The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jill Lepore on Democracy in Peril, Then and Now

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

In the nineteen-thirties, authoritarian regimes were on the rise around the world—as they are again today—and democratic governments that came into existence after the First World War were toppling. “American democracy, too, staggered,” Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker, “weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation.” Lepore talks with David Remnick about how Americans rallied to save democracy, and how we might apply those lessons in a new era with similar problems.  This segment originally aired on January 31, 2020. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. To put the political upheaval that we're living through into a wider context, I often find myself turning to Jill Lepore. Jill is a staff writer and a professor of history at Harvard, and she's also the author of These Truths, a great one-volume history of the United States. Earlier this year, she published an essay called In Every Dark Hour, and she considered how our nation responded the last time that it seemed that democracy was in trouble all around the world. In the 1930s, you could count on the Yankees winning the world series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks, for scraps of food, and democracies die. from the Andes to the Ural's to the Alps. American democracy too staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. We do not distrust the future of essential democracy, FDR said, in his first inaugural address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself.

But there was more to be afraid of. including Americans' own declining faith in self-government. What does democracy mean? NBC radio asked listeners. Do we Negroes believe in democracy? W.B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered and hungered and wondered. Jill, in your essay, you're describing a time when Americans and people all over the world were really questioning the future of democracy.

What was going on that was making Americans so nervous, a familiar feeling, but so nervous about the democratic process? It was witnessing new democracies fail. So at the end of the First World War, a whole lot of new democracies had been born when European empires had been broken up. And it was exciting and riveting, and there was a sense of triumph,

that early 20 sense of triumph, that markets were soaring, people were getting wealthier, democracies were thriving, and it all seemed to fall apart. And by the time you get to the 1930s, the beginning of the Depression, of course, it's much worse and much more perilous because the staggering needs of mass society seemed in many parts of the world to just be not addressable by majority rule, that there needed to be a strong man who could rescue starving populations from their suffering. So this was a period of enormous uncertainty for democracy, and Americans themselves had a lot of questions about what democracy meant and how it should work.

And the solution you suggest to some extent was to talk. Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, a lot of Americans were swayed by communism and by fascism. I mean, there's a huge range of political opinion. opinion and all kinds of new political activity in the United States in the 1930s, political experiments. But in many ways in response to the attractions of forms of political extremism, Americans who did believe in democracy really fought for it by trying to rekindle its spirit. Well, I want to play a clip from something called America's Town Meeting of the Air. What does democracy mean?

This is this completely goofy. I mean, I think I just sort of warn listeners. This sounds really corny. So you either love this stuff or you don't love this stuff. It was a national radio broadcast. It started in 1935, and it was enormously successful. So they would hold these debates in a lecture hall. They'd bring in like a thousand people, sometimes more.

And they'd bring to the stage a few different people. A panel of maybe four or five people. It wasn't like a one-on-one debate. I mean, they called it a debate as more of a panel or something. symposium, and they have these big questions, you know, should the United States have universal health insurance? And they bring in half, you know, half the people on the panel would agree and half would disagree. No more appropriate place could be found for a discussion of the subject. What does democracy mean than our own town hall in New York City, the home of America's town?

In the early American town meetings, a majority of all citizens of a community used to meet together and determine where to build the new schoolhouse, how to run the new road, and what to do about widow Jenkins of Streper's cow. Is it possible to conceive of self-government today in those terms? What then does democracy mean under present conditions? In that sense, democracy for the first time is really being tried. Democracy for the first time is really being tested. Now for the questions.

We'll take some man in the balcony there. Mr. Hathaway stated that the democracy he expects is the democracy that will permit this fresh capitalist class to bring in socialism peacefully. Don't you think that the working class, Mr. Hathaway, would do very well to drop any nonsense of any possibility of bettering its conditions under this present system of society and listen to the message of the socialist labor party, the only revolutionary organization. What I'm struck by listening to it is, like,

the sense that people had in the 1930s that they were really on the precipice of history, that democracy was new, as that announcer said. Historically, like, democracies had only begun with the United States in 1776. But what they really, what they really do accomplish a lot of these conversations is really bringing in ordinary people. I mean, you just really do get the sense when you listen to them or when you read debates,

accounts of debates that are going on in, you know, town libraries and in school buildings that are opened up at night for debates, political debates, that, you know, your kind of basic farmer is there, your union worker is there, then, you know, the nurse from the hospital is there, The librarian is there. And people are really kind of dedicating themselves, kind of struggling with working their way through these really big questions. I mean, think about the suffering of the Depression. I mean, everyone was vulnerable to complete economic collapse, no matter where you stood. Just you could fall really fast and people saw one another falling really fast.

And so what was going to hold people up? Well, you were going to have to hold each other up. I'm speaking with staff writer Jill Lepore. More in a moment. I understand you want to play another clip, which might be more familiar to our listeners. Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the intercontinental radio news. At 20 minutes before 8th Central Time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.

The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving toward the Earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pearson of the observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation and describes the phenomenon as, quote, like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun, unquote. Well, I think some people at least will recognize that this is a clip from Orson Wells' famous apocalyptic radio drama, The War of the Worlds.

But I've got to say, it's not the direction I thought we were heading in. How does this relate to discussions about democracy that were going on at that time? It's totally just a pretext to listen to Orson Will's now. So War of the Worlds was broadcast, of course, on Halloween in 1938. And Wells has offered many explanations over his lifetime for why he did it. But the one I believe, and I choose to believe, is that Wells was actually genuinely concerned about the possibilities that radio could be used for nefarious purposes.

That if you think about what the implications are of a technology of communications, radio is invasive. It's this voice in your kitchen coming out of your living room. It's incredibly intimate. And the term fake news comes out of the 1930s because it's what Americans and the British, what's what the Allies call, Nazi radio broadcasts on shortwave radio. They broadcast these English language news reports. There were just a bunch of lies. They broadcast them all over North and South America.

And there was a lot of stuff on the radio. There was Father Coughlin. There's a lot of nuttiness from Huey Long. There's a lot of stuff that you should be really suspicious of on the radio. And Wells was kind of interested in saying, here's actually another obligation of living in a democracy. You have to actually be careful where you're getting your information. You have to have a critical apparatus around it. And that's a lesson we're still struggling with, it seems.

Jill, one thing that surprises me, you wrote about the Democracy Index, which rates the nations of the world on just how democratic they are, right down to the bottom of the list where North Korea is. but the U.S. isn't doing so great in recent years. Why not? What are the factors that go into a country's rating in the Democracy Index? Yeah, it's this, I mean, you can, I guess people try to measure anything. And there was a kind of concern.

This democracy index was started by a think tank, I think, associated with the Economist magazine, as an expression of concern for the seeming fragility of democracies around the world, that would be something that would be worth paying attention to. So there's a whole series of measures that go into it having to do with voter turnout or having to do with do people show up even kind of congressional turnout legislative turnout. Our laws being passed or are laws being vetoed. How is the press free? Is there censorship? And unsurprisingly, when the Democracy Index started the United States was one of the stronger democracies rated as a full democracy.

according to this index, the United States first fell out of that top-tier category in 2016 and became a flawed democracy. And every year since 2016, the U.S. rating has been worse. So two things seem to be true from this evidence, right, that the number of democracies around the world has been dwindling. And then in the case of the United States, the United States has become significantly less democratic. So we chalk that off to Donald Trump. What are the factors that have made us dip? I guess I just think that stuff that's been going on with the growing power of the presidency

as against the other branches of government goes pretty far back. I mean, it certainly goes back to Nixon. That's for sure. I can't see Hillary Clinton White House having turned that around and ceded power back to Congress, for instance. The increasing politicization of the Supreme Court is something that, I mean, I would date to really Reagan's Justice Department and Reagan's appointments. I guess conservatives would look at that differently, but people would date that to the Warren court, say. Those are things that are making our system of government not work as it was designed.

And increasing inequality, which precedes Trump, and it's just only been exacerbated, but it's not all on him. I take your point completely. It just seems that since 2016 in rhetoric and in action, the individual has made a difference. I'm not saying he's everything and the be-all and there weren't factors before. And it will probably outlive him. Well, it will absolutely outlive him. But, I mean, I don't know. Like I put a chart on the screen in a class that has income inequality polarization charted from 1945 to 2016.

and we get where we get based on changes that start in 1968. So, yes, you could follow that chart from 2016 to 2020 and things look worse, but it's a long-term, those are long-term trends. Your piece fairly yearns for, calls for the modern equivalent somehow of town halls, radio plays, public forums, the kind of thing we were discussing before. How would you see that taking place in the world that you know of the university, of social media, of the technologies that we have available, is it even possible? What would it look like? I'm sure that it actually does take place in all kinds of ways. I mean, I spend a fair amount of time going to K through 12 schools and meeting with kids and watching them debate stuff or argue over things. I think there's a lot more of that going on than we might perceive. I don't think you can really track it going on on social media because it's just not conducive. It's not conducive as a format to the kind of careful, deliberative listening that you can imagine.

But I think it actually goes on all the time in classrooms. Like I went to my city council to a city council meeting this year. And I was like, all right, democracy is still working. But you kind of have to get into a room with people. So I want to go back to your piece. You write about a series that ran in 1937 in the New Republic, where editors asked each writer, a series of writers, whether they thought political democracy was on the wane.

And you described the answer given by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. And Italy at that point was living under fascism. So what did Croce say? He objected to the question, the way a good philosopher should. And he just objected to the passive framing of the question. Because he's like, his thing was, all right, politics and government is not like the weather. Like we don't just like, you're asking me basically a meteorological. question, like, what's the weather look like? It's not the weather. We, this is actually, we control

politics and government. So you don't ask people, what's the weather going to be like? You ask people, go out, how are you going to go out and change the weather? What are you going to do? You don't just sit around, like, trying to decide, do I need an umbrella today? You actually go out and change the weather. And that's, that's what I think people had a sense of needing to urgently do in the 1930s. And I, We do have a kind of different sensibility. I don't know, we, whatever, in the quarters that I inhabit. There's a lot of political despair. It's a fashionable political despair.

It's almost like a fetish for political despair. Is it a reasonable political despair? Seriously, no, I don't actually think it is. Why is that? I really don't. Because, look, before 1965, we didn't even have voting rights in this country. Like, what is it the past that you think was so interesting? infinitely better than this moment. It's easy to take democracy for granted when things are going

fairly well. And when you watch democratic institutions being jeopardized and when you watch abuses of power and authority, it casts your attention and your concern into really stark light. And those conversations that you have about what's going on are what actually restores the democracy. They are what rekindles those traditions, what defends those institutions, and what renews the democracy itself. Juleipur is a staff writer for The New Yorker. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for being with us, and I hope you'll join us next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Riannon and Corby, Cala Leah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Fei-Chen, and Emily Mann.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.