Civic Action: Voting, Part 1

The United States is a representative democracy. The idea is that we’re a government by the people (we vote officials into office) and for the people (the officials in office are supposed to represent our interests). But it’s not so straight forward around here. Take that golden idea and add restrictive voter laws, billions of dollars and a whacky electoral system, and representation takes on a whole different hue.

Our guides to American voting are Nazita Lajevardi, author of Outsides at Home, Kim Wehle, author of What You Need to Know About Voting and Why and Andrea Hailey, CEO of vote.org.

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TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors.

Civics 101

Civic Action: Voting, Pt. 1

Archival: [00:00:04] About it is right at the voters eye level, easily red.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:07] I found this old promotional video for one of the automatic voting machines that was rolled out in the 50s.

Archival: [00:00:14] And all offices and all candidates are at the same high level.

Archival: [00:00:19] No candidate suffers by being placed in an unfavorable position.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:22] The machine itself is kind of bizarre looking and frankly does not look all that simple.

[00:00:27] But in order to sell it --

Archival: [00:00:29] Large number of voters who are disenfranchised every year at the paper ballot type poll by making mistakes...

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:35] They compare it to paper ballots.

Archival: [00:00:37] People, often by habit, make check marks on the ballot in states where an X is required.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:43] And it is voter after voter.

[00:00:46] They might as well have stayed home. That vote is a no vote, doesn't count illegal.

[00:00:51] And I'm watching this thing and thinking.

[00:00:56] Don't lady! Uh-uh. It doesn't count.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:57] Well, that [00:01:00] just sounds an awful lot like voting in America today.

Archival: [00:01:06] Good try sir. But this ballot will be thrown out.

News clip: [00:01:09] For the first time in a presidential election.

[00:01:11] Nine more states are enforcing new laws requiring eligible voters to present a government issued photo I.D. At the politics point out that there have been few instances of voter fraud in the U.S. and that in Texas, where the state once blocked African-Americans and Hispanics from voting.

[00:01:28] It's more important to encourage voter participation, as we've already seen in the primary season, the right of the black man and woman to vote.

[00:01:37] It's still not a Guarantee. Laws across the U.S. are being passed to make it harder, not easier to vote is the only advanced democracy on Earth that goes out of its way to make it difficult for people to vote.

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:01:52] I was at a few BLM protests and, you know, at these protests I got really curious. I ask people, you know, you're really upset you're going to vote.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:59] This is Nazita Lejevardi. [00:02:00]

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:02:01] I am a lawyer and also a political scientist. I teach at Michigan State University. I teach political science, mostly focusing on American politics, studying how racial and ethnic groups fare in American democracy, whether or not they're facing discrimination, the extent to which they're represented, and also how they perceive their inclusion in American democracy.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:35] So Nazita's at a Black Lives Matter protest, and she goes up to some of the protesters who are obviously interested in making a difference in society. Right. And she asks them, what you gonna do?

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:02:46] Like, tell me we're gonna do this, you know where I'm going to vote. And I ask them, you know why you're here. You're spending your time on a Tuesday morning. You know, what are you doing here? And they say, you know, Bernie isn't running. Bernie comes back, [00:03:00] then we'll vote.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:02] I have been hearing this a lot. You've got people who just don't see what they want in the candidate pool. So they're just not going to vote. And it has nothing to do with them not caring. It's just they don't feel like they have good choices.

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:03:16] And so then you have to understand, like, you know, you may not agree with the politics, but what they want is a different vision of America. They want a different vision of this world. Whatever game we were playing is not representative of their interests or at least what they think their interests are. And so maybe there just aren't enough candidates out there who who represent them.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:34] When we talk about voting in America, the most basic democratic exercise that we've got, we're not just talking about showing up to the polls. We're talking about representation. We're talking about access. It's voting that facilitates our representative democracy. So what does it mean when people feel underrepresented by their options at the polls or when getting [00:04:00] to the polls is a hurdle in and of itself?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:06] I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:07] I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:08] And this is Civics 101, a podcast about the basics of how our democracy works. And today we talking about the right that isn't a right. The thing that makes this democracy work, even though a lot of people call it broken. We're talking about voting.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:24] Hold it. What do you mean the right that isn't a right?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:27] Oh, yeah. First thing that you got to know about voting. Nowhere is it written that you have a right to vote. The Constitution left it to the states to set voting requirements.

[00:04:38] The federal government only says that you can't be prevented from voting due to your sex or the color of your skin. Speaking of preventing people from voting, by the way, let's start there, shall we?

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:04:50] Voting rights for restricted to free white people. And so, like going back and thinking about who could vote and how different immigrant groups, especially like [00:05:00] tried to gain whiteness under the law.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:03] There are exceptions, but for the most part, and until fairly recently, voting was restricted to white people, specifically free white men. Now property and religion factored in here and there, depending on the state. But free, white and male was the golden ticket.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:21] When I think of what the various demographics fighting for the vote. Historically, I think of it as them fighting against discrimination, not fighting to be considered white. What is Nazita talking about in terms of gaining whiteness under the law?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:34] Yeah, a major factor in all of this is the Naturalization Act of 1790. It was our first one that was codified, which in effect made it so that only white free men could become citizens and vote in the U.S..

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:05:48] So I think it's important to think about historically who had access under the law and how to groups make arguments that they were white and especially these immigrant groups who came to the United States. Of course, African-Americans were excluded [00:06:00] from the franchise and continue to be so. But I think it's important to think about when we talk about Asian-Americans, we talk about Latinos, we talk about Middle Easterners, we talk about these other natives, you know, things very important to think that, you know, there's been a number of efforts at trying to be classified as white.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:17] The framers had this notion of a representative democracy. Right. When we say that our government is of by for the people, voting is at the core of that. But the history of voting in the U.S. reveals, of course, that many of the people were and continue to be ineligible for that representation for a long, long time in American history. Citizenship and the vote meant proving your whiteness. Black Americans thought this, of course, and argued for their citizenship, civil rights and enfranchisement as black Americans. But there were so many other groups who felt forced to argue that they could be American citizens because they were free [00:07:00] whites.

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:07:00] Which is why you see like Middle Eastern and North Africans classified as white under the census right now these days, that we do talk specifically about the Asian-American vote, the Latin-X vote, for example.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:11] Right. Nazita says that the civil rights movement that fight on the part of black groups to have their civil rights observed and preserved in the 1950s and 1960s resulted in a reinforcement of anti-discrimination laws. And the need to prove your whiteness in order to be enfranchised began to dissolve.

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:07:35] Certainly after the civil rights movement and the three major pieces of legislation that came out of the 1965 Civil Rights Acts as the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act.

[00:07:47] So certainly after that period of time, and especially with like the 1970s and seeing like this mobilization of a Latino vote of the Asian-American vote in the 1980s, you do see right groups starting [00:08:00] to find a positionality in American politics.

[00:08:03] And no longer trying to identify with this whiteness because it's no longer the governing law. Right. To be part of the franchise.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:12] And it's not just that whiteness ceases to be the governing law. Right. Nazita says there's something else going on.

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:08:19] Also, I think it's important because these groups were finding a voice and were making demands on the democracy. They were making demands for representation. And so certainly there was a shift. And it certainly happened after the civil rights movements for four non-black groups for sure.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:39] Demands for representation. OK. So this is the sticking point again, right?

[00:08:45] People demand to be properly represented by the people making their laws and governing their worlds.

[00:08:51] So if these disparate groups have achieved the right to vote and they exercise that right. They should see themselves represented, correct?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:00] Maybe, [00:09:00] maybe if you're in a perfectly balanced electoral system, that might be the case. But a perfectly balanced electoral system.

[00:09:09] We do not have.

Kim Wehle: [00:09:10] The framers left a lot of electoral politics to the states.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:14] This is Kim Wehle.

Kim Wehle: [00:09:15] I am Kim Wehle. I'm a professor of law at the University of Baltimore and author of my second book, What You Need to Know About Voting and Why.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:23] Oh, Kim Wehle.

[00:09:24] She talked us through the Constitution back in the day.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:27] She did indeed. And this time she schooled me on how voting actually works in the U.S. and what that means for representation. I'm going to go over the major ones here. I think you can probably guess the big one, Nick, a little something called congressional redistricting.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:43] Or to friends of old Elbridge Gerry, gerrymandering.

[00:09:48] That's called a portmanteau word, did you know that.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:51] Is that what a portmanteau is?

Nick Capodice: [00:09:51] Yeah portmanteau is when you like mash together two words and make a new word. Yeah.

[00:09:56] So it's it's comes from a mixture of Gerry and Salamander. Gerry [00:10:00] was governor of Massachusetts during some sneaky district redrawing and the salamander part because of the wiggly shape the district ends up having when you bend them around party lines.

Kim Wehle: [00:10:10] And one of the things states get to do is decide how to carve up the districts that go to the United States Congress that represent the Congress. So if you did it logically, you might take a state like Maryland where I live and you might put a big plus sign in the middle of it, make, you know, for congressional districts and just assume there's four congressional members of Congress and each quarter gets the population of each quarter gets one person.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:34] And I think we know that is how things did not go.

Kim Wehle: [00:10:36] Well, we don't have to carve it up in logical ways like a map maker might do. Let's figure out where all Republicans are, all are, Democrats are, and we'll make the salamander light, distorted, tortured districts that kind of cluster or either cluster or break up people from one party. So if you imagine instead of a plus in Maryland, we put circles around all the Democrats and [00:11:00] they don't have to be necessarily equal in size or you did. You do have to be equal representation in terms of the numbers of people. But we'll send we'll carve it up in a way that we just know it's always going to be Democrats living in that city.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:14] See, in a lot of states, it's the state legislature that's in charge of drawing the district lines, which means the majority party can draw those lines in favor of their party.

Kim Wehle: [00:11:25] And so even if the whole state has more Republicans in one day, don't they'll never get a completely Republican representation in Congress because of this gerrymandering.

[00:11:36] So people criticize it legitimately because it's the state lawmakers from a particular party that carve up the districts. And so the politicians are picking their voters instead of the voters picking the politicians.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:49] The drawing of districts is not necessarily political. It's just that the way things go is that the people in power are on the right or the [00:12:00] left, and that is how the districts end up being drawn. And another thing that draws a big fat line between the voter and getting represented by the person who really represents you as a person money. One recent Supreme Court case in particular called Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, ruled that corporations have a right to political speech, which means they can spend big, big money on things like ads for their preferred candidate.

Kim Wehle: [00:12:28] So now politicians care more about raising money from not individual constituents, but from big corporations and, you know, anonymous donors that can put as much money as possible on the airwaves in support of an issue that the candidate cares about.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:41] And what you really need to know here is despite campaign finance reform that has limited the amount of money individuals can give to a campaign. Money has found a way to be very much involved in getting people elected. Why is that a problem for you as an individual?

Kim Wehle: [00:12:58] So this is where billionaires [00:13:00] have big impacts. They still have their First Amendment rights. They want to hire some fancy firm from New York City to spend tons of money flooding the airways waves. They can still do that as individuals. But when it comes to regular people that have bread and butter issues and budgets, we're stuck at twenty seven hundred dollars. And that's a problem in our campaign finance system. But because the Supreme Court has treated corporate speech as a First Amendment right without a constitutional amendment that can't really change. Congress can't fix that.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:33] And there's that one last thing that I'm going to mention here.

[00:13:36] When it comes to unevenness in representation, when you go to the polls, you're voting for your delegate, the or the delegate to Electoral College. You're not actually voting for the president.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:46] Saw this one coming.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:47] It always seems to boil down to the Electoral College.

Kim Wehle: [00:13:50] So most states say You, a state again has 10 delegates and say 51 percent of the [00:14:00] voters in that state voted for Donald Trump, 49 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.

[00:14:07] All 10 delegates will go to Donald Trump.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:12] So that's a winner take all system the winner take all electoral college system, which we have mentioned many, many times before on this show, means that someone can win the popular vote but lose the election. It also means that a lot of voters are going to end up feeling unheard and unrepresented.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:31] And I hate to add potholes to this rocky road to representation. But, you know, Hanna, we still have not talked about the barriers to getting to the polls and to actually being able to cast your vote once you're there.

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:14:43] I mean, I think I think what people don't realize is how much how much planning goes into you and strategy goes into mobilizing and demobilizing folks to vote.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:56] Here's Nazita again.

Nazita Lejevardi: [00:14:57] So oftentimes we say to ourselves, like, oh, [00:15:00] you know, by 2040, you know, America is going to be majority minority. And so it really won't matter that that's actually not true because, you know, there are there are factions there are groups that are interest groups that are being mobilized to keep people away from the polls. Right. Even, for instance, like with absentee ballots, the number of ballots that are thrown away because the signatures, quote unquote, don't match. Right. Is so incredibly disproportionate in certain areas that, you know, her larger percentage of minorities. Right. And, you know, we can't say we can't draw so many causal arguments as we would like.

[00:15:34] All we can say is there seems to be an association. But, you know, it does seem like there is a there there when you take the totality of the picture together.

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Nick Capodice: [00:16:30] So even after disenfranchised minorities clawed their way into recognition and a right to vote, there's still a massive effort to stifle their votes.

Andrea Hailey: [00:16:39] There have been a series of rules and laws put in place to keep people. Politicians are at the point where they're picking their voters rather than voters picking politicians.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:50] This is Andrea Hailey.

Andrea Hailey: [00:16:51] CEO Vote.org.

[00:16:53] We're a tech platform that simplifies the process of registering to vote or requesting your absentee [00:17:00] ballot.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:01] I called up Andrea because things were feeling a little dodgy, Nick. You know, I was looking at this screwy electoral process, efforts at voter suppression. And I'm thinking of those protesters that Nazita mentioned at the beginning of this episode who were like, now we're not going to bother voting. And I hate to say it, but I started to think. What if they are right?

Nick Capodice: [00:17:23] No.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:24] Well, no.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:25] No.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:25] They're not. But I'm going to get to that in a minute. The point is, Andrea runs a site devoted to making it as clear and simple as possible for people across the spectrum to vote. And she was in full acknowledgement. Disenfranchisement is real and it's multifaceted. It's voter suppression, but it's also a lack of options.

Andrea Hailey: [00:17:46] You see people working really hard to overcome odds, those odds, and jumped through all of those hoops to make sure their voice is still heard and they can elect leaders who reflect their own value systems. And so I think that, you know, we know [00:18:00] that young people and people of color have been historically disenfranchised in the voting process and have extra barriers to overcome. And there's several of those barriers. There's, you know, the fact that Election Day is not a holiday. There's all the voter I.D. laws that were brought in, the closing of polling locations that are convenient for people, misinformation about voting. There's there's a whole series host of things that keep people separate from the right to vote.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:34] Is this about when you started to agree with the vote abstainers? Because I'm starting to feel a little down about it myself.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:40] Here is what I hadn't factored in, though, for every person to disillusioned and sometimes rightfully to vote. There's a voter waiting in an hours long line in the stifling heat or rain just to be heard.

News clip: [00:18:54] The amount of people in line shocking to see in the middle of a pandemic. When we first put up causes on [00:19:00] both side of the rules, that high turnout turned into long lines in DeKalb and Fulton County because of problems with the state's new touchscreen voting equipment used.

Andrea Hailey: [00:19:08] One of the things that I'm really excited about, though, if you just looked at the Georgia primary, is the resilience of the American voter, because despite long lines, despite people, the last voters voting at 12, 30 in the morning, a lot of people jumped through all those hoops and overcame those barriers. And I think that moving forward, one of the things that the American public can start to demand is a voting process that makes it easy and convenient for them to have their voice heard. And if their elected officials who who make it more difficult, they can work to fire those people.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:43] In other words, think small, think state and local government, the ones who make the voting laws in your state.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:50] Right. Who is in charge of making it easier or harder for you to vote? Are they someone who you get to vote for? And before Election Day even comes, [00:20:00] Andrea says, what can you do to make sure those officials help you out?

Andrea Hailey: [00:20:05] I think that there needs to be pressure on officials to announce their plan early so that voters can do their job, you know, in show up.

[00:20:14] And I think that it's now on election officials to say how they're going to administer this election in a way that imagines enfranchising the highest number of people possible, like that's literally their whole job is to is to administer safe and free and fair elections.

[00:20:34] So it's it's time for them to do that and to let us know what the plan is for Election Day so that we don't see repeats of Georgia or anywhere else across the country. And I think that that's something that voters can absolutely demand from their county officials, from their secretaries of state, you know, demand that that people make it easy.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:58] Andrea's thing is basically OK. [00:21:00] Yes, there are loads of systems in place to disenfranchise You, especially those of you who have worked so hard over centuries to be granted enfranchisement. Chances are, the harder your demographic has worked for the vote, the harder it is going to be for you to exercise your vote.

[00:21:19] But starting at the state level, showing up and refusing to go away without a ballot or asking for that mail in ballot early. These are the small steps you can take to push the system to work for you.

Andrea Hailey: [00:21:32] We always say this make a plan, make it early, but this year in particular, truly make a plan and make it early and request absentee ballots early, because what happens is that a whole bunch of people start requesting their absentee. Leading up to the deadline, which causes a run on states and will cause issues in states that are not used to handling a high volume of those requests. So go ahead, get your request in early. That [00:22:00] is one part of the plan. And then secondly, blackout time on Election Day, if you can. And if you can't ask your employer for that time on Election Day, because if the system does get overrun or if your ballot doesn't come to you or something like that, then you'll have to go and vote in person. And voting in person this year may mean long lines.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:20] Andrea says things like demanding that polling places stay open, demanding that your polling place provides personal protective equipment, even being willing if you're a young person, to volunteer as a poll person. All of this can mean the difference between disenfranchised individuals getting a chance to vote or not.

Nick Capodice: [00:22:45] All right, so I'm hearing that if you want a clear, demonstrably effective way to make sure voting means real representation and open polling place with a knowledgeable volunteer, AK You is one answer.

[00:22:58] I do think, though, that given [00:23:00] all of these barriers, another obvious step is just know how to vote. Right.

[00:23:06] Right. But you know what? I decided we need a whole other episode to lay that one out. That's in part two of our voting episode: How to Vote, here on Civics 101.

[00:23:20] This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Our staff includes Jackie Fulton and Felix Poon. Erica Janik opt out of the I voted sticker in favor of crocheting. I voted sweater vests. Maureen McMurry makes waiting in line at the polls look like an art form. Music in this episode by Silicon Transmitter, Patrick Patrikios, Jesse Gallagher, Astron and The Mini Vandals. There are oh so many resources out there for you, dear voter. And we've compiled a bunch of them at our Website, civics101podcast.org. Why don't you drop us a line while you're there? You've got a question about American democracy wearing a hole in your pocket. We will take it and make you an episode while we're at it. [00:24:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Posse Comitatus

The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 as the Reconstruction drew to a close and troops were pulled out of the southeastern United States. The idea was to prevent the military from enforcing laws. After all, that’s what law enforcement is for — state and local police forces are the ones deputized to do that work. But what does it mean when the police use military gear and tactics to enforce that law? Ashley Farmer, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University breaks it down.

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Transcript

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors.

Posse Comitatus

CPB: [00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:04] Nick, a while back, a couple of our listeners visited the station and one of them, Barbara, when she stopped by our desks. She brought up something called the Posse Comitatus Act and asked us to do an episode on it. Do you remember this?

Nick Capodice: [00:00:21] I do remember. And we put it on the long list of things we were going to do at Civics 101.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:26] But then, of course, the pandemic changed everything, including our schedule. Plans were shifted, things were delayed. And then earlier this month, we got an email from Barbara and it just said, "is now a good time to talk about Posse Comitatus?"

Archival: [00:00:44] We're going to begin with breaking news tonight out of Minneapolis, where the National Guard is being mobilized after violent protests erupted overnight over the death of George Floyd.

Archival: [00:00:54] The use of force against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square by federal law enforcement backed by the [00:01:00] U.S. military's National Guard, sparked a nationwide debate about the role of the military and civil society.

[00:01:06] And Trump is threatening to deploy heavily armed soldiers to restore peace if local authorities don't act.

[00:01:12] I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.

[00:01:18] And the answer, Barbara, is yes. And thanks. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:28] I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:29] And today on Civics 101 we're tackling this seemingly obscure Latin term and why it is particularly relevant these days.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:38] Let's get that Latin out of the way, please.

Ashley Farmer: [00:01:40] Directly translated from Latin, it just means power of the county. But in relation to this act, it refers to any group of armed persons meant to address lawlessness.

[00:01:50] This is Ashley Farmer.

[00:01:51] I'm an assistant professor in criminal justice sciences at Illinois State University. And my work really centers on policing, police, community [00:02:00] relations. And as part of that, I've also studied police militarization.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:03] Right. So if you hadn't already guessed the term Posse Comitatus in the context of an act of Congress has something to do with policing of a sort.

Ashley Farmer: [00:02:15] So the provisions most directly say that it is just not lawful to use the army of the United States as a posse comitatus or a group of armed persons for the purpose of carrying out laws. So the initial purpose of the act was just to limit the federal government's power to use the military for policing.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:33] All right. Got it. This is where the president comes in. He says he's going to send troops to enforce things. And people are saying, well, you can't because of this act. Right?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:43] Right. And the thing is, that is not really true. We're going to get to that in a minute. First, what is the story of the Posse Comitatus Act?

Ashley Farmer: [00:02:58] This actually came about [00:03:00] at the end of the reconstruction era after the Civil War. And it was really a result of the compromise of 1877, which addressed the very hotly contested presidential election of 1876 because there were allegations that federal troops had interfered with that election.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:19] Right. I know this story. This is the Hayes-Tilden election. Right. Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, is running against Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican. And Tilden won the popular vote and was leading in the Electoral College. But there were a bunch of contested electoral votes and widespread allegations of voter fraud.

Ashley Farmer: [00:03:38] So there were disputes as to whether or not the winner was Hayes or Tilden. So a congressional commission awarded Hayes the electoral votes needed for him to win that election. But in order to do that, he needed to make some concessions. And one of those concessions was that he had to agree to withdraw federal troops from the south.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:58] Right. This is happening [00:04:00] during the reconstruction period following the Civil War. Congress had passed a series of acts on top of the reconstruction amendments to protect the civil rights of black Americans. But federal troops were needed to enforce those rights and to prevent another mass uprising of white southerners while they figured out how to reconstitute these rebel states. It should also be noted, by the way, that these troops could not prevent the continued everyday incidents of racially motivated violence against black Americans in the South. So the Hayes-Tilden election happens. Democrats, that's Tilden's party, want these troops out of there. They also think that the troops somehow influenced the election by enforcing people's rights at polling places. Hayes party. The Republicans wanted the presidency, so they made a deal.

[00:04:54] Hayes got the presidency and he pulled the troops out of the south.

Ashley Farmer: [00:04:59] And once he did [00:05:00] this, the reconstruction era completely collapsed. And as a result, the civil rights that blacks had been promised in the south never came about. So it was originally intended to make it difficult for federal forces to execute those criminal laws in the south, which they had been doing all throughout the Reconstruction era.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:18] So Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to the use of troops in the South. But it also sounds like it allowed for the environment to basically rollback all enforcement of the reconstruction amendments.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:32] Yeah, it certainly helped to make room for the Jim Crow era south. This was a period of state and local laws that enforced segregation and fostered violence and oppression toward black Americans.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:44] Hello, everyone. We just wanted to take a quick second to share a podcast that civics one of our listeners might enjoy. And it's about losers.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:55] The show is called Long Shots. And in it, former foreign correspondent and CNN [00:06:00] contributor Connor Powell explores eight presidential contenders, men and women whose losing campaign had a massive impact on our politics.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:09] These are people like Pat Robertson, whose 1988 campaign showed the way for a new Republican right or Victoria

[00:06:15] Woodhull, who ran on a free love feminist platform in '72, 1872.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:21] You can listen to longshots wherever you get your podcasts or on their Web site. LongShotspodcast.com

Nick Capodice: [00:06:30] Hold it. I'm also thinking of how Jim Crow laws specifically were protested and challenged sometimes by the federal government and how sometimes a Southern governor would send in the National Guard to enforce that Jim Crow law, even if it was in violation of federal civil rights law. Like with Governor Orval Faubus using the Arkansas National Guard to prevent Little Rock high school desegregation.

Archival: [00:06:56] National Guard troops continue to surround Central High School tomorrow morning?

Governor Orval Faubus: [00:07:01] Well, the troops will still be on duty tomorrow morning.  [00:07:00]

Archival: [00:07:01] They will be.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:04] Isn't that a violation of Posse Comitatus?

Ashley Farmer: [00:07:06] No.

[00:07:08] The National Guard and the U.S. Coast Guard are not included in this unless they are drawn up by the president. And in order to do that, the president would have to use the Insurrection Act. However, if the National Guard is called up by the state governor, because technically that's you can't call them up, then it does not fall under the Posse Comitatus Act. So that's why we've seen the National Guard respond to protests most recently in states, because the governors have asked them to come. We saw this after Ferguson as well. We also saw it after standing rock with the protest against the Dakota access pipeline.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:46] I should note, the act only officially pertains to the army and the Air Force, but there are extensions in place for the Navy and the Marines and the Coast Guard and the Space Force have similar provisions. And if we think about the basics [00:08:00] of the Posse Comitatus Act right? The fact that it's meant to separate the military, a federal operation from essentially policing, a state and local operation, then we also have to ask how and if the act is meaningfully being enforced today.

Ashley Farmer: [00:08:18] I think that in contemporary times you can go back to the 1960s when we had a lot of racial unrest in America.

Ashley Farmer: [00:08:27] You had the Watts uprisings in Los Angeles, which was protesting the unequal treatment and violence at the hands of police. So very similar to things that are still happening today.

Archival: [00:08:38] A curfew and blockade of the entire area was imposed and lasted in excess of 48 hours. National Guard troops were billeted in schools, armories, and in the famous Hollywood Park, race track, which was a major staging area for National Guard troops.

Ashley Farmer: [00:08:54] And the government responded with increasing the police power. It was also during the 1960s that we saw the creation [00:09:00] of the first SWAT team. Also in Los Angeles. The SWAT team was created through consultation with military officials to learn how to deal with snipers. If you keep going through history, then up through the 70s and 80s, we of course have the war on drugs.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:14] This is a big one. And I just want to point out, it's not just that we launched something called the war on Drugs. It's the fact that we called it the war on drugs. Police engaging in a war.

Ashley Farmer: [00:09:30] Absolutely. That is one of the dimensions of police militarization has to do with cultural beliefs. And that includes language. How we talk about crime, the war on crime, as he mentioned, the war on drugs. So even the language that we use to talk about these crime problems is very focused and very militaristic.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:48] What did this consulting with the military actually practically do to the police?

Ashley Farmer: [00:09:55] So when you have these PPUs or police paramilitary units like SWAT teams, [00:10:00] they started to do more and more routine police work like drug raids, search warrants for drugs. And those types of things really increased during the war on drugs.

[00:10:11] You saw also as part of this no knock raids by SWAT teams, which is where they used dynamic entry like this element of surprise in order to capture people in the act. It doesn't give them time to sort of get rid of evidence, for example. But we've also seen a lot of problems with no knock raids. Most recently with the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. That was the result of a no-knock raid.

[00:10:36] You also had something in the early 80s as part of the war on drugs that relates to this act. It was called the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act in 1981. This meant that military personnel were allowed to distribute information about illegal drugs to local police departments, which had this clear relationship formed between them then and just further [00:11:00] blurred those lines between the military and the police.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:03] It's not just information sharing either.

[00:11:06] In order to aid in the police war on drugs and crime and poverty, the military provide the police with gear, too.

Ashley Farmer: [00:11:14] And so the Department of Defense supplied local law enforcement agencies with military gear and military training to help with that drug activity and to be a part of the war on drugs. So this was done through a program called the 1033 program. It was originally created in 1989, and it was meant to be a temporary funding program for local police agencies. But in 1997, this was made permanent.

Archival: [00:11:40] Local police are becoming ever more heavily armed or as many put it, militarized. It looks like a military operation. And that's because police departments in the St. Louis area, like those across the country, are arming their officers with equipment

[00:11:57] once on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan [00:12:00]. Many have been talking about how military equipment is making its way from the Department of Defense to police departments around the country.

Ashley Farmer: [00:12:08] And so this statute, along with that earlier act in 1981, kind of continued to blur those lines.

[00:12:16] And then you had 9/11. So now we not only have the war on drugs and the war on crime, but you also have the war on terrorism.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:23] When Ashley says the police are getting gear from the military, what kind of gear are we talking about?

Ashley Farmer: [00:12:29] You know, mundane things like office supplies all the way up to military vehicles, night vision goggles. Of course, weapons and ammunition are included in this as well. And there's really no oversight or guidelines in place for how police departments use it once acquired. They do have to use the equipment within one year. But what that means is if they don't have an apparent purpose right away, they'll find a way to use it. And, you know, it's funny because sometimes the way we see them use it or the way I've seen small police departments [00:13:00] use things like this in the past parades. Right. You know, kids come take a picture with this military vehicle that has our police department logo on it.

Archival: [00:13:07] We do a lot of demos. We'll go out to different community events. And kids just love to get around and see it jump in the back and just sit where an actual officer, SWAT officer sits.

Ashley Farmer: [00:13:19] They can find

[00:13:19] very creative ways to use these materials. These military surplus equipment so that they can justify keeping it.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:33] To explain to me how, given Posse Comitatus, the military, a federal entity, is allowed to work with police.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:41] Ashley basically explained it as well. It's not the military policing. It's police becoming militarized. And she did want to make this distinction.

Ashley Farmer: [00:13:53] I think it's important to remember that the military and the police have very different mandates and very different purposes. The military are trained [00:14:00] for war. They're trained to kill the enemy. Police are technically supposed to be trained to protect and serve communities. Those are very different goals. And so trying to blur those lines and say that they can work together like this really doesn't make sense in terms of what their mandates are.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:17] All right. There is a reason, though, that we've seen Posse Comitatus come up a lot recently. Right? We've seen it on Twitter. There's a reason we got that listener question from Barbara. Posse Comitatus does prevent the president from using the military to enforce laws in the U.S., doesn't it?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:39] Not really.

Ashley Farmer: [00:14:40] Basically, so there are different ways that the president can get around it. As I mentioned, the Insurrection Act. States can get around it by using the National Guard or the U.S. Coast Guard. We've seen that happen multiple times. And, of course, you can also authorize it by the Constitution or through acts of Congress.

Archival: [00:14:58] A couple of blocks north of the White [00:15:00] House.

[00:15:00] You got National Guard down the next block. All kinds of Washington metro police here. I've seen Humvees down the end of this street and the next street. We've had Blackhawk helicopters flying literally just above rooftop level of these low rise office buildings and not a demonstrator in sight, at least not in the vicinity of the White House. They are marching...

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:19] The Insurrection Act, by the way, says that the president can go deploy U.S. military and federalize the National Guard to suppress civil disorder, insurrection and rebellion. It was invoked fairly regularly during the civil rights era. It was how President John F. Kennedy enforced desegregation in Alabama schools. And it's been used a couple of times since during disorder, following Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and during the 1992 L.A. uprising that was following the brutal beating of Rodney King at the hands of police officers. Those last two happened under President George Bush [00:16:00] Senior.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:01] So what I'm getting and correct me if I'm wrong here, what I'm getting is that Posse Comitatus means a lot on paper, but might not in reality. Has Congress ever made attempts to strengthen the act so it actually meant something?

Ashley Farmer: [00:16:15] This is interesting because after the protest in Ferguson, the Obama administration did try to prohibit certain types of equipment going to local law enforcement agencies. The police department and Ferguson was heavily militarized. I mean, we saw what that looked like several years ago in response to those protests there. And so he did create some oversight in terms of the ten thirty three program that helped lower the misuse of acquired military equipment. But those have not been rolled back in the Trump administration.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:47] So all of this for Americans who read or know about this act and believe it should be enforced in a particular way is possibly distressing. Right. Like, [00:17:00] what's the point of it if it isn't being used to effect? And Ashley basically pointed out that, well, part of the point is that questions are being asked. The fact that this act is being brought up at all means that the public is noticing a lack of a divide between a federal and state force.

Ashley Farmer: [00:17:24] In terms of invoking it today

[00:17:25] I mean, I do think that anytime we see a heavily militarized police response or we see National Guard troops interacting with citizens on the street as sort of police officers or at the very least they're sort of monitoring the situation on the street between police and protesters. It's going to raise questions. And so this is an act that sort of says, hey, you have to have this strong divide between the military and the police. But, of course, historically speaking, that divide has become more and more blurred throughout the recent decades.

Archival: [00:18:03] In [00:18:00] the largest public safety operation in Minnesota's history, local and state police and 4000 members of the National Guard took a stand.

[00:18:13] Aggressively using tear gas, pepper spray and drawn weapons in a desperate attempt to squelch days of escalating chaos. There's another flash bang grenade. There definitely esc-- The police are escalating... Rubber bullet rounds. And they hurt.

[00:18:34] He just was pepper sprayed, right there. Police. Police today. Tear gas or smoke, tear gas or smoke.

[00:19:13] Today's [00:19:00] episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Our staff includes Felix Poon and Jacqui Fulton. Erica Janik wages war on poor word choice and historical inaccuracies. Maureen McMurray, eats insurrection for breakfast. Music in this episode by Xylo Xico, Parallel Park, Meydn, Future Mano and Rage. School's out, but if you're hankering for deeper dives into some civics 101 episodes, you can still check out our Learn at home page. That's at Civics101podcast.org. Learn at home. We've got lessons, games and tons of resources to while away those summer hours with some good old fashioned civics knowledge. Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and as a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Civic Action: Protest

What is protest, constitutionally? Historically? What is protected, and what is not? And what do you have to know before you grab a sign and go outside? Today we explore the long scope of public dissent from the Boston Tea Party to the current #blacklivesmatter protests.

Our guests are Alvin Tillery from Northwestern University, and Bakari Sellers, CNN commentator and author of the recent book My Vanishing Country.

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Transcript

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors.

Civics 101

PROTEST

[00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Kayleigh McEnany: [00:00:10] The president has made clear that what we are seeing on America's streets is unacceptable. Violence, looting, anarchy, lawlessness are not to be tolerated. Plain and simple, these criminal acts are not protest. They are not statements. These are crimes that aren't innocent American citizens.

Alvin Tillery: [00:00:31] I do see a kind of inherent double standard in the way we valorize certain anger, certain property damage. And, you know, if the cause is racial justice or LGBTQ rights or women's rights, you know, our history has been much more...whoa. This is a this is violating the social order here. What's going on? Like, oh, my God, they've kicked in a Nordstrom's. We teach literally kindergartners about the Boston Tea Party.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:04] This is Alvin Tillery. He's the director for the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University.

Alvin Tillery: [00:01:10] And I research social movements and leadership. And I've been writing about the Black Lives Matter movement with hopes that some of my research can help them succeed.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:22] I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:23] I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:24] And this is Civics 101, the podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works. And since we are in the midst of the largest nationwide protest I've seen in my lifetime, we wanted to call Alvin to tell us about it, about protest. What it is what it does and has done throughout our country's history.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:45] Now, in terms of what it is, at its most basic level, it's people expressing their disapproval of something, right? Yes.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:56] And did you happen to see the thing Sesame Street put up this week of Elmo trying to. Did you see that?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:03] I did see that.

Sesame Street: [00:02:04] What's a protest? A protest is when people come together to show they are upset and disagree about something, they want to make others aware of the problem through protesting. People are able to share their feelings and work together to make things better.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:22] But legally, constitutionally, protest has been with us from the very beginning. It's written into our founding documents.

Alvin Tillery: [00:02:31] The Constitution makes protest along with speech and the free exercise of religion sacrosanct. It is the charter, right? One of the one of the charter rights and the First Amendment, the fundamental freedoms doctrine says that the First Amendment is really the one that is necessary in order to make all of the other freedoms operative. So there's what we call the right to assembly clause in the First Amendment. So Congress shall make no law. Right. And then it says in the assembly clause, it says Congress shall make no law to prohibit the right of the people to peaceably, peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances. Now, some people separate that and say that there are two clauses, the petition clause and the and the peaceable assembly clause. But I always saw them as kind of one clause.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:31] I haven't heard of the petition clause. What's the difference between protest and petition?

Alvin Tillery: [00:03:36] So petition is writing to your government, sort of expressing yourself to your government.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:43] And people could petition about anything except for a period when slavery was essentially off limits.

Alvin Tillery: [00:03:50] The gag rule that was in Congress in the eighteen thirties up to the Civil War said, you know, you couldn't even write to Congress or make petitions to Congress about ending slavery.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:02] This gag order was in the eighteen thirties when abolitionists had sent hundreds of thousands of petitions to Congress calling for an end to slavery. And Congress passed a blanket resolution that any petitions doing so are to be tabled indefinitely. Former President John Quincy Adams. He fought against it for eight years until it was finally lifted in 1844. But we don't see the Supreme Court weighing in on citizens rights to petition the government until much, much later.

Alvin Tillery: [00:04:31] We really don't even get a lot of good jurisprudence on assembly and freedom of speech until the cases that come at the height of World War One. All of the cases where the Supreme Court actually limits freedom of speech in order to protect government interests.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:55] These cases, which all arose during World War One, are the first time that the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of protest. The Big Three are Schenck v. U.S..That's where Charles Schenck was arrested for handing out pamphlets that criticized the draft. The next one's Gitlow v. New York, where the court decided, Benjamín Gitlow's pro communism manifesto was not protected speech. And finally, Abram's v. United States, where the court said the same about leaflets that advocated workers in ammunition factories go on strike.

Alvin Tillery: [00:05:25] Yeah, the great irony is that the formal elaboration in the early 20th century of our rights to, you know, not only petition and sort of act as individuals, but typically part of a protest. Those rights are are enumerated in cases where the Supreme Court limits the freedoms of the individuals involved.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:51] All right. So I've I've got this. That's how the court started to rule against the rights of protesters. But I'm interested in laws regarding the response to protest. Have there been any cases that address the powers of police?

Nick Capodice: [00:06:05] Yeah, well, police power comes at the local and state level. So many of these cases began with police action and then the issue at stake rose through the court system to the Supreme Court.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:15] So what are the big cases where constitutional right to protest was protected?

Nick Capodice: [00:06:21] Alvin said there have been pretty much two. And we've talked about both of them quite a bit on her show, Tinker V. Des Moines, that's the one where black armbands worn by students to protest the war were protected speech and Texas v. Johnson, where the same was decided regarding burning a flag. However, this isn't to say that there haven't been other legal rulings on the right to protest rulings that have protected the rights of groups. That may surprise you.

Alvin Tillery: [00:06:47] The other irony is that when the court in the 20th century has expanded and protected protesters, they've typically been the most noxious protesters that we will look like. So the Klan can burn crosses, you know, in the 2003 case

Justice Rhenquist: [00:07:05] Record number, 01107 Virginia against Black will be announced by Justice O'Connor.

Justice O'Connor: [00:07:11] The act of burning across may mean that the person is engaging in constitutionally prescribable intimidation, or it may mean only that the person is engaged in core political speech The prima facie provision...

Nick Capodice: [00:07:26] And it's not just one case, it's not just Virginia v. Black from the early 2000s. Protest by the KKK specifically was protected in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969.

Alvin Tillery: [00:07:38] In the Brandenburg versus Ohio case, now, the Supreme Court says the Fourteenth Amendment does not draw down or limit the ability of the Klan to advocate violence at its rallies. Right. Unless they are going to, you know, say let's go and lynch black people now or let's go and burn the police station down now. Right. But you can you go to a Klan rally and say, you know, we hate black people and, you know, let's use Second Amendment solutions to get out Barack Obama. You can do all of that thanks to the Brandenburg case.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:11] So I want to if we can get back to something Alvin mentioned at the very beginning, and that's that politicians and the public alike are calling for nonviolent protest and referencing the work done by Martin Luther King Junior and Rosa Parks.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:28] Yeah. So when we talk of peaceful protests, Alvin shared his polling data with me and he said the numbers of those who oppose the current Black Lives Matter protests are nearly identical with those who opposed NFL player Colin Kaepernick demonstrably nonviolent action of kneeling during the national anthem to protest the treatment of minorities.

Eboni Williams: [00:08:49] You know, certainly many people would agree that it's very American to to protest and it.

Bill O'Reilly: [00:08:55]  There's a difference between a protest and a disrespectful protest. All right. There's a difference. And everybody should know that. My solution to this...

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:02] Then there's the fact that we teach kindergartners that destroying property in protest when it's tea. The Boston Tea Party is great and necessary. So what's going on there?

Nick Capodice: [00:09:21] Do you know the modern day value of that team that was dumped in the harbor one point seven million dollars?

Alvin Tillery: [00:09:27] Firstly, I'll say that, you know, attacking British authority by destroying property was a very common way that the colonists protested. The Tea Party in Boston Harbor is interesting because they dressed as Native Americans because they want to hide their identity so they don't even do it in their own under their own identities. They hide under the guise of indigenous people, which if you know anything about indigenous history in Massachusetts. It's absolutely preposterous. They'd been sort of decimated by the colonists, you know, 80, 90 years earlier and then in the Pequot Wars. And so, you know, the idea that the indigenous people would have snuck into the harbour to burn tea or dumped dumped tea into the harbors is preposterous. Right. But but there was a class element to all of these uprisings. Right. These were the working people.

Alvin Tillery: [00:10:28] These were the Scotch Irish immigrants. These were Crispus Attucks, the biracial former slaves who were the kind of vanguard of the revolution. Right.

Alvin Tillery: [00:10:41] Who, you know, Sam Adams had organized in the Sons of Liberty to get out and to make these kinds of jarring, disruptive, often violent protests to raise the consciousness of the other colonists who were like, whoa, like, I don't like paying these tea and stamp taxes either, but like, we're still British, man. Calm down. Right.

Alvin Tillery: [00:11:02] And so this kind of, you know, rallying effect behind property damage is part of what the the early organizers hope to do.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:13] Alvin said that there have been so far in American history, three movements that changed our country. The Boston Tea Party, Shay's Rebellion, which began in 1786 over wartime debt and led to necessity for a new constitution. And finally, the long, still continuing civil rights movement, which stretches from early abolitionists to its peak in the 1950s and 60s.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:36] You know, scholars have for a while now been pointing out that there's been lots of violence and there have been a lot of riots that maybe you and I didn't learn about in school for many reasons, one of which is that the victims were not white.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:54] This is after the Civil War. One of the first that comes to mind is the one that was depicted in the TV series The Watchmen, the bombing of Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921.

Alvin Tillery: [00:12:04] Those are riots that we have forgotten intentionally because they were riots that were done to keep the racial order in place.

Alvin Tillery: [00:12:17] Those hundred and thirty riots that happened between the reconstruction in 1945, those were race riots that were done because, again, low status elements were upset typically that blacks or Asians would have, had violated some imaginary, you know, segregation line in these places and hundreds and hundreds of people died in each instance. Right. This is the modal, you know, riot in American history. It's a race riot to destroy, you know, communities of color, typically to seize property. Look what happened in the Greenwood district in Oklahoma. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Wilmington, North Carolina. East St. Louis, Illinois. These are riots that razed these communities. The outsiders, the black, brown, you know, Asian outsiders flee and then low status whites claim all that property. Right. If these are there, these are redistributions through riotous behavior. Right.

Alvin Tillery: [00:13:28] And so, you know, we don't like to talk much about that. Most Americans think that when you think race riot, you think, oh, what happened in Watts and Newark after Dr. King was assassinated? Right. And that's just a drop in the bucket of our our history of rioting in this country.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:49] These riots against communities of color resulted in their property being taken.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:57] Yeah, taking property was the express purpose of many of these riots. The name for it is white capping. I read that between 1880 and nineteen hundred and there were two hundred and thirty nine documented instances of it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:14] Okay, Nick, you have talked to Alvin about the history and protections and lack of protections around protest, but due to the fact that many Americans are viewing current protests in the context of that long civil rights movement. I wanted to talk to someone intimate with that story.

Bakari Sellers: [00:14:33] Well, you know, Hannah. I'm a child of the movement. And I say that with a great deal of pride and humility.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:40] This is Bakari Sellers. He's a political commentator on CNN. He was the youngest African-American elected official in the nation and he is the author of the recent book My Vanishing Country.

Bakari Sellers: [00:14:52] My father got started. His activism was piqued at a very young age. He was 10 years old when young Emmett Till was brutally murdered and thrown in the bottom of the Mississippi River. And that picture went viral. You know, we're having this conversation about these images that we're seeing, of black bodies that have been killed and brutally lynched right before our eyes. And for him, it was Emmett Till in 1955. And it his mother had the strength to allow the world to see what hate, bigotry and racism had done to her son.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:23] Bacardi's father is Cleveland Sellers. He's a man who led sit ins in his hometown of Denmark, South Carolina. He went to Howard University, where he met prominent civil rights organizer Stokely Carmichael and later worked during Freedom Summer in 1964, when several hundred people went to Mississippi to help to register African-American voters.

Bakari Sellers: [00:15:47] And then he got a phone call that some of his friends had gone missing. And as we're talking about this word that comes up a lot now, allies, you know, I think about allies in history and I think about Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:05] Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney had come south for Freedom Summer. They were kidnapped and murdered on the project's first day. That's June 21st.

Bakari Sellers: [00:16:14] My father led search missions into Philadelphia, Mississippi, to look for their bodies. Their bodies were found behind the home of one of the local sheriff's deputies and ministers in the town, Edgar Ray Killen. And that was his first indoctrination, indoctrination into the movement. And then he became involved in the most deadly civil rights demonstration this country's ever seen.

Bakari Sellers: [00:16:33] On February 8th, 1968, they were protesting what the history books call the last vestige of discrimination. It was a small whites-only bowling alley in little Orangeburg, South Carolina.

Harry Floyd: [00:16:45] Mr. Floyd. Why have you not permitted Negroes to bowl at your bowling alley here in Orangeburg? Because I have my own customers that patronize me scripted to see. They support me year in and year out. I need no other.

Bakari Sellers: [00:17:02] And after they protested, they went they went back to their campus, I have to stress that fact they went back to their campus, they built huge bonfires and they can't foresee what would happen next. They didn't foresee that South Carolina state troopers would line up along the embankment in front of their campus. They didn't foresee that they would close ranks like they did, and they didn't foresee that they would have shotguns loaded with deadly buckshot and they didn't foresee they'd be turning on them with deadly intent. And it's eerie to talk about this now with the backdrop of everything that we have going on in this country today. But state troopers fired shots into the group of students and and killed three Henry Smith, Samuel Hammond and Delano Middleton. And they wounded my father.

Bakari Sellers: [00:17:44] And he was one of 28, was wounded and a little salt to injury when he got to the hospital. What else do you do to activists? That they arrested, they arrested him in Charleston with five felony counts.

Bakari Sellers: [00:17:55] All eight officers were charged. They were all tried. They were all found not guilty. And my father went to trial. They backdate his indictment from February 8th to February 6th. He was charged, tried and convicted of rioting. He became the first and only one man riot in the history of this country. But, you know, for me, it's the fact that that story isn't told or remembered that hurts more than anything we know about Kent State. But we don't know about Orangeburg.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:21] And, Nick, I have to admit to you, I did not know about Orangeburg until I read Bacardi's book.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:28] Yeah, no, me neither.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:29] And though the officers were acquitted, Cleveland Sellers served seven months in state prison. So I asked Bakari, coming from this deep history of protest, what he thought were some tools and necessities, civics, one to one listeners could use when and if they get involved.

Bakari Sellers: [00:18:50] I mean, the number one lesson of activism is you never ask for permission. You ask for forgiveness. And never forget, people were mad, you know, when we were protesting on airports and stopped in stopping traffic and people were like, man wanted to protest, you know, in a more considerate fashion. You know what? That's not the way protest works, man. I was having this conversation with my wife this morning. I was like, protest is messy. It always isn't supposed to make it supposed to make civil society uncomfortable. Go, go. Block a highway. All right, go. You know, go make sure people miss their flights, you know, be, you know, build unrest, but make sure it's nonviolent. But, you know, make sure you have that.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:32] But before you write a sign and go outside, you have some work to do.

Bakari Sellers: [00:19:39] Throughout this time, you have to know why you're protesting. You have to know why you're getting involved. I guess if we're doing, you know, kind of a civics 101, I think the first step is trying to figure out why. Why is this purposeful? Why is this meaningful and why is this something that I should do? I don't want people who don't feel like this is necessary to get involved.

Bakari Sellers: [00:20:03] I mean, it's not if you don't feel like it's your struggle or you want to sit on the sideline, that's fine. You know, all black people didn't march for civil rights. You don't have to get involved. But for me, this is I don't believe that I can ever be free if we're not all free.

Bakari Sellers: [00:20:18] And so you have to find out your purpose, which is step one and then step two. You have to be intentional and purposeful.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:24] But what about your civil rights when you're protesting? Is there anything you need to know about what the police can and can't do?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:31] Bakari says that that's helpful to know. Yes, absolutely. But he stressed that that is not the most important factor here.

Bakari Sellers: [00:20:41] You should definitely know your rights, but you should also realize that it can go south really quickly with the mixture that we had in our streets today with the mixture of armed law enforcement and military and protesters. So my my I'm telling you all I have to say, when you protest, your number one goal should not be to give an officer a legal lesson on the streets. It should be to make it home safely. Knowing your rights is very important. Making it home safely is much more important.

Nick Capodice: [00:21:13] And I saw Bakari on CNN after the killing of George Floyd, and there's so much pain and anger and exhaustion. And he talked about having to have discussions about all of this with his black children. Did he say anything about this protest and the conversations we're having with our families?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:34] Yeah, he did. He had one specific question for all parents.

Bakari Sellers: [00:21:40] You know, are you are you loving my children the same way you love yours? Are you teaching them empathy? Are you teaching them to value our humanity? You know, those are the type of questions as as a country we hate. We've never really asked ourselves. In all of these before you hit the streets. Right. Like before you go out. These are questions you have to ask yourself first at home to prepare yourself to go out in the world to be a hero. For others, you have to be a hero at home first.

Bakari Sellers: [00:22:08]  You know, I'll write... One of the lessons my father taught me was that heroes walk among us. And I want to disabuse people of the notion that you have to be a superhero to be a leader. You can be a leader in your own community. You can be a leader in your own church, in your own precinct, in your own neighborhood, your own school, PTA, etc..

Bakari Sellers: [00:22:26] You know, right now in this country, you only have two choices. You can either be racist or anti-racist. It doesn't do you any good to sit at home and say, well, I'm not racist, but. You need to get out and be on the forefront pushing these things. And the leadership that's required right now is one of courage.

Bakari Sellers: [00:22:44] And I do recognize in one of the things we all have to recognize is that there's certain rooms where, Hannah, where you would be a better messenger than I. Right? Although we're coming with the same message, there'll be people who are more inclined or vice versa to listen to me versus listen to you. And we have to be courageous enough to speak to people who have preconceived notions, who are our friends, colleagues that we work with in family. And we have to be ready to confront them with some of the ignorant notions that they may present. That's the only way that we can begin to heal.

Nick Capodice: [00:23:18] Can you spell out what Bakari means by that?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:22] I think that what he means is that sometimes a white girl, which I am, is going to be listened to more closely or effectively than a black girl in a certain space. And part of being an entire racist means recognizing that and utilizing it.

[00:23:58]

Nick Capodice: [00:24:29] Today's episode is produced by me Nick Capodice with Hannah McCarthy with help from Jacqui Fulton and Felix Poon. Erica Janik is our executive producer and Maureen McMurray is director of Content. Music in the episode by Chris Zabriskie, Blue Dot Sessions, Lee Rosevere, the Edvin Chamber Orchestra, Meyden and Asura. Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR. New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The United States Postal Service

It’s the government on your doorstep — the only Executive Branch agency that visits every home in the country on a regular basis. So how does the USPS do it? And what happens when an agency this essential is in trouble? Our guests for this episode are Allison Marsh, history professor at the University of South Carolina and Kevin Kosar, a Vice President at R Street.

Episode Resources

Graphic organizer for this episode

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TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors.

[00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:09] Alright, Nick, I got a good one for you.

[00:00:12] We are gazing at North America from the stratosphere. OK, ya with me. Music swells and suddenly we zoom in on a newspaper in front of a suburban house. The homeowner steps out to pick it up on her way to the mailbox. But wait. Who's that coming down the street?

[00:00:30] It's her mail carrier coming to hand off some letters to her in person in the front yard of her house.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:40] I feel like you're pitching me the least dramatic movie that anyone has ever seen.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:44] It might seem that way at first, but it is dramatic. This is actually from a video that the Postal Service produced to show how it works, because when you really stop to think about it. A remarkable confluence of events had to occur [00:01:00] for that postal worker to be handing off a bunch of mail from various parts of the country, maybe even the world, to that lady in front of her very own house. It is a huge operation. And by the way, it's a government operation.

Archival: [00:01:18] When someone sends a letter, it enters a system already at work.

[00:01:23] But most people never get to see.

Allison Marsh: [00:01:29] I was interested in how does this government agencies deal with millions of letters and parcels every day and get them to the right person, you know, across a vast network.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:46] This is Allison Marsh.

Allison Marsh: [00:01:48] And I'm a history professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. And I was a former curator at the National Postal Museum.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:58] The United States Postal Service [00:02:00] is getting a lot of attention lately for being in financial jeopardy and tussling with a president who thinks that it should pull itself up by its own bootstraps. In order to understand how the USPS got to this point and to this kind of a relationship with the government, I needed to understand how and why this institution came to be, how it's even possible that there is a service that can and will deliver objects to every home in this country.

[00:02:28] So let's jump in. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:31] I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:32] And this is Civics 101, a show about the basics of how our democracy works.

[00:02:37] And today...

Archival: [00:02:38] Let's go behind this wall and see some of the work the post office does.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:42] We're figuring out the mammoth creature that is the U.S. Postal Service, which, as it turns out, is a service that helps to make our democracy work.

[00:02:53] It's from the Constitution.

Allison Marsh: [00:02:58] This was something [00:03:00] that was written into our founding documents that you have the right to this service, that you have a trust. They guarantee your privacy.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:11] Right.The Constitution gives this power to Congress. Right, to establish post offices and post roads like a literal road designed to deliver mail.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:20] Yes, that is how important mail delivery was to the framers. They wrote it into the supreme law of the land.

Allison Marsh: [00:03:28] They also focused on the idea that you needed to have a network to move information for for the sake of democracy, that you were to be able to get the news to people up and down the East Coast.

[00:03:44] The idea that we need to have a functioning postal network to have a functioning democracy.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:50] And it was about more than just moving mail around. Our Postal Service had this key feature. It wasn't going to open your mail.

Allison Marsh: [00:03:59] A postal [00:04:00] network existed in colonial North America prior to the establishment of the United States. But there were problems with it. And one of the key problem was the fact that the British Postal Service could open your letters and read them. And, you know, look for things like, I don't know, revolutionary materials.

[00:04:23] And so the idea of having a postal service that you could trust to maintain your privacy, it was something that the founding fathers really focused on.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:35] Wait hold on.

[00:04:37] The British government could just open your mail willy nilly?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:40] That they could in the U.S. first class mail that is mail for personal and business correspondence is pretty soundly protected, with very few exceptions. The government needs a warrant to open your mail.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:55] So our mail system kind of represents one of our earliest tenets of American democracy. [00:05:00] You have a right to information and privacy.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:04] And these days it also means equity of access. The USPS is the only delivery service committed to reaching every home in America.

Archival: [00:05:13] The mail man knows everybody in the neighborhood and everybody knows the mail man.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:17] But it wasn't always that way. Initially, mail was only delivered from post office to post office. If you wanted to get your mail, you had to go to the local office and there was no residential delivery.

Allison Marsh: [00:05:29] This changed actually in the mid 19th century where they started having city free delivery.

[00:05:36] So that's when you have the first letter carriers where people would bring the mail directly to your house. And that was great. If you happen to live in a city was great. If you lived in rural America and in the mid 19th century, the majority of Americans lived in rural rural lifestyles. So we didn't get rural free delivery until [00:06:00] the beginning of the 20th century.

Archival: [00:06:02] Country delivery is called rural delivery. So the rural mail man's route is called an R d, route R and D are the first letters of rural delivery.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:15] Allison says that even when we did get rural delivery, it could be pretty uneven it was all about geography and terrain. In Manhattan, you might get your mail four times a day. But in rural Alaska. Maybe once a week or a month. But over time, the institution expanded wildly in order to provide greater convenience in connection to a nation's citizens, which I think is pretty radical.

[00:06:43] And it took a lot of innovation, like the postage stamp, for example.

Allison Marsh: [00:06:48] Initially, you would go to the post office and you would ask if you had any mail and you had to pay on delivery. So you could pay to pick up your mail. So [00:07:00] the invention of the stamp is the idea that you can prepay and your letter will get there.

Archival: [00:07:05] Meanwhile, Jimmy is buying a stamp for the letter. The money the post office gets for stamps helps pay for the people who work in the post office and for other costs of sending the mail.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:15] So before the stamp, the receiver had to pay to get their mail.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:19] Yeah. So the stamp was this incredibly simple but kind of ingenious way to pay for the mail.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:25] Quick aside, who designs stamps? By the way, as I was looking them up on the Web site and I saw they have a series on voices of the Harlem Renaissance and Arnold Palmer and a silver coffeepot.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:38] Yeah. So the Postal Service works with various art directors who work with professional artists. They design about 35 stamps each year. And the guidelines are basically the art has to be about positive stuff in American life and history. But that could be anything from like a positive event to a pretty flower. And if it's going to commemorate somebody, [00:08:00] that person needs to be deceased. OK. Moving on, another simple, clever thing.

Allison Marsh: [00:08:05] The invention of the mailbox is another thing. Mailboxes weren't required until 1960. Before that, you know, the letter carrier would actually knock on your door and say, hey, you have mail. And an efficiency study said that they there are losing up to two hours a day just knocking on people, stalkers. And so they're like, wow, we need to fix this.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:31] I love to imagine this room is full of post office executives that are brainstorming, like, what are we gonna do about this door-knocking problem? And suddenly someone stands up and like, he might sound a little crazy, but so crazy it just might work. Would if everyone put a little box outside of their house. And that's like how everyone in America gets a mailbox.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:53] Also, Nick, zip codes. Those are fairly new. They were invented by the USPS in the 1960s [00:09:00] to make delivery more efficient. Delivery by air was largely figured out by the post office. They also helped to pioneer optical character recognition. That is where it computer scams writing, including handwriting in order to sort the mail.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:17] So the answer to how the post office became an institution that delivers to every doorstep is that they spent about 200 years inventing clever ways to do it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:26] Right.

[00:09:26] The post office is a giant system that has enormous needs.

Allison Marsh: [00:09:33] Hey, something that you take for granted that you on the person to person basis, it seems, you know, a pen and a piece of paper that you hand to a person that then gets delivered. They don't realize how much technology is built into post office. And so it's a great combination of both the personal [00:10:00] and the individual person to person. Embedded in a highly complex technological system.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:15] All right. You mentioned at the top of the episode that the post office is having somewhat of a hard time these days, and you're describing what sounds like an institution that costs a lot of money to operate. So where does the money come from?

Kevin Kosar: [00:10:29] Yeah, the Postal Service is one of a handful of independent establishment of the executive branch, and it's one of perhaps a couple dozen government agencies that is self-funding.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:46] This is Kevin Kosar. He's vice president for research partnerships at the R Street Institute, which is a think tank in Washington, D.C. You might recognize him from our episode on the Federal Register. Welcome back, Kevin. So Kevin says the United States [00:11:00] Postal Service is part of the executive branch and that it is self funding. Right. But what does that mean?

Kevin Kosar: [00:11:07] That is, instead of each year Congress reaching into the Treasury and saying, here's your money, government agency, use it to do what we tell you to do. Instead, the Postal Service covers or is supposed to cover its operating costs through the sales of postage.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:21] Didn't you say earlier that Congress is in charge of establishing offices and roads for the USPS?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:26] I did. And to be clear, Congress does still have power over the post office, even though it's an independent agency of the executive branch.

Kevin Kosar: [00:11:35] Oh, yeah. If they wanted to pass a law saying the Postal Service is abolished, they could do it. The Constitution, as you note, Article one, Section eight says that Congress has the authority to establish post office roads. It says nothing more than that. So Congress has a really free hand to design the mail system. And if Congress decided one day we just don't need a mail system, it could just zero it out.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:00] But [00:12:00] it wasn't always this way. The United States post office is less than 50 years old. And by that I mean the independent office. It used to simply be the post office department of the executive branch.

Kevin Kosar: [00:12:12] It used to be just a standard government department, like a Department of Health and Human Services in 1970. That changed and it changed because the post office was breaking down. It was losing money. Its functionality was not good. It had terrible management, worker relations. There was a wildcat strike that actually shut down parts of the Postal Service while Nixon was president. And so they decided they needed a new model.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:43] A wildcat strike. By the way, means that unionized workers go on strike without authorization or approval from union leadership. And when that happened in 1970, Nixon deputized the National Guard to deliver the mail. It didn't work very well. And [00:13:00] the whole system was crippled, which was a major catalyst for Congress passing the Postal Reorganization Act. This struck the post office department from the president's cabinet, made it an independent agency like NASA or the CIA and took away the red tape and regulations, but also said that now had to cover its own costs.

[00:13:23] The hope there was that it would force the Postal Service to operate more efficiently.

Kevin Kosar: [00:13:26] And it did model work pretty darn well from 1970 until about 10 years ago. So when our economy took a huge hit in 2008. Mail volume plunged.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:37] Now, historically, drops in mail are temporary in recessions. But this time, things didn't really bounce back. More people and businesses moved to electronic communication.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:50] Right. It's much harder to self-fund if you've got less mail.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:53] And there's one more thing that is putting a strain on the USPS.

Kevin Kosar: [00:13:58] Our country, we have [00:14:00] more and more people with each passing year.

[00:14:02] And those people live in different places. And more addresses. And that just by its very nature, means that the Postal Service has a bigger and bigger job to do each year.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:14] So even though there's less mail, more packages, of course, but less mail, there's also more places to deliver to.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:21] Right. And the thing that says the U.S. Postal Service, apart from other delivery operations, is that they actually deliver to everybody. Companies like DHL, Amazon, FedEx, they contract with the Postal Service in order to make sure packages can get to areas where they don't deliver. Now, consider what that means when it comes to a time of crisis.

Kevin Kosar: [00:14:46] Remember back after the 9/11 attacks, we then had a series of packages with anthrax sent through the mails. That triggered a policy change and the Postal [00:15:00] Service. Under an agreement with a few other executive agencies like the Department of Defense, have an agreement that in the event of a national biohazard type attack at the Postal Service would be the vehicle for getting people the medicines they need to stay safe.

[00:15:23] They have that network.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:26] So the Postal Service is a kind of frontline responder when people across the nation need things.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:31] Yeah. And they deliver to every home. So in some cases, a postal carrier could be the only contact that an individual has. Especially in rural areas. So the USPS facing big financial trouble is a problem for everyone.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:46] With so many people and so many businesses who rely on them, what would happen theoretically if it went away?

Kevin Kosar: [00:16:01] There's [00:16:00] a lot of societies built on the post office, as we already mentioned. Private parcel delivery companies, they don't want to go to every single address and they hand off parcels and pay the postal service to carry them the final mile. There's a lot of people who to be cut off from the economy and face very formidable prices if they live in remote areas. Second reason, voting by mail. More than 20 million people got election materials and voted by mail. And we know in an age of COVID, that number is going to skyrocket.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:37] Right. Yes.

[00:16:38] I've been reading a lot about this in the news lately. During a pandemic, the presidential election could be completely dependent on the postal service, not to mention census documents, stimulus checks.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:50] Yeah. Which brings us back, I think, to the ways in which the Postal Service upholds this democratic system. There's been talk of privatizing the post office, [00:17:00] for example, you know, having it go fully independent, not a government agency at all. I asked Allison about this.

Allison Marsh: [00:17:07] Right now, the USPS is mandated that every single citizen pays these same rates.

[00:17:18] So it does not matter if you are in rural, you know, Montana or the Dakotas or Wyoming, you will pay the same price that someone in one of the big cities either killer will pay. Now, it does no cost the same for mail to be delivered in highly dense urban areas that it does in rural areas. So right now, the system is set up to subsidize the rural areas. And if we privatize that, will those Americans still have the same [00:18:00] access because it costs a lot more to go that last mile than it does to do the sort of nice city block?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:10] Here's the deal. Kevin says that it's really unlikely that the post office is going to be fully privatized.

Kevin Kosar: [00:18:17] And I can't remember finding a member of Congress who really believed we could privatize the Postal Service. Not all of our parts are on the same continent.

[00:18:30] You know? We have Hawaii out there. We have Puerto Rico. We have the Virgin Islands.

[00:18:34] And then nevermind trying to get mail up to Alaska and all the logistical challenges there. The idea that is somehow going to be easily handed over to the private sector and you're going to do it and turn a profit, I think is pretty fanciful.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:47] Well, what do you do then when you've got an essential government agency that is in serious trouble?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:51] This is where we stumble into another essential component of a functioning democracy. Compromise.

Kevin Kosar: [00:19:02] There's [00:19:00] going to have to be a conversation about how do you reform the Postal Service? They're going to have to cut a deal and it's going to have to do something to address the fact that the Postal Service's costs outstrip its revenues year after year.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:17] And I figure that the post office is going to see some major changes one way or another. Right.

[00:19:23] I just read that a new postmaster general was appointed by the USPS governing board, a supporter of President Trump, the first postmaster general in decades. That was not a career postal employee.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:34] Right. And also, of course, we are in a time when the president is questioning the future of the USPS.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:40] There's also a many billion dollar bailout filtering its way through Congress. So it's probably not going to come to a crashing halt or anything, but it seems like it may experience some serious growing pains in the coming years.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:54] Yeah, I think that's probably true. And I guess the important thing to remember amidst all of this [00:20:00] change and chaos is that the USPS is, if nothing else, an innovator. Right. It's figured out a lot of massive, impossible seeming situations. And importantly, it has managed to remain a beloved institution despite lots of setbacks. This is another thing I asked Alison about. Why if we send so much less mail, if we're all pretty much addicted to digital technologies, if this agency is struggling so much, why is this nation so committed to it? What is it about the mail?

Allison Marsh: [00:20:36] Throughout history, there has been both a love for the post office department as well as for the people who work for the postal system. And if you think about it, um, letter carrier is most likely the person that You [00:21:00] in the federal government that you have the most intimate relationship with in that you can see your letter carrier every single day. You might know his or her name. They might know, you know, your dog. They might check in on you. From the very beginning, the post office was likely the first federal building in any given town. And it was your link to the federal government. So it is what kept you in, you know, in touch not only with your friends and your family members, but with your is the only contact you may have had with the government. So I feel like that commitment is built on centuries of this trust and duty that works.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:53] The United States Postal Service is, despite massive shifts in organization and operation, an entity that is [00:22:00] as old as the country itself. It might have problems, but it's always been a problem solver, too.

[00:22:08] So what the USPS will be in the coming years remains to be seen, but it is probably going to figure out a way to be.

Archival: [00:22:31] So with our ever increasing volume of mail, we have some very serious problem that we are solving. We are making real progress. Welcome to your United States post office department.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:52] Today's episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Our staff includes Jackie Fulton. Erica Janik communicates exclusively [00:23:00] through letters written in an indecipherable shorthand, but we are going to figure it out one of these days. Maureen McMurray is the one who started the whole snail mail chain letter thing. Thanks a lot, Maureen. Music in this episode by Uncan, Asher Fulero, The Great North Sound Society, Jesse Gallagher, James Pants, Patrick Patrickios and you know you missed me. Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

AP US Government Prepisode

Starting next week, millions of American students are going to be taking their Advanced Placement exams from home. One of those is AP US Government and Politics. This exam is usually taken at school, but this year students are going to take a significantly modified test from home.

We talked to three teachers to find out what is taught in the course, the nine foundational documents that students are expected to know, and myriad tips and tricks for taking the exam.

This episode features the voices of Jenifer Hitchcock, Jim Kelly, and Ryan Werenka.

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TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors.

Civics 101

Episode: AP US Government and Politics Prepisode

 [00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:04] All right Hannah, you there?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:07] I'm here.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:07] Alright. There are 15 million high school students in the U.S. and every single one of them is facing the challenges of learning from home. Every single school district is trying to figure out the best ways to teach them to support them and to grade them. SATs are on hold. ACTs are on hold as well. But days from us recording this, three point four million students are going to be taking a test that is not administered by their teacher. They're going to be taking one of the 38 AP Advanced Placement exams. They're gonna take from home. Online.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:45] And what is usually a three hour exam that students have preped year or at least a semester for is going to be 45 minutes. And one of those courses is AP U.S. Government and Politics. You and I have had the benefit of meeting [00:01:00] many, many wonderful AP gov teachers at conferences and events over the last few years. And I've always had this insatiable, almost morbid curiosity about this super challenging class. What's taught in it? What's the exam like?Could I pass it?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:16] Do you think you could?

Nick Capodice: [00:01:17] Oh, absolutely not.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:20] This is Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:22] I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:23] And today we're doing a special episode on the AP U.S. Government Politics Exam with a focus on this year's take home test. Monday, May 11th, four p.m. Eastern. I spoke with three AP gov teachers who told me what the questions are like on it, the foundational documents that are required reading for the course, and finally, just some tips for taking it this year.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:45] Hold on before you get into this specific exam this year. What does Advanced Placement mean?

Nick Capodice: [00:01:53] Yeah sure! These are classes that you could take in high school that sort of roughly mirror an undergraduate college course. [00:02:00] They are, frankly, challenging. The exam at the end of the year is scored on a scale of one to five. And if you get a three or higher on it, you could earn college credit. This could save you money and time at college, an AP score can also help you apply to college. It could help you get a scholarship. But it is a depth of political study that I never had.

Ryan Werenka: [00:02:22] High school kids that are taking AP, U.S. government and politics class, mom or dad or whomever, you know, they have they're having dinner while we're, you know, social distancing and we're all cooped up, you know, and they start having these philosophical questions. Maybe they're watching the news. You know, these kids can chime in with the answers and say, well, no, actually, it says no. Constitution says this. My name is Ryan Werenka. I teach AP, U.S. government and politics at Troy High School in Troy, Michigan. And I'm excited to say that I was accepted to be an AP reader for this year. So I haven't read the exam yet. But I have taught AP, U.S. government and politics for many, [00:03:00] many, many years and have relationships with readers and have a pretty good understanding of what they're looking for.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:05] What are readers?

Nick Capodice: [00:03:07] These are several hundred teachers who read and score the exam. And since they teach their own classes, they are not given the test in advance as they could give their students a bit of an advantage. The questions on the exam are a big old secret.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:20] So how are they going to take the test this year?

Nick Capodice: [00:03:24] Well, in a non Corona world, students across America would normally sit for about three hours and take this exam and it had multiple choice sections and about four FRQs, which are free response questions, essays, basically. But that's not how it's gonna go down this year. Multiple choice is gone. It's going to be in its entirety two free response questions in 45 minutes.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:47] Two questions. What kind of questions?

Ryan Werenka: [00:03:50] Here's Ryan again.

Ryan Werenka: [00:03:52] Yep. So the first free response question is the the argument essay, and that'll be 60 percent of the exam. And then the second one is the concept application question, [00:04:00] and that will be 40 percent of the exam.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:03] Right. Take me through these. Let's start with that argument essay.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:07] You got it. As an example, here's last year's world. The United States Constitution establishes a federal system of government under federalism. Policymaking is shared between national and state governments. Over time, the powers of the national government have increased relative to those of the state governments. Develop an argument about whether the expanded powers of the national government benefits or hinders policymaking.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:28] Good Lord.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:29] Develop an argument. And the students have to use evidence from specific documents to back up their claim. And they explain why that evidence supports their thesis and respond to a hypothetical opposing perspective. I know I'm sounding wordy

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:43] Yeah, you kind of do. But at its core, these are not just skills for taking a test, right. These are massively helpful, critical thinking skills like make a claim. Back it up with evidence. Consider other sides to an argument.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:59] Yeah. If we could just. Do [00:05:00] this for everything.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:01] So what are the documents that they have to know?

Nick Capodice: [00:05:04] Ok. Here's Jim Kelly. He teaches AP Gov at Timberlane Regional High School here in New Hampshire.

Jim Kelly: [00:05:09] There are a list of than nine foundational documents the College Board gave all of us at the beginning of the year that we needed to focus on. Nine.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:16] Are you ready for this list, Frodo? Of the nine?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:18] That ring is not gonna throw itself into the volcano.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:21] Here we go.

Jim Kelly: [00:05:22] One, the Declaration of Independence.

[00:05:24] The Declaration will be a triumph. I tell you, a triumph.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:28] Of course, the greatest breakup letter ever written. An ordinance of secession. A master class in political philosophy.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:35] It didn't just create us. It laid the foundation for popular sovereignty. That is a term that means the government is created by people and its job is to serve those people.

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:05:45] The declaration I mean, I see the declaration as a 'why'. I teach it as, you know, like it frames the Constitution. It tells us what animates us.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:54] This is the inimitable Jennifer Hitchcock, by the way. She teaches AP Gov at Thomas Jefferson High School for [00:06:00] Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. She is also a reader. She has dozens of wonderful online classes on YouTube. They are one of the best resources I have seen out there to prepare for the test.

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:06:11] If we're thinking of like the essence of what it is to be in a democracy. And like, you know, I, I, I personally question to what extent are we a democracy? Like, that's my enduring question for life, just like, are we really.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:24] OK? On to number two.

Jim Kelly: [00:06:25] Two, the Articles of Confederation.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:27] Our first rule book.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:29] Yeah, our first constitution, and something frankly, we are thinking a lot about in the age of Corona, powers of the states and governors versus federal powers and presidential powers in times of an emergency. The Articles of Confederation gave enormous powers to the states with a very weak federal government.

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:06:47] So I give the Articles short shrift.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:50] But that doesn't mean you have to.

Jim Kelly: [00:06:52] Three the Constitution of the United States.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:54] Yeah.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:55] Yeah.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:56] But if you're looking at the Constitution and you want to know what specifically [00:07:00] to focus on before you take the test, Jim had some advice.

Jim Kelly: [00:07:03] I strongly recommend going back into the constitutional clauses that I'm sure students have gone over with teachers if they haven't yet. You know, even just a quick Google search of most important or key constitutional clauses would be very important. Go through, review those and even make like to call them notes with clause and explanation of clause amendment, an explanation of amendment. Go right back through that. I think that's very important. Take a look at different actions that Congress takes different responsibilities of Congress. And, you know, just being clear that even though it seems like common sense, I don't think it's it's a bad idea to go back and brush up on some of those, like common sense concepts that you might know.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:46] I'm not going to make a joke about a sanity clause. So let's get on to number four.

Jim Kelly: [00:07:51] Four Federalist number 10.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:53] All right. We've got our first Federalist Paper. One of the 85 essays that are written to convince New York, and then later the whole [00:08:00] country that the Constitution should be ratified.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:03] Yes Fed Ten is one of the most famous ones. It is by James Madison and it is all about factions. That is the magic word. Factions. Large groups. They've got different interests. And the two big ones that he was referencing were property owners and non property owners,

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:19] A.k.a. rich people and poor people.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:22] Yes. And this paper calms the fears of wealthy people that the non wealthy will make all the decisions because they're in the majority. Right. Because unless we give everyone the same exact amount of money, Madison says that factions are unavoidable. He says, "Liberty is to factions what air is to fire."If you're a free republic, it's going to happen. But the fact that there are several factions that compete, that's what's going to keep us clear of tyranny in the United States.

Jim Kelly: [00:08:53] Five, Brutus 1.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:55] OK. I have a vague sense of Brutus one but to be honest, I'm not super [00:09:00] familiar with it.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:01] Yeah, Brutus 1. All about it. I did not learn it in school. I had never read it. And it is wonderful. It is an anti-federalist paper. And the cool thing is it came out a few weeks before the first federalist paper. Brutus, which is a pseudonym of an anti federalist, he laid out all of the arguments for why the Constitution should not be ratified, said the federal government proposed within it was too powerful. The states were too weak. Brutus one is an argument for a confederation style of government, not a republic. And Brutus says that previous republics like Greece and Rome, they ended up in tyranny. So why should we try it here? And because it came out earlier. It's like a setup. It's like the setup for the spike of the Federalist Papers. Hamilton, Madison and Jay's 85 essays are a response. Eighty five responses to the concerns of Brutus.

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:09:53] For me in particular, Brutus can go almost anywhere. And I think that [00:10:00] almost gets short shrift, like we talk so much about the Constitution. You know, Brutus opens the door to so many different routes. He opens the door to declaring that perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perchance our founding fathers were elitists. He opens the door to, oh, my gosh, wouldn't it be great if we had participants, more participatory government? I almost use Brutus as an outline in my own class. My kids will go through and annotate. Here's his argument. And then we come back and say, what did the founding fathers say in response? Like what was, like each federalist paper is a response to Brutus. It's the cleanest, most comprehensive argument against the Constitution.

Jim Kelly: [00:10:41] Six Federalist number 51.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:44] I know this one. This is Madison again, this is the federalist paper that defends a government with separated powers consisting of three branches that check each other at every turn. It's the one where Madison says that if men were angels, [00:11:00] no government would be necessary.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:02] It is also about factions and the fear of an overpowerful majority. He says, quote, Society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens that the rights of individuals or the minority will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. I'll cut that.

Jim Kelly: [00:11:19] Seven. Federalist number 70.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:22] Finally, Alexander Hamilton comes out, right?

Nick Capodice: [00:11:27] Yes, we've had a lot of Madison now. But Hamilton's Federalist 70 is the one that supports a strong executive branch. Quote, Energy in the executive is the leading character in the definition of good government, end quote. And Hamilton argues for a unitary executive. That is that the president is in charge of the whole executive branch, the whole shebang. It prevents against legislative encroachments.

Jim Kelly: [00:11:51]  8, federalist number 78.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:54] This is your favorite.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:55] I do like this one. And it's Hamilton again, because it's about the powers of the judicial branch. Some [00:12:00] of Hamilton's points are that the judicial branch has, quote, no influence over either the sword or the purse, end quote. He argues that lifetime appointments of federal judges secure justice. And finally, in federalist 78, he outlines the process of judicial review that federal courts are the ones who should determine if laws are constitutional or not. This is a principle upheld in the delightful court case, Marbury v. Madison, 1803.

Jim Kelly: [00:12:27] And nine. Letter from Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr..

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:32] Letter from a Birmingham jail. Something written in the mid 20th century is a foundational document.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:39] I know, right? I was taught that document in English class, it was about like how to make an argument, not a civics class. Dr. Martin Luther King was arrested on April 12th, 1963, for parading without a permit in Birmingham. And a group of eight white clergymen from Alabama wrote a statement titled A Call for Unity. Letter from [00:13:00] a Birmingham jail is a response to that statement and his arrest. And it is a bedrock document for civil rights and for the idea of nonviolent protest. It is a foundational document because it lays out a reasoning and a process for the people to push back against unjust laws. There are dozens of excellent lines from it. Whenever you look for summaries on it every teacher says just read it. You just got to read the whole thing. One great line is, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed."

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:13:38] You know, it's funny, when they came out and said that they were going to put this onto their documents, I think a lot of people were flabbergasted and they saw it as a historical document or, ah, you know, a piece of rhetological argumentation. And I understand where they're coming from. But there are so many just amazing corners of that document that [00:14:00] I just want to sit in and think about. Once the kids see that, it allows them to walk into making connections with other groups, both then and now. You know, like I want to talk about how this connects to Black Lives Matter. I want to talk about how this connects to the Port Huron statement. I want to talk about how this connects to, you know, the environmental movement. Like, how are we using this as a way to delegitimize groups that are external to power structures.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:29] So I'm presuming that these students know these documents really well. By the time they take this test, can they, like, reference them? Can they have them out in front of them?

Nick Capodice: [00:14:40] In previous AP exams, you had to have that all memorized, it had to all be in your noodle. But due to the tests being taken at home, it is an open book test. You can have these documents at hand. However, Jenifer had some strongly worded advice about this.

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:14:56] I know that I'm telling my own my own friends. My my [00:15:00] my best friends and education, my students this year that I want them to turn everything off, like don't have a cell phone out, don't have your books out. It's just it's a distraction. And you won't you won't be able to turn a corner in twenty five minutes with all of that stuff there. It really is just can you create a claim, give evidence that supports that claim and gives great commentary that will connect your evidence back to whatever position you've taken on the prompt.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:30] Those minutes are going to go by fast. Jennifer filmed herself taking a practice exam under the new rules for this year.

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:15:36] I laughed on the camera last week, so I was like, it is way more stressful than it looks, especially like when you're doing it live. My handwriting fell apart. I mean, I was just like, oh, my God, everyone's judging everything that I'm saying. Like, they're like, that's not what that said. It's it it sounds a lot easier than it is.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:58] You do, though, want to have whatever notes [00:16:00] and outlines you yourself have prepared with you. That is a must.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:03] We talked a lot about the first essay here. Not much about the second. What is it called?

Nick Capodice: [00:16:08] It's a concept application question. It's 40 percent of your grade, 15 minutes.

Jim Kelly: [00:16:12] So the concept application question presents the students with an authentic scenario and assesses their ability to explain the effects of a political institution, behavior or process, and then transfer their understanding of course concepts and apply them in a new situation or scenario.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:29] For example, last year's concept application question was fascinating. It was about a hypothetical super conservative religious group and their constitutional rights regarding challenging part of a tax law. Ryan Werenka had some tips for this, which also can kind of apply to the argument question as well.

Ryan Werenka: [00:16:46] I think I picked up at a an AP teacher seminar was a little acronym that was APBS. It's not what you think, right? It stands for answer the prompt and be specific. You know, if we're [00:17:00] doing that, it's giving us a very specific thing. Let's make sure that our answer is relating back to what the prompt is asking us. And then provide specific information.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:08] APBS

Nick Capodice: [00:17:09] Answer the prompt. Be specific. Last year's essay about the religious group. The first question was describe in action Congress can take to address the concerns of the interest group in the scenario. So so Congress could pass a law. So describe it. Congress could pass a law reversing the Johnson amendment. Answer the prompt, be specific. Another handy acronym Ryan told me about is RSVP.

Ryan Werenka: [00:17:36] Where RSVP is, restate the language of the question in your answer and vanish the pronouns. They did this. Who did that? What? Make sure you... The Supreme Court decided this. Or James Madison wrote that. Or Alexander Hamilton was really bad at duels. I think those are the things that are going to help an AP reader to know this, that you know your stuff, that you know [00:18:00] your content and you know how to apply.

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:18:02] One of the things that I see is that kids will use things like legislature a lot. Or courts. You as the writer have to do all the heavy lifting to show me that, you know, that the state legislatures are the ones who have the authority to redistrict and draw maps. If you say legislature, I have to do too much inference right. Like I'm like, which legislature? Because it ain't gonna be Congress. Pronouns are like the Devil's Playground. Just don't use them. Don't say he. Don't say she. Don't say they don't say it. Like repeat, repeat, repeat. Proper nouns are preferable. Active voice and past tense is preferable. Just clear crisp statements. Very factual statements. Short to the point. Get it done.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:47] Jennifer give me another tip on this one. Whenever you see the words original constitution.

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:18:53] That is like a red flag, like red flag goes up and you should know immediately. We're talking 1789. [00:19:00] No constitutional amendments. You have to think about what the framers arguments were. Don't get bogged down on what we've what we've evolved to.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:10] And second and Jennifer framed this specifically as an equity issue because access to technology and Wi-Fi is a big problem in the country, especially now. But she said if you can take the test on a computer with the keyboard, if you don't have one, if you know someone who's got one, borrow it, write down the password to log into the computer on a piece of paper, leave nothing to chance. But if you can't. If you don't have access to computer, do your best on the phone. And also, if you prefer, students can write their answers on paper and upload photographs of them. But they're only given exactly five minutes to do that. So whatever your plan is, practice it beforehand. So you're not stressed out because one universal thing that all three teachers told me was not just good luck, but you've got this.

Ryan Werenka: [00:19:59] All the students [00:20:00] that are taking this on, I know this is a challenging time and a challenging class, and this certainly hasn't made things easier. But you guys are rock stars. You are are a good example for all of us. And I wish you the best of luck.

Jim Kelly: [00:20:12] We know how stressful this is. So we get it. But we also know that you guys are gonna do awesome on the exam this year and just go for it and do the best that you can.

Jenifer Hitchcock: [00:20:24] To all of my new friends who are taking this course with me. I wish you the very best of luck. And to my class of 2020, my Colonial's, my heart is with you as you sit down for this and you walk straight into the doors of where our future is trying to solve all of these issues with us, for us, all of those things.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:44] It is an intense class and it sounds like a really intense exam. Whether you take this test or not, these concepts and these documents would give anyone a fantastic education on [00:21:00] 'us.' America is about arguments. It's about discussions with evidence and rebelling and resisting and compromising and refusing to compromise.

[00:21:15] Yeah, we call our show the basics of how our democracy works. And I'm just grateful to have taken a peek behind the curtain of Civics 202.

[00:21:34] That’s that for today, this episode was produced by me, Nick Capodice, with you Hannah McCarthy thank you

H: Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton, who says soverignty is just a popularity contest

N: Erika Janik is our executive producer and could cut a three hour test into seven minutes

H: Maureen McMurray took her AP with a quill fashioned from a turkey feather and never stops talking about it

N: Music in this episode by Moore and Gardner doin’ this jaunty rag you hear right now, also by Uncan, Tone Ranger, Ikimashu Oi, Blue dot sessions, Broke for Free, gladrags, Inequalis, sara the illstrumentalist and the artist pick that’s never risky, Chris Zabriskie

H: Civics 101 is supported in part by the corporation for public broadcasting and is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire public radio

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Emergency Powers of the Governor

All fifty states and many tribes in the nation have issued emergency or major disaster declarations in the past weeks. State governors have been issuing orders, offering condolences and rallying cries and clashing with mayors and the President as they navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and attempt to keep their citizens and their economies safe. So what are a governor’s emergency powers? State and local government reporter Alan Greenblatt leads us through the how and why of those powers, and what they mean for the future.

Episode Resources and Lesson Plans

Graphic organizer for episode

The National Governor’s Association is the go-to for reliable information on the comings and goings and hows and whys of governors.

You can see the details of state and tribal declarations here on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s site.

Wondering about the other chief executive? Check out this guide to federal emergency powers here.

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TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors. 

Emergency Powers of the Governor

[00:00:00] Civics 101 is brought to you in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:08] Hi, all. Hannah here.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:09] Nick here.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:10] We hope you're all holding up out there. Here at the show, we've been leaning hard into responding to all of your wants and needs as best we can. And you know, when we first started Civics 101 way back in the day when it was a very different show, it was in part in response to a flood of questions we were getting at the station after the 2016 election.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:29] Yeah. And those questions included a lot of can this person do that? Is this addressed in the Constitution? How does that job work anyway? And unsurprisingly, those questions have resurged in a big way in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic.

[00:00:44] John Raby, a history teacher at Thornton Academy in Maine, wanted to know whether governors have the constitutional authority to close their borders as governors across the nation continue to impose restrictive measures to stem the spread of COVID-19. [00:01:00] Is there a chance that one of them will just close the castle gates? And while we're at it, I figured we should understand how governors have the authority to do any of what they're doing right now. So I called up someone who knows.

Alan Greenblatt: [00:01:14] My name is Alan Greenblatt. I'm a reporter with Governing where I cover state local government issues.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:19] Governing is a news site and source on state and local government. Alan also happens to have written a textbook on state and local governance. And before we get to how governors are using their powers right now, let's get the role of governor out of the way.

Alan Greenblatt: [00:01:35] Well, governors are, of course, the lead political actors in their states and they set the agenda. So that takes a lot of different forms. It varies by state, of course. But governors generally have the first swing at setting the state budget. They typically set the legislative agenda. In general, they have a lot of appointed powers. They can hire cabinet secretaries [00:02:00] and the like, their commander, chief of the National Guard. And, you know, they can veto legislation and issue line item vetoes of a budget items.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:11] All right. So this is not dissimilar from the powers of the president. Right.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:14] Right. It's the chief executive of a state. Of course, each state has its own constitution, which is why gubernatorial powers will vary from state to state. Gubernatorial, by the way, means relating to a governor.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:28] But those formal powers are in times of relative normalcy in which we are currently definitely not.

Alan Greenblatt: [00:02:39] Yeah, of course. So I think every state now has an emergency operation center which comes into play, and so there's a certain command and control structure that is ready to go and the governors actually spend a good amount of time rehearsing for emergencies, which is one reason I think governors have stepped up so quickly during this Corona virus crisis.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:59] Hold. Hold it. Governors [00:03:00] rehearse for this, like for a play.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:03] Oh, yeah. Alan says that governors have plans for floods, hurricanes, even terrorist attacks. And they practice. They play out scenarios so that in the event of an actual emergency, they know that their plan could work in the current situation.

Alan Greenblatt: [00:03:21] I think every governor has declared a state of emergency.

[00:03:25] Let's just talk about the actual action of signing a merger declaration for a state of emergency in North Dakota.

Governor montage: [00:03:32] I am declaring a state of emergency to ensure that we are able to swiftly deploy the personnel and resources necessary to address coronavirus virus and where I have officially declared a declaration of emergency, which gives us certain powers.

[00:03:47] I am now issuing a state of emergency for our state of Alabama.

[00:03:53] I'm signing an executive order declaring a state of emergency in New Hampshire.

Alan Greenblatt: [00:03:56] Most of them, if not all of them, have requested a [00:04:00] federal disaster declaration which frees up different federal funds. It varies by state. Some governors are able to unilaterally declare an emergency. I think that's true in New Hampshire. There are other states where the legislature has given the governor emergency powers. For example, Georgia and Kansas, they've enacted legislation giving their governors new emergency powers.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:26] Ok. So the governor either has the power to declare an emergency or the legislature gives the governor that power. But this freeing up of federal funds. How does that work?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:37] Alan's referring to funds distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That's also called FEMA. If a state makes a disaster or emergency declaration, FEMA can then approve financial assistance for both individuals and communities to apply for. So if you go right now to FEMA.gov/disaster, you will find a list of states that have made that declaration [00:05:00] and whether their dollars have been approved, which at this point is all of them. And FEMA has approved all of them, too.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:07] But being in this state of emergency, though, what does it mean practically? It seems that governors are suddenly empowered to take drastic actions like they can shut down businesses and they can shut down schools.

[00:05:18] And before we get to the border stuff, is that legal?

Alan Greenblatt: [00:05:25] The powers are broad, so it's not specified. The governor may shut schools, they shut. Businesses may do this. Some things are specify, but basically it says any actions relevant to the public health and safety. So basically they have broad authority. So, you know, it's going to vary by the statute and probably by the court how expansive the powers are and what they can get away with. I mean, so far what we've seen is a move toward greater and greater restrictions.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:56] So basically, if it's done in the name of health and safety, [00:06:00] it can be done.

[00:06:02] But a state or a governor can always have their orders challenged in court.

Alan Greenblatt: [00:06:06] And your state, New Hampshire, there was a lawsuit last month challenging the governor's authority, whether he had the ability to limit large gatherings and therefore protests and things like that. And a judge ruled that it was within his authority.

[00:06:20] He could go under soon and you could shut down those large gatherings, given the emergency powers grading to the governor by by the state.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:28] All right. Well, while we're on the topic of New Hampshire, though, that makes me wonder how a governor chooses what to limit or shut down public schools, restaurants, of course. I get it. But in our state, for some reason, golf courses can stay open. What's up with that?

Alan Greenblatt: [00:06:43] I think, you know, if you're a governor, you are, of course, also concerned about the economy. Let's see arguments. They always bring up. They don't want to shut things down too fast or too much.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:56] But let's get on to John's big question, because ordering [00:07:00] businesses and schools to be shut down, asking residents to stay at home unless they need to pick up essentials, that's not the same thing as shutting down your border. Like on the national level, the border between Canada and the US is currently except for trade shut down. Nobody's going in or out either way.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:17] Right. And there are a number of things to consider when it comes to the constitutionality of shutting down state borders. I mean, first of all, it's unprecedented in the history of the United States. And several Supreme Court cases have referenced the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution. That is the one that prevents states from discriminating against the rights of people from other states. And the Articles of Confederation and determined that we have a constitutional right to travel between states, the Articles of Confederation, they drag that thing out of the closet. They sure did. And then there's the fact that it's Congress who has the constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, something that would certainly [00:08:00] be affected by a border closure. So it's also a question of who would shut down a state border. Would it be the state? Would it be Congress? Would it be the president?

Alan Greenblatt: [00:08:11] I don't know that we could have a national quarantine or shutdown order. The way we've had statewide stay at home borders.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:21] Alan basically said that this is a tricky question to answer. As you know, Nick, our most constitutionality questions and we should note in terms of constitutionality, that's something that a court would have to decide in the event of a challenge. So right now, the furthest that states have gone is mandatory quarantine orders.

Alan Greenblatt: [00:08:42] Rhode Island said that they were going to stop and ask for self isolation from people with New York license plates for fear that New Yorkers were spreading the disease. And Governor Cuomo, the governor of New York, complained, and Governor Raimondo, the governor of Rhode Island, [00:09:00] seemed to back off. And then she said, well, we're not going to single out New Yorkers were going to stop people with any out-of-state license plates. This has been a big concern. A lot of New England states and other places that have summer homes or vacation homes have been very wary about people coming in. I'm not sure that they could actually stop them. I haven't seen any state that's actually stopped people from coming in. What they've said, some of the southwestern states, for instance, are asking for people from New York or New Jersey or Connecticut to self-quarantine for 14 days. They're not blocking entry, but they're just putting this kind of public health provision on entering the state.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:40] And as far as a border closure order coming from somewhere else?

Donald Trump: [00:09:44] If you are from the New York metropolitan area and you travel elsewhere, we need you to self-quarantine for 14 days to help us contain the spread of the virus. I am now considering we'll make [00:10:00] a decision very quickly, very shortly, a quarantine because it's such a hot area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, we'll be announcing that one way or the other fairly soon.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:16] There already was a federal quarantine order?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:19] Nope.

Andrew Cuomo: [00:10:20] I've been speaking to the president. This is would be a declaration of war on states. A federal declaration of war.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:28] That was Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York. He basically said, I'm pretty sure that isn't legal at all. And it's a total violation of the constitution. And the president backed off immediately. The general consensus among constitutional experts right now is that even if a state border closure could happen, it could be ruled constitutional. A shutdown like that is so opposed to American ideals. It's just really highly unlikely to happen.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:56] You know, Hannah, this question is reminding me an awful [00:11:00] lot of a certain philosophical principle of which you are inordinately fond.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:04] Is it? Go on.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:05] This is federalism, right? This dance over the division of power between the states and the federal government. And even in this pandemic, cities and towns and individual citizens.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:17] Exactly. The president pushing buttons, the state pushing back. And the same is going on at the local level. Governors are giving orders. And cities, towns and people are pushing back. Like that lawsuit against the New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu that he ended up winning. I should mention, though, that it's just like how federal law beats state law. State law beats local regulation. If a city says close that beach. But the state says, nope, all beaches are open, that beach stays open.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:50] While we're talking federalism. I have just one last question. What are the chances that the strong powers claimed by governors in this time will [00:12:00] set a big precedent for even more strong gubernatorial powers later on, even after the pandemic is quieted?

Alan Greenblatt: [00:12:06] It's always possible once, once any political office when this presidency or the governorship gets new powers, they tend not to give it back. In this case, these emergency orders apply to certain timeframe of the legislature set a date or there's a time relevant to what HHS, the Federal Health and Human Services Department, has said.

[00:12:30] These powers won't last forever. So of course, it's possible there's a precedent. My guess is we won't really see too much of it that everyone recognizes that this is a true emergency. This is not a fake fake emergency. This is a true public health crisis.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:49] So like in all walks, we just keep our eyes on the horizon of normal life.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:53] In the meantime, maybe we can take some comfort in the fact that federalism persists even in the face [00:13:00] of crisis. And this is something that Alan actually pointed out just before we hopped off the video call.

Alan Greenblatt: [00:13:05] So you had different states respond differently, but you certainly had many states respond more aggressively than the federal government did, at least at the start. And so in the way our federal system may have been a blessing, if you had just one authority in charge and it chose to do nothing or do little. We'd be in worse shape than we are.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:26] State autonomy can mean strength and proactivity and innovation, and it can also mean disparities in the services and resources available to people just based on where they live. We're still those 50 little sovereigns in a single union.

Governor montage: [00:13:43] Connecticut's going to beat this virus by sticking together and sticking to the rules.

[00:13:47] Restrictions that I put in place were in order to require everybody flying back into Rhode Island from any domestic location to be quarantined for 14 [00:14:00] days.

[00:14:00] You for everything you're doing to ensure the health, safety and well-being of children all across Pennsylvania.

[00:14:07] We will get my priorities. Your governor is making sure that every Alabamian has access to accurate up to date information about about COVID-19, so that you can make decisions that will keep you and your family safely.

[00:14:22] Silver lining is beginning, just beginning to emerge in Colorado. The data is telling us the thanks to the actions we've taken and you've taken, we're starting to make progress.

[00:14:31] I want to encourage my fellow Georgians to hang in there. I know that you're tired of this. I know you want to return to business as usual, but we must first overcome the obstacles that we have in our path.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:48] Thanks to Alan Greenblatt for stepping in on very short notice to school, [00:15:00] me and gubernatorial emergency powers, among other things, you can find loads of coverage on state and local government in the time of Corona at governing.com, this episode was produced by me Hannah McCarthy with you, Nick Capodice and help from Jackie Fulton.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:13] Erika Janik is our executive producer and has issued an executive order to take a nap for once, for crying out loud.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:19] Maureen McMurry has shut down the borders between imagination and podcasting.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:23] Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Broke for Free and our friend Chris Zabriskie.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:28] Do you need a quickie episode on something that's been bugging you during this strange time, during any time, really? You can at us on Twitter, we're @civics101pod or submit a question at our web site.

[00:15:39] Civics101podcast.org.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:39] Civic 101 is production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

[00:15:57] Civics, 101 is supported in part by the Corporation [00:16:00] for Public Broadcasting.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

19th Amendment: Part 2

The Nineteenth Amendment was first introduced to Congress in 1878. It took over four decades of pleas, protests, petitions and speeches to finally get it ratified. We’re told that the Nineteenth granted all women the right to vote in America — but this was not the case in practice. How did the divides in the suffrage movement define the fight for women’s enfranchisement? And how did that amendment finally get passed? With a stern note from someone’s mom.

Our guests are once again historians Martha Jones of John Hopkins University, Laura Free of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Lisa Tetrault of Carnegie Mellon University.

Episode Resources and Lesson Plans

Graphic Organizer for episode

Around a hundred marchers were taken to the hospital from injuries sustained in the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade — learn more about the history of that event here.

Read Francis Ellen Watkins Harper’s remarkable “We Are All Bound Up Together” speech

Take a deep dive on the events surrounding the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the work that it left unfinished here.

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TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors. 

Nineteenth Amendment: Part 2

Adia Samba-Quee: Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101, the podcast about the basics of how our democracy works. Hannah McCarthy here.

Nick Capodice: Nick Capodice here too. We are about to dig into part two of a two-part episode on the 19th Amendment. If you haven't listened to Part 1, I recommend you hit pause on this. Go back and give it a listen. There's a whole lot of context in there that will make what you're about to hear actually makes sense. OK, that's all. Thanks for listening.

Our first episode on the 19th Amendment left us in this murky place. The 15th Amendment, the amendment that granted African-American [00:01:00] men the ostensible ability to vote had just been passed. Victory for American democracy, right? Except, well, not so as far as Susan B Anthony and friends were concerned.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, this really shocked me. It's part of the narrative that I had not been familiar with. This felt like the glass shattering moment because this whole swath of the women's suffrage movement breaks off to form a new organization that is in part opposed to the 15th Amendment.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, this is a political choice that Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton make. The argument is white women should get the vote before African-American men. So Anthony and Stanton break off and they form the National Women's Suffrage Association, dedicated to the defeat of the 15th Amendment, which feels so horrible.

Right. Especially when we're talking about a movement that did ultimately result in the 19th Amendment, which, [00:02:00] to be fair, is a good thing. I kept pushing this question during my interviews like Stanton and Anthony and a lot of their cohort were the awful racists. Right? So here's Laura Free, history professor at William and Hobart Smith College as an author of Suffrage Reconstructed.

Laura Free: I think we have to say, yes, these suffragists were racist in these moments and they were also important advocates for equality in America at certain times in their lives. So I view this as us, as a kind of. Yes. And approach to thinking about racism in the movement.

Nick Capodice: I know about. Yes, And. This is maybe our first improv reference in civics 101. You made a choice in a scene. I'm not going to say no. I'm going to affirm it and add to it.

Hannah McCarthy: Right, exactly.

So, yes, these women, they were racist and they helped a lot of women.

The other person that's really helping me think about it is Dr. Ibram Kendi, [00:03:00] who's a historian of American racism. And in his most recent book, How to Be an Anti-racist, Kendi argues that racist and anti-racist aren't identity positions, but their policy choices and their policy choices that people make over and over and over and again and again. And he even says you can flip back and forth between a racist position and an anti-racist position from moment to moment. And I think this is a really useful model for helping us to think about the suffragists, because Stanton throughout her life hops into and out of racist positions, supporting racist policies and ideas, and she hops into and supports anti-racist positions throughout her career.

Hannah McCarthy: Make no mistake, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B, Anthony, these women were political movers and shakers in gloves and white dresses and they made what they felt were politically expedient choices.

And sometimes these were really gross [00:04:00] choices.

Lisa Tetrault: I think one of the other things that makes it hard to grapple with these women is that we still have a double standard that we apply to female politicians.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Lisa Tetrault, history professor at Carnegie Mellon and author of The Myth of Seneca Falls.

Lisa Tetrault: Which is that they're supposed to be good and noble and pure, you know, and kind of worked for the broader good, whereas we know that men are, you know, selfish and conniving and, you know, domineering, you know, in these suffragists were those things, too. But partly because they're women and they were social activists, we think somehow they must be noble and pure. You know, how could they possibly have engaged in this kind of activism? And, you know, the thing is, people are complex and, you know, female political actors are just as complex as male political actors.

Hannah McCarthy: And let's just remember the fact that while many of these white activists broke off to form this anti 15th Amendment organization, African-American women activists are reveling and they are leveraging this moment in history for their own political empowerment.

Martha Jones: For African-American women, the 15th Amendment in many ways [00:05:00] is a watershed.

Hannah McCarthy: Our third guest here.

Martha Jones, history professor at Johns Hopkins and author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All.

Martha Jones: We know that black women, their families and their communities have already by 1870, when the amendment is ratified in their communities, black women have already been an important force during political deliberations. When black men get the vote in 1870 and they begin to go to the polls, we can recover stories of the black women who accompany them, whether they are in the air, the ears of men telling them how they should vote, or they are quite literally part of a community that is standing guard and ensuring the safety of men who are going [00:06:00] to vote for the first time.

Hannah McCarthy: And it wasn't just whispering in the ear of men who were going to vote as we think about the ways in which women like Stanton and Anthony were scrambling for political influence. Martha points out that it's important to remember that African-American women were doing the same thing in their church communities.

Martha Jones: And so we can see black women after 1870 in their church communities, in their church conferences, in their congregations, beginning to speak about rights, beginning to speak about the vote, beginning to call for their office holding.

And really transforming the equation, if you will, between gender and power in their churches on terms that very much mirror the political debates that we associate with the 15th Amendment.

Nick Capodice: This makes me wonder about African-American women, their relationship to the men and their community, [00:07:00] because there's this dual thinking about civil rights and women's political rights, like these women supported the 15th Amendment because it meant that half of their community was finally enfranchised and it gave them the opportunity to speak about their own vote.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, this is a really good point. Martha says that, you know, of course, African-American women had their share of foes within their own community. There's often still a divide between men, women. Right. But thinking of race and gender bias in the same breath allowed for this radical approach to equality.

Martha Jones: When these questions get debated, sometimes how it's put is --

So what distinguishes the black church and powerful men, along with powerful women, will argue that part of what distinguishes the black church is its longstanding rejection of man made, so-called man made [00:08:00] differences between human beings. Right. The black church should reject racism. That's not controversial, but perhaps also the black church should especially reject sexism because the argument goes both are not God given differences, but manmade differences in the black church can distinguish itself.

Hannah McCarthy: So we've got these parallel communities, some working alongside and in support of African-American men's enfranchisement. Some working opposed to it, both with the same goal, though, women's enfranchisement. It's a complicated web of activity.

And keep in mind, we're in the 1870s, right? We are still 50 years away from the passage of the 19th Amendment. Susan B, Anthony is in her 50s. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is getting into her 60s. Neither of these women who are at the forefront of the movement will live to see national women's suffrage. And we're going [00:09:00] to pass into a new generation of suffragists soon.

So does that mean we are also going to see some better ideas about race among suffragists? Does the younger generation ally with women of color?

Not exactly. Stanton and Anthony say that a really strong precedent. Here's Laura free again.

Laura Free: We see this in the way that those younger generation of suffragists treat women of color in the movement. The suffragists organize a big parade in Washington, D.C., which is their way of doing a march on Washington right?

Isola Dodic remembers the 1913 March on Washington:  The theory that you would say.

that Gable marched around the wall of Jericho seven times before seven times before it fell?

Isola Dodic interviewer: And you were going to knock that White House down if they didn't pass the suffrage act?

Isola Dodic remembers the 1913 March on Washington: Not the White House, it was the gate. It was to rouse the consciousness of President Wilson.

Laura Free: And the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago [00:10:00] is a group of very eminent African-American women activists, including Ida B Wells, the prominent anti-lynching advocate. And they ask for space in the parade to join this movement and the white suffrage. Just tell them yes, but you have to march at the back.

Hannah McCarthy: You can be a member of a super progressive movement that's about rights for people. Right. But that doesn't mean that power structures and racism and sexism can't bleed into that. And in fact, it often does. So this is the atmosphere in which women for the next four decades are tirelessly marching, lobbying Congress and working at the local level. Lisa mentioned at the beginning of our interview that 1920 this year that, quote, all women get the right to vote. That is kind of a falsehood. It's not just a falsehood because of the many ways that people of color were disenfranchised. It's also [00:11:00] a falsehood because women had the vote before that.

Lisa Tetrault: So to get women's suffrage, you have to go state by state by state. And there's this massive campaign that takes place at the state level that we almost forget about every time we follow the 19th Amendment.

And they have tons of victories. Like I said over the you know, by the 1910s, all of the Western states have have taken mail out of their constitutions and allowed women to start voting on same terms as men.

Nick Capodice: Women were voting in the US before the passage of the 19th Amendment?

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, women had the vote in New Jersey at the dawn of the American Revolution. I mean, they lost it before the passage of the 19th. But yeah, Wyoming gave women access to the polls in 1869 when it was still a territory and maintained the decision when it became a state. In fact, lots of states in the West gave women the right to vote before the passage of the 19th. African-American women were voting in New York, Illinois, [00:12:00] California all before its passage, which is a part of the story that's often left out. And I think kind of disempowers the women who won suffrage or partial suffrage over the course of this movement. Still, the passage of a federal amendment remained important even to the next generation of suffragists.

Lisa Tetrault: And then, you know the ratification story, don't you?

Hannah McCarthy: Do you?

Nick Capodice: No I don't. Hannah, do you, though?

Hannah McCarthy: Actually, I really didn't.

Lisa Tetrault: So they finally get it passed through Congress and then it has to go to the states for ratification. And two thirds of the state legislatures have to vote for it, which is, you know, a lot. And it also requires that some of the southern states, which did not allow women voting in any capacity, have to vote for it. And that was unheard of. It goes out to the states. It gets all the states it needs except one. It's short one. And no other state will take it up. And they just sit there for months with no like no progress. And it looks like it might fail. And then Tennessee takes it up.

Everyone [00:13:00] thought Tennessee would show its opposition in some ways. The governor called a special session of the legislature just to declare the up their opposition to the amendment. You know, it's people stream into the state. All the opponents stream men trying to sabotage the amendment. All the suffragists, three men trying to advocate for the amendment. You know, they're getting legislators drunk the night before. You know, I'm in the capital than the state houses. You know, just in a bedlam the night before the vote, the night before the vote, it looks like the no's have it. The vote is then taken the next day. And it seems pretty clear it's going to fail. And it goes around and everyone votes. It's a tie. And then a young man named Harry Burn, who was 23, the youngest member of the legislature, had gotten a letter from his mother in which she told him to vote for the ratification, quote -- and quote, Be a good boy. She tells him and he then changes his vote and votes for it. And without the tie is broken and it it clears to ratification with that one single vote.

Nick Capodice: Be [00:14:00] a good boy.

The 19th Amendment passed because a legislator was scolded by his mother?

Hannah McCarthy: Which I think is just the most perfect end to this long, sometimes bitter, sometimes ugly fight.

Be a good boy now. Give the women what they want. And finally, they do 1920.

The amendment is ratified. Written into the Constitution on August 26.

Nick Capodice: So circling back to where we started, August twenty sixth isn't necessarily the date we need to care about. Right. Like Lisa said at the beginning, it didn't start with Seneca Falls and it sure didn't end with the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Lisa Tetrault: How do we get out of the 1848 to 1920 story? Right. When we look at black women's, because this is the point I was trying to make earlier, which is that there's two ways of thinking about race in the movement. One is trying to locate black women in the white [00:15:00] movement, and the other is just to look black women on their own terms. Right. And that's what Martha's doing. And that really blows open the 1848 to 1920 story. You know, it just it doesn't fit at all. You know, whereas locating black women in the white movement allows us to kind of have white women still define what the narrative is.

Hannah McCarthy: It doesn't fit at all. I told you that the point Martha Jones made at the end of my interview with her changed the way that I perceived approaching the 19th Amendment. The story of women and the vote is a much longer one. 1920 was just the beginning.

Martha Jones: If we treat that as the end, point us as storytellers and if we treat that is the end point we miss. What comes next and what comes next is as important as any chapter in the history of our democracy. When it comes to voting rights.

Nick Capodice: So the point is we can [00:16:00] tell the story of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which we kind of just did. But that is not the story of women's suffrage.

Hannah McCarthy:  Right.

The story of women's suffrage is a hundred plus year fight. There are decades of violent disenfranchisement of African-American men and women.

And it isn't until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that voting is really protected for most people in the country. And as I was wrapping up my interview with Laura Free, my last question for her was, OK. I was thinking back to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, this well-known African-American speaker, and she had this all bound up together speech that we talked about in part one where Harper says, yes, white women do need the right to vote so that they can educate themselves and better understand what African-American women are facing and better support them. And so I asked Laura free. Okay. So when in this long story did that happen? When did white [00:17:00] women educate themselves and support the African-American community?

Laura Free: Have we done so yet? Right. White women, it turns out, vote pretty much exactly like white men do. They vote on their economic and ethnic and religious interests. And there's not until I believe that the there certainly were white women involved in the civil rights movement. Don't get me wrong. And in the race, racial justice movements today, I think it's absolutely essential that white women own the racist past of our activist foremothers and work to use our privilege to advocate for the rights of others. That said, I don't think I don't think you could say that all white women now have gotten over that racist past and now support people of color.

Nick Capodice: So in other words, Hannah, [00:18:00] this isn't just one hundred years story. It's an ongoing story.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Talking about the 19th Amendment in particular really highlighted for me the fact that an amendment to the Constitution doesn't suddenly fix everything. Right. It's on us to make sure it's implemented in so many different ways. So I guess my final thought is go out there, get educated and bring the 19th Amendment to life.

Hannah McCarthy: This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with you, Nick Capodice,  and help from Jackie Fulton.

Nick Capodice: Erika Janik is our executive [00:19:00] producer and she has been telling the story of women's suffrage ever since we met.

Hannah McCarthy: Maureen McMurry holds a women's march every day just by getting out of bed in the morning.

Nick Capodice: Music in this episode by Chad Crouch, Ramzoid, Chris Zabriskie and Blue Dot Sessions.

Hannah McCarthy: There are resources, graphic organizers, transcripts and so, so much more at our Web site, civics101podcast.org. While you're there, don't forget to check out our brand new Learn from home page for all of you students and educators fighting the good fight from kitchen tables.

And our new Civic Shorts, fast and fun episodes for the younger set.

Nick Capodice: Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

19th Amendment: Part 1

The prominent figures and events of the women’s suffrage movement of the 19th and 20th centuries can feel almost mythical at times. That’s in part because they are, in fact, myths. The telling of the Nineteenth Amendment tends to stretch from a convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 to the amendment’s ratification in 1920, but the true story is a much longer one. We explore the myths and unveil the realities in part one of two episodes on the Nineteenth Amendment.

Our guests are historians Martha Jones of John Hopkins University, Laura Free of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Lisa Tetrault of Carnegie Mellon University.

Episode Resources and Lesson Plans

Graphic Organizer for episode

Ain’t I a Woman: Two competing narratives of Sojourner Truth’s speech by Teaching Tolerance

Centennial Craftivism: Make your own buttons and sashes!! From Humanities NY.

Black Women & the Suffrage Movement: 1848-1923

Have a civics question? Click here to ask and we’ll do our best to answer!

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TRANSCRIPT

Nineteenth Amendment Part 1

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors. 

Hannah McCarthy: Hey, everyone, Hannah here. How are you doing out there? Nick and I are thinking about you constantly. We're a part of your community. If from afar. So please don't ever, ever hesitate to reach out to ask us about anything. Anything, not just civics at Nick knows a lot about old movies and board games. And I know a lot about decommissioned psychiatric hospitals. And Nancy Drew. Anything. E-mail us at Hannah@civics101podcast.org or Nick@civics101podcast.org. And we will answer you. And we love you. OK.

Nick Capodice: Yes. Please e-mail us. This is Nick here, by the way. Thank you for keeping Civics 101 in your lineup in this time. That is so strange for many of us. We're all watching right now to see how the government -- if the government works -- now more than ever, it is crucial for us to understand [00:01:00] our history, how we've navigated strife in the past, our missteps, our triumphs, and what systems have come out of that navigation. We'll be here every step of the way to give you the context that you need.

Hannah McCarthy: We also need to know what you need. So please let us know. We've posted a survey to our Web site, that's civics101podcast.org. It's right there on the landing page.

Hannah McCarthy: And we're asking how we can best serve you in this era of Corona virus. It's super short, super short. And we will take what we learned from you and make you and yours the very best episodes and resources to get us all through.

Nick Capodice: Alright. On to the episode.

Hannah McCarthy: There's this pretty powerful story that tends to go along with telling people how the 19th [00:02:00] Amendment came to be. It happens in a place called Seneca Falls, New York.

So here's the ad that was published in the Seneca County Courier, "A Convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women will be held blah blah blah blah, uh, ladies only on day one. The public can come on the second day when... Okay, here we go.

When Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia and other ladies and gentlemen will address the convention.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Reenactor:  e hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal.

Laura Free: If you go back to the Declaration of Sentiments, the document that was the foundation of the Women's Rights Convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, it sort of serves as a manifesto for the women's rights movement in the early 19th century, and there were lots of things they were asking for.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Laura Free. She's [00:03:00] an historian of voting rights.

Laura Free: I teach college students at Hobart and William Smith colleges in Geneva, New York. My most recent book was called Suffrage Reconstructed Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era.

Hannah McCarthy: She's also working on a podcast called Amended, which is tackling, coincidentally, the 19th Amendment, which is just a glint in the eye of all of these women at this convention at Seneca Falls. The Declaration of sentiments that Laura is talking about, that's this document written primarily by this woman named Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It's modeled after the Declaration of Independence. And it basically says that women should be on equal footing with men.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Reenactor: Let that be submitted to a candid world. He has never permitted her to exercise her an alienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she had no voice.

Nick Capodice: And the 19th Amendment, just to clarify, this is the one that gave [00:04:00] voting rights to women.

Hannah McCarthy: Actually.

Can we just read it out? It's really short. Would you do the honors?

Nick Capodice: Sure. Sure. Here we go.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Hannah McCarthy: Right. You can't deny someone access to the polls based on sex. And Congress can make laws to enforce that right. This amendment was the result of decades of work on the part of the women's rights movement.

Laura Free: So people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B, Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone. These women had all been very much into expanding rights for women, things like property rights, the right to divorce, the right to have access to higher education, a very broad range of activities.

Hannah McCarthy: Suffrage, otherwise known as the right to vote, is one of these activities. And that's what women are ostensibly granted with the passage of the 19th [00:05:00] Amendment. It's ratified on August 18th, 1920, and written into the Constitution on August 26, 1920.

Nick Capodice: Wait, what do you mean by a sensibly grant?

Hannah McCarthy: As soon as I started to report on this episode, it became clear that the story we think we know isn't really the story of the 19th Amendment.

Martha Jones: I want to say I think it's very important from my vantage point that we not drop this story on August twenty sixth when we celebrate one hundred years of the 19th Amendment.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Martha Jones.

Martha Jones: And I am the Society of Black Alumni, presidential professor and a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. I'm a historian of the role that black Americans have played in American democracy.

Hannah McCarthy: I figured that making an episode about women's suffrage and the 19th Amendment [00:06:00] was going to be more complicated than the story of ladies in white dresses marching on Washington. Right. But it took Martha saying this for it all to click for me.

Martha Jones:  Because what begins on August twenty seventh, right.

Is that next chapter for black women? Right. That will drive all the way to 1965 in the Voting Rights Act. And if we'd stop at August 2016, 2020, we missed the opportunity to really place this next chapter. This chapter that black women really lead.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: And today we are talking about the 19th Amendment, the long fight that preceded it and the long fight that followed. So long, in fact, that we need two episodes to tell this story. Women's [00:07:00] enfranchisement continued to be a struggle long after the American suffrage movement ended. The 19th Amendment isn't some singular event. It's a continuing principle that just like every other amendment, takes proactive enforcement. So this is a story about voting, but it's also a story about civil rights.

It's about race. It's about slavery. It's about the reasons why when we think 19th Amendment, we think Susan B, Anthony, we think Seneca Falls.

All right. The prevailing story about the 19th Amendment goes like this.

Lisa Tetrault: Oh, so we have a very clear set of outlines that start and finish the story.

This is Lisa Tetrault, author of The Myth of Seneca Falls. So what is the myth?

Lisa Tetrault: The 1848 women make the first claim for the vote, which is false. But that's the way the story is told.

Hannah McCarthy: In actual fact, women had been calling for enfranchisement and [00:08:00] empowerment and equal rights for a long time before this.

And that declaration of sentiments, that manifesto for the women's rights movement?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Reenactor: He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her sphere of action, one that belongs to her conscience and to God.

Lisa Tetrault: We elevate the declaration of sentiments simply because we have given so much credit to Seneca Falls. But that wasn't the first women's rights manifesto. Sarah and Angelina Grimke wrote women's rights manifestos. Mariah Stewart was write -- and a black woman, freed black women in the 1830s, was writing women's rights manifestos.

Hannah McCarthy: By the way, Nick, Martha told me that Stewart wasn't just politically active. She was the very first American woman to speak at a podium to a mixed audience about politics.

The very first.

Martha Jones:  And when we read the records of her speeches, when we read [00:09:00] the pamphlets that she published, what we discover is that she is already rethinking politics in what today we would call intersectional terms, which is to say she's already cognizant that she is an African-American woman labors under two burdens, racism and sexism.

All right. So I feel like Lisa and Martha are describing some radical women. So if these bold moves were being made by people like Mariah Stewart, like 15 years before Seneca Falls, why does everyone talk so much about Seneca Falls?

Hannah McCarthy: That's a great question. And I'm going to call that myth number two.

Lisa Tetrault: So it became to be curious to me as to how Seneca Falls won out as the vision for when at least this kind of strand of white women's organizing began and all the black women were there. But this wasn't always their preferred method of organizing.

And so I started wondering, like, where on earth did this story come from?

Hannah McCarthy: Lisa [00:10:00] told me that as she dug into this story, she discovered that it's not like people immediately happily fell in line behind women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They didn't become the names that we remember by default. They made that happen.

Lisa Tetrault: There were contests against their leadership and different organizations formed that were rivaling them.

And sort of arguing they weren't legitimate leaders anymore because of the racism and the anti black sentiments they were engaging in.

And so one of the things they do is start to tell this Seneca Falls story as a way to center their own leadership. So by centering the movement at the beginning, it's Seneca Falls. She really cuts out without resorting to outright exclusion, cuts out all of these other women and says, I am the movement. Right. I began the movement. Therefore, I am the movement.

Therefore, my my leadership is the most legitimate. And [00:11:00] through a variety of really complicated things, Susan B. Anthony, who wasn't there, even though a lot of people put her there, which is really the logic of the story they create.

Susan B. Anthony very quickly becomes associated with that event and will always carry the mantle of it, even though she was never there.

Nick Capodice: So not only is Seneca Falls not actually the start of the women's rights movement or the origin of the first women's rights manifesto. The lady who championed the story of Seneca Falls wasn't even there.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah.

And we already know the icing on the mythological cake.

Lisa Tetrault: 1920 women win the vote, which is also false. And in between, a lot of white ladies who's mostly who we remember sort of march up and down and champion and fight valiantly and keep the cause alive and win voting rights for all women.

Nick Capodice: The question is then, Hannah, what is the real story about women's suffrage?

Martha Jones: I would begin the story of African-American women's suffrage in the earliest decades of the 19th centuries. That would be the 1820s [00:12:00] and the 1830s.

Hannah McCarthy: Here's Martha Jones again. She's about to publish a book, by the way, about this movement called Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All. And that story, she says, began way before Seneca Falls.

Martha Jones: This is a period in which we have growing really burgeoning communities of formerly enslaved people, principally in the north cities like Boston and New York, New Haven, Philadelphia, Baltimore have become really hubs for formerly enslaved people who are building communities within the building of institutions within the creation of those communities in debates inevitably arise about many things. But in particular, by the 1820s we see on the landscape recurring debates [00:13:00] about what roles women should play in that project, which is breathing meaning into freedom building institutions and the struggle for civil rights along with the anti-slavery struggles.

Hannah McCarthy: The fight for the abolition of slavery is very much bound up with the women's suffrage movement and women like Stanton and Anthony. They were abolitionists. But it was an entirely different thing for African American women to speak up for civil rights, especially during this time.

Martha Jones: It is a dangerous business for an African-American woman to step to the podium. Not only reputationally, but literally her own safety is at risk.

The term I've come to use is a movement for voting rights, and that is useful, I think, for appreciating the scope and [00:14:00] the scale of the political work that black women are doing from the 1820s forward.

We might say until today I say voting rights because they understand their quest for political power to be absolutely linked to the possibilities and the problems that African-American men confront as they strive for political power. For me, the term suffrage denotes a specific episode in the long story of the American story of voting rights. Suffrage is a movement largely led by and championed by white middle class women.

Nick Capodice: And were those white middle class women involved in that same fight? You said that [00:15:00] Susan B, Anthony was an abolitionist. Did she fight alongside the African-American community, like in the name of the African-American community?

Lisa Tetrault: These women had all been very much into expanding rights for women. But they also were interested in ending slavery in the United States. So during the Civil War, they agreed to help the Republican Party to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. And the 13th Amendment said that there can be no slavery or involuntary servitude in the United States.

Nick Capodice: But ending slavery is a different thing from campaigning for civil rights. Did the 14th and the 15th get the same support from people like Stanton and Anthony?

Hannah McCarthy: This is actually where things really start to fall apart. See, Laura told me that suffragists expected a kind of quid pro quo on the part of the Republican Party. Like we helped you to get this massive legislation passed. We helped you to abolish the institution [00:16:00] of slavery. And now it is time to give us what we want, which is women's rights, women's voting. But when Congress starts to debate the 14th and 15th amendments, they also start to consider ways to exclude women from these changes to the Constitution.

Laura Free: So Stanton and Anthony see that this is going on. They see that that gender is a problem. They see some of the early proposals. There are 70 different proposals for the text of the 14th Amendment. They see that in some of the early proposals, some people have included the word male. So they kind of freak out and they say to all their friends, we've got to stop this now.

Hannah McCarthy: At first, it seems like this could be a moment that will strengthen the activist community. We all pushed for abolition. Now we can all work together to make sure that Congress grants rights to African-American men and women.

Laura Free: But in May of 1866, Stanton and Anthony and [00:17:00] all of the people in their community who were activists and engaged in women's rights activism, they say, you know what? I think we need to create and what we would describe now as an intersectional movement. We need to be working for the equality of all people at this. At this moment. So they form what's called the American Equal Rights Association. And its goal was to, as Stanton put it, bury the black man and the woman in the citizen so that all women and men would be viewed as citizens rather than as a combination of gender and race identities. Right. So they attempt this alliance. They attempted an alliance operative word there at this meeting in '66. This is where Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who's probably one of the most well-known black writers at this time period. She's a poet. She's a novelist. She's also an incredible speaker. She [00:18:00] gets up and gives up some really interesting speech. And she says basically it's known as the all bound up together speech. And she says we're we're all bound up together. Here's her language. She says, You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. So her experience, she's saying as a woman of color in the United States is an experience of being wronged and that rights are important, but that she wants to rectify the wrongs, that the harms that are being done to women of color. She's like, I do not believe that white women are dewdrops just exhaled from the skies. Right. Like you delicate white women. And she says, too, that the white women of the country need the ballot in order to become better educated. She says if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America. And almost right away, [00:19:00] there starts to be tensions in this organization.

Nick Capodice: Harper is not mincing her words here. And I'm starting to suspect that these white women activists didn't really see their enfranchisement as a way to help women of color.

Hannah McCarthy: And unfortunately, things are just compounded by the debates going on in Congress about the language of the 14th and 15th amendments. Like in New York. They were having a constitutional convention, you know, where a state will decide whether or not to ratify a proposed amendment. Right. Here's the debate that was going on there.

Laura Free: So like one of the men in the debate says, black men need the right to vote because they're men. Women do not need the right to vote because they're not men. And that's a direct quote. It's just basically laying it bare.

Hannah McCarthy: And when Congress passes the 14th Amendment, it does, in fact, include [00:20:00] the word male when talking about apportionment and denying someone the ability to vote.

And when they pass the 15th, it does prohibit disenfranchisement based on race.

Lisa Tetrault: And only enfranchise as black men.

Hannah McCarthy: Here's Lisa again.

Lisa Tetrault: And Stanton and Anthony stand up and say we refuse. We refuse to support this amendment and the things that Stanton says are really cutting. She calls black men sambos, ignorant, she says that and she goes on to then rail against not just black men, but the immigrants.

And, you know, the kind of ignorant foreign vote and Chinese man. And she goes on and on and on and says, we cannot have these people, you know, these degraded people voting over educated white womanhood, refined, educated white womanhood. And, you know, it's just appalling.

I just want you to keep in mind Frederick Douglass, the famed African-American abolitionist and activist and formerly enslaved person. He was a friend of Susan B. Anthony [00:21:00] and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He was present at Seneca Falls. He also argued for women's enfranchisement.

Lisa Tetrault: Frederick Douglass stands up and says, you know, I can't believe that you're saying that you get to go first when we have campaigns of violence unleashed against our bodies in the south and in the north, and we are being hung from light posts and having our brains dashed out on the pavement. You know, this is a matter of life and death for us. And Stanton and Anthony say no and they bolt and they go form their own women's rights organization, their own woman suffrage association, the National Women's Suffrage Association, dedicated to the defeat of the 15th Amendment.

Nick Capodice: There were suffragists who actively opposed the 15th Amendment?

Hannah McCarthy: The best known suffragists actively opposed the 15th Amendment.

Lisa Tetrault: And then this is where the first talk of a federal amendment for women's suffrage comes from. And they say, well, the only thing that was good about the 15th Amendment is that it federalized suffrage.

Nick Capodice: So this major push towards the 19th Amendment starts in this [00:22:00] racist, ugly response to the 15th Amendment.

And basically, these women deny this real victory in enfranchising African-American men and grasp at anything about the 15th Amendment that will get them what they want.

Hannah McCarthy: You know, the facets of the women of the suffrage movement are many, and not all of them are gleaming. We do ultimately arrive at the 19th Amendment. The 19th Amendment, which is, by the way, a wonderful thing. But the way we finally got there says a lot about the women who led the movement. And it set the stage for a whole new era in the battle for enfranchisement. The winding story of the 19th Amendment continues in part 2 here on Civics 101.

Civics 101 was produced today by me, Hannah McCarthy, with Nick Capodice. Our staff [00:23:00] includes Jackie Fulton. Erica Janik is our Executive Producer. She also fights for things in dresses, but they're multi-colored and she makes them herself. Maureen McMurray's daughters daughters will adore her. Well done, Sister Suffragette. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Doug Maxwell, Chris Zabriskie and Chad Crouch. There's so, so much more to see at civics101podcast.org. We are churning out educational materials and sniffing out resources like mad these days. And again, don't hesitate to tell us what you need, you parents and teachers alike. I'm hannah@civics101podcast.org, Nick's nick@civics101podcast.org. Email us, we'll answer you and we will find a way to get you what you need. Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Civics 101 Presents: Code Switch

We tend to produce our show irrespective of the news, giving you the basics of democracy so that you have context for whatever comes next. But lately, the whole world is talking and worrying and wondering about the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re going to lend what we can to that conversation.

There is a lot of information out there about the virus itself, how we think it spreads, what we can do to prevent it — so we want to give you the social context. When disease spreads, it often carries xenophobia with it. Today, Civics 101 shares an episode of NPR's Code Switch that investigates the racist ideas that flare up around epidemics and pandemics, especially those about Asians and Asian-Americans.

Our hosts are Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji.

Episode Resources and Lesson Plans

Vox on fear-mongering, mass hysteria and racism during a pandemic

The Conversation on how we haven’t learned much since the Black Death

Psychology Today on why xenophobia and disease have long gone hand-in-hand

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TRANSCRIPT

 NATALIE ESCOBAR, BYLINE: It's kind of bizarre, really. Asian Americans, as a whole, tend to be invisible historically, culturally and otherwise - until something like this happens.

REBECCA WEN: So a couple of weeks ago, I was organizing a birthday party for a friend.

ALLISON PARK: I was getting on the D.C. Metro.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I was having dinner at one of my regular restaurants.

DEVIN CABANILLA: My family and I - we were going out to lunch.

JANE HONG: I was walking with a colleague at lunch.

ROGER CHIANG: I was on the BART train for my morning commute to work.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Some guy at the bar, whom I had never seen before, said, do you have the corona?

CABANILLA: They told my wife and son to get away.

PARK: Get out of here. Go back to China.

SARA AALGAARD: People call us Corona. People ask us if we eat dogs.

WEN: And this kid said, well, you're Chinese, so you must have the coronavirus.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Coronavirus.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: It's probably coronavirus.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CHIANG: The woman then replied that she isn't racist, but she just doesn't want to get sick.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GENE DEMBY, HOST:

You're listening to CODE SWITCH from NPR. I'm Gene Demby.

SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI, HOST:

And I'm Shereen Marisol Meraji. The news about COVID-19, aka coronavirus, has been unsettling. And as the virus spreads, so does suspicion and harassment of Asian Americans.

DEMBY: And we have been here before in the United States because fear of disease and xenophobia have often gone hand in hand - or unwashed hand. SARS was associated with Chinese people. Ebola was associated with Africans.

ERIKA LEE: Irish as, you know, typhus carriers, or Jewish Italians and others from southern Eastern Europe as bringing tuberculosis and smallpox.

MERAJI: That's Erika Lee. She's a historian at the University of Minnesota and author of "America For Americans: A History Of Xenophobia In The United States."

LEE: Historians have pointed out that in times of epidemics like this, that existing prejudices, existing ideas about certain groups get medicalized. So it's no mistake that certain diseases get attached to immigrant groups that are the perceived threat of the time.

MERAJI: Groups like the Irish and Italians eventually folded into whiteness and are no longer considered a threat. Now, Italy has the highest rates of coronavirus deaths outside of China as of when we recorded this episode.

LEE: You know, I doubt that we're going to see the same types of exclusions or informal acts of discrimination targeting Italians or Italian restaurants or Italian communities in the same way that we're seeing this with China.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MERAJI: Professor Lee, welcome back to CODE SWITCH.

LEE: Thank you.

MERAJI: We heard from a lot of people from across the country who've experienced discrimination. They've experienced name-calling, bullying, you know, being told to cover their mouths and people walking away from them if they're Asian and they happen to sneeze - these kinds of things. And this has all been in the wake of the coronavirus news. What have you been hearing?

LEE: So I think there have been a number of incidents that I began to read about and hear about in January, most of them outside of the United States - restaurants in Vietnam putting signs on the outside of their doors barring Chinese people, a lot of so-called yellow peril rhetoric that was being circulated in French newspapers, the incident at UC Berkeley that was, I think, initiated by the Health Services that said - I think it was an Instagram post, and it essentially said that there may be very common responses to anxiety about the coronavirus, including xenophobia directed at Asians. And because of a backlash, that post was then deleted.

But then, of course, there are countless incidents similar to the ones that callers have just relayed of informal, as well as just explicit racism, assuming that because someone is Chinese- or Asian-appearing that they are carriers of this disease.

DEMBY: You've written that these fears have actually influenced American immigration policy. Tell us a little bit about that?

LEE: Some of them predate even, you know, Chinese immigration to the United States as part of a larger Oriental discourse of China and Asia being uncivilized, impoverished, unsanitary and, you know, crowded - you know, the teeming hordes of millions living in filth. And then, as Americans who traveled to China and then came back to the United States, they spread those ideas. And then as Chinese people started to migrate to the United States, those ideas became even more entrenched in popular culture, and then also in public policy.

So we know from the very beginning, as West Coast Americans and as Americans in general are starting to debate the so-called problem of Chinese immigration, they are explicitly tying China, Chinese people, Chinese spaces with disease and contagion. Historians have shown that the rhetoric is about Chinatown as plague spots, as cesspools of - laboratories of infection. And we see in congressional records how these ideas get part of the public record, part of American public policy. And they're used as justifications for immigration exclusion, as well as specific policies to try to deal with outbreaks of disease.

MERAJI: I can hear people listening to this possibly being like, OK, yes, all of this was way back in the day. But right now, I'm rightfully anxious about getting sick and my family getting sick. How does being anxious and cautious transform into xenophobia?

LEE: So there's much that we don't know about COVID-19, but many of the things that we do know about it is that it is spread through contact and through not washing your hands, you know, just like the flu. So we know (laughter) that as long as we can use those just commonsense precautions, we can protect ourselves against the virus.

What is happening in this current environment with - I know there's a lot of global anxiety. I know there's a lot of anxiety within the U.S., as we see in the news headlines, the number of cases being reported, the number of deaths being reported. Racist scapegoating and outright discrimination does not have to accompany this anxiety. It is an unfortunate sort of echo of the past, but it doesn't have to be. It would seem that we should have learned some of these lessons. As we talk about this history and know how unjustified these ideas were and how racist and discriminatory the policies were, they have been discredited in the past. And to see some of the same both informal and formal discrimination happening today is pretty discouraging.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DEMBY: After the break, we're going to get into more of this history with Professor Erika Lee.

MERAJI: And she'll tell us how she thinks the president's been handling things.

DEMBY: Oh, boy. Stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DEMBY: Gene.

MERAJI: Shereen.

DEMBY: CODE SWITCH. And we're back with the historian and professor Erika Lee. And she was just telling us before the break about a bunch of the ways that Chinese Americans in particular have been singled out historically as conveyors of disease.

MERAJI: But there was another group I wanted to ask her about.

So you have a chapter in your book called Getting Rid of the Mexicans. And you also talk about how this is something that was used against Mexicans in the United States. You said that there was a near-hysterical campaign depicting Mexicans as dirty and diseased, carrying diseases like typhus, plague, smallpox. When was this, and what was going on at that time?

LEE: This campaign targeting Mexicans as an immigrant invasion but also as a racially inferior threat is happening (laughter) at the same time as the campaign targeting Chinese. And this is one of the ways in which xenophobia works. It uses an already-existing playbook. You know, certain immigrants are threats. They're threats because they bring crime, also because they take away jobs, but also because they bring disease. And they are sort of genetically carriers of disease.

So just in the same ways that American policymakers described Chinese and Chinese communities as places of filth and disease, lawmakers also described Mexican communities as, you know, places of laziness, of general squalor, of filth and disease. And when Mexican immigrants arrived across the border, they were routinely subjected to invasive, humiliating and harmful disinfecting baths using pesticides to rout out louse, but also (laughter) to cleanse, you know, Mexican peoples, their clothing and their baggage before entering the United States.

This is much harsher than what happened at Ellis Island, where European immigrants certainly faced scrutiny, but the medical exams were known as six-second physicals. They were pretty quick. So what's happening at the border is a reflection of the (laughter) idea that Mexican immigrants are a much greater threat.

DEMBY: Listening to your answer there, it reminds me of some of Shereen's reporting before on the language of vermin, as it pertains to immigrants, and sort of the dehumanization, as it pertains to immigrants to the United States. But it seemed like it also was actualized in policy - this idea that these people were almost like rats carrying bubonic plague. In fact, in 1900, the fear of bubonic plague among Chinese in San Francisco's Chinatown precipitated this quarantine of Chinatown. And they, like, disinfected the entire community. Could you tell us about what that process looked like?

LEE: Yeah. This idea that immigrants, but particularly Chinese immigrants, are vermin-infested - I think we see some of that rhetoric today, too. But it has really deep roots. And it is, in one way, very applicable to lots of immigrant groups. But there is a particular way in which it has been racialized with Chinese - Chinese as dog-eaters, as eaters of weird and strange animals, including rats and mice. There's a pretty famous 19th century advertisement for a rat poison that's called Rough on Rats, and the image of it is of a Chinaman - you know, a stereotypically drawn Chinese immigrant male in Chinese robes with a queue and, you know, sort of colorized deeply yellow - eating - like, literally about to bite into a full-grown rat. You know, so on the one hand, that message is, hey, the Chinese are (laughter) good exterminators of rats, and so is this poison. Buy this poison. But also, of course, is the message that the Chinese have these completely strange and uncivilized eating habits and that they - if they are eating and consuming rats that are known to spread disease, then Chinese people as a race (laughter) are also carriers of disease.

So that message is very clearly in the minds of officials in San Francisco when bubonic plague is discovered in 1900. It's about pointing the finger at Chinese people as carriers of the disease, rather than rats. So when the plague struck and the first instance was found in Chinatown, the city ordered an immediate quarantine of Chinatown with orders to remove all whites from the affected area. So (laughter) the white residents of San Francisco were ordered to leave Chinatown, but Chinese people could not. And the mayor of the time, James Phelan - he would become a national spokesman in the effort to exclude Japanese immigrants in about 20 years. He also warned that no Chinese people should be hired or allowed to work outside of Chinatown.

DEMBY: So we know that during the period in which many Chinese immigrants to the United States were coming to the U.S. through Angel Island, which is in San Francisco Bay, that Chinese immigrants were separated out, even from other Asian immigrants, for special inspection because they were seen as specifically carriers of disease. And I know that you are a descendant of immigrants from China who arrived through Angel Island, correct?

LEE: Yes.

DEMBY: Has your family ever told any stories about their experiences coming through Angel Island?

LEE: They never talked about their experiences coming through Angel Island, but because I'm a historian, (laughter) I found the records. And I found the records of my grandparents' interrogations - but especially pertinent to this conversation, my grandfather's medical exam. And it was nothing like anything I've read before.

Immigration officials ordered my grandfather to be subjected to the most invasive and humiliating medical exam that I've seen in hundreds of these records. So they had the medical doctor at Angel Island, you know, examine him for diseases, but also to measure every aspect of his body - his teeth, his genitals, his, you know, his height - to determine what age he was - to determine whether his claim of being 17 when he was immigrating was actually true. And they included just all of these detailed notes in the record. And it was just quite shocking to read.

DEMBY: Wow.

MERAJI: God.

DEMBY: There seems to be this paradox here, right? Like, on one hand, Chinese immigrants and Chinese people - Chinese people in America are held up as, like, model minorities, right?

LEE: Yeah.

DEMBY: Uniquely adept at assimilating to culture in the United States - the dominant culture in the United States. But there's also this latent sense that they're still much these very, like, dirty, backwards others - right? - who are sort of scheming and, as you said, disease-plagued. How do we make sense of both of those things sitting next to each other?

LEE: You know, one of the things about the model minority is that it's always been a very - it's always been a very complicated and complex stereotype. And that is, on the surface, they seem like they're the right kind of immigrant, the right kind of American, but you really can't know for sure. They may still hold allegiances to China, to Japan, to Korea. You know, they may not fully be assimilated as we think. And so there's this - scratch the surface, and you might reveal the real, true nature of the inscrutable Oriental who is actually not assimilated or who is really loyal to another country.

This is also a stereotype that goes way back. I was thinking about not just the ways in which these anti-Chinese stereotypes are so endemic to U.S. history, but how global they are. And I think that's another aspect of what we're seeing today - how easily weaponized certain stereotypes about Chinese are not only, you know, enduring across the decades and centuries, but also how they're globally understood.

As I was thinking about this, I remembered this just horribly racist book from Mexico that was published in the early 1920s. It was making the case for the restriction of Chinese immigration. And there's one cartoon - one illustration in it that's called "The Terrible Ills Of The Orient - Highly Contagious" (ph). And it shows Chinese people - Chinese immigrant men infected with syphilis, with trachoma, with leprosy. It's just really horribly drawn and very graphically drawn to see them as diseased and contagious. But the other part of the caption is that these Chinese people cover their diseases with very clean clothing when they work as waiters in cafes, as launderers or domestic servants.

DEMBY: Wow.

LEE: So they're spreaders of disease, but they cover it up really well.

DEMBY: Right.

MERAJI: Erika, I'd like to steer the conversation toward President Trump for a second. You wrote in an op-ed that he may be the most xenophobic president this country's ever seen. And I was wondering how you feel he's dealt with the coronavirus situation. Do you think he's been fanning the flames of xenophobia?

LEE: It certainly seems like he is. He's been reported as lumping in the virus as another failure of Democratic immigration policies that are allegedly allowing immigrants to overrun our borders. And so here, the message is that Democrats are also allowing disease-carrying immigrants to come to the United States and bring ruin and destruction.

And then there are other politicians who are feeding into a larger global anxiety about the so-called Rise of China, you know, not only as an economic competitor, but also as a competitor for world leadership and the Chinese government's alleged insidious plans to, you know, to steal secrets. And also, I think it was Senator Tom Cotton who alleged that coronavirus was, you know, formed or created in a lab by the Chinese government to explicitly cause harm to the United States and the world economy. These are - you know, these types of charges are part of a more recent discourse about China being malicious and deliberately threatening and a dangerous enemy to the United States.

MERAJI: At the beginning of your book, you said something like you were really surprised that Donald Trump's positions on immigration got him elected - or helped to get him elected. You were really unprepared for this United States of America, and that's what made you want to, like, dig into this history and understand it more. Do you feel differently heading into the 2020 election?

LEE: One of the things that I think is the most important aspect to remember about going into the 2020 elections is that Trump inherited these policies, these rhetorics from a long line of both Democratic and Republican presidents. And it's not going to be enough to simply reverse these executive orders, to undo what Trump has done. We know that migration, globally, is on the rise. We know how easily xenophobia is weaponized. It's going to take much more than just a new person in the White House to fully dismantle our xenophobic tradition.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DEMBY: Erika Lee is the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She's the author of "America For Americans: A History Of Xenophobia In The United States." Thank you so much, Erika.

LEE: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MERAJI: And that's our show. Please follow us on Twitter. We're @nprcodeswitch. And don't forget to wash your hands.

DEMBY: (Laughter) It's very important. Like, 20 seconds under hot water is very, very important. You can follow Shereen @RadioMirage. That's @RadioMirage, all one word. You can follow me @GeeDee215. That's G-E-E-D-E-E 215. We want to hear from you, of course, so you can email us at codeswitch@npr.org, and subscribe to the podcast on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts.

MERAJI: And we wanted to thank all of the listeners who wrote in with their stories, the ones that called in and let us record their stories. You heard them at the beginning of this podcast. Thank you so much. This episode was produced by Jess Kung and Leah Donnella, with help from Natalie Escobar and our interns, Dianne Lugo and Isabella Rosario. It was edited by Leah.

DEMBY: And shoutout to the rest of the CODE SWITCH fam - Kumari Devarajan, Karen Grigsby Bates, LA Johnson and Steve Drummond. I'm Gene Demby.

MERAJI: And I'm Shereen Marisol Meraji.

DEMBY: Be easy, y'all.

MERAJI: Peace.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Money

Attention: In our initial episode we erroneously stated that the 12 Federal Banks print money, that is not accurate. The money is printed at two factories in DC and Fort Knox, and sent to those 12 banks. Civics 101 deeply regrets the error!

What do the little green rectangles in your pocket even mean? Why are we talking about the peso? And what happens when you trade a cow for a teapot? Today we embark on a brief history of American money, from silver certificates to a greenback dollar to a freshly-struck penny.

Our guides are Stephen Mihm, professor at the University of Georgia and author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, Ellen Feingold, curator at the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian, and Todd Martin from the U.S. Mint.

Episode Resources and Lesson Plans

Graphic Organizer for episode

Parts of a Coin: from the US Mint

Symbols and numbers on the dollar bill: from The Bureau of Engraving and Printing

Field Trip to the Money Factory: See how our bills are made, from usa.gov.

Have a civics question? Click here to ask and we’ll do our best to answer!

Episode Segments

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TRANSCRIPT 

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors. 

Civics 101: Money

Adia Samba-Quee: [00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:03] OK, your levels sound good, professor, Are you ready to jump in?

Stephen Mihm: [00:00:07] Absolutely. Absolutely.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:09] So my first question, and maybe it's foolish to start with this one, but what is money?

Stephen Mihm: [00:00:21] (laughs) Do you really want me to try to answer that?

Nick Capodice: [00:00:48] This is Civics 101, the podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works. I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:53] I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:55] And yeah, today we're talking about it. Talking about money. American money [00:01:00]. Its history, bills, coins, the Mint, you name it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:06] Did you get an answer from him?

Nick Capodice: [00:01:08] I did. That is Stephen Mihm, by the way, he's a professor of history at the University of Georgia, and he wrote a book called A Nation of Counterfeiters, Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States. And he is the first guest on Civics 101 to deal with natural disaster.

Stephen Mihm: [00:01:24] I don't mean to be trouble here, but Athens, Clark County is under a tornado warning. Tornado warning for us means that there is a likelihood there is a tornado in our area...

Nick Capodice: [00:01:34] And Stephen stuck it out through a tornado warning so he could tell me about money. And sometimes in this episode, you're going to hear him talking and you'll hear a little siren in the background. But back to my broad question. So money is this thing we all have or we want to have. It's something we need to carry out our daily life. But have you ever just wondered what it is?

Nick Capodice: [00:01:56] Stephen told me that money, in its classic sense, consists of three [00:02:00] things. Number one, it has to store value. It has to hold its value over time. It can't rot like a banana. Two, unit of account. That means its value is measurable. It's countable and it's the same everywhere, right. No dollars worth more than any other dollar. And three medium of exchange. That means it is something that is generally accepted to be exchanged for goods and services.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:23] All right. Gotcha.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:24] But Stephen also said.

Stephen Mihm: [00:02:25] That question, what is money, the answer will tell you a great deal about the person answering it and less about what money actually is. Anthropologists might invest money with cultural significance. That money originated not to meet economic needs, but rather originated out of something like either religious ritual or kinship relations or some way of creating reciprocity between social groups. Money, in other words, is is is [00:03:00] what you make of it. And what you make of it depends very much if you're asking an academic on your academic training.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:07] And I asked that same question to Ellen Feingold. She is the curator of the National Numismatic Collection at Smithsonian.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:13] And what does numismatic mean?

Nick Capodice: [00:03:15] A numismatist is somebody who collects and studies money.

Ellen Feingold: [00:03:18] I prefer a simpler definition of money, and that is money is anything that can be used to make a payment. And really, any object can serve that purpose as long as it has an agreed upon value and is trusted for use in transactions.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:32] And in the past in world history, that's been shells, beads, giant stones with holes in them. And in America today, we're talking about coins, bills, credit cards, cryptocurrency and any of the myriad ways that banks electronically handle our accounts.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:46] How did we start using money in America? Was a dollar always this green thing with George Washington on it?

Nick Capodice: [00:03:53] No. Oh, not by a long shot.

Stephen Mihm: [00:03:55] Before the United States was created as an actual bonafide independent nation, [00:04:00] America and the colonies that would become the United States experimented with monetary substitutes in ways that actually marked the United States, or what became the United States, as very unusual. In other words, one of the first and really arguably the first state issued paper currencies in the Western world at least came in Massachusetts.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:23] So Massachusetts had no way to pay its soldiers.

Stephen Mihm: [00:04:27] And ultimately hit upon this very interesting idea of issuing what were effectively IOUs that would derive their value, interestingly enough, from the fact that they could be used down the line to pay taxes.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:42] But when we just started out as a nation, we used other people's money.

Stephen Mihm: [00:04:48] A motley assortment of coins made in other countries, either Spain or more likely Spanish colonies like Mexico or Bolivia, [00:05:00] what have you. To compound this confusion from our modern day perspective, if you were in Massachusetts, a Massachusetts pound might not be the same as a British pound.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:16] This sounds impossible.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:17] It does. And it was. And that's why we started to make some changes in 1776.

Stephen Mihm: [00:05:22] During the American Revolution, though, there was there was a desire to create a new currency. So that's really where it dates to. And this was a currency known as the dollar. But again, this dollar was not a truly novel creation. It was a dollar pegged to the Spanish peso. That is one reason why the American dollar is divided in the way that it's divided say, in quarters and originally also in 8ths and in halves, because the Spanish peso is divided into 8ths. And this made total sense. I mean, it was. Basically, we were lazy [00:06:00] and we're like, look, there's already a currency out there, most of us handle these silver coins. Let's just roll with this.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:06] The peso.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:09] I never knew the peso was to thank for the dollar.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:12] Right. But speaking of the dollar, let's get back to the paper currency. It caught on really quickly with merchants because there wasn't a lot of money around.

Stephen Mihm: [00:06:22] It's hard for us to understand now this problem which bedeviled the colonies. And that problem was that there was literally a shortage of money. Not a shortage of wealth, but a shortage of things that could be used as tokens to move between people and economic transactions. So people might have huge amounts of silver in the form of, say, plates and teapots and the like sitting on their mantel. But they had no money. The paper money solved this problem. It was a way [00:07:00] of making economic transactions move smoothly and operate, you know, with less friction than they would when you have to engage in barter or try to pay for a cow with a teapot. In which case, you know, there's a problem making change and and so on and so forth.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:18] But the biggest problem with all these paper bills at the time was forgery.

Ellen Feingold: [00:07:23] The colonial notes were, were were were often targets for counterfeiting. And that could be by American colonists. That could be by British troops, that could be by anyone who had an interest in taking advantage of those banknotes. Many of the notes had a statement on them that stated the legal penalty for counterfeiting, they said "to counterfeit is death." Many states went to, well, early colonies, went to great lengths to try to make their notes hard to copy. And one of the most famous examples of this comes from Benjamin Franklin.

Stephen Mihm: [00:07:54] Ben Franklin, who is the kind of where's Waldo of colonial America, he's everywhere, he devised [00:08:00] these paper notes that used a very kind of proprietary process to take a leaf and turn it into an engraving. And every leaf's veins are unique. So it was kind of this nature looking like a nature print on the back of his currency.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:19] Were counterfeiters actually killed?

Nick Capodice: [00:08:22] No. I mean, it was the technical penalty in a lot of states. But Stephen said it very rarely happened. Sometimes colonial authorities later hired counterfeiters to make bills for them. And the Secret Service, which today we think of their primary function as protecting the president, that agency was created specifically to deal with forgeries. It was that massive of a threat to our economy.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:43] Do they still do that?

Nick Capodice: [00:08:44] They do. If you're making some funny money, the Secret Service just might show up at your door. But it's harder today than it was even in Franklin's time. We've got color changing ink, watermarks, thread that glows in ultraviolet light. It's very sophisticated.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:05] All [00:09:00] right, when did we start to print a federal greenback dollar?

Nick Capodice: [00:09:11]  Civil war.

Ellen Feingold: [00:09:16] So in 1861, beginning of the Civil War, the federal government decides to get into the business of printing money mainly to pay for the war. So, they produce what are called demand notes. And they have this vibrant greenback. And they have an intricate design, though not nearly as intricate as the designs become over time. And that quickly evolves into a variety of types of notes, over the decades that follow. And what really unites the design of these notes is a consistent use of... Of green ink.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:51] And Ellen told me an interesting story about George Washington's face being printed on these.

Ellen Feingold: [00:09:56] George Washington is currently on the $1 bill. And the predecessor [00:10:00] of that bill is a $1 silver certificate. George Washington, when he first appears on that note, does not appear by himself. He actually appears alongside Martha Washington in 1896. And in fact, 10 years earlier, that same denomination, the 1886 silver certificate, actually featured Martha Washington by herself. It's the only example of a... Of a historic American woman being featured on a federal banknote in a portrait on her own.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:31] That's the last time there was a woman on our paper currency. But in 2016, then Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew announced that Harriet Tubman was going to replace Andrew Jackson, a slave owner, on the front of the $20 bill. It actually initially was going to replace Hamilton on the $10 bill but after the musical his popularity skyrocketed and they put an end to that. Today, Steven Mnuchin, our current Secretary of the Treasury, has not yet committed to the Harriet [00:11:00] Tubman change.

Ellen Feingold: [00:11:00] Something I collected recently, that's now on display in our gallery The Value of Money, is a 3-D stamp produced by a man named Dano Wall. And it is a stamp of Harriet Tubman. And individuals can use this stamp to stamp Harriet's portrait on $20 bills, thereby replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:27] Is that legal?

Nick Capodice: [00:11:28] Good question. Did you grew up hearing that it's illegal to deface money? Like you're not allowed to mess with money.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:34] Yeah, I always had a sense that you like...You shouldn't rip a dollar bill in half or something like that.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:38] Right. Right. It's not legal to rip a dollar bill in half because that's defacing or destroying currency. It's it's in the U.S. code that you're not allowed to do that.But to Ellen's knowledge, nobody has been reprimanded for stamping money or writing on money because scholars are currently debating what defacing means.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:56]  And who is actually making our money today?

Nick Capodice: [00:11:59] Starting [00:12:00] in 1913, the Congress put the Federal Reserve in charge of money production and the value of the bills produced was tied to a specific amount of gold. This is called the gold standard. We don't do this anymore. I'll talk more about that a little bit. The Federal Reserve is in charge of money, but the bills are printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Whose web site is the delightfully named moneyfactory. gov. Do you have any dollars on you?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:25]  I can go get one.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:25] I don't have any cash on me! We're a cashless society. Oh, thank you. What's this?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:30] A nice fresh dollar bill.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:30] Look at this dollar bill.`I've never been to either a place that prints bills or a Mint.Have you visited one of these?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:39] I think I have.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:41] Where?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:41] In Massachusetts.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:43] So the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has two locations that print money, those are in DC and Fort Knox. They send that money to 12 federal banks. If you were in Boton, that’s the A bank. So if you look at this dollar bill on the left side, to the left of George Washington, it has a big A on it. That says which of the 12 banks it came from. [00:13:00]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:59] No way!

[00:13:00] Yeah, so A is Boston. B is New York. C is Philadelphia. You could look up the whole list online. And when it comes to the Mint, I spoke with Todd Martin. He's the Chief of Corporate Communications at the U.S. Mint. He told me the six things that are on every coin-.

Todd Martin: [00:13:14] Which are liberty, in God we trust, United States of America, E Pluribus Unum- which is Latin for " out of many, one"-the domination, and the year that the coin was produced.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:29] And there's one more feature to look for. It's the Mint mark. This is like that letter on the dollar bill. It's a tiny letter on the head side that tells you where it was made-.

Todd Martin: [00:13:37] P for Philadelphia and D for Denver.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:42] The Federal Reserve, our National Bank, decides how many bills and coins to make every year. That's what puts money into circulation so you can have it in your wallet and your back pocket. But far and away, the most fascinating thing I learned about the Mint from Todd- and this doesn't happen with the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, by [00:14:00] the way- is that the Mint makes coins and they shipped them to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve buys them from the U.S. Mint at the rate of a penny for a penny. Five cents for a nickel. Twenty five cents for a quarter. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:19] No. They make a penny.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:22] Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:23] And then they sell it for a penny?

Nick Capodice: [00:14:25] Right. They sell the Federal Reserve a copper-ish piece of metal. That's a penny. And the Federal Reserve pays them a cent for it. So- and that's how the Mint pays for itself.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:37] Ok. I want to get back to this. Right? This dollar bill in my hand here. Does it represent anything? Is there like a piece of gold in a vault somewhere? Do you know what I mean- like what does this mean?

Ellen Feingold: [00:14:52] It means that you trust the federal government.So it's fiduciary or fiat currency, which [00:15:00] means that it's money because the law says it is. And because you choose to trust the federal government and trust the law that establishes our national currency system.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:09] When did that change happen? When did we stop using notes to represent silver or gold, and start using fiat currency, and just trust that this dollar is what it says it is? Who did that?

Stephen Mihm: [00:15:21] FDR did- Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: [00:15:24] Therefore, the United States must take firmly in it's own hands the control of the gold value of our dollar.

Stephen Mihm: [00:15:32] You know, when people think about FDR and the New Deal, they always think about like Civilian Conservation Corps, you know, public works projects and WPA or what have you. But one of the most momentous revolutionary things he did was to sever and put an end to the gold standard. And he did that quite dramatically. It became illegal to own gold. In order for a currency that  [00:16:00]is a fiat currency to work you've got to stamp out other- the competition. And in this case, holding gold would have been a very potent way of competing with the nation's currency. So it became illegal. There was a executive order. Gold was confiscated. And you got paper money in return at a fixed rate.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:20] But we kept using gold to represent the value of the dollar internationally until-.

[00:16:26] I directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets-

Nick Capodice: [00:16:33] President Richard Nixon.In 1971, he announced that the U.S. would no longer convert dollars to gold at a fixed value. And that ended all official ties to the gold standard. Now, we have to be careful with fiat currency, because now that our money isn't tied to a gold standard, inflation- which means our money is worth less- can happen if you print too much of it. If you're making too much money. And finally, in 1975, it became legal to own [00:17:00] gold again.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:00] So this dollar only means a dollar because I believe that it does?

Nick Capodice: [00:17:08] You got it right on the money. So the next time you look at the number in your bank account remember that it only has value because everyone else agrees that it does. Are the levels okay? They seem fine they seem fine.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:19] They seem fine to me.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:19] Alright let's go! Let's go! Five, six, seven, eight Put it in the bank. Today's episode is produced by me, Nick Capodice, with you Hannah McCarthy, thank you.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:29] You're welcome.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:29] Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton, who asked if blue jeans are used to make our dollars and we all laughed and it turns out it was TRUE.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:29] Erika Janik is our Executive Producer and has been waiting to do an episode on the Mint for two years.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:34] Maureen McMurray is a hip hip hip hip lady.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:38] Music in this episode by South London, Hi Fi, Broke for Free, Blue Dot Sessions, Matt Harris, Sara the Instrumentalist- no-.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:44] Sarah the Illstrumentalist.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:45] Yep. Sarah the Illstrumentalist. Rachel Collier, RKVC, and that wonderful 1910s band, the Weems.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:52] There is just so much, good heavens, to learn about our bills and our coins. What is on them and why it's addictive. And now I can't stop [00:18:00] looking at serial numbers on my dollars. To join my newfound obsession visit our website Civic101podcast.org where we put links to our favorite explainers on money.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:10] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And it is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Independents

What prevents someone from affiliating with a political party? What is the ideology of an independent? And how can these voters exist in a two party system?

Walking us through the world of the party outsiders is political scientist Samara Klar, head of IndependentVoting.org, Jacqueline Salit and president of New Hampshire Independent Voters, Tiani Coleman.

Have a civics question? Click here to ask and we’ll do our best to answer!

Episode Resources and Lesson Plans

Graphic Organizer

The latest data on independent voters by the Pew Research Center

A quick video explainer on independents by The Washington Post

Independent voters explain themselves to CNN

The issues independent voters care about most, tracked by the New York Times.

Episode Segments

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TRANSCRIPT

Ben Henry: [00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:05] I want to run a super quick experiment on you, Nick.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:08] Alright. Let me have it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:13] For this to work, let's just say that you are either a Republican or you're a Democrat. OK?

Nick Capodice: [00:00:17] Hypothetically, okay, yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:20] You're moving into a new neighborhood and you're looking at two different houses. One is next to a person who shares your party affiliation. OK? Your neighbor is the same party as you. The other house is next to someone who identifies as a member of the opposing party. The houses being otherwise alike in dignity, which one do you pick?

Nick Capodice: [00:00:46] This seems like you're pulling one over on me. But of course, I would like to live somebody who shares my party affiliation and beliefs.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:53] Ok, now let's throw a third house into the mix. But this house is next to an unaffiliated [00:01:00] voter. Someone who identifies as an Independent- they don't have a party. Does that change your pick?

Nick Capodice: [00:01:10] Yeah. Honestly, it does, because I feel like I could learn something from that person and thus about myself. Why do you ask?

Samara Klar: [00:01:21] If there's one thing that Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on, it's that Independents are the best.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:26] This is  Samara Klar. She's an associate professor of political science at the University of Arizona. And I bring this question up because Samara made this discovery while researching her book on Independent voters.

Samara Klar: [00:01:39] When we ask them who they want to live next door to? Who they want to work with? People, you know, if they're given a choice between someone from their own party and someone from the other party. They'll, of course, choose somebody from their own party. But if we add the option, "What about living next to an Independent?" Well, that's what they really want. People really like Independents.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:55] By the way, because I really want to hammer home the American love [00:02:00] for Independent voters...It isn't just that we want to live next to them. We want to date them.

Samara Klar: [00:02:07] I ran an experiment with my co-author, Yanna, where we showed people a series of faces. They were computer generated faces. They weren't real people. These were sort of robotic, formulaic faces. And we would randomly tell people that the face was either somebody who was a Republican, or a Democrat, or an Independent. And we would ask people to evaluate these characters that they were looking at. And we found that this- there's a broad consensus across all partisans that Independents are more physically attractive. Independents are more likable. And Independents are more trustworthy. And again, these were- this was an experiment. They were randomly assigned partisanships. And frankly, neither of them were particularly attractive- if I'm gonna be totally honest with you.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:49] All right. Wow. So Americans really love Independents.But I want to know what is an Independent? And is it even possible to have no party affiliation? [00:03:00]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:00] Right. There is a degree to which the Independent voter feels almost like a myth. Like trying to pin down something intangible. Well today, we are going to try to pin down the un-pin-downable. This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:16] And I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:18] And first thing first, what is an independent voter?

Jacqueline Salit: [00:03:21] So this a constituency, or a community of voters, that are enormously distressed with the status quo. That are willing to move all over the spectrum without regard to political correctness or party loyalty.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:38] This is Jackie Salit. She's the president of Independent Voters dot org. She became an Independent, in the 1970s, after being raised in a very progressive, left leaning family. And she still identifies with a lot of that ideology. She just doesn't see the Democratic Party as being the vehicle for it.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:56] So when Jackie says "move all over the spectrum" does she means [00:04:00] swing voters? Like we think of swing states that can go for one party or the other? Is that the thing that makes an Independent an Independent?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:06] Well it can. You might call a true swing voter a pure Independent. Right? A voter who isn't just not registered with the Democratic, or Republican Party, or some third party- but who truly votes for the person over their party affiliation. They can vote for a Democrat, or a Republican, or a Libertarian, or a Green Party candidate- whatever.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:30] Are there really, though, even voters out there who vote Democrat one year and Republican the next?

News Anchor: [00:04:36] Show of hands, how many of you have at times voted for Republicans and at times Democrats? All of you.

Independent Voter: [00:04:44] I really wish I could pull a number of things from a number of candidates to create an ideal candidate.

News Anchor: [00:04:48] In 2016 she supported Marco Rubio, but this time around-.

Independent Voter: [00:04:53] Tuesday I am going to be voting for Pete.

News Anchor: [00:04:55] Independent voter, Chris Davis, supported Trump in 2016, but now [00:05:00] he's leaning towards Joe Biden.

Independent Voter: [00:05:02] I am always on the fence until I make the decision.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:05] Do Independent swing voters actually exist? Yeah.

Jacqueline Salit: [00:05:10] Obama's margin of victory over Mrs. Clinton in 2008 came from Independent Voters. His margin of victory over John McCain came from Independent Voters. And then flash forward to 2016, Independent Voters swung towards Trump. And you had that kind of really fascinating and very misunderstood, in my opinion, phenomena of something like- I don't know- it's estimated 9, 10, 11 million Americans who had voted for Obama and then voted for Trump. Which you can't account for in, strictly speaking, ideological or partisan terms.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:50] The swing vote is a major element of the Independent ethos. But for an Independent like Jackie, and the work that her organization does [00:06:00], reform of the election system itself is paramount. Being a true Independent means dissatisfaction with the limitations of a two party system.

Tiani Coleman: [00:06:10] In 2016, we actually saw a pretty big phenomenon in the candidacies of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, who also... I think... earned the support of quite a few Independents. It was not just Libertarians and Green Party members, but a lot of Independents also chose to go that direction if they didn't want to go with either Trump or Clinton.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:32] This is Tiani Coleman. She was actually in the interview with Jackie and I. Back in the early aughts Tiani was actually the chair of the Salt Lake City County Republican Party. And now she is the president of the New Hampshire Independent Voters. So 2016, you've got these Independent voters who are eyeing Jill Stein and Gary Johnson and putting their support behind them. But of course, ultimately, those campaigns and candidacies tanked. Part of what really happened was that people could [00:07:00] see that the system wouldn't allow them to express a vote for a third party, or for someone else other than someone in the two major parties, because we have created a system where people fear the other party so much that they won't take a risk on a third party candidacy. Because they're afraid that by voting third party they might actually, in effect, end up helping to elect the person that they most do not want. So, part of the- what we're trying to do as Independents is change that system. So that people are able to truly express the choice that they want without the system, kind of, telling them they only have one choice or two choices.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:44] This is especially an issue for Independent Voters in the primary. Ina lot of states you can't even vote without declaring a party affiliation. And this idea of wasting a vote, Samara Klar says that is the reason why Independent candidates do not succeed.

Samara Klar: [00:08:00] And [00:08:00] there's this sort of nightmare scenario that the party you prefer is going to lose by one vote. And it's because you gave your vote to the Independent Party who you knew was never going to win in the first place. So that really tends to drive people apart...and that...that...that hurts Independents.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:16] Take Bernie Sanders, for example. He's the longest serving Independent in Congress and he's already filed to be an Independent candidate in the 2024 Senate race. But he's running for president as a Democrat, just as he did in 2016.

News Anchor: [00:08:31] So I guess my question to you is, do you... do you consider yourself a Democrat?

Bernie Sanders: [00:08:36] No, I'm an Independent. And I think if the Democratic Party is going to succeed- and I want to see it succeed- it's going to have to open its doors to Independents. Who are probably... there are probably more Independents in this country than either Democrats or Republicans.

Samara Klar: [00:08:51] And he had to spend a lot of that primary trying to convince people he was electable. They weren't going to waste their vote. He was an electable guy. But he didn't run as I did as an Independent. I think that was really key. [00:09:00] He ran as a Democrat. When we see these sort of Independents leaning characters- Bernie Sanders is one done. Donald Trump is certainly one. I mean, he doesn't have a very partisan background. He's donated to Democrats. It's not really clear if he's voted in the past. We don't really know what his political background is. These people who are... who tend to be Independent, they succeed when they run as a Partisan. They don't succeed when they run as an Independent.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:25] Ok. OK. All right. Huh. This is just like when you've got an Independent voter, who ultimately feels that pressure in the voting booth and concedes to one major party candidate or the other. Because we are a two party system and to win you got to pick a side.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:40] So yes, that's true. Most voters do eventually pick a side. Still, Samara says that ever since we started measuring how many Independent voters there are in the United States, the number has been climbing.

Samara Klar: [00:09:51] The percentage of Independents has increased dramatically. 2016, to my knowledge, was the first election year where a plurality of Americans identified [00:10:00] as Independent even in the week following up to the election. Which is really unusual. Normally as a presidential election approaches most people will tell a survey researcher which party the identify with. That's the period of time where you're most likely to identify with a party. You've been thinking about it a lot. You've decided who you're going to vote for. If you don't identify as a partisan in the week before the election then you never will. In the week before 2016, we still had more Americans saying, "no, no, I'm an Independent".

Nick Capodice: [00:10:32] To what degree, though, was that just voters feeling like they really didn't like either option for a presidential candidate?

Samara Klar: [00:10:38] Now, partially that could be because Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both historically disliked by their own- by their own voters. These were two candidates that really did not garner a lot of enthusiasm from most mainstream Democrats and Republicans. But it also could be that we had reached this unprecedented level of fighting bitter vitriol attacks. [00:11:00] I mean...I have a book on Independent Voters with with my co-author Yanna. And what we found is that over time the percentage of sentences in presidential debates that convey insurmountable conflict increases exponentially every year. Presidential debates become more and more about fighting and attacking each other than about actually debating policy issues. And these are the kinds of signals people are getting when they're looking at the TV to figure, out "What is a Democrat? What is a Republican?" and they see all this fighting and they say, "well, that is not me".

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:34] Now, I should be totally clear, the majority of people who Samara and her co-author identified as Independents, did admit to leaning Republican or leaning Democrat. And that was ultimately the way that they voted. Identifying as an Independent does not mean being non-ideological. There are liberal Independents and conservative Independents and moderate Independents. But on that point, Jackie Salit, [00:12:00] it brings it back to the system itself.

Jacqueline Salit: [00:12:02] And my experience is from talking to Independents across the spectrum is that the decision to identify yourself as an Independent is an act of non-compliance with the system in like ninety eight-percent of the elections? Those are the only choices. So if you want to vote, you have to vote for either Democrat or Republican. But even beyond that, frankly, in a two party system like ours, in a system which is so controlled at the top by the parties in every way, at the electoral level, at the policy level, at the national dialogue level, at the level of rules, etc. and so forth for set forth for so many Americans to be saying, well, I'm not part of that. I'm an Independent, I think is a political statement of great importance, actually. [00:13:00] Frankly, I think it's of greater importance than who anyone decides to vote for in any given cycle. And I think that is the process and that's the moment that we're living through. And I think it's a very big test of the country. I also, by the way, think it's a very big test for progressives who, in my opinion, can oftentimes be less than fully responsive to that statement of noncompliance.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:37] So even if it is kind of semantics, like even if it's symbolic to declare yourself an Independent, that's symbolism does actually mean something. It's signifying to political scientist and activist groups and candidates that you are fed up with the partisanship. So then I have to ask, why is there not a capital by Independent party [00:14:00] if across the spectrum Independents can agree with noncompliance? Why not form the Independents Party with a platform all about being free to choose whomever you want?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:10] Well, for one thing, there are parties in some states that call themselves the Independent or the Independence Party. In the case of the New York Independence Party, which Jackie helped to found, the platform is in fact reform. So this is the kind of true independent voter-minded party that you are talking about. But word to the wise, there are parties like the California Independent Party that are conservative leaning on abortion, gun rights, same-sex marriage. And then there's the Alaska Independence Party. And that's all about states rights and has this kind of libertarian bent. Many people who identify as Independents actually accidentally register with these parties and don't realize they've become affiliated with the party. But anyway, back to your question. Why not forming national [00:15:00] reform based party?

Jacqueline Salit: [00:15:02] Here's some different ways that I think about this. First of all, I don't think at the moment.

[00:15:10] I don't think that independents as a whole are looking to aggregate themselves into a third party. I think what's happening with independent voters right now is that they're swinging all over the place.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:24] Basically

[00:15:24] Jackie brings it back to the unpredictability that independents represent. Independent voters don't necessarily want to establish themselves as this unified voting bloc. They also don't want to eliminate the party system entirely. The independent identifier represents weariness with hyper partisanship and a desire for more than two options.

Jacqueline Salit: [00:15:49] Look, I think in general, if you asked independents, you know, should we ban political parties in the United States of America, most independents would say no. But I think independents would like [00:16:00] to have more choices. They'd like to not be restricted in the political process. And they would like to see a culture change that does not enforce the idea that at the end of the day, there are only two parties. There's only two ways of thinking about things. There's only two choices. And that's where you have to live. I think I think independents experience that as completely out of step with what is happening in actual life.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:32] This idea of what is happening "in actual life" is, I think, a really useful lens for understanding an independent voter. Samara made this point about partisanship versus the average American. And the reason why she and her co-author might be encountering more and more people who identify as independent.

Samara Klar: [00:16:52] What we found is that there's a real stigma against being a partisan. I mean, if you turn on the news, you listen to the radio while you hear [00:17:00] are angry Democrats and angry Republicans, particularly in Congress, yelling at each other, fighting with each other, unable to have any sort of compromise.

[00:17:09] Most Americans aren't like that. They're actually pretty nice people. They want to get along with their neighbors and they don't want to be associated with that kind of anger and that kind of vitriol. So as we see the sort of stigma against partisanship increase, more and more people say they're independents. And there's actually a sort of a sort of what we call social desirability bias could have seen as more socially desirable to say you're independent because people then don't associate you with all these things.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:36] So do you think, Hannah, that this rise in the number of people who identify as an independent is maybe a sign that lots of Americans prefer functioning relationships and healthy communication to bitter partisan arguing at the Thanksgiving dinner table?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:51] As the co-host of Civics 101,

[00:17:53] I have to believe that.

[00:18:01] Civics [00:18:00] 101 is produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with Nick Capodice and help from Jackie Fulton. Erica Janik is our executive producer. Maureen McMurry would never be part of any political party that would have her as a member. Music in this episode by Chad Crouch, Diamond Ortiz, KieLoKaz, Spazz Cardigan, Chris Zabriskie and Wild Light. You can find loads more resources, including educational materials and transcripts at Civics101podcast.org. Special thanks to Chad Peace of the Independent Voter Project for all of his help on this episode. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The Stump Speech: Student Contest

What’s wrong in America today? What would you do to fix it? Today we share the winners of our third annual Student Contest. Hailey Cheng, Tigist Murch, and Vijay Damerla give us their minute-long pitch for what America needs. Political Science professor Dan Cassino weighs in on the tactics used in these three speeches, and whether or not they’re shared with the current presidential candidates.

To hear all the finalists, visit civics101podcast.org/contest.

Have a civics question? Click here to ask and we’ll do our best to answer!

Episode Resources and Lesson Plans

The Perfect Presidential Stump Speech: By the folks at FiveThirtyEight, two professional speechwriters demonstrate every trope for a surefire stump.

Address America: from the Constitution Center; A lesson plan about creating a stump speech in only six words!

Breakdown of Trump and Clinton’s 2016 Stump Speeches by NPR

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TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors.

Civics 101

Stump Speech: Student Contest

Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:04] What is the biggest problem in America today? What would you do if elected the head of our democratic republic? In short, what's your stump speech?

Bernie Sanders: [00:00:15] -A government that works for all and not just the one percent.

Elizabeth Warren: [00:00:18] -but on your 50 millionth and first dollar you've got to pitch in.  and  one million first dollar. You've got to pitch in two cents.

Donald Trump: [00:00:26] -We are building the wall, 100%... 100% -

Nick Capodice: [00:00:33] That was the task for our third annual student contest and we received over 100 submissions from across the country.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:38] This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:40] And I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:41] And today we are bringing you the winners of our student contest.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:45] One of the only stipulations is that these stump speeches had to be a minute long. And we received a huge diversity of topics. We got gun control.

Student: [00:00:52] I would raise the age requirement for purchasing a gun to be at least 21 years old.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:56] Hyperpartisanship.

Student: [00:00:58] In America's political climate of polarization and even factionalism, that seems to reflect Dante's portrayal of Florence, unity as the most rational solution to our problems.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:06] And a lot about immigration.

Student: [00:01:08] Overall, I consider that the government should try and help the immigrants as much as possible.

Student: [00:01:12] Enforce Border Patrol and continued the border wall construction.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:15] And there are things that just plain work when it comes to these. The team at the Website FiveThirtyEight, they have a wonderful project called the "perfect presidential stump" speech where they lay out some tips like, "repetition can be good" or "always do things in threes".

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:32] Yeah, and you're always supposed to say "this is the most important election of our lifetime." And yet, to end with "and it's not about me. It's not about this election. It's about- this other thing that I've been talking about."

Nick Capodice: [00:01:44] Right. So the entire Civics 101 team met and we deliberated at length, and then we finally voted, and we selected three stump speeches as this years winners. But we've put all the finalists on our website and you can listen to them at civics101podcast.org/contest.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:59] We didn't just want to air the speeches without understanding their broader political context. So we brought in someone who lives and breathes politics.

Dan Cassino: [00:02:11] Hi there Nick!

Nick Capodice: [00:02:11] Dan!

Dan Cassino: [00:02:11] I'm doctor Dan Cassino. I'm a professor of government and law at Fairly Dickinson University.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:18] Did you know he was a doctor?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:19] I didn't!

Dan Cassino: [00:02:21] You know Nick, scientists have been PHD's since the 12th century. Doctors only start being called "doctors"," medical doctors", in the sixteen hundreds. So we're the OG doctors. 

Nick Capodice: [00:02:28] Well, that is a little news you can use. So Hannah and the OG Dr. Dan, let's do this! First contest winner Hailey Cheng from Arcadia High School, in California.

Hailey Cheng: [00:02:42] Giant corporations are responsible for the majority of global emissions, and they must be held legally accountable for their actions. When businesses make decisions about manufacturing, they do not consider the environment because they hardly feel the consequences. And if these companies can still make more profit by ignoring environmental implications, they will do so. Corporations should not get away with making a profit at the expense of our planet. We simply cannot stop the path of climate change if America does not take the drastic measures to regulate colossal corporations who are the brunt of the problem. Climate change is a threat on the planetary scale and a warrants a solution on the planetary scale. So as president, I would make sure big businesses are held accountable and uphold the government's ultimate responsibility to protect their citizens.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:41] All right.So, Dan, what do you think of Hailey Cheng's speech?

Dan Cassino: [00:03:45] So Hailey is really, I think doing something really smart, which is focusing on big corporations. When we talk about climate change, what we can do about climate change, we're talking at the individual level, right? "Well, don't throw out your plastic straw." But Hailey, I think, has gotten really at the heart of the matter, which is it's not individuals that are going to save the world from climate change. It is large corporations and governments. There has to be structural changes. She's also talking about, you know, though she doesn't use this terminology. She's talking about what economists have talked about for a long time. And that is the idea of "negative externalities." That is when somebody does something, if it affects somebody else, they should be made to pay for all those negative externalities.That's a really smart argument and one that is not just going to appeal to liberals, but also appeal to conservatives. I mean, this is Chicago school economists who are making these sort of arguments.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:30] Dan, are there any 2020 candidates that Haley reminds you of?

Dan Cassino: [00:04:35] Well, we have had candidates who were talking a lot about climate change. Michael Bennett, for instance...

Michael Bennet: [00:04:40] When I woke up this morning here, blossoms in my backyard were blooming a month before they should. That's the third or fourth year that's happened...

Dan Cassino: [00:04:49] But they haven't been able to get as much traction in the Democratic primary as candidates who either have more broader set of policy proposals.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:58] It's interesting, that climate change hasn't gotten all that much traction in this election because a significant number of our submissions featured that as like their primary focus.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:07] I think it was a greater percentage than any other topic of these submissions. Number two, Tigist Murch from Brewster Academy in New Hampshire.

Tigist Murch: [00:05:19] How is it fair that men get paid more money than women for doing the same job? Hi. My name's Tigist Murch. And here's why you should vote for me for president. I will personally take action to make sure there's equal pay by putting in place laws for women all around. Aren't you guys sick and tired of seeing the same thing? For example, the U.S. women's soccer team, thier salary is one hundred thousand a year, while the men's soccer teams base salary is 387,500 a year. Another example is in Hollywood. Men tend to make double what the women make. You can also see this in basketball players and hockey players. My plan will work. We pass a law and then penalize those who don't abide by the rules. Last but not least, women will finally get the equal pay they deserve. Poverty rate amongst working women will also go down. Vote for me as your president. I will bring this country what it needs. Equal pay for all. Just as it should have been from the beginning. Thank you.

Dan Cassino: [00:06:19] So Tigis is making a really focused case about gender equity and especially about equal pay for women.Now, it's not a bad idea to make an appeal to women because women, of course, are a majority of the electorate. So if you have to appeal to a group of women, there's not a bad group to be appealing to.  A lot of the examples she gives of men being paid more than women for the same work are really potent. The idea that the U.S. women's soccer team doesn't get paid much as the men's soccer team, despite the fact that the merchandise makes more, more people watch them, they're actually good...

Whoopi Goldberg: [00:06:52] The Women's Cup. World Cup soccer final in 2015 was the most-watched soccer game in United States history for that. They get paid 38 cents on the dollar compared to mount players.

Dan Cassino: [00:07:05] And the most popular laws about trying to create equal pay for men and women are actually laws, regulations really that force companies to disclose pay. That is once you...once companies have to tell everybody, here's how much you're making here's how much everyone else in your office is making, once you do that, you're not telling companies what they have to pay. But you're rather empowering workers to go to their boss and say, hey, you're paying this other guy a thousand or ten thousand dollars a year more than I am? What gives? Also she does make one really cool linkage and that is the link to poverty. Most of the households that are in poverty are female headed households. So we got single mothers who are working and they're not being paid as much. And that forces them and their children into poverty. They would be, of course, much better off if they get equal pay.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:50] So Dan, have we heard any messaging like targets in the 2020 election?

Dan Cassino: [00:07:54] Sure. We actually have seen Elizabeth Warren talk quite a bit about gender equality and the way women are treated in the workforce.

Elizabeth Warren: [00:08:01] The game is rigged when women earn less than men for doing the same work. It's rigged when women can be fired for asking how much the guy down the hall makes for doing the same job.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:16] All right. Last but definitely not least from Arcadia High School in California, Vijay Damerla.

Vijay Damerla: [00:08:21] I think that the main idea of my presidency can be summed up in one word. Invest. My priority will be tackling the daunting enemy that is climate change, because we need to invest in our future. We need to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions immediately. One way would be to reinstate the Obama-era auto policy that regulates cars to 55 miles per gallon, while companies like Honda have agreed to continue this, even though it's not the law, others like Toyota have simply refused. We need to invest in gigafactories. And with just one hundred of these, the entire world's energy needs could be theoretically met. But only if we invest in it. We need to invest in renewable energies such as electric, solar, hydroelectric and wind. We need to invest in our middle class. We need to tax those above the one million dollar tax bracket at a very high rate because the top 400 Americans are richer than the bottom 150 million. That can't be the case. Now is the future and we need to start investing in it. Thank you.

Vijay Damerla: [00:09:37] So Vijay has some really good ideas, ones that are actually going to appeal to a large segment of the American population. A lot of what Vijay is saying is based on this idea of technological optimism, the idea that really whatever problem we have, we can invest and we can build our way out of it. We can find new technologies for whatever is the problem we're facing. And those new technologies will help everybody. And that's a really popular appeal because allows us to avoid tradeoffs, much same way that supply side economics for a long time let people say, oh, we'll cut taxes and raise revenue, we'll avoid the tradeoff. Technological optimism, let's say, well, this is a problem, but we don't actually have to fix it. We just have to give a bunch of money to very smart people and they'll fix it for us. Vijay makes a very strong appeal to inequality, saying, look, there are rich people who are not paying enough in taxes and we should tax them. And that feels like it should be a popular appeal in American politics because after all, most of us are not very rich people. But it turns out the American public doesn't actually like that argument very much. They don't like this argument that, well, rich people are, have too much money. So if you want to make the argument that we should tax the rich more and more progressive taxation system, it really helps to frame it in terms of equity. That is, rich people get all these tax breaks that you and I don't, or rich people should pay their fair share. And those appeals to equity do a better job of bringing everybody along on this idea of a more progressive taxation system.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:01] Dan, who does Veejay remind you of?

Dan Cassino: [00:11:03] Oh, Veejay sounds a lot like Andrew Yang, actually.

Andrew Yang: [00:11:06] Efficiency because trucks can convoy together and lower wind resistance. And so robot trucks really get places with less fuel.

Dan Cassino: [00:11:13] Andrew Yang is doing very much the same thing with the technological optimism saying we have to get rid of these old solutions and just bring in totally new solutions and trust in technology and science. We think that they can save us.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:27] All right. Thank you so much, Dan.. And even more. Thank you, Hailey. Thank you. Tigist. Thank you, Vijay.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:33] And to all who entered, it was the best part of our job to listen to these and the hardest part of our job to pick only three.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:40] Again, you can listen to all the finalist speeches at civics101podcast.org/contest. We're going to continue our series on political parties in our next episode. And to any educators out there. Be sure to visit our education page civics101podcast.org/info, where you can get free graphic organizers for each episode and join our new education newsletter, for our monthly digest of not only what we've been up to in the education world, but picks of our favorite civics and U.S. history lesson plans from across the nation.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:11] This episode was produced by you Nick Capodice with me Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:14] Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton, Erika Janik is our executive producer and cutter of cloth and expressions like "chicago-style Economics".

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:21] And you know what? It's not about Maureen McMurry. It's not even about this election. It's about something else.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:26] Music in this episode by Scott Granton, Scott Holmes, Audio Hertz and Rachel Collier.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:31] Civics 101is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR. New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The Republican Party

What role did slavery play in the formation of the Republican Party? How did a scrappy third party coalition create what became known as the Grand Old Party? And how did the party of Lincoln become the party of Trump?

Taking us on the journey from 1854 Wisconsin to the present day Republican party is political columnist and author George Will and political scientists Keneshia Grant, Kathryn Depalo-Gould and William Adler.

Have a civics question? Click here to ask and we’ll do our best to answer!

Episode Resources and Lesson Plans

Graphic Organizer for this episode

The History of the Political Parties by C-SPAN Classroom

Party Systems by iCivics. Does every country have a two-party system? Compare ourselves to other systems around the world.

How the Republican Party went from Lincoln to Trump: A seven minute history from Vox.

Episode Segments

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TRANSCRIPT

 NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors.

Civics 101

The Republican Party

CPB: [00:00:00] Civics 101 is brought to you in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:05] I grew up in a George Will household as I'm sure a good many people who are listeners did too.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:14] Way back when we decided to finally do episodes about the parties. What is the Republican Party? What is the Democratic Party? I think that this was your first suggested guest, Nick.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:27] Yeah. George Will is a conservative journalist who played a major role in the Capodice home when I was a kid. I was the only one who didn't get sick when reading in the car so I would read George Will to my dad in the backseat.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:40] Did you know what he's talking about?

Nick Capodice: [00:00:41] I had no idea what he was talking about.

George Will: [00:00:44] Hello?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:44] Hello. Is this Mr. George?

George Will: [00:00:46] Well, this is me.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:47] Hello. This is Hannah McCarthy at New Hampshire Public Radio. How are you doing this afternoon?

George Will: [00:00:52] I thrive.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:53] George Will, conservative political commentator, writer of many columns and many books most recently The Conservative Sensibility.

George Will: [00:01:02] I wrote the book precisely because I felt the Republican Party and hence the conservative movement had become untethered from its serious intellectual pedigree, and the founders thinking. And I like to think that it's a path back to that.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:18] Right. The thing you need to know about George Will is that this lifelong Republican is not a Republican at the current time.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:25] He severed ties after the 2016 election. He is now unaffiliated.

George Will: [00:01:28] You know, leaving the Republican-political party is not leaving a church or like leaving your family. It's not a wrench to your identity. Political parties are useful until they're not. And I decided the Republican Party wasn't useful to me anymore.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:44] George Will is discontented at the moment. Which is kind of perfect because discontentment- the writing of a new political philosophy, the sloughing off of the old and no longer useful-that is where the Republican Party all started. And that is why it has changed over time.

George Will: [00:02:04] People ought to remember that the Republican Party started as a third party. Americans periodically say," Gee, can't we break up the... the duopoly of our two-party system?" Well, we did once. And that is the Whigs were there and then suddenly they weren't there. They were replaced by this insurgent third party, The Republicans, founded in 1854 in Wisconsin.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:25] So how did we get from that party in Wisconsin in 1854 to the party that George Will has just left in 2020?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:32] Well, that is a long messy story so let's get started. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:37] I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:38] And this is Civics 101 and today we are talking the Republican Party. And the Republican Party that started in Wisconsin in 1854 looked dramatically different from the party today.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:53] Right, before we dive back into the history of the Republican Party can we just together establish what is the Republican platform right now?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:02] So the last time the party published an official platform was 2016. And keep in mind, few members of the party outside of politicians and pundits actually read platforms. But lawmakers do tend to vote along the lines established there. So the Republican platform reflects social conservatism. It supports restrictions on abortion and immigration but fewer restrictions on gun rights and corporations. It's big on states' rights, as well. And choice, when it comes to health care and school. It's about what the individual wants rather than what the government says is good for you or not. And fiscally, the GOP is all about low taxes and free-market capitalism.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:54] What does that mean? Because I hear that so often with the Republican Party, what is free-market capitalism?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:59] Right. Most basically it means a system where the market regulates itself and government stays out of it.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:05] OK. Socially conservative, generally opposed to government interference with economics and state lawmaking, and that's the brand of the GOP.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:15] Right.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:16] Wait, where- why do we call them the GOP?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:18] Oh, yeah. GOP stands for Grand Old Party, which used to be a moniker used by the Democrats but the Republicans kind of took it over following the civil war and it just stuck.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:33] Ok. And despite them being the Grand Old Party the Republican Party is, in fact, younger than the Democratic Party.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:39] It is indeed. For a few decades in the 19th century, it was the Democrats and the Whigs. And they're holding down the fort trading the presidency back and forth.

Kathryn Depalo-Gould: [00:04:51] Well, the Republican Party, as we know it, formed in 1856. And it was the first time that the Republicans as a party had a national convention.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:01] This is Kathryn Depalo-Gould she's a professor of political science at Florida International University.

Kathryn Depalo-Gould: [00:05:08] And really, what had happened previous to this is the Democratic Party created in 1828, really with the election of Andrew Jackson, had existed alongside the Whigs. And the Whig Party had competed with the Democrats up until about the 1850s.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:25] So mid-1850s the Civil War is on the horizon.

Kathryn Depalo-Gould: [00:05:29] At that point, slavery became such a huge issue and the Whig Party refused to take a stance. And by the 1850s, slavery wasn't something you could just sort of go "meh". So what happened was the Whigs split apart. And those that had supported slavery became Democrats. And those who wanted slavery abolished became the Republicans.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:54] So the Whig Party just vanishes?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:56] It couldn't agree on slavery, an issue powerful enough to tear the country apart. And it tore the Whigs apart as well. So the Republicans staked their platform mostly on being anti-slavery. Some of them are outright abolitionists, want to get rid of slavery entirely. Some just don't want it to expand west as the country expands west. There's a whiff of small government and states rights in there. But fighting slavery is the great unifier for this young party. Their first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, loses to James Buchanan. But their next candidate is Abraham Lincoln.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:35] So a completely brand new party manages somehow to elect the guy who's later considered the greatest president of all time.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:43] Well, you can't discount the fact that this party burst onto the scene in what is essentially a perfect political storm. Because you've got the weakening of the Whigs. There's this division in the Democratic Party. And this really strong simple platform of being the anti-slavery party.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:03] Okay. But after the war is done, then what are the Republicans? Once slavery is eradicated what's their new platform?

Kathryn Depalo-Gould: [00:07:14] What is interesting is, the Republican Party really became this sort of civil rights party even during Reconstruction after the Civil War. They pushed different civil rights acts to protect these newly freed slaves from their state governments for violating their rights.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:31] For a while, after the war, the Republican Party remained the party on the side of African-Americans. They pushed for civil rights legislation. And they started the Freedman's Bureau to protect formerly enslaved people in the south. But the country is changing. And so the Republican Party begins to change too.

William Adler: [00:07:51] The beginning of it, I guess, would be the 20th century -the early 20th century- and maybe around 1912 or so.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:00] This is William Adler, associate professor of political science at Northeastern Illinois University.

William Adler: [00:08:08] And this is actually- the 1912 presidential election turns into a three-way contest between Woodrow Wilson for the Democrats. William Howard Taft, who's the president at the time, the incumbent president of the Republican Party. And then Teddy Roosevelt, who had already been president under the Republican banner, comes back in 1912- decides he wants to try to get the nomination of the Republican Party again away from Taft. With very complicated and messy drama between the two former friends. Taft ends up getting the nomination and Roosevelt and his supporters leave the Republican Party and form a new third party that they call the Progressive Party, sometimes called the Bull Moose Party because of the insignia of the party organization.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:52] Right. This is the election where Teddy Roosevelt spoils the Republican vote by running as a strong third party candidate.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:00] You have the more progressive Republicans behind Teddy Roosevelt. And the more conservative Republicans behind Taft. And the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, wins. Now, the Progressive Party does not stick around. But that divide between liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans does.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:21] Wait, so is this that moment that shifts the Republican Party towards conservatism?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:27] Well, it's certainly part of it. But the shift takes a really long time. For decades, the Republican Party dances and vacillates on social and economic issues.

William Adler: [00:09:39] It's not clean because you still do have conservative Democrats representing the South, progressive Republicans representing New England in the Northeast. But it's sort of the first move towards that process. The presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt is also a step in that process.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:56] Remember, the Republican Party is the party of the North, ostensibly the party of African-American rights. But as the nation is becoming more urban and more industrialized it's also the party of northern businessmen. And both parties are reassessing who it is they want to court as voters. And a few other complications arise between the 1912 election and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933.

Keneshia Grant: [00:10:26] One of the important things that happens is the Great Depression. And in the Great Depression, the parties have to make a decision about how they are going to respond. The Republican Party suggests that it wants to respond by waiting it out. "It'll be okay. We have kind of downticks in our economy all the time."

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:42] This is Keneshia Grant, assistant professor of political science at Howard University. She also happens to be a foremost scholar on the other major shift happening in the United States at the time, the Great Migration.

Keneshia Grant: [00:10:55] Black people are flooding into the cities. The Great Migration brings about six and a half million black people from the south into the north.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:03] The Republican Party is focusing on business interests and towing a different line than the Democrats in terms of the economy.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:10] Right. And all these African-Americans were moving into the north. I imagine their needs don't necessarily line up with the needs of comparatively prospering northern elites. Right?

Keneshia Grant: [00:11:21] The Republican Party and the people who are making decisions in the Republican Party are suggesting that the Great Depression is not actually that bad. You know, "It'll pass. It'll be fine". But they're making those statements because they are not impacted in the same way. Like they- they may... may lose money. But their losses are not going to look anything like the losses of the person who has just moved to Philadelphia, for example.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:47] So is this when the African-American community started to vote more Democrat when we elected FDR?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:54] Well, not the first time he was elected. Actually, the 1932 election was the last one in which a Republican candidate got the majority of African-American and person of color votes. Things began to change after that. But, you know, again it was slow.

Keneshia Grant: [00:12:09] This is not a neat transition. It's a messy transition. So whether Republicans support black political participation and how they do varies from place to place. So I went to school in Syracuse for grad school- in Syracuse, New York. Black people participated as Republicans for a long time because the Republican Party was actually friendly to black interest. So we think about Chicago, we think about New York, we think about Democrats. But there are some pockets of places where the Republican Party does kind of do the civil rights thing. And black people are thoughtful enough to go to the party that best supports their interests at the time. But eventually, the things that are happening and percolating at the state and local level have to be reckoned with at the national level. And I think this is where we end up with a Republican Party that's making decisions about- not necessarily- "We don't want to be the party of civil rights. But we really care about business interests."

Nick Capodice: [00:13:11] So the GOP starts focusing less and less on civil rights. That leaves this huge issue and a voter base wide open.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:20] Right. This is all part of that transition. And then something big happens in the mid 20th century. Here's William Adler again.

William Adler: [00:13:28] And then the big shift happens after the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, really tied into the passage of the civil rights laws, which really marks the Democrats as the party of the liberal side. And gradually, the Republicans, even though they're split on the issue of civil rights, gradually after that point, turn in a more conservative direction. Gradually over the course of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, all those Southern Democrats gradually become Republicans. And so what you have today, then, is a situation where those people's- you know- the next generation down the line, have essentially flipped their partisan loyalties as a result.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:13] Many Republicans, including George, will say that this change really happened with Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964. Goldwater sought to refocus the party.

George Will: [00:14:25] Goldwater said in his book, The Conscience Of A Conservative, that we had strayed from the idea of limited government. That the founders wanted it limited for a reason. That government should be limited in its power to allocate wealth and opportunity so that we don't politicize life promiscuously. So I... I think beginning with Goldwater we began to worry about this articulately. And we began to say that the Republican Party has to rethink its... its connection to the founding.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:59] Goldwater saying the Republican Party should get back to its roots, which is about small government and the free market.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:06] Yeah, he was very much opposed to government interference. He was all about states rights. He was opposed to most social programs. A lot of moderates in the GOP thought that he was too far right. But he had passionate support among voters and really served to establish the Republican Party as the party of the right. Even that, though, took decades of ideological tug of war between conservative and liberal Republicans.

George Will: [00:15:31] That lasted until Ronald Reagan came in and the parties began to sort themselves out. There really are no longer liberal Republicans and they're no longer conservative Democrats. Whether people are happy about this remains to be seen.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:52] Hannah, we've been talking so much about strong but limited government, and free-market capitalism, but we also have social conservatism. Right? We haven't talked about the "Christian" right. How... how did they become such a significant part of the Republican Party's voter base?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:12] Well, Reagan- I mean- Reagan really firmly established what the Republican Party is. He played to both the capitalist leanings and the social conservative leanings of the voter base. George Will calls this the "theory of fusion". Bringing together two separate but overlapping groups of people.

George Will: [00:16:32] Evangelical Christian social conservatives, concerned with abortion and pornography and all the rest. And, on the other side, the libertarian impulses of those who believe in free-market capitalism. And what Ronald Reagan did was successfully bring those two into the Republican tent. And keeping those two in...in equilibrium and in amicable relations has been a sometimes challenging project, but it has been the essence of Republican success since Reagan.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:08] So all these elements- limited government, limited regulations, social conservatism, those are still part of the Republican Party platform. That's how they define themselves. So what is it that made George Will, a lifelong Republican, sever his ties to the GOP?

George Will: [00:17:28] Today the Republican Party is, in my judgment, a cult of personality. When the party gets back to ideas which are interesting and which people like to talk about, then you can have really serious arguments about whether or not the government should allocate wealth and opportunity. Whether or not the government should... is more efficient than the market in allocating services such as health care or pensions. These... when you start arguing about ideas like this, then questions become empirical questions. What does the evidence show us? What does history teach us about government's effectiveness? And you can lower the temperature of politics by bringing in... by increasing the fact content of it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:13]  So I'm not going to say that the country is anything like it was in the 1850s. But the Republican Party did arise out of extreme division and a bunch of people defecting from another party. George Will is looking for a return to something, right, a party recommitted to old ideas. The Republican Party called itself that name way back in 1854 because they were going to be the true representation of Jeffersonian politics- of a philosophy that our nation was built upon. They were harkening back. That was their genesis. And it's something that Republicans like George Will revere. But I'm wondering about the future of the Republican Party. I asked Kathryn Depalo-Gould about this. What might the GOP look like going forward?

Kathryn Depalo-Gould: [00:19:06] I mean, what it's going to look like I can never predict. But that is something that parties change. And I think the winning candidate, who has voters who vote in the Electoral College system, and this candidate's ideas go forward, really influences the party's platform. Because especially these days where we have ideologically divided parties, they're very polarized ideologically, which we haven't really seen frankly since...you know...the Federalists with Hamilton and Adams and the Democratic-Republicans with Jefferson and Madison. It's fascinating that it's almost like "What is my team doing?" And, "I'm going to go with my team." And, you know, that kind of partisanship is something, again- we've only seen a few times, I would argue, in U.S. history.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:54] I want to be careful because we're a show that talks about, say, the civil war. And making big, broad, sweeping statements about how,"Hey, things have never been as partisan as they are right this second." But that said, we are divided as a nation unlike I've seen in my lifetime. And I wonder how that division will change both parties. Does Kathryn think that stark divide between the parties will result in them changing yet again?

Kathryn Depalo-Gould: [00:20:24] The Republican Party is going through changes and this is actually a normal course of events. You know, parties are big tents. They have to have a lot of voters. They have to- they have a lot of issues. They're not going to please everybody. But, you know, as society grows and changes you're going to have shifts. And I think the sort of parsing out that happens from election to election is a very normal thing to be happening. And it's fascinating to see what comes out at the end.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:48] Over the course of its lifetime, the one reliable constant in the Republican Party has been change. The party stays alive not because of its commitment to any one social or economic issue but because it can court voters. So what the GOP will be, and I guess, if the GOP will be, is all in the hands of the people who keep it in power.

Republican 1: [00:21:14] The top three things that are important to us is the economy, we're pro-life, and we want a more tolerant party to the LGBT community and other groups.

Republican 2: [00:21:23] You see a person that actually stands for, you know, what they've been thinking in their head but were too afraid to say all the years.

Republican 3: [00:21:30] Being a Latino in the Republican Party is not the easiest thing in the world this election cycle- I mean it's just honest-

Republican 4: [00:21:37] Honestly, I do not recognize the Republican Party of today.

Republican 5: [00:21:41] Immediately I saw a plan to bring back a manufacturing base to America and that's why the economy needs right now.

Republican 6: [00:21:47] A majority of young Republicans now support marriage equality.

Republican 7: [00:21:50] They reject Republicans on social issues and they reject Democrats on economic issues.

Republican 8: [00:21:55] If they're connected to Donald Trump, they are not connected to me.

Republican 9: [00:21:58] Talking about bringing America back and I'm thinking, "these are values"-.

[00:22:01] If you don't like this country, get out, please. That's all he said.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:25] Today's episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with you, Nick Capodice.  Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton. Eric Janik is our executive producer.

Nick Capodice: [00:22:33] Maureen McMurray is neither grand nor old but she sure is a party.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:37] Music in this episode by Cambo, Bio Unit, Audio Hertz, Chris Zabriskie, Chad Crouch, and Pro Leader. Civics 101 is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The Democratic Party

How did the Democratic party become "blue?" Why were they initially called Republicans? And most importantly, how did the party that supported slavery become the party that nominated our first African-American president?

Taking us on the long winding path, from the origin of the party to the modern-day Democrat, is author Heather Wagner, political scientist Keneshia Grant, and historian Paddy Riley.

Have a civics question? Click here to ask and we’ll do our best to answer!

Episode Resources and Lesson Plans

Graphic Organizer

One Big Party by iCivics (explains the role of parties, not their ideologies)

Political Parties and Conventions by Carolina K-12 (students learn about platforms and hold a mock convention)

Why Red Means Republican and Blue Means Democrat, a video from Vox

Episode Segments

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TRANSCRIPT

NOTE: This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service, and may contain typographical errors.

Civics 101

Democratic Party

CPB Grant: [00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Katie Couric: [00:00:03] You can see on this map there are a number of undecided states of the Democrats in Pennsylvania. A little concerned about Sarah Palin's...-

Nick Capodice: [00:00:13] When were talking about political parties, we tend to talk a lot about election night. Right?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:19] Right.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:20] And there's this moment that I think is the most exciting. And it's where they've got this giant map in the studio, and there's an empty silhouette of a state, and then it flickers and it snaps either red or blue.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:33] Yeah. That's when you as a political person, your heart either rises or sinks. Right? When you see a state go for one candidate or another.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:42] Do you know when that started? Red states? Blue states?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:46] Have we not had that for like forever? For decades and decades?

Nick Capodice: [00:00:50] Right, here let me play you something. This is from election night, 1980-.

News Anchor: [00:00:52] -Electoral votes. And so we will put on our map in blue, for those of you who are [00:01:00] watching in color, we'll make Florida our projected winner for Reagan.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:04] Blue for Reagan! This is 1980?

Nick Capodice: [00:01:07] Yeah, hold on check this out.

News Anchor: [00:01:09] - We'll color those in now. Red across the western rim, the Pacific Rim of the United States, for Bill Clinton. And just a few blue spots on that map for George Bush. 362-

Nick Capodice: [00:01:20] That was NBC coverage of the 1992 election. Democrats used to be red. And then they sort of switched. One station switched it to red for Republicans because they said "we're coloring it red for Reagan". In the 1996 election, Clinton v. Dole, that was the first year that all three major networks had red for the GOP and blue for Democrats. But the terms "red state" "blue state" they did not enter our common parlance until-.

News Anchor: [00:01:48] It appears that there will be a recount in the state of Florida. They still need to wait for- what is it?- overseas ballots.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:59] Bush v. Gore? [00:02:00]

Nick Capodice: [00:02:00] Yeah, because of the closeness of that race, the ensuing recount, America had been staring at a red and blue map for days. I saw VOX video about this, actually, and it said that David Letterman was one of the first. He made a joke about blue states and red states. And the term just stuck it too soon.

David Letterman: [00:02:16] Here's how it's gonna go,George W. Bush will be president for the red states. Al W.Gore will be president for the blue states. And that's-

Nick Capodice: [00:02:26] And now Democrats embrace their blue. They put it in their campaign logos. We have terms like "blue wave" versus a "red tide". And that division, that color polarity, is really new.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:37] It's hard for me to wrap my mind around this idea that a party can rebrand itself that quickly based on this arbitrary choice made by a news network.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:47] You think that strange Hannah hold on your little purple hat.I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:53]  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:55] And this is Civics 101. And today we're talking about the Democratic Party, capital [00:03:00] D. What it is. What it was. What it will be. And if we're gonna talk about how the party has evolved over the years we have to say what they're all about today. So let's go with their own words in their 2016 Democratic platform the planks of which included, "addressing economic inequality, college debt, climate change, and access to health care." It is also today the party of inclusivity when it comes to issues like same sex marriage, women's rights, and immigration.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:31] So let's go back now, the genesis of the Democratic Party. How did it start?

Heather Wagner: [00:03:36] The Democratic Party, to make things really clear, began actually as the Republican Party.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:44] Oh come on!

Nick Capodice: [00:03:44] I know. I'm sorry. I know. This is Heather Wagner, by the way. She wrote the book, The History of the Democratic Party.

Heather Wagner: [00:03:50] So the Democratic Party was founded by Thomas Jefferson, and other men like him, who were dissatisfied with [00:04:00] the direction the country was going under George Washington and John Adams. And they felt George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton were believers in a very strong central government.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:14] And Jefferson wants a smaller federal government with more power given to the states. And he is our first Democratic president even though he was called, sorry again, a Republican. But pretty quickly, the name gets changed by his opponents, funnily enough.

Heather Wagner: [00:04:30] His critics said that he and his supporters were too much like the radical French. Who had sparked the French Revolution and led to bloodshed and violence in France. And as a critique they would call this group of Republicans The "Democratic Republicans." It was meant to be a dis. Jefferson and his supporters decided to adopt [00:05:00] this points of honor and called themselves the "Democratic Republicans".

Nick Capodice: [00:05:05] And this was the founding of what we know today as the Democratic Party.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:09] And how are their beliefs related to what we think of now when we think of Democrats?

Nick Capodice: [00:05:14] Okay, here is Keneshia Grant. She is a professor of political science at Howard University.

Keneshia Grant: [00:05:18] So when we think about the Democratic Party at that time, we don't think of anything like the Democratic Party at this time. The Democratic Party at that time is "liberal with a lower case L", as scholars say. And that means that they don't want to see the government being very active. The government should not be involved in your life telling you what to do. The government should just kind of be around to make sure that things don't fall apart. Which is different from the party as we think about it today. We think about a Democratic Party today as one who is willing to step in to try to correct some of the perceived wrongs, they they might say, in the economy. Or some of the perceived wrongs in the way that we treat humans [00:06:00] and these other kinds of things.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:02] How does it change? Because that to me is like 180 degrees.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:07] All right, we'll get there. And that is Keneshia's particular bailiwick. But first, there is a big shift and it starts with Andrew Jackson in 1829.

Heather Wagner: [00:06:16] By the time Andrew Jackson is president he has dropped the Republicans from his affiliation. So he identifies himself as a Democratic candidate. Andrew Jackson was the Southerner. He was a slave owner. He was a war hero. He champions- even though he was a wealthy landowner- he championed the idea of sort of the "ordinary man" "common man" around... his presidency was when white men, I should say, were given the right to vote based on age. As opposed to if you had property or paid a certain amount in... in landowning taxes. So it was the evolution [00:07:00] of voting rights towards white men over the age of 21 as opposed to landowners.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:06] Quick side note, opponents of Jackson, during the 1828 election, called him a word that means donkey... but it was an epithet that Jackson embraced. He even put images of donkeys on his campaign posters- and that is when that all started. And the party that went up against Jackson was the National Republican Party. But they were just as often known as the anti-Jacksonians. They did not like what Jackson had done to the role of president.

Heather Wagner: [00:07:33] He took steps to concentrate power and to make sure that he was a very powerful executive. He had taken certain policies that really infringed on the rights of Native Americans and the rights states. And this sort of sowed the seeds of what would gradually flare up into the start of the modern Republican Party. And also, the disagreements [00:08:00] that flared out into the Civil War.

Keneshia Grant: [00:08:04] So remember the- part of the story is that the parties want to maintain cohesion. They understand that is difficult for minor parties, third parties, or smaller parties to win the presidency. It's difficult for them to win Senate seats, or seats in the House of Representatives, and be appointed to Senate seats. And because they are worried about splitting their power they are trying to do everything they can to... to remain together. And one of the things that splits them up more than anything else, kind of- I would say the thing that stresses the party the most- is a conversation about slavery. And if we want to have a party that is unified in the north and in the south we can't have this conversation about slavery because people in the north are going to disagree from people in the South. So we end up with these parties that exist in different ways because the one thing that they probably [00:09:00] should be talking about they are not talking about. So we end up with these cleavages, kind of, for that reason- where we have a northern Democratic Party that looks different from a southern Democratic Party. But eventually they do have that conversation. And we end up with a Republican Party that's more dominant in the north, because they have had the conversation and come down on the side of black people. Come down against slavery- for various reasons, again, not all of them on the up and up- set up where we have a party, again Republican Party in the north. A Democratic Party that's kind of dominant in the south. And then we have some kind of debate about who's going to win the west, and what the farmers want, and whether or not the parties will be willing to bend to the demands of the people, who are in the West, and who now have the ability to vote and influence politics too.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:47] All right. Now I want to learn about that shift. How does the party that is the party of slavery, the party of the Ku Klux Klan, become the party of the civil [00:10:00] rights movement? The party that gives us our first African-American president?

Keneshia Grant: [00:10:05] So if you want to sound really smart with your friends, if you like know a political scientist and you want to get their gears going, you just say "re-alignment". Because that... that is the one word answer to that question. Realignment happens and the parties change. And so the political scientists argue about how realignment happens. I'm in the camp of people who think realignment is a slow and gradual process. The short version is that America changes. So in the story that we've been telling up to this point there are folks who live in the south, there are folks who live in the north. We don't yet have like a large wave of immigrants coming into the United States. So we get an industrial revolution and we get a world war. We get immigrants coming into the United States and we don't yet in the nation have rules that are structured to prevent them from participating, in the ways that we try to prevent them from participating now. And so it's kind of easier [00:11:00] to get to citizenship, easier to get to participation in politics. And so, a part of the answer about how the Democratic Party in particular becomes the party of the people, as opposed to the party of the slave owners or the party of Southern business interest, has to do with their decisions to or attempts to win elections. Particularly, I would say, at the state and local level and to to speak to the needs of immigrants.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:29] Now I do want to step in here and say that the North and the South are not just one unified thing, that's unfair. There were people who opposed slavery in the South. People who supported it in the north. Whites only signs. Other forms of segregation in schools, businesses, housing.Those existed in the North as well as the South. And as Keneshia told me, African-American voters are a huge part of the story.

Keneshia Grant: [00:11:52] It's not just immigrants who are flooding into the cities, black people are flooding into the cities. The Great Migration brings about [00:12:00] 6,500,000 black people from the south into the north. And parties on the ground, local party leaders, mayors, aldermen, governors have to contend with how they might get this bloc of voters to support them as well. Which makes them takes, kind of, steps towards civil rights that they might not otherwise take.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:22] And then we have the Great Depression in the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his party, the Democrats, said "People are suffering. We need to do something." And what they did was the New Deal, relief reform, recovery.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: [00:12:39] This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms-

Nick Capodice: [00:12:42] What this did was further cement the notion that the Democratic Party is the party of big government spending on domestic programs and social welfare programs. But the civil rights movement that initially was more allied by geography than [00:13:00] by party. Almost 100% of northern Democrats in Congress supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But, so too did 85 percent of northern Republicans. Just 9% percent of Southern Dems and 0 Southern Republicans supported it in Congress. So here's Paddy Riley. He's a professor of history and humanities at Reed College.

Paddy Riley: [00:13:19] But I mean I think the key thing is that the Democratic Party...is just no longer become possible for Southern white supremacist to remain in the party because the because the national party has moved so hard on civil rights. I mean that's Johnson's-  Lyndon Johnson's famous line, "We lost the South for a generation". And it turns out to be true, a generation and more at this point. So I think effectively the South kind of becomes up for grabs. Because they're not going to remain in the Democratic Party. So is someone going to capitalize on them? And Republicans do. I mean, that's just what happens.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:54] I don't want to sound cynical here.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:56] Go ahead. Go ahead.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:56] But it just kind of sounds like a big part of the reason [00:14:00] that the Democrats completely reversed their positions on just about everything was not purely because of ideals, but to court voters?

Keneshia Grant: [00:14:13] Well, I mean, I'm a political scientist so I think everything is about political strategy, political expediency. But yes, I think that one of the kind of biggest broadest ways of understanding party history is that parties are trying to- one- maintain themselves. And then parties as groups who are willing to court coalitions in order to keep or maintain power. "Black people are here. They want to have some kind of intervention on civil rights. We're not opposed to that. That seems like it could be okay for us. We think that they would help us win these local and state elections. We think that because they live in these states with large electoral college votes they could help us win the presidential election. Let's test out a coalition between [00:15:00] black people and the Democratic Party." So it's the same kind of thing, parties kind of moving and shapeshifting as they encounter groups so that they can maintain dominance.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:16] So thinking about like the party today versus the party then, there's a lot of arguing going on on social media about the problematic history of both parties. Right? And I'm just wondering, like, given how different the parties are today- from how they were at their genesis- is that even fair to do?

Nick Capodice: [00:15:36] Yeah. People taking the Democratic Party to task for being the party of the KKK. I asked Paddy about that specifically.

Paddy Riley: [00:15:42] That accusation, in some sense, it seems like it has power partly because maybe we are just not open and public enough about just how deep and powerful the history of white supremacy is in the United States. You know, it shouldn't be possible for us to continue to, like, romanticize the past. So, [00:16:00] you know, those accusations seem to have power just because we need to be more open.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:08] So finally, with all that history under our belt, I ask Keneshia about the party going forward. If she thinks there might be another realignment?

Keneshia Grant: [00:16:16] The Democratic Party is a big tent party. Keep these coalitions in mind. The Democratic Party has to please immigrants, black people, gay people, progressive white people. Like- business interest for some people... like people- just so many groups of people they have to be worried about. When you think about the Democratic Party or any party, particularly in a national election, they have to get in a room and fight it out. A party platforms only so long and, you know, not everybody's gonna read it. But it matters a lot to the party and it matters a lot to the messaging of the party. And so how do I say, "I really care about [00:17:00] urban development and I really don't like displacement of people as a result of gentrification"? In some instances that stuff is going to be in conflict. And so the Democratic Party has this difficult road to travel, because they have to please all these different groups of people and these different groups of people have different interests.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:22] So the Democratic Party has come a long way. Changing names, switching positions on the way to the blue party we think of today. And that's the thing. These parties are always changing. So it's really hard to say what a Democrat is because there's not one answer and it depends on a ton of other things. And you can still see that push and pull of this big tent, that Keneshia mentioned, in the huge pool of Democratic candidates in the 2020 race.

Andrew Yang: [00:17:50] So, we need to pay teachers more because the data clearly shows that a good teachers-

[00:17:53] -public colleges, and universities, and HBCU's debt free-.

Elizabeth Warren: [00:17:57] I think I'm the only [00:18:00] person on the stage who has been a public school teachers-

[00:18:01] {montage of candidates}

Nick Capodice: [00:18:19] Well that will just about tie it all up in a big blue bow or a red bow maybe if it's pre the 1992 election. Today's episode is produced by me, Nick Capodice, with you Hannah McCarthy. Thank you!

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:30] You're welcome. Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton. Erika Janik is our executive producer and her cut of the week, lots of stuff about a national bank. Thanks, Erika.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:40] When it comes to salting her food, Maureen McMurray is liberal with the small L, as scholars say.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:44] Music in this episode by Chad Crouch, Blue-Dog Sessions, Diala, The Grand Affair, Reed Mathis.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:50] And it wouldn't be a Nick Capodice  episode without Worth the whiskey, Chris Zabriskie.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:56] Civics 101 is made possible in part by the Corporation [00:19:00] for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.