the Supreme Court, over the course of the 20th and early 21st century,

made some a number of enlightened decisions, which they wouldn't have made a hundred years ago and didn't make a hundred years ago. When France, there was a decision, a unanimous decision upholding the Espionage Act with it's giving the right to the government to censor the press and to silence people and send them to prison for

saying what they believed. So I think we've got some improvements in our national consciousness, but I do think we still do face some dangers. Yeah, the history of the Supreme Court is such an interesting one because of some of those landmark and necessary decisions. We have, in some cases, an inflated view of the history and nobility of the Supreme Court, when, in fact, many of the worst moments in American history began with Supreme Court decisions in this era and going back. And I think sometimes understanding that history, it gives you not just an honest picture, but it also gives you a more balanced picture

that allows you not to, I just feel like the last couple of years people have been going around screaming, this isn't normal, this is unprecedented. And in fact, it's very precedent and very normal. That doesn't mean that it's acceptable in any way. But in the sense that, you know, a special forces operator or a firefighter,

they don't run up to a fire and go, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. We have no idea what to do about this, right? They have to be calm under that pressure and see it as a solvable problem if there is any hope of mitigating that damage or solving that problem. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, just talking about the Supreme Court, one of the most moving moments that I felt I was able to write about in American midnight was about a Supreme Court justice who changed his mind about something. And I'm thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who in early 1919, wrote the unanimous decision upholding the Espionage Act.

It was a case where several people had been sent to jail for circulating a leaflet opposing conscription, opposing the draft. And Holmes wrote for the whole court in declaring that the law that under which they sent to jail was completely constitutional, and that free speech was free speech, but this often repeated phrase that doesn't give somebody the right to shout fire in a crowded theater, which was a ridiculous thing to say because in fact opposing conscription is not like shouting fire in a crowded theater. But like that at all. Yeah.

Some months later, another case came before the court again involving some people prosecuted on the Espionage. Again, for distributing a leaflet, which had been tossed out the window of a garment factory in New York City. And Alms changed his mind, and he told his colleagues on the court that he was going to write a dissent, not upholding the espionage act. They were so alarmed that three of them came to see him at home and said, you have to, we have to stick together on this. You have to be like the old soldier you once were because homes had actually been wounded

in the Civil War. You almost died a kiddie's murder. In the Civil War, right? And they were speaking in his study in the very room where his officer's sword hung on the wall. And we know what they said because his law clerk was in the next room listening in through a half open door. And home said, no, I'm going to dissent. And Justice Louis Brandeis joined him in that dissent.

Supreme Court dissents don't make law, but they're the words of their dissent, which have to do with the importance of the free marketplace of ideas, has been more quoted than any other Supreme Court dissent in history. And I think from that moment on, the court did become somewhat more enlightened and led to some of the great decisions later on in the 20th century, Brown versus Board of Education and decisions on gay marriage in our own century.

So there is possibility for people to change their mind and to grow. But that's one of the, that's one of the beautiful stories in Barry the Chains, the man who wrote Amazing Grace. You detail this sort of story from being a merchant of slaves effectively into being an anti-slavery advocate, or at least the writer of an anthem that helped lead and inspire that movement. Yeah, John Newton, who'd been a slave ship captain.

You know, people think of his great hymn as being an anthem of abolition, but it really wasn't. He wrote that when he, before he became involved in the anti-slavery movement, but he did change his mind. He was willing to go on record as being in favor of abolition and wrote a very forceful pamphlet against slavery testified before Parliament. And it's always moving to me when you see somebody who's capable of doing that. Well, this idea that no one is fully irredeemable is such a beautiful idea to talk about Supreme Court

to sense one of, I think, the most beautiful in moving once in American history is, is Harlan's descent in Plessy V. Ferguson. Harlan, not just, you know, insisting on what the, those amendments were supposed to be about, but it's all the more beautiful when you realize he himself had been a slave owner prior to the Civil War. And this idea that to go to your point about coalitions and working with people that no one is fully a lost cause. Yeah. Yeah. I'm always looking in history for those people who change sides. Yes. Yes. They're the ones that inspire us that were not lost causes. Yeah. Yeah. Or people who grow to become aware of something that they weren't aware of earlier.

Yes. Yes. I'm writing about Truman now, and there's a quote from one of his advisors, and they said, the most remarkable thing about Harry Truman in those years that he was president was his capacity to grow and change. Yeah, because he hadn't been brought into the know about anything about the Hiroshima bomb or anything else by Roosevelt. So he had to learn fast and he did. Well, so as we wrap up by speaking of the Supreme Court, it strikes me that that's probably

what your father wanted for you. You wanted you to be one of those kinds of people. He wouldn't have wanted. I'm sure he was very intent that I go to law school. I don't think he had any friends who were judges, but he sure had a lot of friends who were influential lawyers and what kind of a lawyer. Well, he wanted you to be a part of the establishment, thinking that that was the way that you could make a different,

that one that was how you would be safe and secure and not persecuted or any of these sort of deep subconscious fears that you talk about in the book. But I also think that's how he thought you would contribute to society, right? That's how you would pay forward the privileges and gifts that you had been given. And yet you have gone on to have such a big impact in the world through your work and your writing, working maybe a little bit more outside the system. Do you feel like your father came around to understand that fully?

But there are different cats. Not really, because by the time I had not written any books by the time he died, although I had co-found a magazine, which was fairly successful, and done a lot of magazine pieces. But I think he might have been pleased with some of the books that I've written. In my next life, I'll be a Supreme Court Justice.

I'm trying to find a way to end this on a note of hope. So I was hoping you'd say, ah, he saw it all. We came around. He realized that my way also worked and all was well. I can't quite say that, but I can certainly say, as I tried to go into detail about this at the end of halfway home, that we did make our peace. And I'm very grateful that he lived long enough for that to happen

Because I have friends who've struggled with difficult parents and often the most painful thing is when that parent dies before there's a chance of resolution because Usually there is a chance of some kind of resolution if both people wanted Do you feel like I guess if we're thinking about ultimately what we control because, you know, our parents are going to do what our parents are going to do? Do you feel like you were able to make peace with it or is it something that you still carry around and is painful? Oh, I feel I've completely made peace with it.

Writing the book was a big help, writing half the way home was a huge help. But my goodness, if you're as old as I am for decades now and haven't made peace, you're in tough shape. So I feel very grateful to be where I am in life, to have people that I love and to have work that I love doing and that I hope has at least some small impact in the world. Well, it's certainly had a big impact on me and I thank you for writing it and I'm glad you were able to get there.

Well, thank you very much, Ryan. It's a total honor. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.