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Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O.com. Hi, I'm Tara Swisher, editor of large of Reco. You may know me as someone who's tired of living through history and would like to request that we live through a couple boring years that historians can ignore.
In my spare time, I'm just a reporter and you're listening to Reco Deco, the podcast about power change and the people you need to know. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is one of my favorite historians, John Misham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books such as American Lion, Franklin Winston, and Thomas Jefferson, the art of power. He's the host of a new podcast from James 13 called Hope Through History.
John, we need a lot of hope. It's about the history and trying times in American history, including the 1918 flu pandemic. That's 1918, not 1917, as President Trump likes to say, the Great Depression and World War II, and how we came through those moments as a unified nation. John, welcome to Reco Deco.
Thank you, ma'am. Appreciate it. So, so much to talk about. I don't know where to begin, but let's start with this idea of hope through history.
I just saw Matthew McConaughey doing the same thing on the Twitter. He's now doing a whole thing around hope. We've got lots of celebrities talking about hope. Let's talk about it in a historical context, not in cool videos of people with puppies.
Like, let's talk about where we are right now in hope through history. Well, Matthew McConaughey and I are often as one, so I like to see that. Look, the story of the country is not some nostalgic fairy tale. There's not a once upon a time in American life.
There's not a happily ever after. There is, in fact, a perennial struggle of challenges that can seem insuperable in real time, but actually end up, to some extent, being overcome. Some are not. You know, Langston Hughes taught us about dreams deferred, but some dreams are realized.
And we've been doing this more or less since 1787, when we fought out a constitution that was based on the fundamental insight that we were going to screw things up far more often than we got them right. And we've done everything we can to prove the founders correct ever since. As Winston Churchill once said, you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing once we've exhausted every other possibility. And we've done that.
We're here. We're fighting it out. It is, I think, ahistorical to pretend that the past was somehow simpler. Their problems seemed uniquely oppressive, which is a phrase of Arthur Slasinger Jr.'s.
Our problems seem uniquely oppressive. Both can be true. My own view is that if we don't look back, we foreclose the possibility of learning from the only data set that actually offers us a cogent way to look forward. That's not to say that if you look back and see 1918 or the polio vaccine or World War II or the civil rights movement or suffrage, whatever it is, that somehow or another you will then learn these three steps that if you program them into your gene.
Right, exactly. So let's go back and talk about that because this was a discussion I was having with my kids last night. I'm seeing my kids a lot these days. How's that going?
How's it going for you? You know, great, actually, but they're going through a lot of grief, I think. I don't know how else to put it. They're going through a lot of trying to pretend it's not a big deal when it is indeed.
But they're very lucky, but it's still difficult. And so one of the things, you know, they have been disturbed a while ago by those pictures of people in Wisconsin and what are they doing and how's it going. And I said, this is so unusual. And I said, actually, the Whiskey Rebellion.
I'm trying to think of something. I'm trying to historically give them a sense that these things have happened and we've gotten through them and I really feel like this is never happening. So let's talk about some of those unique times in history. The Whiskey Rebellion, the people don't know, was they were trying to tax whiskey.
And Hamilton was very critical to watching that. It was very dangerous for Mason Republic, as I recall, in my historical view, and was people that just didn't want to be taxed and didn't want government or central government, which is the same issue we face today. But let's talk about these trying times, hope through history. Let's start, I guess, with the pandemic that happened in 1918.
It was the wages of globalization. We thought it came from Spain. It didn't. It probably came from the United States.
Woodrow Wilson had waited as long as he could to get into the First World War. Monday, April 2nd, 1917, he announces that he's going to declare war or ask Congress for a declaration of war. The influenza breaks out in army camps. We take it to Europe.
It comes back in an even more exacerbated form. If you read through the newspapers of the time, which blessedly you don't have to do because you have people like me to dork out for you, we did social distancing. Movie theaters were closed. Movie releases were delayed.
Some schools let out. The Chicago public transportation system banned smoking for the first time on the elevated trains because it was a respiratory pandemic. The only answer to the influenza pandemic, which killed far more people than we think almost 675,000 Americans, imagine that, was what we're doing now. The phrase quarantine actually comes from the 40 days that sailors were asked to spend away from the population when they were coming out of the Black Sea to Europe during the 14th century during the Black Death.
And so the solutions we're being offered by the medical professionals are tried and true. They are based on history. They are not based on wishful thinking. And what I would say to your kids, what I say to mine, I have 18, 15, and 12, is this is a, you're going to get 40% of the country to be wrong about almost everything.
40% of the country never voted for Franklin Roosevelt. White supremacy, I live in the South, I come from the South. Otherwise, perfectly, seemingly decent, upstanding people were complicit in unimaginable discrimination the day before yesterday. You know, in my lifetime, we've had riots.
We've denied people the right to vote just right before I was born was the great high watermark of the civil rights movement. And one of the things that I think is so important is sometimes when I make a point I just made, which is, you know what, we stumble through what George Elliott has a great line in Middlemarch. She talks about the dim lights entangled circumstance of the world. You know, we come through that.
Well, I'm a white, boringly heterosexual Episcopate. Things tend to work out for me. But here you go. If people like me, it seems to me, don't make this case, then we're being derelict in our duty.
Because what history tells us is that if you want, in Theodore Parker's phrase, a phrase Dr. King used, a phrase President Obama likes to use, that the arc of a moral universe is long but abends toward justice. Well, it doesn't bend toward justice if there aren't people insisting that it swerve toward justice. That's the dialectic.
And so if you feel strongly about something in the public square, my message is not don't worry about it because it's all going to work out. My message is get in there, stand in tradition of Frederick Douglass and Alice Paul and John Lewis, and force the rest of us to pay attention. That's the way progress comes in America. Not when the powerful decide to do something.
Not when Lyndon Johnson does the Voting Rights Act or Woodrow Wilson decides to support the suffrage amendment. That's not where change comes. Change comes first is when the powerless convince the powerful to do the right thing. Let's talk a little bit about that because you're saying hope through history.
And a lot of the history you're talking about, despite the fact that he emerged from it, it's not hopeful for a lot of people. And the same thing is happening in this pandemic. You know, New York Magazine just had to cover Rich Corona for Corona. And all kinds of stuff.
So history is sort of the lens you see it through. It's always been taught in classes I've taken as sort of a victory over, a victory over. However, when you're trying to go through hope through history, talk a little bit about what you mean when you have this podcast, this idea of finding hope in these, often really from slavery on up, including the decimation of you're talking earlier about your book on Jackson, the decimation of other people. So talk about this idea of why hope is the way forward for everybody.
Well, crisis itself, the word crisis is from the Greek. Hippocrates used it most significantly for our purposes. Crisis initially meant a moment of decision in the course of a health crisis. So it was the moment in a condition when you lived or you died.
And I think my view of hope is that when you look particularly the American story, and you look at crises where we have not fully applied the implications, the logical, compelling, self-evident implications of what was the most important sentence ever originally rendered in English, in my opinion. Thomas Jefferson, that all men were created equal and were in doubt by their creator with certain analytical rights. A sentence, by the way, written on a laptop desk made by the hands of an enslaved person at Monticello. So you don't have to look very hard in American life for irony.
You mentioned Andrew Jackson, the great champion of a common man, as long as you were white and a man. But here's the thing. Do we today, in 2020, for all our sins, omissions, shortcomings, for all of our fallen nature, our frail nature, our fallibility, are more people happier and more invested in this experiment in the sense that it is the best option for moving forward in an incredibly complicated, multi-ethnic, globalized, continental nation? And the answer, I think, is yes.
You and I have a lot of friends who live in Manhattan, and before every presidential election, they say, if the Republican wins, by God, we're moving to Canada. But, you know, the traffic's still pretty bad up there. People tend to stay. They tend to fight it out.
And so it's really almost a utilitarian argument. It's been the might. What produces the greatest good for the greatest number? And so far, by and large, the American experiment has produced great good for a great number.
So what is it? What are the moments we look back on that we tend to celebrate, we tend to commemorate? In the last 60, 70 years, that's Selma, that's Stonewall, that's the fall of the Berlin Wall. And those moments are ones in which we have reached out, as opposed to clenching our fists.
So what do we do now, right now? Because it seems like, you know, you think every day it's going to not turn around from the health point of view, because a virus is what it is. A virus is a virus. How do you imagine to get to that level of hope?
Because I just, you know, the other day, I thought, oh, the mood is going to turn around. The weather's going to get nicer. I know it sounds crazy, but it does lift people's moods. And then you open the paper, and it's just like the concept, and not just the news of the virus, which I think is just, again, what it is.
But how do you get to that level of hope? What is the journey that you've seen in these specific events where it happens? Is it sort of this valley before? Yeah.
I mean, we look, if you're an African American, and you live within five miles of where I'm sitting in Nashville, Tennessee, for 100 years, you faced a legal, prevalent, and generally accepted system of apartheid right here within the life within the lifetime of most of the people we know, many of the people we know. And that was dismantled with some enduring problems about policing, about incarceration, about economic equality, about economic opportunity, about health outcomes, environmental outcomes, disproportionate vulnerability. But when in a period from about 1954 to about 1966, a serious, seriously minded, carefully thought out, unimaginably courageous movement of people forced a change that would have been largely unthinkable even a year or two before. The Democratic Party gnawed itself apart over civil rights as recently as 1948.
So again, just because we've come through difficult times before doesn't mean we're going to do it now. But if you accept intellectually that segregation was an enduring crisis of opportunity and evil, and in our lifetimes that has been ameliorated, then that does create hope, it seems to me. And what it required was the people who were most affected steadily, courageously appealing to the conscience and the pocketbooks of the country. So if we have that example so close to hand, it seems to me, in terms of this particular health crisis, you know, you've got, I remember thinking about March 10th or so, Lord, please don't let this become a partisan pandemic, right?
Let this not, and within five minutes, it did. If you believe in the science, if you believe in the lesson of the influenza pandemic, which is you follow the facts, then all you can do is do it yourself and speak up and hope that other people do. If the other people are on the wrong side of this, there's not much you can do except continue to bear witness, which may seem like a soft answer. But what was Rosa Parks doing?
What was John Lewis doing? What was Sakharov doing in the Soviet Union? So there are these individual stories of people who insisted that we had to do the right thing. And those were long, lonely years.
So this is, you know, when President Kennedy was assassinated, Dr. King went to the funeral in Washington, and he was standing on the street as the casing went by. And one of his associates said, you know, this is really going to get the civil rights bill through. And King turned to him and said, we're a 10-day nation.
We're down to about a 10-minute nation. Well, we're going to talk about that when we get back. We're here with John Meechum. He's the host of a new podcast, Hope Through History News, also well-known as an author and historian of Pulitzer Prize winning books such as American Lion, Franklin Winston, and Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power.
We're going to talk about the 10-minute nation and what it means for hope for our citizens when we get back. This week on Network and Shell, I'm joined by Tank Sinatra, the meme king, with over 15 million followers across Tank's good news, influencers in the wild, and his personal account. Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is, how much a single-sponsored post pays, why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes, and how meme culture, think, preparation, age, starter packs, and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value. Get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll, make you rethink what going viral is really worth, and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. We're here with John Meechum. He's the host of a new podcast called Hope Through History. He's obviously a very famous historian and writer of many books on history.
I do want to talk about what he's working on now, but talk about the 10-minute nation. It's something I talk about a lot, the twitchy nature of our society. You see everything being, you know, Trump is sort of the top of this game, and everything's being done through Twitter, the reaction, the action, and everyone's living in that world. What does that do to history?
If we are, we were a 10-day nation, it's king said, and now we're 10 seconds. I would say 10 seconds, not 10 minutes. Yeah, I'm trying to be optimistic. So we're both playing our assigned roles.
It makes it incredibly difficult to have large, sustained public action. It's hard to imagine President Kennedy's inaugural, quoted St. Paul, talking about the Cold War. long flight struggle and saying we had to be patient in tribulation hard to imagine the country having the focus and attention span to undertake something as complicated and costly as the cold war we're having a and that would be this would all be theoretical if it weren't for the pandemic and here we have we're being asked for a certain number of months not necessarily years to make certain sacrifices and as we can see we're having an incredibly difficult time doing it however and this is the hopeful part of this in the 10 second vernacular in that cacophony that we all tend to live in we feel as though we're not going to be able to do it but then you step back and you look at the polling which is interesting and there is a partisan divide but there's still a significant number of folks who get it and they don't necessarily live in the echo chamber of fox and friends to the oval office uh to maga and into all the oppositional forces that have taken their stand so you can be fancy about this but i don't i think it's a pretty straightforward thing we know what works to keep the fatalities the deaths somewhat in control that will keep us healthy no one's particularly puzzled by what this will be it is inconvenient is economically cataclysmic for many people it is emotionally taxing as you said in your own household and yet this is what we're being asked to do for a certain amount of time and the 10 day nation should be able to do that the 10 second nation doesn't want to do you imagine what it impacts the things like social media and technology have had on history i mean it's interesting because you know you did have these great you're talking about great speeches and great moments in history that sort of played a narrative that plays out in a wider space and now it's so accelerated and i think i wrote that it weaponizes everything accelerates everything accelerates every trend as a historian when you look at this and i'd love to get it's like how are you going how are historians of the future going to figure out what's happening especially as it's happening so quickly in such small little bites and and and twitchy man in a twitchy manner the phrase you just used i think is the important one it accelerates it exacerbates and accelerates uh first of all we don't know the answer yet because we're at the beginning of that drama i do have a slightly counterintuitive view of this which is speed is relative and you know this uh technology's impact is relative so if you were in the 18th and 19th century and really the wages of gutenberg were only reaching you uh in the interior of north america for the first time you were getting a newspaper once a week or once a month that was the information superhighway right my god there's a newspaper and they were entirely partisan uh until the early 20th century the period of consensus that we romanticize although it was such a consensus how to create john birch the bull connor uh and lead to vietnam is really the exception not the rule the age of cronkite that we think of was a very brief moment really from the end of world war ii until the early 90s which historically is you know it's 40 years 50 years or so but that's only about 25 20 of the life of the nation and so what we have to figure out is for what extent a did we have truly have a common set of facts in the period we lionized and did that actually create better public outcomes so let's think it gave us vietnam so that's not so great it did give us a civil rights movement but it also gave us the reaction to that it gave us an expanded role for women uh it has given us a remarkable when you think about the social science a remarkable new openness and acceptance of non-traditional identity but did that common set of facts is that a causal relation or is it does it just so happen what i think is and i've been a skeptic on this um the idea that our divisions are structural as opposed to seasonal i may well be wrong meaning the technology isn't causing it's just there it's just the latest technology here yeah exactly or the television and it also presupposes that there was a more there was some era of consensus and we are no longer in that and that's i so here's my dork theory which i will try out on you what i'm about to say it's either an 800 word op-ed or 800 page book i haven't decided which um but here you go from 1933 to 2017 so i spent our conversation about how things are kind of the same right trump is as if george wallace or john thurman had actually gone all the way uh and in 1968 george wallace maybe aaron burr with twitter but go ahead yeah yeah and i didn't look at um and he shot somebody so um uh he sounds so important but go ahead uh but trump is the fullest manifestation of perennial american forces that's the historically based argument okay so but here's the other way of looking at it which is contrary to what i just said 1933 to 2017 could be seen as a kind of figurative conversation between franklin roosevelt and ronald dragan you had two central questions that confronted us the relative role of the state in the marketplace and the relative projection of force against commonly agreed upon foes and rivals and you could be at the 10 yard line or the other 10 yard line but you are on the same field this is not a sequential chapter in that conversation so barack obama and franklin roosevelt actually governed more or less in an ethos that would be recognizable to both i've blown this by clinton george w bush and obama and they all agree um so i have some some cover on this trump doesn't make sense in that way and so my view is not that there was a liberal consensus that has broken apart and we have you and i have lots of mutual friends who sees for 1964 1968 that there was this moment but then it fell apart i actually think the consensus was far more contentious even at the height of the consensus than we tend to remember what this election is about and i try not to be hyperbolic about this but i believe this to be true if the incumbent president is re-elected much of what i said about the resilience of the country will be fundamentally weakened and arguably dismissible if vice president biden wins then that is about as clean a win for this argument as you can think of i have a friend who was the chairman of the democratic party in the age of obama which is like being the radar operator who has a great line great sasser he said basically trump wants to take us back to 1955 and biden wants to take us back to 1965 which is exactly right and now there's a whole generation a whole world that would rather not do either right they would rather move forward yes most of us but go ahead right but if you had to pick between those two years you want 65 yeah yeah i would not everybody not everybody but we're talking about but here's the thing but that's an interesting question so who are who is the not everybody my mother is your mother for trump i think she did well not where she should be if she's voting for my brother same thing um but that's okay but you're talking about it's a hillary right there you go but that's another important point presidential elections are not referendo people like me always say this is a referendum no it's not it's a choice nobody came to the country said hey you want donald trump to be president that wasn't the issue it was which of these two people do you want yeah yeah she can be she can be moved so can my brother i mean it depends she can be they can be moved for sure on this office one you want one more dork thing sure one more thing okay i got a whole bag of them uh but i'll just pull one more out so i was trying to think what is what's the metric of bipartisanship right so you said your mother your brother are persuadable that's a vanishingly small number of americans but it's about 10 and here's how i get to the 10 it's not who says they're independent so i try to think what would be an actual data point for this and it occurred to me that if you are a self-identified democrat or republican and if you cross the aisle in a presidential election to vote for the other person that's probably the best metric right so we have we have data from 1952 forward so in eisenhower got about 40 of democrats johnson got 40 of republicans in 1964 1972 nixon gets 40 of democrats and then the numbers collapse but they collapse because most of those democrats in 72 became republicans so in our time more or less last quarter century nine percent of democrats told pollsters in 2000 on election day that they had voted for george w bush which is what makes the difference in that election uh 13 percent of republicans told pollsters on election day 2008 that they had voted for president obama so 9 13 so call it 10 there's 10 of people who depending on where they are that's the real balance of power in the country so when you think about this i want to get back i want to talk about where you think this country is going and hope through future i guess not through history and how you would write about this era if you were john meacham 100 years from now we're here with john meacham the host of the new podcast hope through history he's also the best-selling author of many many books on all kinds of presidents and people in power including american lion which i joked with him i have been listening to on audible for three years now that said i've been reading ron cherno's book on hamilton for five years for whatever long it's been out anyway we'll be back after this we're here with john meacham the host of a new podcast hope through history obviously he's a very well-known historian writes lots of books john what are you working on now what is your focus besides this dork idea you have this i mean when you have this many dork ideas yeah you have a lot it can be kind of consuming uh the book i'm working on i'm working on two books uh one which will be out before the other is a biography of john lewis who is uh fighting cancer and i actually believe is a christian saint in classical terms uh someone who was willing to die for an idea he certainly is and um i wanted to tell that story because it's so countercultural it was then and now it's almost at least then it was somewhat imaginable and now it's just you know totally beyond our kin and then a book that you will spend 10 years trying to get through uh so i've got a decade planned for you which is a biography of dolly and james madison together oh wow that will take me 10 years i'll probably be dead by then your last book was called the soul of america um and you were talking about appealing again because you're a positive leaning person are better angels again this is something that you come back to the battle for our better angels where are we in that battle right now from your first as we move into the election what are the big risks is it russian interference is it partisanship when you look at this election compared to so many elections that passed and there's been problems with every election i think probably since the beginning of elections have in here in this country but what do you think of this critically important if you were looking back at this what would you think you would be focused on the thing that i think is so important right now is to what extent are we willing to give a little bit not much but actually accept that the team we had already picked might be wrong and the team that we tend to dislike might have something right i don't know boss charlie peters the editor of washington monthly founder of washington monthly who used to define intellectual honesty as the ability to say something good about the bad guys and bad about the good guys and i think that's where the angels take flight right now and it doesn't have to be an existential manichaean full-on road to damascus moment it doesn't have to be oh my god the other side is so right i have been so wrong woe is me it can be as simple as let's say you're a conservative republican you couldn't stand senator clinton you took a flyer on this guy but by god you can see that this pandemic has brought home yet again that the temperament and the character of the person we send to that desk does matter and you know what i'm not in this anymore uh that would be a better angel winning out and so a huge amount depends on what happens in november i don't think i would have written the book i wrote in 2018 which was basically again trump is perennial uh a full manifestation of this but we will come through it if he'd won the popular vote because because it would have been that would have been a majority did think that right uh and i don't think a majority i mean he's never had a majority right he's never been above 50 on anything and so it's not that it's a fluke but it is i think a fever and fevers either break or they kill us and my bet is it breaks but i'm not sure and i'm certainly not arguing the one criticism i got from that book and i didn't get much of it but some people i'd respect raise it with me privately was that it was too optimistic but not maybe but it was i followed the data on reconstruction suffrage the role of immigration intervention isolationism and civil rights and the data in all those moments suggests that enough americans decided to be open as opposed to closed often that'd be dragged kicking and screaming to it but again i think the central question you have to ask is is the fight for this question is the fight for the shape of american life in the next 20 years is it worth it should we be here making this fight or is somebody else getting it doing it better and that's an alternative and it's not a love it or leave it point at all but it is a you know but you do have to sort of ask you know what i'm frustrated i hate you know people say i hate this president hey i can't believe it mitch mcconnell ah you know everybody goes all right i get it but is it worth the fight so when you think about that idea but one of the things that's come up a lot with people is this idea of wealth in this country and obviously the people i cover are the wealthiest people there are in history um and the wealthiest people in the world in world history uh nobody's wealthier than these people most of them come from tech they're unaccountable uh they run companies that they run themselves that they don't have that have enormous impact on the population are you you think you know we've been through these times historically we had rockefellers we had carnegie's is this a similar thing or is it just is it something fresh and new sort of fresh new wealth that is hard to deal with or do you see any similarities between them i think it is a difference of kind to not degree uh partly because if you look at say facebook that's a wealth creation engine that has a direct and discernible impact on what people see and therefore what they think right so it's not i mean you could say that but go ahead absolutely but hearst didn't have the reach facebook has so you've got and people knew hearst also never pretended to be above politics he never uh you know he was a partisan who you knew where he was coming from right more rupert murdoch yes precisely uh that's exactly the analogy um and press barons who have points of view are again what interests me about facebook is they are in fact purveyors of partisan information but pretend not to be and they're not willing to exercise the most basic kind of editorial judgment that's not what john d rockefeller did that's not what jp morgan did that's not what carnegie did they were building things that affected american life uh in incredibly important ways, but they weren't in every American's pocket or in their lives every day.
And so that is different, and that is a vast unaccountable empire out there. So yeah, I think that does require, and what it requires is an informed and discerning citizenry. Can you get 80% of that? Probably not.
But if you can get 20-25% of people who are able to make the right, you know, make a judge and make an informed call, that's probably a rational expectation. And will their impact have an effect on history? Like, how is history, how would you, for example, cover how Trump has used Twitter or how Facebook has been influenced by the Russians or whatever? Oh, yeah, absolutely it's affected history.
I mean, we'll be studying the 2016 election forever because of this. Yeah, I mean, if in fact Russian disinformation, in an election that close, if it moved a vanishingly small number of votes, yeah, it changed the course of the presidency. And people like me sometimes get criticized for, we spend too much time thinking about presidents, it's the people, etc. Okay, well, I submit to you that the last three months have shown that studying the president matters.
So how different would the world be if Hillary Clinton had carried the states she should have carried? I mean, she ought to be getting that debate, but that she wanted to carry. And so it would have been incredibly different. So yeah, if Facebook was a tool for shifting some votes in an incredibly close election, absolutely, it matters and we'll have to study it forever.
And lastly, one of the things you've talked about, you've been talking about a while, is this, you had written the book on Jackson and others. If you were to compare sort of what history we're in right now compared to a previous time in history, would you pick the Jackson era? I don't think I would from reading your book, because he was much more complex and intelligent than Jackson. Well, by the time, yeah, by the time Jackson.
Awful as he was. Okay, but by the time he got to power, he had been a prosecutor, a judge, a senator twice, a congressman, a general. He had also, most importantly, accepted the verdict in 1824, when he had won the popular vote, but the election had to go to the House. He immediately branded it a corrupt bargain and ran against John Quincy Adams for four years, but he did it from Tennessee.
You know, he didn't summon an army, he didn't, you know, try to disrupt the ordinary acts of governance. No, to me, we are in a period from about 1915 to 1930. I think we're in the, where the Klan was refounded in 1915 because of anti-immigration. There were five governors who were members of the Klan in the 1920s.
1924, Democratic National Convention went to 103 ballots because there were 347 Klan delegates at Madison Square Garden, and they wouldn't vote for Al Smith, the governor of New York, because Smith was an Irish Catholic. Seven senators, 30 members of the House, there were 50,000 Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1925. In the midst of that, suffrage passes. World War I globalizes and creates this, really the world we know, and the decade ends with the Depression.
So I'm more where we were a hundred years ago. New technology, the radio, became widely commercially available in the early 20s. And so that's where we are. So how does it end, John?
How does the story end? Well, it ended with Franklin Roosevelt. Right? It ends with...
Who's that then? Well, I don't know. Is it Biden? Is it, you know, is it the next generation of Democratic politicians?
But it was a damn close-run thing, as Wellington said of Waterloo. But that's the whole thing, right? I mean, Lincoln barely got a lot. He got 138% of the popular vote.
This gets us all the way back. FDR, 40% of the country never voted for him. I understand the natural human inclination to want the past to have been a simpler and easier time. But I think that does two things that are worth avoiding.
One is, it doesn't give proper credit to the people who fought and lived and died to create a more perfect union. One. And two, if it was all so simple, then there are fewer lessons for us to draw from it. That is a great way to end, John.
It's not Twitter's fault. It's not a word. I think Twitter's a symptom, not a cause. But I'm going to be wrong.
You know, look, this is one man's opinion. Yeah, they don't have to go to work now in case you're interested. I don't know if you're right about that. They declare that nobody at Twitter has to go to work anymore.
Anyway, John, I really appreciate it. It's great to get a longer-term perspective, and I really do look forward to your next adork coming out. I appreciate it. Again, John has a new podcast.
It decides there's many, many books, of which you should read, and I really am reading all of them at once. Hope Through History is his new podcast, and you can get that wherever you get podcasts, so you can tell us about that in a second, John. You can follow me on Twitter at Kara Swisher. My executive producer, Eric Anderson.
It's Eric America. My producer, Eric Johnson. It's at HeyHeyESJ. John, where can people find you online?
They can find me at at JMeacham on the evil Twitter. And JohnMeacham.com, and wherever dork products are sold. Exactly. If you liked this episode, we'd appreciate it if you shared it with a friend.
And make sure to check out our other podcasts, Pivot, Reset, Recode Media, and Land of the Giants to search them in your podcasting app of choice. Thanks also to our editor, Joel Ravi, and special thanks to Squadcast.fm. Thank you for listening to this episode of Recode Decode. I'll be back here on Monday.
Tune in then.