The Daily Stoic - Sharon McMahon on The Unsung Americans Who Altered the Course of History

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

“The people that history smiles most kindly upon, are the ones who just kept doing the next needed thing.” These words from Sharon McMahon remind us that making a difference is not accomplished through fame or fortune, but by taking consistent action. Sharon joins Ryan today to talk about the stories of hidden trail blazers, unknown symbolism in the Statue of Liberty, and the change-makers she chose to include in her new book The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement.After years as a high school government teacher, Sharon McMahon now runs the non-partisan, fact-based Instagram account @sharonsaysso. In her book The Small and the Mighty, Sharon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks.Check out Sharon’s podcast Here’s Where It Gets Interesting and follow her on Instagram @SharonSaysSo and X @Sharon_Says_So📚 You can grab signed copies of The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon at The Painted Porch. 🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcast. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with me when I went to Australia. When I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So, we're not staying in a hotel. We're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location. You can find something awesome. You want to stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels. So I'm excited that they're a sponsor of the show.

And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audio books in the car.

Instead of having that be dead time, we wanna use it to have a live time. We really wanna help their imagination soar and And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories, self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app. And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing Right Now on Audible.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You can get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits

that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I didn't people think that social media only surfaces the worst stuff, that it's bad for you, that these tools have ruined the world, ruined society, broken our brains. And I would agree to a certain extent. The algorithms prize engagement, high valence emotions, conflict, extremes, also just the platforms themselves, like what fits in a tweet, how a thumbnail has to jump out at you. It doesn't incentivize necessarily

the best stuff. I've had to figure out with Daily Stoic, you know, how a thumbnail has to jump out at you. It doesn't incentivize necessarily the best stuff. I've had to figure out with Daily Stoic, how do we use these platforms which have enormous audiences for good? How do we harness that algorithm to spread stuff we want people to hear? But it's a tough sell, right? An obscure school of ancient philosophy

going up against internet memes and fails and thirst traps, all the stuff that social media prioritizes. There's an even bigger uphill battle, which my guest today has conquered at a level I can't even comprehend. Sharon McMahon is known as America's government teacher. She spent years as a high school government teacher

and she now runs this nonpartisan, fact-based Instagram account, Sharon Says So, that has millions of followers and has reached millions of people and about government, right? The thing that we, we love politics as a society, but we hate government, how it actually works. And she's reached this huge, like super diverse audience.

This is how unique her audience is. I've had the honor of having like so many cool people on the show, huge movie directors and athletes and billionaires and celebrities and actors and like doers. It's been awesome. But my in-laws who live down the street from the studio have only asked to come meet one guest. Rod and Karen, they're amazing.

I don't know if I could do all this stuff that we do without their wonderful support and help, but they are big fans of Sharon McFann. In fact, they were going to see her live at the Paramount Theater. Sharon was doing a talk in Austin that night and they came to meet her while she did the show. So they wouldn't have to wait in line

as she signed books for thousands of people. She's awesome. I've been following her, I think, since the pandemic. My wife turned me onto her and maybe she discovered her through her parents. I don't know. But Sharon's awesome. There's all this misinformation and polarization out there. People just don't understand how the government works. There's a quote I love from Kennedy. Kennedy was saying, you know, parents want their kids to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to be politicians. People don't understand how the system works, that being a politician is how you move

the levers of government. And so many of the Stoics were politicians, but in the sense that they understood how the levers of power worked, they were functionaries in the government. They weren't all emperors. Cato has these boring jobs in the levers of power work. They were functionaries in the government. They weren't all emperors. Cato has these boring jobs in the sort of machine of the Roman Empire.

Seneca does too. A bunch of the middle Stokes, we talk about lives of the Stokes, all did. And that's what Sharon is a world-class expert in. And going into an election, that's what we need more of. And she has this amazing new book. Like, I loved this book. It's called The Small and the Mighty.

She looks at the lives of 12 ordinary Americans who actually weren't ordinary at all. They did extraordinary things. And they changed not just their own lives, but the lives of people around them. And we live in a world that they helped create. I really love this book. It touches on a lot of the same themes.

And in fact, even some of the same people that I talk about in Right Thing Right Now. I so enjoyed this conversation. I was so excited to see her and we need more people like her, people who are charismatic, people who are smart, people who are caring and compassionate, but also understand how these social media tools work. They can surface the ideas that the basic civic knowledge that we have to have to be able to operate the machinery that is government. I think it was Barney Frank, a Democratic politician, who once said that, you know, government is the name we use for the things we choose to do together. That's

how you have to see government, not as this negative nasty thing that Ronald Reagan said, you know, government is the problem, not the solution to the problem. No, government is the things we do together. Sometimes we do them well, sometimes we don't do them well. Sometimes we don't do them together when we should. And Sharon talks about that amazingly in her new book. In this conversation, we talk about this idea of contributing to society, how history favors the doers,

as the Stokes would say, act in non-verba, and how we can actually make a difference. I think you're really going to like this. She was awesome. And you can grab signed copies of the small and the mighty at the painted porch. I'll link to that in today's show notes. You can follow her on Instagram at Sharon says so, and you can check out her podcast. Here's where it gets interesting, which I will link to in today's show notes.

This episode was so good. We split it up into two parts. So I'll bring you part two in a couple of days. Look out for that. By the way, if you don't have a plan for voting, get it together, find out where you can vote early. Absentee ballot deadlines probably already passed. Check your voter registration.

This is a consequential election to say the least. And as we've talked about, Astolic participates and let's get after it. Well, I loved your book. I thought it was a great idea. I think that's the heavy lifting too, is like, okay, so you have a huge social media following. How do you translate that into a book?

You have to, like, I think books are one of the hardest mediums to compete in, because you're competing against the greatest books of all time that have such staying power. And so how do you come up with a unique angle to talk about? Yeah, you're absolutely right. Books have a legacy that other types of media do not

that I can post all day on social media and that's gonna be gone from the algorithm in 24 hours or maybe one week if you're really lucky. So yes, this idea that like books are somebody's legacy is something that it's not a fact that's not lost on me at all. And yes, how do you compete in this vast sphere of books, Ryan?

All of these books, this wall is a graveyard of exactly what you're up against. So Portfolio did send me about five, I was like, give me one of every one of your titles. And so I used that, but mostly I use this company called Book by the Foot. You've heard of this company? Yeah, yeah.

So these are all books that were really popular and then nobody wanted anymore. Yeah, like L. Ron Hubbard. Yeah, yeah. Right, because they give a lot of those away. But like, there are Shadow Divers by Robert Kirsten, incredible book, but was a huge book 15 years ago. So he probably sold a million hardcovers.

And then those people died and their kids were like, or they moved to a smaller house and they're like, well, I don't want this anymore. And they all end up at Goodwill and this company goes and gets all these books. So these are what I sometimes kind of ego is the enemy. I kind of look through and I go, yeah, this book was like a cultural sensation

for a brief moment and then I bought it by weight. Is that different though than any other kind of media? No, like I think about this, like if you listen to like a Spotify playlist, best of the 90s, you've heard of 80% of the songs. Then you go 80s, you're like 60%. Till you get to a decade where you're like, I don't know any of these songs.

And those are the, that's a collection of the biggest songs of an entire era. They've sold millions of copies, they've been in movies. And you're like, nope, none of this is registered. And so how far do you have to go back to get to that oblivion? You think it's gonna be like the exercise they do in politics is like, they'll go,

who is the vice president, three presidents. And you're like, wait, and that was the second most famous person in the world. Right, right. Or whatever. Yep, yeah. So, but I mean, like, is this idea that you're supposed to be competing against all titles of all time, is that an idea that's worth, like,

holding onto, exploring, like, feeling bad about if you don't compete against all titles of all time? Well, there's a passage in Mark Cirulis' Meditations where he goes, Vespasian. He goes, how many people know who that is? And Vespasian was the emperor, like five emperors before Marcus. Actually, the only reason, I think there's a,

some language, Vespasian is the root word for toilet because he created public bathrooms in Rome. That was his thing. But so, this is the most powerful, important person in the world, ruled as an emperor god in the biggest empire of the most famous empire in history, and nobody knows who he is. And Marcus Aurelius was saying that just a couple of generations. And so his point was not, okay, so you have to really conquer a lot of territory to be more famous than Vespas. And he was saying, this is a race you can't win.

So opt out. So yeah, I think when I look at this, I just go every, it's like Shakespeare, out, out, brief, candle. All of these people had their little moment and probably most of their moments were bigger than my biggest moment. And so if you're going to take your

identity and worth from surpassing them, even if you do it, you're going to lose. I like thinking about it more in the sense of what somebody said about a character in this book, and as Mulholland after she dies, they say something to the effect of, no work for liberty is ever lost for it becomes part of the fabric of the nation. And I love thinking about contribution in that way instead of how long can my name be in headlights or in spotlights? How long can my name be in the spotlight? I think it's like a, perhaps a healthier way to think about things in the sense of my contribution

becomes part of the fabric of this society. Yeah, there's a famous World War I poem and he has this line, I used it in the Justice book. He says, to you from failing hands, we throw the torch. If you see the figures as a person who moved the ball forward or carried the torch a little bit, but that it was part of this continuous battle or this perennial march, then it's beautiful.

And each one of them was significant. If you try to attribute it to any one of them where you go, this was the person, each individual accomplishment is not that great and ultimately can be cut short, whether it's by assassination or they have some personal scandal. So yeah, I think it's about making your brief contribution

with the resources you have in the moment of time that you're in and then seeing it as part of this larger procession. That's the only way to do things and to do it not motivated by it. Yeah, I totally agree with you. And I think the people in this book are great examples of that.

Yes. Yeah, where their contributions are by and large lost to history, either by virtue of the fact that they died young, they didn't have descendants to keep their memory alive. They were intentionally excluded from history because they were the wrong color or they were the wrong gender.

And yet it didn't, it does not negate what they did. No. And I have really been enjoying sort of excavating their contributions. Well, and what they did is actually in many cases more significant than a lot of people you've heard of. Exactly, exactly. And I think it's actually tremendously encouraging

to people who feel, I'm sure you've heard this many times, people feel like nothing I do matters, nothing I do makes a difference. I did the things, I made the calls, I wrote the letters, I did the voting, I did, you know, whatever it is. Nothing is changing. Right. And it can feel very discouraging and it can make you feel hopeless

as though, you know, it makes you retreat into cynicism, as though nothing you do will ever move the needle. I think that's one of the problems. It's not totally incorrect. Some of the structural theories, critical race theory, these sort of explanations for the interlocking systems of oppression and discrimination, how they have shaped and informed history, how we're still living in them. There is, it's not a nihilism that comes from it, but like the great man of history theory, at least gives people something to believe in

and aim for it. So if you believe that everything is interlocking and structural and it doesn't matter what individuals do, that's also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you can make it, if you don't believe you can make a difference, you will definitely not make a difference. That's absolutely right.

Just because you believe you can make a difference doesn't mean you will, but certainly believing that change is not possible a difference. That's absolutely right. Just because you believe you can make a difference doesn't mean you will. But certainly believing that change is not possible makes sure that it is not possible. That's absolutely right. Yes, if you believe you can't, then you're right. Yes. And I just, yeah, it's been tremendously helpful,

at least for me and from other people that I've heard of, to sort of reframe this idea of what it means to make a contribution. And does not necessarily mean that your name is on the side of a weirdly shaped rocket ship, right? Or that you have an airplane emblazoned with your local. Yeah, or that it was even appreciated or understood in the moment that it was happening.

Sometimes if you're ahead of the curve, you're probably not gonna be appreciated in your moment. Or you're not gonna be fully appreciated for the magnitude of what you're ahead of the curve, you're probably not gonna be appreciated in your moment, or you're not gonna be fully appreciated for the magnitude of what you're doing. You might be appreciated by your small group of people or your supporters or believers, but most people, it's almost a sign that you're not that groundbreaking if everyone likes what you're doing.

Yeah, I think that's totally true. If you look back at some of the biggest change makers in history, they were widely opposed, right? Like the Martin Luther Kings of the world had a lot of hate in his lifetime. And not just from white people, by the way. Like a huge percentage of black America thought either Martin Luther King was too radical

or not radical enough. And so, you know, in his own community, he was considered, you know, two in the middle. And so, yeah, there's something about being able to stand alone and do the thing because you think it's the right thing. It's such a big ask for some people. Sure. Right?

Like it's such a, I would love to hear what advice you have for somebody who feels like they just, like they just don't know if they can do that. We think of change as this enormous thing as opposed to, like I was fascinated, I didn't end up doing a chapter about it in the justice book, but like I was fascinated with footnotes, like how many future Supreme Court decisions

the stage was set for them in like, by a footnote in a descent from a much earlier Supreme Court decision. And so, yeah, like it feels paltry and not nearly enough to be dissenting in say, Plessy v. Ferguson. But the argument that he lays out in that decision is drawn upon a generation later. And so, yeah, sure, would it have been better if he could have convinced all of his colleagues

to not do this morally important thing, but he couldn't. And so he did the piece of it that he could do. And it stood there for a very long time. More than 50 years, yeah. Yeah, the stoics, like Cato resists Julius Caesar's attempts to overthrow the Roman Republic. With the stokes, Cato resists Julius Caesar's attempts to overthrow the Roman Republic. He is defeated. And he, instead of,

Caesar almost certainly would have pardoned Cato, and Cato found that subservience to be morally unconscionable. And so he kills himself in this incredibly dramatic resistant way. It's the ancient world's version of the monk who lets himself on fire. And it has exactly zero effect.

Caesar takes over, he's later assassinated, but has nothing to do with Cato, really. So philosophers would debate, like should he have stuck around? But like 2000 years later, it's Cato that George Washington is modeling himself on. should he have stuck around? But like 2000 years later, it's Cato that George Washington is modeling himself on and the founders are modeling themselves on.

And so, yes, sometimes you do this thing that you're trying to inspire others or send this message. And you're thinking like, I hope everyone around me sees this, but it may stay dormant for a hundred years. It could stay dormant for a hundred years. It could stay dormant for a thousand years. So I think the idea of like, hey, I'm going to do what I think is right here and I'm going to send this message. To me, the stoic part of it is I don't control whether the message is heard. I only

control whether I say it and let's see where it goes. Yeah, I love that. That's really interesting. I'm Professor Cezanne Lipscomb and on Not Just The Tudors from History Hit, we do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry VIII, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors, murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title, really. So follow not just the Tudors from a history hit, wherever you get your podcasts. In early 1607, three ships carrying over 100 English settlers landed on the shores of present-day Virginia where they established a colony they named Jamestown. But from the start, factions

and infighting threatened to tear the colony apart. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondries Podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, after their arrival, English colonists in Jamestown quickly established a fort, but their pursuit of gold and glory soon put them on a collision course with Virginia's native inhabitants and the powerful Chief of Chiefs Powhatan. Before long, violence, disease, and starvation would leave the colony teetering on the brink of disaster.

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My wife read your book and loved it. And then my in-laws both read it and loved it. And I was like, I was waiting to read it till closer to when you came. And I was trying to like guess who was gonna be the figures. Were there a bunch that you didn't include that you wanted to? Yeah, yeah. And there's also stories of the figures

that I wanted to include and couldn't. You know, like I think that's always true of any sort of non-fiction writer is that you have to, you end up with stuff that you wish you could have included and you just couldn't make it work or whatever. There was one aspect of a story in this book that I am still convinced is true.

Okay. I just couldn't find the documents to prove it after years of looking, which is that one of the characters in this book, my hypothesis is that her family was involved in the Underground Railroad. And- Which one is this?

Anna Jeans. So Anna Jeans lives in Philadelphia and she's in the right place, she's in the right time, she's a Quaker, she has the right right place. She's in the right time. She's a Quaker. She has the right belief system. I can put her brothers, she's the youngest of six surviving adult siblings. I can put her brothers in the same room

with very prominent workers on the Underground Railroad, like William Still. They're in the same room together. They belong to the same sort of abolitionist societies. And the Jeans family was very wealthy. And there's almost no chance that the people who were raising money for the Underground Railroad were not hitting up the Jeans family, right?

There's almost no chance. But the other sort of piece of the puzzle that I became really intrigued by is the fact that the Jeans family has a country home that is where they can just kind of go in the summer that the Jeans family has a country home that is where they just kind of go in the summer, that they abandon. And at one point, their country home is robbed, and somebody steals a painting off the wall

that Anna had painted, and Anna had an attachment to that painting and she wanted it back. And so there's this big sort of investigation into who broke into the household, et cetera. And there were reports in the newspaper that talk about how there was food left on the table as though people had left in a hurry. And that's not something that the Genesys would have done, right?

So to me, it makes sense that they had sort of said, okay, you can go ahead and use our house. You know, go ahead and like, if you need to use it, it's yours for the using, that somebody had been there who needed to leave in a hurry for whatever reason, because why would the genes have needed to leave in a hurry? Why would they have left food on the table? And, you know, there were not reports that the house was trashed or that vandals were living there or anything of that nature. So that's a whole storyline that I ended up writing up everything that I knew about the Jeans family and about how I... The evidence that I was able to compile about their involvement in the Underground Railroad. But ultimately, because the Underground Railroad was intentionally secretive,

and because the Jeans family was intentionally secretive, and because the Jeans family was intentionally secretive, they believed in this sort of biblical edict that you should not let your right hand know what the left is doing and that you should give in secret and your reward will come in heaven later. And so they purposely did not attach their names to things. They purposely were not like courtesy of the Jeans family, you know, like that was not their vibe. They didn't even like courtesy of the jeans family, you know, like that was not their vibe. They didn't even allow their picture to be taken. You know, like they were very, like hardcore, very hardcore about it. Yes. So there's that aspect. And then there's

also the aspect that the underground railroad was also intentionally secretive. They're not like, and we stayed at this house. So there's just no documentation that I can come up with that is the smoking gun that says, and we stayed at Stapley Manor, you know, outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as much as I looked. And the other thing that's quite possibly true is that the people who were on the Underground Railroad would not have known what that house was called. Right. And they would have been very reticent to give up a description of the Underground Railroad would not have known what that house was called. And they would have been very reticent

to give up a description of the house. They would not have known who owned it. They would have just been word of mouth told, you can stay, there's that house over there, you can stay at if you need to. So there are definitely stories like that that I wished that I could have included. And there are aspects of other people's stories too

that ultimately did not make it into the book. Well, as I was thinking about this, I was like, I don't wanna talk about the people in the book that much because the book's so good. I wanted people to, like, I think it's a spoiler thing. Like, I feel like you wanna, so I was gonna tell you some of my favorite small but mighty figures.

I'd love to hear them, yes, tell me. But the concept of like, who are these kind of hidden figures of history who punched above their weight? I love characters like that. Yes, same. So when you're talking about the Underground Railroad, do you know who Thomas Wentworth Higginson is?

Okay, so he's a translator of Epictetus. He's the first one who translates Epictetus in American English. But so he's a professor at Harvard, he's a contemporary of Emerson and all the transcendentalists, but he's much more radical than they are. So he's like one of the six who funds John Brown, a couple of those riots where the fugitive slave catchers

would steal people out of Boston. He was like there when they would riot. So he's this kind of radical abolitionist and he ends up leading the first black regiment of troops in the US Civil War. So there's Colonel Shaw who people know, that's what the movie Glory is about. He's a little bit before him.

They were less distinguished in balance. But so you have this philosopher who is, you know, not passive, like you would think of the stories, but like engaged in the great struggle of his time. But then he's also this lover of poetry and art, and he meets this, this woman sends him her poetry, and he likes it and he ends up publishing it, which brings her great fame. He's the person who discovers Emily Dickinson.

And so I just love, so it's like, you know, if you did any one of those things, that's an incredible life. But just the guy that is funding John Brown is leading black troops for the Union in the Civil War. And just on the side, discovers one of the great American female poets of it. I just love-

I love those kind of, yes, I call them brain tangle moments where you're just like, I love knowing that. That is just like, does a little something in my brain where I'm like, that just feels real, scratch a little itch I didn't even know I'm like, that just feels real scratch, a little itch I didn't even know I had. Yes.

Speaking of Emerson, Emerson was potentially in love with Emma Lazarus. Okay. And Emma Lazarus is the woman who writes the poem that is currently affixed to the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poor huddled masses. Yes, yes.

The new colossus, the poem is called. Give me your tired, your poor. I'm not thinking of those two things as overlapping, but yeah, of course, this is like 1870s, 1880s. Yes, your huddled masses, you know, weary to whatever. So she writes that, she's asked to contribute to this sort of fundraising effort, because of course, the United States needed to pay for this sort of fundraising effort because of

course the United States needed to pay for the base of the Statue of Liberty which was gifted to the United States by France and she actually, Emma Lazarus, was friends with one of the descendants of Alexander Hamilton and they were very good friends with each other. After Emma Lazarus dies very tragically and young, Louisa Hamilton discovers this, one of her poems in a bookstore, rediscovers the new colossus in a bookstore. And it's like, this deserves to be on the Statue of Liberty.

And that, it wasn't attached to the Statue of Liberty at the Statue of Liberty sort of dedication. It was years later and the Hamilton descendant had to raise her own funds to get the brass plaques made and to petition to get it added. But anyway, Emma Lazarus was a relatively well-known poet in her own day, but she was a young Jewish woman who, you know, her family was wealthy.

Her dad was a sugar merchant. She never had to work. She was, you know, her family was wealthy. Her dad was a sugar merchant. She never had to work. She was, you know, home educated. And what she wanted to do with her life was just write poetry. And she begins getting published and she begins corresponding with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who's significantly older than she is.

And the letters that exist between them are very like, hmm. And eventually she kind of sours on his advances, which did seem a little- Creepy. Maybe not quite creepy, but like, what are you doing? You know what I mean? Like you're a 60 year old man. This woman is 23.

Also married. She's a young woman, but she's flattered by his attention because he's a giant of literature at the time. But he becomes sort of a champion of Emma Lazarus's work. And she was, again, she was relatively well-known in her lifetime, but most Americans would not recognize her name. Yes.

But we would recognize her contribution despite not being able to pick her face out of a lineup. I have an amazing kid's book for you in the book store. Have you read her right foot by Dave Eggers? I think I have, yeah. He had a kid's book about the Statue of Liberty. It's all based on this little observation he makes, which is that her foot is raised.

And his point is that she's not stationary. We think of the Statue of Liberty as this monument to Liberty. No. As opposed to Liberty being on the march, which is what she would have represented to France shortly after the abolition of slavery. So, so we're seeing it as a celebration of what we have done. That's right. As opposed to a, a monument to the doing, which is supposed to be, as we're saying,

this perpetual ongoing thing. I love that. And the Statue of Liberty also has a broken chain around her foot, as though she has freed herself from the shackles. And they're not, the chain is just kind of like hanging there as though it just recently happened. the shackles and they're not, you know, the chain is just kind of like hanging there as though it just recently happened.

Yes. There's a lot of symbolism actually in the Statue of Liberty that I think kind of goes unnoticed because we see it from afar and it's so large that it's so difficult to observe all of these individual elements, but yeah. Or that kids paid for it. Yeah, that children paid for it.

The first crowdfunding campaign was, because America was like, what are we supposed to do with this? Kids made it happen. Yeah, totally. I wrote a piece for The Economist about this because there was a throwaway line I read as a kid in Victor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning,

where he talks about how he loves the Statue of Liberty, but he felt like there needed to be a corresponding statue of responsibility on the West Coast. And so I did this big piece on the idea of a Statue of Responsibility, because again, yeah, we think of the Statue of Liberty as being this thing that it was like a celebration of how great we are, as opposed to a call to arms.

But then also, liberty, which America is founded on, confers by definition a certain amount of responsibility. And that is what America is like. I don't like that part. No thanks. No, of course not. No, I wanna be free to dump my trash wherever I want. Exactly.

Yes, that's what freedom is apparently. To some people. I think about this on my neighborhood all the time. So yes, I don't like that people do it, but if I don't clean it up, it's just going to stay there. Right? So the responsibility of, hey, I live on my own road and the government can't tell me what to do with it,

also means I can't call the government to clean up someone else's mess. I have to do it. And it's disgusting and I hate it, but I try to teach it to my kids. But the idea is like, everything that's not enumerated in the constitution, just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it, right?

And that is again, a big part of I think the fundamental premise of America that your average citizen wants to not. I'll add an agree to that. Like the social contract isn't just your contract with what the government is not allowed to do to you. It's also the contract of the responsibilities that are thus inherent on you to take care of.

I think you're absolutely right. I don't disagree with you at all, but it's very, when you start getting into things about social contract, man, there's gonna be always be people who push back on you who are like, oh, that's communist. You know what I mean? Yeah, of course. That's communist. Freedom means freedom to do what I want. If I don't want to participate in that, then I shouldn't have to. But you're, I mean, you're not wrong at all. Of course. Yes. But,

you know, the idea that the Statue of Liberty, liberty enlightening the world, there's a verb in there, right? Like it's continuing to enlighten the world. Not Liberty enlightened the world, that it is an ongoing effort to enlighten the world. And I, yeah, I think that's worth remembering. One of the other ones I'm fascinated with, I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong, but do you know his name was Senator Proxmire,

he was the Senator, he might've been from Minnesota, so I'm probably butchering the pronunciation if you're not hearing what I'm saying, but he's the one who, he wakes up one day in the 70s and learns that immediately after the foundation of the UN, almost all the countries of the UN, almost all the countries pass a treaty basically banning genocide, and the US just didn't sign it.

We were like the only major country that didn't sign it. And he's like, this is absurd. We invented the UN. Like it's on our soil. We're the main driver of this. And we're just like, I don't know if we're opposed to genocide, that might be inconvenient. And so he gets up and gives 3000 consecutive speeches

in the Senate, pushing for the ratification of this. I think it takes like 25 years or it takes this absurd amount of time. And again, we just take for granted that these things happened because everyone was in agreement about them. And what I love about the characters in your book and all my favorite historical characters are like,

if they hadn't done it, it wouldn't have happened. That's right. They forced or forged a consensus that would not have existed otherwise. And his intellectual predecessor was this guy named Lemkin, a displaced European Jew who lived in America, who during the Nuremberg trials and then the founding of the UN,

invents the word genocide, which did not exist. He gives the crime a name. And you would think coming out of this horrendous genocide, everyone's like, yeah, we definitely need a word for that and we should all be opposed to that thing. But there was not a consensus. It was inconvenient. And it was only the force of will of this singular human being that wills

a concept into existence. And again, you might go, what is the concept? The concept doesn't matter. But having a you might go, what is the concept? The concept doesn't matter, but having a word for something like having a footnote in a Supreme Court decision, it's the only way, it's the most necessary first step in hopefully eradicating or preventing that. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of Sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly?

Introducing the best idea yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the bolder-est takers who brought them to life. Like, did you know that Super Mario, the best-selling video game character of all time, only exists because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye? Or, Jack, that the idea for the McDonald's Happy Meal first came from a mom in Guatemala from Pez dispensers to Levi's 501s to Air Jordans

discovered the surprising stories of the most viral products. Plus, we guarantee that after listening, you're going to dominate your next dinner party. So follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the best idea yet early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. It's just the best idea yet. Yeah, you know, I keep coming back to this idea that history favors the doers and not the critics, right? This is true of the entire sweep of history. Who are the critics that

we look kindly upon, right? Who are the critics that we look kindly upon? Who are the critics that have the biographies written about them unless they have done something truly terrible with their lives and they're worth remembering as a villain? And the people that history smiles most kindly upon in many ways are the people who just kept doing the next needed thing. I love that phrase in your book.

Yes, that just the next needed thing. I love that phrase in your book. Yes, that just the next needed thing. These are people without some grand five-year plan. These are people without access to the levers of power by and large, people without fame and fortune by and large, people who are often very marginalized by society, who just continue to do the next needed thing. And the effects of their actions are still being felt in the United States today in some

cases. And in some cases, the effects of their next needed thing, it's almost incalculable, the effect that they managed to have outside of the traditional levers of power. And that to me is a really interesting, an interesting proposal to think of. We think about how do we make change in society? We always think about using the levers of government. As a long-time government teacher,

I can tell you that's an important component of it, right? Sure. But yet, so many of the big and important and lasting changes, especially in American society, have been enacted by people who just decided I'm just gonna try or they were almost in opposition to government I don't mean that in the libertarian sense like I love Florence Nightingale she wouldn't be a small but mighty figure is not really American but like you think of her and

Every one of her reforms was done in the teeth of enormous army bureaucracy and government inaction and inertia. And so like, because it was inconvenient, because it was expensive, because she was a woman. And so often what these people do, like there's a famous poem about Florence Nightingale where she's the lady with the lamp, and this is all the art.

And one of her aunts who volunteered with her was like, she hated that. She was like, that's not what she did. She's like, the image of her is at two in the morning with a lamp doing fucking paperwork. You know, like her force, she was a bureaucratic warrior and a reformer and that like oftentimes, yeah, that next needed right thing is like,

let's help this person and let's help that person and let's set up this hospital or let's do this campaign. And yes, so much of that is not only not with the government, levers of governmental power, but it's usually done in resistance to the powers that be even if they're in agreement. Like that's like, again, with the civil rights movement, the civil rights leaders had a lot of democratic,

Northern democratic support, Johnson and Kennedy, both Kennedys, but they were like, you're moving too fast. Or like, hey, I have these other concerns. And so there was this push and pull. They were very astute political fighters who understood, hey, Johnson might be sympathetic to me as far as the cause, but he's only gonna do, he's only gonna support me here

if there's political pressure upon him or if events dictate that he has. And so they were just really savvy at using the media, using public support and all that. Like that's an underrated part of it, I feel like. They're just doing the thing. Yeah, well, and again, they're doers, right? They're not the critics.

They're not the people who are just like, oh my gosh, Johnson is so lazy. Johnson just, he's all talk and no action. Like nothing will ever happen. That would not have yielded the same fruit as people who just did stuff, right? And I think so often we wait for somebody to come by and we're waiting for somebody to come by

and give us permission to start doing things. We're waiting for some group, who knows, to give us their stamp of approval. And the civil rights movement is full of people who did not wait for permission, who in fact would have never been chosen. I think about people like Claudette Colvin, who refuses to give up her seat on the bus

well before Rosa Parks does. And she's a 15 year old girl. And she says in that moment, when the white bus driver tells her that she needs to get out of her seat, she had been sitting in a seat reserved for black patrons and the white section filled up. And so he was trying to force all of the black patrons

to move back. Everybody else in Claudette's row gets up and moves back, but she refuses. And she says in that moment, I felt the hand of Sojourner Truth on one shoulder. Who actually was the first person to fight for fair seating on a public accommodation. Yes, yes.

In Washington DC, like a hundred years earlier. And the hand of Harriet Tubman on the other. And she of course, Claudette Colvin is still alive, but at that time- Frazee by the way. People think this was a long time ago. No, not a long time ago. She would not have known the phrase,

history has its eyes on you. Because she would not have seen Hamilton in the 1950s. But nevertheless, that's exactly what she felt in that moment, that history had its eyes on her. And that she has the courage as a 15-year-old girl to do what she viewed as the next needed thing, which was to resist an unjust system of oppression. Well, and to go to the point about the levers of power, also, you know who was opposed to the Montgomery bus boycott, if I remember correctly? The NAACP also. Like, not once it got momentum, but they

had a plan for how they were going to do things. And so oftentimes, there's even disagreements within factions or within causes that are largely in agreement with each other on the timeline, on the right people. And there is an element of it's ultimately moved forward by the kids who are like, hey, let's go do it today. Let's go integrate the counter at Woolworths today. And that forces the hand that starts the movement

that the people at their desks in a big expensive nonprofit in Manhattan are just gonna have a different timeline and a different view of prioritization. Totally. And Claudette feels cast aside by the machinery of the movement, because she becomes pregnant.

And so she's a pregnant 16 year old. And that is not the face that they want to put on the front of the newspapers. Not in the 1950s. Not in the 1950s, that was not acceptable to be pregnant outside of wedlock. And it certainly was not acceptable to be a pregnant black teenager.

And so she was not the person that they could have elevated to that status, right? And so in many ways, she feels really salty about it. She feels like, listen, I was out here doing the thing before y'all were and I get no credit for it. And then I get convicted of crimes. And she finally, within the last couple of years,

begets her criminal record expunged. And it took literally until, I wanna say it's been within the last three to four years that her criminal record was finally expunged and only because she fought for it. Not because Alabama was like, you know what, that was our bad. You know, like she had to say, I actually did nothing wrong here. You accused me of things I didn't do. It's weird how we tell ourselves, it's not just that it's historically untrue, but we tell ourselves a story that's actually like disempowering.

So like we tell ourselves even about Rosa Parks that like, okay, this is this little old lady and she was tired and she's just, I had enough. And then that's how it happened. And it's like, actually, no, this lady went to a school where they trained her to be like an agent of chaos and a disruptor. Like, I think that's been one of the most eyeopening things

I've understood in my study of the civil rights movement is they weren't just like brave and they weren't these like saintly, naturally endowed heroic figures, but like nonviolence wasn't just, oh, they went to church and that's when they learned nonviolence. No, they would practice getting the shit beat out of themselves.

And they would practice having white people say horrendous things to them at these schools and they'd practice not getting provoked. Like they had all the regular impulses that any human being would have, including hatred and resentment and anger, all very deserved, but they conquered that in like the stoic sense of the command of oneself

is the greatest empire sense. Like a soldier, that's how they did it. Yeah, you know, I was talking to somebody about this book earlier this week, and it's always interesting to hear what other people take away from your own work, right? And the takeaway that this person had was that every single person in this book had learned how to suffer. And then they used that suffering for something else.

And it was an interesting thought to me that everyone has learned who has made significant change learned how to use their suffering for something. Yes. And again, it feels like it's so long ago, but I interviewed Ernest Green a couple of years ago and it was like, it was someone my age's grandfather. Like not-

Totally. My grandmother went to Little Rock High School. Did she? Yeah, before it was integrated. Yeah. So again, that's not a story that, when my parents talked to me about these things Yes.

when I was a kid, it was distant past then, not like, oh, grandma could tell you about this. You know, she went to an all white high school. It's like, no, this was a long time ago. And it's like, no, grandma could tell you about this. You know, she went to an all white high school. It's like, no, this was a long time ago. And it's like, no, these people are still around. Yes, they're still alive. I think about like the Little Rock Nine that was happening in September of 1957,

which is when my mother was born. Yeah. Shoot, my mother was born in September of 1957. Like that's what was happening in the world when the person who gave birth to me was born. Yeah. The idea that this is just some, and I know you deal with a lot more ancient history That's what was happening in the world when the person who gave birth to me was born. The idea that this is just some,

and I know you deal with a lot more ancient history than the average Joe Ryan, but these events in this, you know, America's a young country, right? And most of these events happened within just a few generations of us. And I think it's also worth reminding ourselves about how far we've come, right?

Like there's a lot of work left to do, but sort of the trajectory, that moral arc of the universe, you can see how it in fact does bend toward justice when people work to bend it. I hate that quote. Yeah, because bends is passive. It's saying that it's like, it's bending under its own weight, like a heavy- Like a rainbow is already bent. No, it's pulled down. Like a bunch of people, people in your book, people I've talked about, like people- Bend it.

They reached up and they grabbed it and they pulled it down with their body weight, and a little bit at a fucking time. It's bent that way. And by the way, other people not only resisted them doing it, but were trying to bend it in the opposite direction. That's right. It's like, I'm writing about Lincoln a lot right now. And I think we think of Lincoln

as the guy who abolished slavery, but the primary fight of his time, it was first and foremost to stop the active expansion of slavery. So not just like, oh, like people go, oh, he didn't actually wanna stop slavery. Actually what Lincoln was trying to do was not like, it's not like Lincoln was okay with the status quo.

And by the way, neither were the slave owners. The slave owners imagined in America where slavery was legal across the entire country, and they had their eyes on Cuba, and they had their eyes on huge swaths of Mexico, the parts that we hadn't already taken. And they saw an enormous slave empire occupying the Northern and Southern hemisphere. And so it's not just that the arc of history bends towards justice because it doesn't, it's bent that way.

But if it is not bent that way, do you know what direction it can go? Like there are awful people who want not just to keep, like it's not just their conservative forces who want to preserve the status quo, but there are often very radical forces that want a new reality you can't even fucking imagine. A horrendous one.

Yeah. Yes, and you can look no farther than Aaron Burr, who decided after he killed Alexander Hamilton, that he was going to try to seize portions of North America for himself and contacts people in England and is like, you wanna help me out? I'll be a friend to you if you let me be the ruler

of this section over here, this little section of Texas and Louisiana, I would like it for myself, please. And then of course he's put on trial for treason for attempting to do that, he's acquitted. But nevertheless, the history is full of people who, they're not just low level resistors, you know, of like, no, I don't want you to change that. Keep that the same. I think that's how we tend to view people who work in opposition to change makers. Yeah, no, I just want to

keep things the same. No, there is a faction of people who would like to radically remake the country in their own image. They have a profound vision for a different world. Yes. And it's vicious. Yes, yes. And you see that at work today. That demon of unrest is afoot in the country today.

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