The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jill Lepore on Parents’ Rights and the Culture War

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

A wave of book bannings sweeping the country, along with conservative fury over titles like “Antiracist Baby,” seems like a backlash against the heightened racial consciousness of the post-George Floyd era. The historian and staff writer Jill Lepore sees these conflicts as the continuation of an old dynamic. She relates today’s “anti-anti-racism” movement to the anti-evolution campaign of the nineteen-twenties, which included the prosecution of a Tennessee teacher for teaching Darwin’s theory in a high-school class. Lepore tells David Remnick that what links these battles over biology and history is the argument that parents have the right to determine their children’s education in public schools. 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. Right now, a wave of book bannings is sweeping schools around the country. The examples are many. But the focus is clearly on how schools teach race and racism, whether acknowledging some of the realities of history is just too divisive. The political ramifications go well beyond the classroom. In the state of Virginia to take one recent race,

Glenn Yonkin, the Republican, made the alarm over critical race theory a cornerstone of his campaign for governor, which he won, even though CRT is not part of the state curriculum. And Ted Cruz made school library books a set piece in the confirmation hearings of Judge Katanji Brown Jackson. I find that statement a little hard, to reconcile with the public record because if you look at the Georgetown Day School's curriculum,

it is filled and overflowing with critical race theory. Critical race theory and introduction. They include the end of policing and advocacy for abolishing police. They include how to be an anti-racist by Ibram Kendi. They include literally stacks and stacks of books. And I'll tell you two of the ones that were most stunning. They include a book called Anti-Racist Baby by Ibram Kendi. Now this is a book that is taught at Georgetown Day School to students in pre-K through second grade, so four through seven years old. Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist? Senator, I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or though they are not valued or though they are less than, that they are victims, that they are oppressors. I don't believe in any of that.

But what I will say is that when you... But if this culture war is today's headlines, the dynamics have been around for a long. time, at least a century. That's according to my colleague Jill Lepore, who's a staff writer and a historian at Harvard. Lepore sees the school's issue in light of another epic culture war, the fight over revolution in the 1920s. Jill, sometimes it seems that the work of a historian is to point out almost that it was ever thus. You just wrote a piece of reporting for us called Why the School Wars Rage, and you link the current wave of book banning in schools across the country to something that at first glance

isn't necessarily an obvious connection, the Scopes trial, the so-called trial of the century a full hundred years ago. Jill, do you see a clear resonance between the Scopes trial and this debate over critical race theory and so much else? I do. I think what draws together the anti-evolution campaigns of the 1920s, and we might think of them as that, you know, anti-racism campaigns of the 2020s is a kind of battle between parents and the state. It's not like, okay, we can say, here's 1922 and here's 22, and if we just take it like an accordion and press it together, it's going to make this beautiful noise of explanation. My point is, in the 1920s, what was hot in terms of being contestable about biology is the same

thing that is now contestable about history. That is to say, it's a basic model for how change happens. Biology and history share a really similar intellectual architecture underneath. They're both explanations for change. But in the 20s, biology really just was just sparky. Everything you talked about, we talked about, but it's the age of eugenics. Everything matter. You know, post-reconstruction, Jim Crow, people are in the United States are fighting over. where people are dying every day due to ideas about race and the fixity of categories of race. So when arguments come along about evolution,

they're immediately deeply political and easily politicized. In 1925, biology teacher John Scopes spiraled to fame in the legal battle that became known as the monkey trial. Whether a man was descended from the monkey or just making a monkey out of man, was fought in a courtroom that challenged the truth of the Darwin theory of evolution. The existence of man in the prehistoric world was denied.

And where humans come from, what happens after we die? Of course, that stuff's going to be sparky. So 100 years later, what are the sparks that are flying everywhere? Are in some ways kind of the same questions. You know, can people change? What does race mean? And then this big, big question about what's the relationship between parents, authority over their children and the state's authority.

already over parents and children. The press and public listened with unprecedented interest as the legal brains of both sides dug deeper and deeper into the conflicting theories of man's heritage. In this better legal engagement, the defense fought against the... Well, for those of us who haven't watched Inherit the Wind lately or read a good biography of Clarence Darrow,

tell us, give us the setting. What was the trial of the century? And what were the sides? Who was pitted against whom? So most people's understanding really does come from Inherit the Wind, even if they haven't even, even if they haven't seen Inherit the Wind, which is the great, amazing Frederick March, Spencer Tracy, 1960 adaptation of the play. So the supposition that we get, I think, from watching that film or from, you know, most of your listeners have in mind is that there was the forces of modernism represented by Clarence Darrow, the great attorney for the damned. who strode into Dayton, Tennessee, and convinced the world,

this was the first trial broadcast live on the radio. Everybody listened to it coast to coast. It's kind of incredible that that happened, but convinced everybody coast to coast to these Yahoo's, these hillbillies, were opposed to everything about modernity. They were opposed to science. They were opposed to Darwin, which was a basic scientific method. They were opposed to free speech.

They were opposed to public discourse and public deliver. liberation, they were superstitious, they were mystical, they were ignorant. And this is not a trial about evolution or about John Scopes. It was a trial. Civilization itself is on trial. And opposed to Darrow and to Scopes and opposed to the ACLU and to modernism was fundamentalism. And it's really the first major battle of our culture war. That's historian Jill Lippur, our conversational. continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. You write that the battle over public education that afflicted the 1920s has somehow started

up again, this time over the teaching of American history. How are the circumstances the same or resonant at least, and how are they different, if at all? First of all, mandatory public education was a progressive era crusade. And it was hard for a lot of people to take, hard for a lot of farming families, in particular rural families, and especially devoutly religious families. It was a progressive crusade for all the good reasons. It was good for children's health. It was good for the nation. It was good for the production of knowledge. It was good for providing, above all, for providing equal, the quality of opportunity to young people. The people who objected. The people who objected at first were businesses that employed

children. So, for instance, in the South, a lot of southern textile owners did not want kids to go to school. And so some sort of big businesses used that argument to play on the fears of families, poor families with small farms, convincing them that if their kids had to go to school, they would lose their farm. When in fact, there was a whole progressive set of packages that were also designed to help those families keep their farms, right? And we also forget that. And we also forget that. at the time, compulsory vaccination was part of that same package. Even before the 1918 influenza pandemic, compulsory vaccination was accomplished by way of making schools compulsory.

So you had to go to school. And in order to go to school, you had to be vaccinated. So it was kind of a whole package deal. So when people were objecting, by the 1920s, people were objecting to the teaching of evolution, they were actually objecting to a whole package of progressive reforms that included some things that we would absolutely find unsavory today. And one of them is the way that evolution was actually generally taught, which was as a kind of social Darwinism.

The so-called feeble-minded and the criminal and the insane ideally should be sterilized. And thankfully, evolution has taken, improve the human race through various iterations. And it's that, during that kind of contempt for ordinary people, the contempt for the poor, the contempt for rural families, the contempt for people that disagreed with all of other, all of progressivism's other reforms, was a big part of progressivism, and it is still today. Now, one of the through lines of a hundred years ago and today, is this idea of parental rights, you heard it in the scope situation, you heard it really loudly in Virginia. In fact, it's considered a great screw-up that Terry McCall have said parents shouldn't dictate what schools teach.

And Glenn Youngkin jumped all over that. What are the parental rights and how do they play into the conversation? Let's concentrate first on the anti-evolution bills of the 1920s. Yeah, so parental rights were really invented during the progressive era as an argument to use against progressive reforms. That included compulsory vaccination, compulsory. education and the abolition of child labor. So parents could say, parents who didn't want those things could say, you know, these are violating our parental rights.

So it was a legal gambit. And it really, it just didn't, it didn't work. It didn't, it didn't succeed ultimately, right? We have compulsory schooling everywhere, vaccination to some degree. So the parental rights arguments didn't work, but neither did they die out. they surface again, really in the 1950s after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, in which the U.S. Supreme Court decrees that segregation and education is unconstitutional. And the argument that is made really immediately and is made in the run-up to that decision

is that telling schools that they have to be desegregated, that they have to desegregate and integrate is a violation of parents' rights. The problem is the people who segregationists who want to make that argument, I think, this is my theory. They also are making what they consider to be a state's rights. Well, this is it. States rights sounds a lot like parental rights. Right. So they decide, this is, I'm imagining some dark smoky room where Strom Thurmond and James Eastlinder, you know, smoking a cigar and saying, I know, it's called school choice.

But like, I don't know. Somehow they decide to call it school choice. Because choice was the key word of the Cold War. Like in free societies, we have choice. And the unfree world doesn't have choice. So let's use choice. We'll call it school choice. So under the banner of school choice, they fought against school integration.

And that lasted for decades. Well, let's look at that. Today's book bannings aren't just about books. It's about critical race theory. It's about anti-racist language that became mainstream after the murder of George Floyd. it's about the 1619 project, and arguably it's about the way we think about the Trump era as a whole. When you listen to this debate and when you clue into it, whether it's on MSNBC or Fox News, how do you analyze it? And perhaps through the prism of what you are telling us about the 20s, where are the vanities, where are the errors?

what are we not seeing about ourselves? And let the critique fall where it may on the progressive side or the conservative side. Well, I think the conservatives are just trying to win elections on this issue. I actually doubt the sincerity of a lot of the people who are leading the charge on the conservative side. Like the idea that these various, you know, the 16-19 project or critical race theory

or LGBTQ positive books are bad for our community because they divide our community, we're going to divide our community by calling them bad. This is just bunk, right? So what's my analysis? I find that to be bunk. Now, not to say, like, I actually understand that many parents are kind of concerned about, everybody pays attention.

If you're being a good parent, you're paying attention when you're considering at school. Yeah, I don't fault parents who kind of get a little bit swept away in this. It's the kind of the political consultants who are devising these. Jill, how much is this whole conversation about parental rights and how, how much of it is just about the midterm elections? I think honestly, I think a ton of it is about the pandemic. The pandemic? You think that's the thing? I really do. I just think the anguish of parents over what the pandemic has meant for children

and their own helplessness, our own, I will speak for myself, our own helplessness, and doing the parenting that is needed is a pretty considerable force. at play in the world. It can be exerted in all kinds of good directions, thinking about different ways to help your community, help out your schools. But I think that great sort of pulling your children close, tucking them back into your family life inside the hard drive of your computer,

watching over them in this new and different way, and fearing for them, fearing even for their lives in a way you have not quite felt, and letting them back out of the way. into the world unmasked and vulnerable. I just feel like that runs through it all. And that's why we should forgive one another about people just being completely screwy in the head

about what to do next. Like I just think people are still, parents are still feeling like they're not doing enough. So I think there's that. And then there's the really, really creepy politicians who see what that is, who have the kind of political instinct, the kind of almost like animal instinct

of a Donald Trump sort of person, the kind of, you know, the instinct that a Yon has or DeSantis has, wow, that is this giant cloud of misery that I can just take a parachute and wrap it around that cloud of misery and just cinch it in and I'm going to, then I'm going to turn it into a hot air balloon

and I'm going to rise politically from these people's misery. That's what I picture when I see this stuff. You know, we've had conversations in the past, and I always feel like I'm the one arguing for hysteria. This has never happened before. Something like Trump has never happened before. This has never happened before. And you're the one that edges toward this has happened before. Don't freak out.

I think maybe the reason I write about history is that I'm the one who's always freaking out, and I always need the fix that says, Wait, calm down. This could be okay still. So I don't know that maybe I just have a good at pretending to not be freaked out. You're the voice of hope, Jill. Thanks so much. Thanks, David. You can read Jill Lepore's essay,

Why the School Wars Still Rage at New Yorker.com. She's also the author of These Truths, A History of the United States, and many other books. I'm David Remnick. See you 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 Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Cario, Brito Green, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Alison McAdam, Harrison Keith-Line, and Mung Faye Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.