Campbell Conversations

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. The program you're about to hear was intended to be a debate between two candidates, but today my guest is Kailee Buller, who is the Republican challenging the Democrat John Mannion in New York's 22nd congressional district. We extended the same debate invitation to both campaigns. Our longstanding practice made clear that both campaigns in the invitation is that if only one candidate accepts our invitation, we will go forward with an interview of that candidate. And unfortunately, Congressman Mannion declined. The 22nd district contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland, and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica, and Auburn. Ms. Buller, welcome back to the program. And I just want to say at the beginning, I appreciate your willingness to engage in a debate. I'm sorry that we couldn't do that, but I am glad that you are here to talk with me. Let me just start by giving you a chance for the benefit of those who may not have caught my previous interview with you a few months ago, if you could very briefly just reintroduce yourself to our listeners.

Kailee Buller: Well, thank you for having me. And this is the kind of leader that I'm going to be. I want to be open to all invitations and have conversations with people of all different beliefs. So, my name is Kailee Buller, running for Congress, New York 22, Republican conservative candidate for Congress, grew up blue collar, dad's a prison guard, mom's a nurse. Went away to college, worked hard, was saddled in student loan debt, and there weren't a lot of jobs here in the Syracuse area when I graduated in 2011. So, I went to DC, didn't have any money, and just worked really hard. I became a CEO. I've been a lobbyist. I've worked for President Trump and the Trump administration, and I've gotten a lot of things done in a bipartisan manner with members of Congress and when the Biden administration and the Obama administration were in. And so I've seen how things work in DC, and we've been left behind in central New York, so I'm ready to fight for central New York. My family never left. I've come back my whole career, and I moved my family back in February to run for this seat and I'm proud to be here. And as I talk to constituents, I feel very needed and I feel like I'm in the right place.

GR: Well, thank you, I appreciate that. So let me get into the questions then. You've made a lot of criticisms of the incumbent, John Mannion. What do you think, if you had to choose, are the three most important ones? You know, the three most important reasons that voters should choose you over the incumbent?

KB: I mean, we are struggling more here in this part, this area of New York, in this part of the country than more than any other place in the entire country and a lot of that is for broken tax and energy policies. And a lot of these policies are things that John Mannion spearheaded and voted for when he was in the state Senate and then went to Congress and really didn't do anything about those things. So, number one, he voted for increased taxes while he was a state senator. We have the highest tax in the whole country. Number two, when he was in Congress, he voted against the tax cuts. He voted no on no tax on tips, no on no tax on overtime, no on no tax and Social Security, no on the child care tax credit, and then he says he's an affordability guy. When he was in the state Senate, he voted to ban gas stoves, he voted to ban gas cars. He's been a proponent of the renewable energy endeavor that we're on. And listen, I'm all for all of the above energy, but we don't have that here in New York. And if you're a true affordability candidate, and if you're looking to help the citizens of New York right now, they are struggling with their energy bills, extremely. And Congressman Mannion hasn't done anything but just add his name to a bill a week ago that got introduced a year ago that has no chance of passing. And so, I'm someone who is very action oriented. And John Mannion likes to complain and he says he's a moderate. His voting record is more aligned with AOC, 98% Democrat. So, I would say the crisis that we're in in New York State is in part thanks to John Mannion's voting record and the things that he believes. And he really needs to open up and get away from the partisanship and talk to people where they are and understand that we have to compromise. We need to start drilling here, we need to start opening up nuclear quicker. All these things need to happen to broaden our options and lower our costs.

GR: So I want to pick up on that affordability theme that you just brought up, because that is, been, at least as far as I can tell, one of the main themes of your messaging more generally that Mannion has made this affordability problem worse and not better. What would you be advocating in that regard that would actually help? I'm gathering from what you just said, that some tax relief would be part of that expanded energy development as you say on all fronts. But tell us a little bit more about how you would attack the affordability problem.

KB: Sure. And I've laid out my five point plan, I'm a very policy heavy person and I know what needs to happen. I laid all that out in April very transparently on my website, and now we're on the trail talking about it. But number one, as the highest taxed state in the nation, I'll never support a tax increase, period, full stop. We have a spending problem, not a tax problem. More taxes is not equaling better services. We have some of the poorest people in the whole country that I've ever seen, our homeless population is through the roof. Number two, on the energy side of the house, I support fast tracking state, local and federal nuclear. I support building the Constitution pipeline, which Kathy Hochul and John Mannion have refused to do. We could open up a lot of union jobs, and we could actually be drilling our own energy here. We're sitting on a very lucrative, the Marcellus Shale here right now. Pennsylvania is run by a Democrat governor and a Democrat House and they have wind, they have solar, they have nuclear, they have hydro, and they are fracking and they are drilling, and we are buying 86% of our natural gas from Pennsylvania. Please explain to me how a Democrat governor is making this work. It's not Democrat or Republican, we have the wrong Democrats in office serving us. They're not serving us, they're serving some larger political pet project and we need to take a step back and look at other states, red or blue, who are doing this better than us. Pennsylvania is one of the biggest states that we are losing migration to, not outward migration, Pennsylvania and Florida are two of the highest ones. Democrat state. We have the wrong Democrats in who aren't thinking about all of us.

GR: That's interesting. I knew about Florida. I wouldn't have guessed Pennsylvania, but, well, there's a long border there. Let me ask you this, and this is a question that kind of comes out of the problem of spending and taxing, it's about the national debt. And this is something I have been thinking about a lot, both as a political scientist and as a citizen. The national debt relative to the size of our economy is now rivaling what it was in World War Two. This is a bipartisan thing. Obama saw it go up, Biden saw it go up, but so did Bush 43 and Donald Trump has presided over this as well. Now, you say you wouldn't consider a tax increase, full stop, because of the situation that New Yorkers face being in either the or one of the highest taxed states in the country. But I don't see how we're going to get out of that national debt problem without something on the revenue side, at the national level anyway. Could you just talk more about how you think we could get our hands around this national debt problem, without raising taxes apparently?

KB: The national debt is one thing that makes me sick. We are over $40 trillion, and I started out as a tax and fiscal analyst back in 2010 - 2011. And when that happened, we were talking about how Social Security is going to become insolvent. And now we're among that time frame. About 2032, everyone on Social Security is going to get an 18% to 22% haircut unless people in Congress have a fix. And so, there is a lot at stake with our national debt. And I think a lot of people are like, oh, you know, someone else can deal with it, but this is now our kids’ and our grandkids’ problem and we have to have good people in Congress who understand how to balance a checkbook. I have to balance our checkbook every, you know, month with my husband, the government should too. And there's so much that needs to happen here. So, it's going to take a lot of different ideas. It's going to take a commission to figure a lot of these things out, but it needs to be people on both sides of the aisle who actually understand tax and fiscal policy when it comes to Social Security, for instance, everyone who's paid into it has to have it. But my kids, we have to reform the program for people. My kids are six, three and two, I'm a mom, 37, three young kids, and this is not sustainable. And people aren't having kids at the level that they were when these programs were, and people are living longer. So, when these programs were made, they were well-intentioned, but we have to acknowledge they're not working for how far we've come as a society. It's great that people are living longer, it's great that people have control over how many kids they want to have, if at all, but that's putting us in a vulnerable situation. And this is one thing I very much disagree with the Trump administration on, and I'm endorsed by the president, I've worked for the president, but I don't like how we’re deficit spending at all. And it's been a criticism when I was in there in the first term and in the second term, and someone has to come in and get this together, and there has to be leadership at the presidential level. And, you know, we can make some ground on some of the waste, fraud and abuse, and I commend the administration, they've done that, but we can't get there with just waste fraud and abuse, and I understand that, I understand the numbers. So, I can't tell you today the exact way to approach it, because I alone would never be able to fix this, but it would have to be a group of 10, 12, 20 of us who actually understand this and want to get the right solution. Because when you negotiate, someone is always going to give up a concession and someone is always going to, you know, it's give and take. No side comes away with a perfect win.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Kailee Buller, the Republican who's running for Congress in New York's 22nd district. I just want to say I appreciate what you put in at the end that waste, fraud and abuse cutting is not going to get us all the way there. I think too often people hide behind that, so I appreciate what you're saying on that. Let me just follow up and say then what I'm hearing from you is that you are willing to, through a bipartisan process with a commission reminiscent perhaps, of the one during the Reagan administration looking at Social Security, and I believe the late Senator Pat Moynihan was part of that, to take a serious look at Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Do I have that right?

KB: Yeah. I mean, listen, the deficit spending isn't just happening on only those programs. Those are the biggest ones, obviously, but then you look at, you know, the wars that we find ourselves in, I'm not supportive of the Iran war, I've been very vocal about that. I grew up during Iraq and Afghanistan, and I don't want to see boots on the ground, and there's a lot of money being spent on a lot of these wars. And, you know, I think all of us want peace through strength, and we want to take care of America first. A lot, especially a lot of people in the younger generation. They're like, people are struggling here in America, we have to take care of America, and that's true, too. And two things are true at once but we're spending a lot of money on a lot of different things. And we need a full audit, and that's the other reason, I believe, that we should have fully transparent expenses at all levels of government. And Auburn is a microcosm where I live, I can't see the line by line breakdown of what they're spending money on and the same thing goes at the federal level. These are all of our taxpayer dollars, and we should understand where they're going. We're a generous population, I'm a generous person, I want to help those who need it. But it's gotten extreme when you see all of this, these different levels of fraud and people spending our money and not really thinking about the ramifications of it.

GR: So, I want to ask you a question now about immigration policy. We haven't talked about that yet. It's been extremely controversial in the second Trump administration, not only across the nation, but right here and this area of central New York as well. We could have talked for the whole program on that and s till not finish the topic, but I want to just give you a chance to sketch out in broad terms, what kind of immigration policy you would like to see going forward, and in particular, what kind might you be able to imagine getting through Congress as a compromise?

KB: Yeah. So right now, the current laws on the books, which are extremely broken, are the ones are which are being enforced by the president. Congress has failed us on immigration reform time and time again for at least over a decade. I've been working on immigration reform when I was in the industry for grocery and the snack food industry, a lot of those facilities, stores, manufacturing were like, rely on immigrants. And so I understand the H-2A program very well. That's the program that farmers use and it works well for apple picking and berry picking, but it does not work well for dairy and meat because you have to milk a cow and you slaughter, you know, cattle 365 days a year, whereas apples and berries that season is short and so the H-2A labor works there. So, number one, in terms of the confines of a policy that can work, and this is again, a negotiation, number one, we have to have the border secure in law because right now the president has secured the border, but another president, Democrat or Republican, can come in and open it back up. We need to secure the border in law. Number two, any illegal immigrant here that is a criminal needs to get out. That's rape, that's molestation, that's pedophile, you know, we don't want them in their country if they're not contributing. Number three, the H-2A program needs to be fixed and expanded so dairy and meat can be allowed there. And number four, we're a compassionate population, we, and I recognize there are people who came here for the right reasons under the wrong circumstances, who've been here for many years, and they've contributed to our economy and they're admirable neighbors. And in that case, we need to find some kind of way to make them part of our community. They came here for the right reasons for the wrong circumstances, but we also need to make sure those who've waited the right way come first, and then the people who came here the wrong way, but are still good people come second. So, there's a way to do that with the right people at the table. I've worked on this issue long enough to understand that, and I think that the president could even get behind something like this if we had a bipartisan situation in this coming term. And when I'm elected, this will be one of the key priorities I want to work on, because I understand it and I think everyone automatically assumes, oh, Republicans, they, you know, hate this and that, but that's just not true. We're talking about people here, right? These are people, these are humans.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Kailee Buller. She's the Republican candidate for Congress in this November's elections and she's challenging Democrat John Mannion in New York's 22nd Congressional district. I wanted to follow up on the immigration issue, which we were talking about before the break, and ask if I understand something about what you said correctly. Right now, the illegal crossings into the United States or crossings in general, have really plummeted.

KB: They're gone, they're done. Zero, I've seen zero numbers, but…

GR: You've seen zero, okay, well I know they're way, way down. So can I take from that and what you said prior to the break as an indication that you going forward then would not necessarily see the need for the kind of activity that we are seeing by ICE in the different communities right now?

KB: Yeah, I mean, if you get this right and federal law and actually do it right, you wouldn't need the same level of probably ICE enforcement. And listen, ICE hasn't been perfect, they've got some things wrong and we've all seen it, you know, play out and it's horrific. None of us would condone some of the things that have happened. But there is a place for ICE. I don't support abolishing ICE. I don't support abolishing prisons. I don't support defunding the police. Like, those are irrational things. And also, I mean, we have to make sure that our, you know, prison guards, our police and our ICE agents are trained properly. A lot of these things come down to failure of training, right? So, but I believe that if we got an immigration law right, that this would be less of a situation.

GR: Well, and to your point and a question for you, the ICE initiative was stood up rather quickly, I think after January 20th. Would you not agree?

KB: I mean, yeah, listen, I ran a $200 billion, 100,000 person department at any one time if you're doing anything that quick with a huge workforce, like, things are going to go wrong and I'm not, no means defending anyone that did anything wrong, because there's absolute missteps and there's been tragedy. But sure, I mean, sometimes when you move, sometimes when you move too slow, you miss opportunities, sometimes you move too quick, you make mistakes, right? And that's just life right now.

GR: So let me ask you a question that has been getting a lot of attention in the media just this week, and it is President Trump's recent television spot, I assume that you have seen this or read of it. It was made with tax dollars, it says that right at the end of the, I think it's a 30 second spot. It's very dark, it's very ominous. He's talking about the deep state, globalists, communists and so on. What do you think of this kind of communication coming from the president?

KB: I mean, listen, the president has a lot of innovative ways to communicate, I've seen it in person. I think that he's really flipping the script on what it means to communicate. I mean, look, listen, what he did with Twitter in the first one, we've never seen that happen ever, right? So he's doing things that are different. But the president has witnessed a lot of things in his experience and a lot of those things we don't even know because they're top secret and they're behind closed doors. But I can tell you when it comes to communism, at least, is part of what you asked, I mean, I'm really nervous about a lot of, especially the youth being much more open to socialism and communism because, you know, I was a political science and history person, and I know you are too and I'd love to have a greater conversation on this and get your views. And you, you're teaching the youth, so I would love to hear where their opinions are, but, and I talk to a lot of them every day, and a lot of them have grown up in a very inherently, place where the system has screwed them, right? Like, Democrats and Republicans they’re buried in student loans. They can't find jobs that are aligned with their circumstances, especially in this area. People that I know, people that I went to college and high school with, and they've turned to drugs or they're waitressing and they're trying to pay their loans off. And so, the system, in a lot of ways, has failed them, and so those are a lot of the people that are looking to socialism and saying, well, why shouldn't we do that? Because, you know, the current system is not working, let's try something new. And I don't blame them for being interested in a different system. But when I look at history and around the world, first is high taxes and it's take your property, then it's take your freedoms, and that is really how we've seen socialism play out around the world. So I, as a 37 year old mom of three, I'm not interested in exploring socialism. I'm interested in giving people back more of their money and doing more of what they want with it, not taking more and then distributing it how we want to. And so, I think that's a real conversation that we need to have. We need to embrace the young people who want that and learn from them and understand, like, why are they gravitating toward that? What does that mean? Because I think there's a lot of people in politics who just want to say no, but it's like we need to talk to them and understand why they got there. And I can kind of understand it, I got lucky. I was in debt, I went and left and paid it all off and now I'm back trying to help other people who are in the circumstance I was in. But people who stayed here, they didn't have the same opportunity I did, and I want to change that. So, to your point on the commercial, you know, I don't really have an opinion on it. I just think that Trump is changing the way we communicate, for better or for worse and that's what it is and I'm going to focus on the issues that matter to central New York. And no one's asked me about that commercial but you frankly, so, which is interesting.

GR: (laughter) Okay, all right. Well, if you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Republican congressional candidate Kailee Buller. So, you talked a little bit about this earlier, but, if you win, it’s going to be extremely likely, at least in my opinion, that you’ll be joining a minority caucus, that’s what all the polling figures seem to suggest. Tell us more about your strategies you’ll have to be effective being in the minority. You already mentioned, you know, you’re going to be looking to reach across the aisle, but give us a little more detail about how you’re going to approach that.

KB: Well, first, just as a reminder, because I know a lot of people think that I have no chance of winning this race and I want to just dispel that because this district is 35% Democrat, 32% Republican and conservative and 29% Independent and I talk to people every day who are so fed up and they want change. And part of the reason I came into this is because I've watched my family and friends suffer, and I've seen how other states do such a better job than we do here in New York in taking care of their people and giving them more opportunities. And so, part of the reason I want to do this, I want to show that even though I'm a Republican, even though I've worked in the Trump administration, there are really good Republicans out there who actually are well intentioned to actually want to work across the aisle and my career shows that. I was a lobbyist during the Obama administration, and I got the healthy food financing across the line. I was the only Republican lobbying this issue, and it was a bipartisan issue that the president signed into law for the Farm Bill, and I got that done. I lobbied Democrats and Republicans and it won by one vote in the Ag Committee and then it passed and it was signed into law. That's the first big thing that I did. In the Obama administration, I did a ton of things with biofuels. I worked with the Obama administration on a day-to-day basis on biofuels and on renewable energy issues. And that's why I say I'm not opposed to renewable energy, I actually have worked on it. So I actually have a real experience. And then when I worked inside the Trump administration, I worked with Democrats every single day that would be frustrated or they had questions. And, you know, Rosa DeLauro and Amy Klobuchar and, you know, the Pennsylvania, Fetterman, I mean, they would reach out all the time and we'd have great conversations. We didn't let it play out in the media, no one even knew we were talking but we would just, like, be helpful and have good conversation. So that's the kind of leader I'm going to be. I want to work with anyone who is well intentioned, wants to work with me. What I've seen happen in the political process is everyone just criticizes each other and my opponent does this constantly. Trump did this, Trump did that, okay, what solution do you have to fix it? I don't like just complaining, I like having a solution. Like, my team sometimes gets annoyed with me because I'm like, I don't know what my position is on that yet, I'm not going to go out and say that until I start figuring it out and rolling out exactly what I think we could actually do. I know how the process works, I know what's viable and what can't be done. I think a lot of political people get into this and say, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that and a lot of them don't know it's not possible. I know what's possible in DC and what's not in a minority, you know, and when a president is a Democrat, again, I will work with that person, just like I'm going to work with this president. I think we've all gotten so hung up in the political party, and I want to kind of knock that down and show people that the new next generation of leaders is different.
GR: You know, j
ust for our listeners who may not be familiar, the three names you mentioned there, I was struck by DeLauro.

KB: I love her.

GR: The two of you are a little ways apart politically.

KB: I love her.

GR: Yeah, interesting, very interesting. Let me ask you this…

KB: She's extremely liberal.

GR: I know, that's why I'm asking.

KB: And I love her. And honestly, like AOC, if we have ideas we can work on together, like, I will work with anyone who wants to work together.

GR: Okay, fair enough, glad to hear it. So, let me ask the question then this way, if you're elected, and by the way, I want to make it clear both to you and our listeners, I have not seen a poll on your race, my comment was about the likely composition of the House of Representatives.

KB: Yeah, I understand.

GR: Okay. If you're elected, what former member of Congress from this district, if any, meaning, I don't mean the 22nd by number, I mean, you know…

KB: The area, because it’s changed so much.

GR: Yeah, it’s changed, yeah, the district that's centered around the city of Syracuse. Is there one that you would most closely resemble? People who can remember them, can look back and say, okay, she's saying she would be most like…?

KB: I mean, certainly John Katko comes to mind, but I've talked with every one of the members. I've talked with Ann Marie Buerkle, I've talked with Brandon Williams, I’ve talked with Katko, I've talked with Walsh, like, I’ve really wanted to dig in. And I love hearing people's feedback and advice and that I make my own assumptions and then I kind of make my decisions, but they've all been tremendously helpful and very thoughtful and have had really good guidance for me. So, I want to bring that statesmanship back to central New York. This is still a moderate district, even though the Dems slightly outrank the Republicans here. And in my opinion, Kathy Hochul and John Mannion are too radical for where the state and where this area needs to be. And that's what frustrates me and part of the reason I want to run, because I watched John Mannion get elected and he was moderate and I'm like, he's likable, I think he'll be good for the district. Dan Maffei was here, he wasn't terrible, right? Like, he's a really smart guy, he was a Democrat, like, this area can go back and forth, but John Mannion's voting record and what he says are two very different things. And for me, I want to come out and say, I voted for this because X, instead he votes and just like hopes you're not watching, and that's not a statesman. And Katko was and Walsh was and even Brandon was and Ann Marie.

GR: So, let's broaden this and say, what living American politician right now do you most admire and why?

KB: Mike Lawler has been someone who's been really helpful to me and how he's been able to navigate (unintelligible) he has 100,000 more Democrats. He and I are both very moderate and we're both, he's 40, I'm 37, he has young kids, I have young kids. So, he is someone that I look up to, and I also call for advice because we're just pragmatic. We're different, we fight back when it's right, but we, you know, make deals and we'll talk and work with anyone. And he's one of the most bipartisan members of Congress. So right now, in this moment, I would say Mike Lawler.

GR: All right. Well, we've got about a minute and a half or so left, and I wanted to leave you a little bit of time at the end to talk about any issue that I haven't asked you about, that you want our listeners to know that you'll be paying a lot of attention to if you win, because we talked about immigration, you know, we talked about affordability. Is there something else out there that you want to make sure they hear?

KB: Well, I think when it comes to good governance, listen, I signed a term limit pledge. I believe strongly in term limits. And we talked about this a little bit, but I've been a lobbyist and I see how corrupt things can get when you know, people are in for too long. So, I believe the House and Senate need to enact term limits. You get and you get out, you make a difference, and then let the next person come in and have their legacy. Like, this business of staying in until you die and you're in for years and years and years, it's not appropriate. And then I also think the gerrymandering that's happened around this country, I hate it. In New York, it's Democrat, but other states have done it Republican, and it's caused our nation to become more partisan because every cycle people have to double down and become more Republican or more Democrat to align with their new gerrymandered district. My dad lives on a street, half the street is Auburn School District, half it's Skaneateles school district. We should not be dividing streets, counties, neighborhoods and schools. It's just wrong and it's for political purposes, I don't like that. And then the other thing I will say is, I want to show everyone that I am the next generation of leader. I want to be transparent. I want to have the difficult conversations. I want to have the town halls. And that's another reason it's so disappointing that, you know, my opponent doesn't want to have live debates, he doesn't want to have open questions. He, you know, doesn't want voter ID, but he wants ID to come into his town halls. If people want to talk to me, I want to talk to them. I meet random constituents all the time. I go up to people all the time. If I'm going to represent you, I want to hear the good, the bad, and I want to represent everybody. And I learn a lot. I mean, I've been spending a lot of time at the homeless shelters and in Section 8 and I just want folks to know that I am here to give back and use my experience to make better change here and make this a place my kids can stay, your kids can stay if they want to. I didn't have that choice. And so, I think we need someone like me to do that.

GR: We'll have to leave it there. That was Kailee Buller. Ms. Buller, again, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

KB: Thank you. That went so quick, how fun. I appreciate your time and having me, thank you.

GR: It always does. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the "Campbell Conversations." I'm Grant Reeher. Most of us are familiar with the basic story of the women’s struggle to earn the right to vote, but what about the right to hold elective office? My guest today is Wendy Chmielewski. For over 30 years, she served as the curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, and she's now the coauthor, with Jill Norgren, of a new book titled, "Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States." Ms. Chmielewski, welcome to the program.

Wendy Chmielewski: Thank you, it’s an honor to be here.

GR: Well, it's a pleasure to have you and an honor, and I want to just congratulate you on this book. It's a lot of things I really was unaware of, and I'm a political scientist, so I'm a little embarrassed to say that, but it's great that you wrote the book. Let me just start with a basic question that your book deals with and it's this, why did the struggle for women holding elected office follow a different, specific path in the struggle for suffrage to get the right to vote?

WC: Well, as we know, the right to vote, the qualifications for the right to vote, at least in the first half to three quarters of the 19th century were completely set by the States. So in some cases, states allowed women to run for office even if they couldn't vote. That's the sort of the legal legislative answer. The sort of social and cultural answer is that a lot of the first offices that women ran for and were elected to had to do with education in schools and socially, women were seen as nurturing the first educators of children. Teachers were, by the halfway point of the 19th century, beginning to be the majority of teachers. And so, a lot of legislators, voters, who were mostly men at the time, saw women who could run for education offices. And so that was some of the first ones they campaigned for successfully, though not all, but some of them.

GR: That's interesting, because I am more familiar with later parts of the story for women’s path into elective office and the school board still factors quite heavily on those as a springboard.

WC: Yes.

GR: Yeah, that's interesting. So, one question that occurred to me as I was thinking about this is, there are specific restrictions on federal elected office. You know, you have age, and for the president, you have, you know, being born in the United States or in a U.S. territory. And so, but the Constitution didn't really have that kind of specific language about voting being just for men, right?

WC: Yes, correct.

GR: Why was it left to the States?

WC: I really don't know. I think that at the time that the Constitution was written before many of the amendments, I don't think that anybody thought, a few people thought that women and non-property holders would have the right to vote. You know, most voters were property holders in the early years, and nobody thought that women would want to be, could be property holders of course, because married women had no legal identity and could not own property in their own names. That changed, of course. So, but of course, women did vote in New Jersey until 1807, and they actually could vote, I think, until 1809, in town meetings in Massachusetts. Again, property holders, just like men.

GR: That's fascinating, I didn't know that. So, I wanted to keep with this sort of juxtaposing struggles for the right to vote and changes from the right to vote with holding elected office and then we'll get more specifically into elected office. One of the arguments against women voting when this became, you know, more of a national issue, once the movement began, was that women would just replicate their husbands’ votes. You know, so why give them a vote? Was there anything similar claimed about women as office holders? It sounds like you're saying almost it's the opposite, is that women have a special kind of background that helps them.

WC: I mean, there certainly were cases where we've seen men elected to a local office, say, the town council or mayor, and then women suddenly appearing, their wives I should say, wives suddenly appearing on the school board for example, or even some of the other local offices. And some women were in the hired position of deputy, let's say, county clerk. That was not, I don't think we've come across any state where that was an elected position, they were hired or appointed, and sometimes women who filled those offices were a relative of, let's say, the county clerk. The argument, I haven't seen so much of that argument that women would replicate their husbands. We have seen some cases where political party officials have recommended a woman for a particular position because she was a widow, she needed the money. So that's not quite the same thing as what you're asking, though. And it doesn't always work, you know, it depends. There's so much about local politics in this, depending on the party and the state and who's, you know, which main party or even third party is in power in a particular time and in a particular place. And so sometimes women, if they’re party regulars, get swept in on the sort of, the rest of the party, though, again, that's not always true, but it can happen.

GR: So you mentioned the widow's being put in office because they needed the money. And of course, the tradition of a widow taking her husband's place, an elected, that's still with us today, I mean, Lindsey Graham, right? So yeah, that’s very interesting. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Wendy Chmielewski. She's the coauthor of, "Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States." Let's talk more about the early pioneers in the struggle for elected office. You mentioned the number of women who were elected to school related positions. Was there a next wave after that? How'd it play out?

WC: After the first wave, again, I think that if we wanted to sort of think about this in waves, the second grouping in the 1870s were women who ran for an educational offices, school boards, but also county superintendents of schools. And these were women often, sometimes, women who were part of the suffrage or I should say, women's rights movement at this time, sort of a broader movement than women's suffrage only. And some of them were educational professionals, that is, they were teachers who wanted to move up in the administration, and they were very well-paid positions. Women often were paid the same as men because they were, the salary was set by the state or the local, maybe the county in some cases. And so those were, I think, and sometimes they were women who were, they wanted to be political party participants, though that comes more so a little bit later in maybe the 1890s and after that.

GR: Was there pushback against women holding these kinds of offices early on?

WC: Oh, absolutely, yes. Yes. (laughter)

GR: And the concern was what?

WC: I think that the, there were several concerns. One is that women wouldn't stay long in the position because the typical, sort of idea, just as I think we've probably heard this before, that women would get married and leave. And in some states, women couldn't, married women couldn't hold certain positions, usually not the elected ones, but that was true. Also that there were men who thought women shouldn't get involved in politics. Politics were dirty, they were the sink of corruption and something that women shouldn’t get involved in. And also, that meant there were men who didn't want women to be involved because they wanted the offices for themselves. And a lot of these early women, let's say, in the 1870s and before, were running against men, even for positions on the school board or for the county superintendents of schools. In some cases, these school board positions were steps to hire office for men, occasionally for women, but usually for men.

GR: Interesting.

WC: So those were some of the issues.

GR: And then after these women are running for these other offices, you're kind of talking about, you know, second wave, I guess that's more my language. But was there a significant kind of historical inflection point after that where all of a sudden a different set of offices was seen as being okay for women to run for?

WC: Yes, and the examples that we see this mostly is in California and I think, Iowa, I think it was it Iowa. I'm trying to think, I just came across this, I think actually it was Idaho. Anyway, what happened was that women got full suffrage in those states, in 1912 in California, for example. And almost immediately, so once women have the vote for a certain set of offices, including all of the offices after full suffrage is passed, they can run for any office. The idea is that state constitutions say that the qualifications for being elected to office is that you have to be an elector or a voter, and then women become qualified. But what we see in California is that women get shunted into offices on the county level - county clerk, county treasurer, county recorder. And while women do run for the state legislature in California, after I think 1914 is the first time, they don't really get elected in any large numbers for a long time until after 1920 and the passage of the 19th amendment, which is for federal office, right?

GR: Right, right. And I want to bring us up to that time and beyond. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Wendy Chmielewski. She served as a curator at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection and with Jill Norgren, has recently written "Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States." You know, I want to go back a little bit in time with this question, but I was wondering whether Reconstruction in the South following the Civil War might have had an effect on this of a of a racist kind. I mean, the argument would be that, you know, look, if black men could hold elective office in some pretty high levels, then why not women, or at least white women, you know, should be able to do the same thing? I believe that was one of the arguments that was advanced at the time on behalf of women voting, as I recall. So, did that play any kind of role in any of this?

WC: Yes. And I think you have to talk about where in the South, because there were some states in in that region where women did run for office, not immediately after Reconstruction, but later on in the 19th century and early 20th century. For example, in Texas, a woman ran for city clerk. In the 1890s, there had been a state Supreme Court case for some of the county and city offices allowing women and people of color to run for office that basically said the voters would decide, and the assumption was that that voters wouldn't elect women or people of color. But after, the first decade of the 20th century, there were women elected as clerk of the district court. And in some cases, depending on the county in Texas, women were also county recorder, and there were quite a few women who ran for that office. So, it just, it depends on where, states are very different.

GR: Yeah. It's a story of federalism, that’s for sure.

WC: Yes.

GR: So, after women get the right to vote, kind of opens things up it sounds like, but there's still some distance to travel for women when it comes to elected offices.

WC: Yes.

GR: So, when does it become normal or almost normal for women to be running for state legislative office, to be running for Congress, to, you know, maybe even run for governor? When does that become more accepted?

WC: So, again, if we're talking after 1920?

GR: Yeah.

WC: Okay. Because before in places like Colorado it was very ordinary for women to run for the state legislature.

GR: Oh okay.
WC: From the 1890s onward, women in the state gain full suffrage in 1893. And immediately the following year, there were a few women elected to the state legislature, well, the lower house, not the Senate. So, women, you know, sort of did that. Now, if we're talking about other parts of the country where it was less likely, you know, it's, again, there are these women who run for governor, who run for the, I mean, you know, Jeannette Rankin was elected from, republican from Montana, she was elected in 1916 for the U.S. Congress. Alice Robertson from Oklahoma was elected in 1920 to the U.S. Congress, she was anti suffrage, by the way. And, so, you know, almost in the 1920s there were women who ran for governor. I think the, you know, usual, not seen as sort of different, I think the 1950s and 60s and even into the 70s before it becomes a much more usual kind of practice.
GR: And thinking back on all that expanse of time, are there one or two women that really strike you as like the trailblazers? The real kind of, this woman really kind of changed the conversation in an important way that you could point to?
WC: Well, I think Jeannette Rankin definitely, that you know, she was the first, she was a suffrage activist. She was part of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She had campaigned in Washington state before, also then campaigning with other people in Montana where she was elected just a little bit later than the suffrage was passed there. It's sort of hard to say about trailblazing. I think in many ways it was the number of women who, over time were just the full force of the number of women who became symbols and just the, it just became ordinary to see women in some of these elected offices in places like Colorado. By 1900, almost all of the county superintendent schools were women.
GR: Wow, that’s striking. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the "Campbell Conversations" on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is Wendy Chmielewski. She's the coauthor of, "Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States." So, let's fast forward to today.
WC: Okay.
GR: And, what barriers or hurdles do you think are still in place for women who might want to seek office?
WC: I think some of them are the same ones that women faced early on, which is the idea that women aren't as qualified, that they don't necessarily always have as much access to political party hierarchy, and that, of course, there are women today who do. I think that the expectation is that women have domestic responsibilities still, just as they did in the 19th century. The expectation there and that that is something that women always have to contend with. I think that in some ways, some of the cultural ideas today is that women should not be working outside the home. I mean, this is a slightly more extreme position, but unfortunately, it seems that this is something that is gaining some traction again, that women, that there should be something called a household vote and, which means that, and that the head of the household and it's assumed that a husband is the head of the household and there should be one vote coming from that household. 19th century suffragists would have been outraged, and early 20th century women's rights activists as well.
GR: I think probably people in the 21st century as well (laughter)
WC: Right.
GR: So, I wanted to get your take on this, it's a little bit more of a niche-y type of question, but, I work with veterans who are interested in pursuing elected office. We have a program here at the university where I am, and I work pretty closely with it. And one of the things that is clear to me is, and it's true, you know, in recent years, it's bipartisan, both parties seem to be really keen to recruit women veterans to run under their banner. They view that as some kind of special sauce or perfect combination. I just wonder what your thoughts are on that.
WC: I think that women veterans are seen as having succeeded in a man's world, in the military, that they are realistic, perhaps, they've seen the world. These are not necessarily my thoughts, but I think that that is some of the appeal. They served their country and that this is a plus for arguing that they are qualified for the office. And I think that's probably true of male veterans as well. But this is sort of an extra added plus for women because they, this is sort of a worldly experience that they've had rather than maybe coming through community activism or nonprofits or school board. And of course, in the 19th century and the early 20th century after World War one, some of the same sorts of women who were running for office used some of the similar kinds of arguments, that is, they had served overseas as nurses in World War One, or they had a family member who had served and that was their patriotic contribution, or they had worked for the Red cross, for example. And some of the women who are elected in 1918, 1919 and so on, were, part of their appeal was that they would work for Veterans Affairs as well, for soldiers.
GR: Yeah, that's interesting. Well, we've got about 2 minutes or so left, and I definitely wanted to squeeze this last, one last question, and it's a big one. We haven't talked about the elephant in the room yet, and that's a woman president. And just the political scientist in me will note that women have had a lot more success becoming prime ministers through the parliamentary system, working their way up through the legislature than they've had in presidential systems where they have to run for president. I'm just wondering, you know, in a couple minutes or so, I know you could talk much longer about this, but do you think, like, the combination of Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, have they effectively broken that glass ceiling and now it's just a matter of time, or is this still a big thing that needs, a big hurdle that that needs to get jumped over?
WC: For the presidency?
GR: Yeah.
WC: I, well, it's so hard to say. I don't think that they've broken the glass ceiling. I think if they had they would have been elected, one of them or both. And, you know, we have had a woman speaker of the House, but I'm not sure, Nancy Pelosi, but I'm not sure that there's anybody right now sort of in the wings who would be next. And that's certainly not in the Republican Party, I don't see that. You know, it's been a hundred years since women got the right to vote. Now, not all women, of course, but the ratification. And as we note in the book in the sort of conclusion chapter that the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote, but it did not give them the right to run for elected office. And there were court challenges after in the 1920s about that. And in Oklahoma, women couldn't run for governor until the 1940s. So, I don't know, I'm not particularly optimistic at this moment. Perhaps things will change and we will be able to see more women in the highest office. I mean, of course, Kamala Harris was vice president, and that was a great step forward.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Wendy Chmielewski and again with Jill Norgren, her new book is titled, "Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States." Wendy, thanks so much for talking with me. This book teaches us a lot, and it's a lot of stuff that is surprising, so congratulations on it.
WC: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
GR: You've been listening to the "Campbell Conversations" on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Upstate New York is rich with history from the abolitionist movement. My guest today has written a new book about one of its leaders, Frederick Douglass. Dennis Rasmussen is a professor of political science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship, and his new book is titled, "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution." Professor Rasmussen, welcome to the program.

Dennis Rasmussen: Thanks for having me, Grant.

GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with the beginning of your book. You've got a prologue, and you do, I think, a nice job of summarizing the current debate that's going on in the country about how we should regard the founding period and the founders in terms of slavery. And it also illustrates, I think, why what you're writing about is relevant to us today. So, if you could just start, just give us a thumbnail rendering of that debate that's going on today.

DR: Absolutely. So of course, there are lots of books on Douglass, biographies of Douglass. My book mostly looks at his views of the founding and the founders and the Constitution. And so, particularly apt this year, we're all talking about the founding because of the, right, the 250th anniversary we've heard about a thousand times by now. And so, you know, we debate about how we should view the founding and the founders, given their complicity regarding slavery. And I say, well, let's go back to Douglass, he had very thoughtful views on this. But in terms of setting it up for today's camp, right, there's one camp that I loosely associate with what was called the 1776 report that was commissioned by President Trump during his first term, that was a kind of patriotic response to the 1619 project, which I'll mention in a second. But the 1776 view of the founding is that the founders were, you know, maybe not demigods, but good people. Wise, well-intentioned individuals, they managed against very long odds, to establish a successful constitutional republic. And yes, slavery was bad, slavery was a large and of course, lamentable. But it was a temporary aberration that the founding generation did its best to combat. And, you know, when we did combat it through the Civil War and reconstruction and the civil rights movement, we did so using the very principles that the founders articulated. So that's one view, what I call the 1776 view. Then there's a second camp, which you can associate with The New York Times, this 1619 project that says, well, slavery actually made a mockery of these principles. Sure, the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal, we possess inalienable rights. But guess what? At the time, there was something like 600,000 enslaved people spread across every one of the newly independent states. The Constitution, according to this view, has various protections and benefits for slaveholding interests. This allows slavery to expand both demographically and geographically. Slaveholders control much of the American government, national government for the first, you know, seven decades or so. America is the preeminent slave power in the world. Many of the leading founders, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, are slaveholders. So, these founding ideals are just a sort of flimsy cover for the perpetuation of slavery and white supremacy. So those are the two kind of polls, maybe overly drawn, but kind of polls in today's culture wars, I think, about the views of the founding today.

GR: Yeah, it's clear that those are woven into, you mentioned the culture wars, they’re woven into that. So, and then you also write about how Douglass is this towering figure in American history and as you note, he's almost universally celebrated today. It's one of the few things that there's bipartisan agreement on. But you also, I think, give us some good and interesting specific reasons why he is or should be still of interest to us, and tell us some of those.

DR: Sure. So he's, you know, first of all, who he was, right? He escaped from slavery at age 20, he endured slavery himself. He spends then a half century as an author and an orator. He becomes, I think it's fair to say, the leading abolitionist in the country, probably the world at the time, maybe the greatest champion of freedom in American history. And during that time, he's often cast as the spokesman or even the representative embodiment, if you will, of the slaves' position. Views on this question are all the more interesting because he changed his mind radically, right? He spent the first, you know, ten years or so of his career as an abolitionist, holding one view and then the next ten years holding the complete opposite view. So, it's a really interesting thing to see this guy who's, you know, a very thoughtful individual, he's a, I think, a thinker of the first rank. You see him wrestling with this really important question and, you know, coming to terms with the fact that, wow, I've been wrong for a decade on this thing that's very important to me. So, in some ways, just an admirable little episode where you see someone who has this laudable willingness to change his mind.

GR: Yeah and something we don't see too much today on either side, that's for sure. So, tell us a little bit more about Douglass's original view of the Constitution and the fundamental setup of the government. You kind of intimated I think maybe what those views might have been when you were talking about the 1619 project. But tell us why he was the fiercest critic of the Constitution.

DR: Sure. So, throughout the 1740s, he is basically a disciple of a guy named William Lloyd Garrison, who's probably the most famous abolitionist before Douglass's meteoric rise onto this stage. Garrison is editor of The Liberator, the leading anti-slavery newspaper. He's the chief organizer of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which is the nation's biggest abolitionist organization. And Garrison views the founders as utter hypocrites, right? They fight for their own liberty, but not for those whom they've enslaved. He sees the Constitution, he calls it time and again a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. At one public meeting, he burns a copy of the Constitution and grinds the ashes under his heels. So, there's no ambiguity involved.

GR: (laughter)

DR: He is definitely anti-founders. And as I say, Douglass kind of comes up under Garrison, and he's very much a Garrisonian for the first decade or so of his career as an abolitionist. He agrees with everything Douglass says, he reads the Constitution as containing a number of protections and even rewards for slaveholding interests, right, among other things. There's a guarantee that fugitives have to be returned to those who hold them in bondage. You get an augmentation of the slaveholders' voting power in the House of Representatives and also the Electoral College, amounting to 3/5 of the population they’ve enslaved. And you have an insurance that the international slave trade can continue at least for 20 years. And Garrison and Douglass both thought this made The Constitution, again, in their view, is not just flawed, is downright evil. Douglass says early in his career, the founders little better than a band of pirates. Really colorful phrases for the Constitution, I can't remember them all. Something like, a most cunningly devised and wicked project or something like this, right? You know, he's second to none in his criticisms of the founding and the Constitution.

GR: And so that, there were a number of different views about slavery during this period, you know, all different shades. And, you know, Lincoln occupies one space, for example, but that view that you just articulated, how unusual was that for the time?

DR: It's funny, so it's common on both of the poles, right? So some of the leading abolitionists because of Garrison, Garrison just has this massive influence over the abolitionist movement and he does not brook people differing from him kindly. If anyone disagrees with him on anything, you know, he’ll rebuke them immediately, to leave a single difference of opinion to go on unrebuked as a dereliction of duty in his view. So he gets many of the leading abolitionists to take this view that the founding, the founders, were pro-slavery, whatever. But then you get the same view in John C. Calhoun and Taney and the, right, the kind of southern defenders of slavery have the same view. They say, yes, the founders were on our side. Jefferson, Washington, they're slaveholders are on our side, they're pro-slavery, and says we are the two extreme poles have this view, whereas they're more in the middle who are like Lincoln, as you say, who say, well, the founders they didn't like slavery, they couldn't get rid of it immediately, but they wanted to do what they could to, you know, hem it in and hopefully set on a course to eventual extinction. So strangely, it was the two extremes have this view that I'm attributing to Douglass, whereas the middle tended to have a more positive view of the founders.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Syracuse University political scientist Dennis Rasmussen. He's just published a new book titled, "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution." So, you talk about, and you already mentioned this, but you talk about William Lloyd Garrison. And now, as I recall, he lived a good chunk of his life in this area. Is that correct, or do I have that wrong, am I confusing him with somebody else?

DR: Garrison lives in Boston.

GR: Okay. I may be thinking of Samuel May and some of the other folks that are up here, around here. Okay. And how does Garrison get these ideas? What is his sort of foundational story?

DR: So, he has a number of controversial views, right? Of course, the hatred of the Constitution is one of them. He's also a strictly anti-political or apolitical abolitionist. That is to say, he says, it is the duty of abolitionists to abstain entirely from politics, to vote in an election to support a political party, no matter how anti-slavery they may be, is supporting a fundamentally corrupt institution. And so, you know, he and his followers say, no, we're, you know, we can't even, you know, sully our hands by casting a ballot. So, there are lots of things that and frankly, because of his controversial views, you get a split around 1840, you get a split in the abolitionist movement. It was more common in our area, in Central / Western New York for people to be political abolitionists. That is to say, to want to use the government to use the Constitution to fight against slavery, to support, say, the Liberty Party or eventually the Radical Abolition Party, Free Soil Party, you know, the various anti-slavery parties. So, there's a split where you have the American Anti-Slavery Society that's headed by the Garrisonians, but then a couple of other societies and a couple other newspapers that are headed by the political abolitionists. And so it's, you know, Douglass starts out in Massachusetts, it's when he moves to Rochester, he moves to New York to start his own newspaper, that he kind of comes into the orbit of these political abolitionists and gets, you know, frankly, a different view than it had for the first, you know, many years during his time on the lecture circuit.

GR: And is that a part of the change, then, in his views about the Constitution? How does that come about for him?

DR: It is. So, he moves to Rochester, he starts the North Star, his first newspaper, against the wishes of Garrison. Garrison worries that it's going to compete with The Liberator and kind of take away from the time of his, the time that Douglass should be devoted to lecturing, because, I mean, he's an extremely powerful orator. And, you know, people flocked to see him. This is an age when attending lectures was on a par with sports or pop music today, right? It's like popular entertainment of the first rank, and he exceeds everyone else. And so, Garrison kind of says, well, we, you know, we have Douglass the star, we'd rather have him out on the circuit, now he's going to be stuck in Rochester editing this newspaper. You know, I hate to impute this to him, He may have wondered, could this unlettered, right, uneducated, former slave be successful as a newspaper editor that could have been at least in part of his mind. Anyway, Douglass moves to Rochester, he starts this newspaper, and he's now in the home, as I just said a second ago, of political abolitionism. So, he's forced to defend, you know, at first he still holds these Garrisonian views, and he's forced to defend them against his own friends and neighbors, his new neighbors, in a way that he didn't really have to before, everyone was a Garrisonian back in Boston. And so, is this that kind of first opens his eyes to other possibilities, and then he starts doing some reading and we can talk about his change of mind, if you like. But I think it's both the duty to edit this newspaper and doing so in this new location that kind of provide the, together provide the impetus for his change.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Dennis Rasmussen. He's a professor of political science at Syracuse University, and we've been discussing his new book. It's titled, "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution." So, Dennis, you were talking about this change in Douglass's thinking and I want to just to dig a little deeper into that. Is there a kind of ah-ha moment, a conversion moment for him, or is this more kind of a gradual thing as he continues to read, he kind of persuades himself, wait a minute, I've kind of been seeing this wrong? And I also wonder whether it's connected somehow to becoming more in the camp of those who want to use the political system to change it. In other words, if part of his thinking is not sort of strategic, you know, I can't be bashing the Constitution and make any political traction, I've got to change my views. I wonder if that's part of it too.

DR: So, it's definitely a gradual process. It begins in something like 1849. It's really a two-year process of him changing his mind. There are a bunch of different steps I won't go through all of the steps. But he starts, so he attributes his change of mind to new reading. He reads some figures who are all but forgotten today. The really radicals known as constitutional abolitionists. I can talk later about what constitutional abolitionism entails, but folks including William Goodell, Lysander Spooner, Gerrit Smith, who's actually from the area from Peterboro.

GR: That's who I was confusing with Lloyd Garrison, there we go, yes.

DR: Okay, so Gerrit Smith is actually the closest of these figures to Douglass personally, probably does the most to help him change his mind. So Gerrit Smith, in addition to being a radical abolitionist, is fabulously wealthy. He's one of the richest men in the entire United States, maybe the greatest philanthropist that the nation had seen to that point. He gave away enormous sums of money. And so, the Garrisonians accused Douglass of changing his mind, basically, that he was bribed by Gerrit Smith's gold, that Smith helped to fund his newspaper and so, well he had to change his mind to kind of butter up his provider. I think that's entirely unfair. It also just doesn't fit the timing very well. So again, it's a long process, two-year process. Gerrit Smith doesn't start supporting him until he's basically already finished changing his mind, you know, in part, because he has changed his mind. So, it’s not, you know, he definitely wasn't motivated by financial considerations. There is as you suggest, it could be just political expediency, right? It could be, well, I'm not going to win too many people to my side by bashing the Constitution and burning it like Garrison does, you know, catch more flies with honey than vinegar, right? Aren’t I going to win more converts to the abolitionist cause if I wrap myself in the flag and the Constitution and things that most Americans admire. And there are a number of contemporary scholars who say as much. Douglass anticipates this kind of, I don't know if we want to call it a criticism, but this of this line of thinking and tries to rebut it, he says, no, you can change your mind, right, you can just have new ideas, be exposed to new arguments and change your mind. And he says, that's all it was that, of course, I was a Garrisonian when I first came up, I didn't know any better, right? I just, you know, escaped slavery, you know, this is, The Liberator is the only thing I know. But then once he is exposed to new ideas, he thinks for himself and he comes to new conclusions. So, you know, it's impossible to read into his mind how much, you know, the political considerations counted and how much it was just pure, you know, convinced by new arguments. But the latter was his claim, at least.

GR: Okay, I want to join this book that we've been talking about with one of your earlier books. You've got a really neat earlier book, "Fears of a Setting Sun," where you argue that many of the founders actually, by the time they got to their death, they were relatively pessimistic about the young republic's future. I really thought that was an interesting piece. So, let's do that with Douglass. What was Douglass's sense of the future of America when he got to the end of his life?

DR: So, if we skip to the very end, right, so he is seen by this, he lived so long, he lives to I wish I had on the tip of my tongue, I think it's 1895, right, so he lives so long, he sees everything that he's been fighting for come to fruition with the Reconstruction Amendments and then reconstruction, and then he sees it all go away with the failure of reconstruction. So, in his last year, you know, he kind of goes back and forth. He has moments of hope, but mostly he's aghast at how easily he thinks, you know, we have these guarantees written into the Constitution for equal rights, and then they're still not being respected. So, I guess by the very end, I think he too is, you know, like you said, like most of the founders were, wasn't as happy as he had been earlier in his life.

GR: So, I want to come back to talking about this part of upstate New York and get your thoughts about this. I know that this is not what you wrote your book about, but, you know, you've obviously spent a lot of time knee deep in it and thinking about it. This region of the state was such a hotbed for all sorts of political movements and other movements of great passion, whether it's abolitionism or utopian communities, religious awakenings, millennial movements. And I've had other authors on the program who have written about some of those things, and I asked them this question, what is going on with this area? What do you think is the reason why this part of upstate New York has this, it has, you know, the birth of Mormonism, it's got, you know, Millerites. It's just, you know, is there something weird in the water up here? What's going on?

DR: It's a good question. I mean, I'd add to your list the temperance movement, the feminist movement, like, Seneca Falls, of course, is right here.

GR: Women's movement, yes, sir. Yeah.

DR: In fact, one of the names for Central and Western New York then was it was called the burned-over district.

GR: Right.

DR: And that was because of the kind of religious fervor that had swept through the area like a wildfire, you know, earlier in the 19th century. Yeah, it's a fascinating question. I'm open if you have suggestions, but I don't have any myself. It's, you know, it makes 19th century New York, Western New York, a fascinating place to look at, though.

GR: Yeah. One supposition I've heard is a lot of it had to do with the canal, and that being a crossroads. But I don't know, there are other crossroads in the United States or other places like that and, you don't, you know, St. Louis, you don't associate that, so very, very interesting. If you've just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Dennis Rasmussen. He's the author of "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution," as I just mentioned. You know, you've obviously been knee deep and Douglass's writings and speeches in order to write this book. I was wondering if there's any particular passage or passages of his work that really have stayed with you, you know, and to ask if you could share it with us. And so, obviously, I gave you a heads up about this and you did find some things, but I'm really curious to hear what you chose.

DR: Okay. So, I'm going to read a pair of passages that come from the same speech, the speech is his most famous speech and I think one of the great speeches in American history, it's called "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" It was delivered on the 5th of July in 1852. So, this is just after, like a year after his change of mind about the founding and founders.

GR: And this is the core question we've been talking about. He's distilled it in the title of that speech, right?

DR: Correct. Now, his view is still subtle, right, so we haven't really gotten to his view. He becomes, has a much more positive view of the founding and of the Constitution from 1851 onward. But it's still not just rah rah, the founders were great. It's also he's still a radical critic, right? That's the part of my subtitle, right? “How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution.” So, he does these two things that don't often go together today, which is, he embraces the founders, he embraces the Constitution, but he uses them almost as cudgels to beat his contemporaries with. So, I’m going to read two quotes from this speech, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?," that point in these, you know, these two parts of his mature view. The first one is prominently quoted in the 1776 report, this report commissioned by President Trump that's a very kind of patriotic view of American history. So, this is a quote from, from Douglass that they also quote in the 1776 report, Douglass says, quote, "The Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation's destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost." That's the end of the quote. All right, so very positive, you know, you can see Trump and people like him, you know, embracing this, yes, Douglass embraces the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, rather. Here's another quote from this very same speech. This one is prominently quoted in the 1619 project, from The New York Times. Here's the second quote: "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour." That's the end of the quote. So again, very powerful writer and orator. And it's so fascinating, right? You know, he pulls these two things in his mind together at once, right? It's not just America's great, America is terrible, you know, both are true in certain respects.

GR: So, let's fast forward to the civil rights movement and the 20th century, and a lot of Douglass's, I guess I'll say his second view, the later view reminds me a lot of Martin Luther King, to say, you know, we're taking these principles and we're taking them seriously, and if you take them seriously, then you've got to make some big changes.

DR: Yes.

GR: And then I can really hear echoes when you're reading that and talking about it. And then I'm also thinking, though, say about Malcolm X, and Malcolm X sort of taking more of the Garrison sort of position. I mean, is there any kind of mapping to, you know, later periods that you see here?

DR: Sure. I mean, you could do the same thing with Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois later in the 19th century, right? Malcolm and Martin, in the 20th century, right, where you see, you know, you see these threads both throughout African American political thought, but also, you know, white American political thought, the kind of different uses to which the founding is put. But, you know, I'm sorry I almost interrupted you there, I started to agree emphatically, right, the Martin Luther King, the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, right? The founding documents are a promissory note that we're cashing in now. I mean, this is very much the later Douglass, that we want to cash that, right?

GR: Yeah, yeah. And it was, I couldn't help but think about that. So, you're not going to like this next question, I'm just going to give you that, but we've got we've got about, oh, two minutes left or so, but I want to squeeze in two more questions. The first one is the tougher one, maybe, I don't know, we'll see. But you've obviously got your own views of these issues, I'm sure you came in with them, or hunches, you do all this work. Has it changed your view of the of this big debate that we've been talking about?

DR: I've certainly become more open to the idea that the Constitution can legitimately be read in an anti-slavery, maybe even abolitionist light. With two minutes we definitely don't have time to go through all those elements, I spent two whole chapters on this, but, I kind of had accepted and I think this is a predominant view among historians today is that, you know, the founders wanted to enshrine slavery, and they did so. Douglass has perfectly good reasons to read the Constitution as not just anti-slavery, but abolitionist. If you read it properly, you have to instantly free every slave in the land. And, you know, I would have thought that was utterly preposterous going in. I don't know that he's got a slam dunk argument, but it's, you know, it's there. The possibility to argue in that direction is definitely there.

GR: So maybe not to push you too far, but you've invoked the 1619 and 1776, it sounds like maybe you're somewhere in between at this point.

DR: Yeah. So, well, I guess I'm probably somewhere in between. I think more interesting is where Douglass is, which I argue isn't just somewhere in between. It's not just, well, the founding is admirable in some respects, and it's, you know, less admirable in others. Rather, he, the mature Douglass anyway, he admires the founding and founders every bit as enthusiastically as the firmest adherence of the 1776 view. I think almost no one today would dare to go as far as he does in characterizing the founders and the founding documents is just resolutely anti-slavery. And so, you know, he's unlike the 1619 project, say, he doesn’t, or at least some of its supporters, he doesn't resort to sort of fatalistically writing off America is intrinsically or irredeemably racist. But then, on the other hand, his embrace of the founding, as I just suggested a second ago, doesn't engender the slightest bit of the complacency or unreflective patriotism or sort of, just blindness to oppression that you sometimes see among the 1776 crowd today. He is second to none in denouncing America for its evils, you know, before and after the Civil War. And so, you know, this is the most interesting thing about him is he combines these two things that so rarely go together today, deep admiration for the nation's birth and radical criticism of the nation, partly, as I've said, he just shows how far the nation's deviating from its first principles, but also, and maybe more interestingly, he sees the founders themselves as radicals, right? If we want to oversimplify only slightly, the founders fought tyranny in their time, taking the word fight in the most literal possible sense and he says we should imitate them by fighting it in ours. And that's what, you know, maybe a bit counter-intuitively, after he begins to embrace the founding, he grows more open to the use of violence against slaveholders and slave catchers. And so, he says, you know, if we want to be true to the founder’s vision in the Constitution, we need militant resistance to any form of tyranny that we see. That's the Douglass that I find most admirable.

GR: I'm so glad I asked that question first, because we don't have time for the second one, but that was a much better question, and that's a great way to end. Thanks so much. That was Dennis Rasmussen and again, his new book is titled, "Frederick Douglass's American Founding: How the Nation's Fiercest Critic Embraced the Constitution." Now, as you can probably gather from the conversation we just had, his book is not only deep, but it is extremely readable and the passion in the book comes through. Dennis, thanks so much for talking to me. I really learned a lot.
DR: Thanks for having me, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Many writers in recent years have argued that the American Dream is in peril. But what is the American Dream, and how has it been compromised, and can it be reclaimed? This week, Grant Reeher talks with author and economist Charles Whalen, author of "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist, The Battle to Defend Working Families."

Grant Reeher: Welcome to "The Campbell Conversations." I'm Grant Reeher. Many writers in recent years have argued that the American Dream is in peril. But what is it exactly and how has it been compromised? Can we reclaim it? My guest today has thoughts about all of those questions. Charles Whalen is a research fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at SUNY Buffalo, and the author of a new book timed for Labor Day. It's called "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." Mr. Whalen, welcome to the program.

Charles Whalen: Thank you, Grant. Pleasure to be here.

GR: It's great having you. So let me just start with this. The structure and the style of this book, I think, is one of its most interesting features. Tell us about that. And how and why you came up with the idea to write it in the way you did.

CW: So "Fighting for the American Dream" is the result of being asked to write a book about the erosion of the American Dream over 25 years ago. My career has focused on economic challenges facing workers and how to address those challenges to foster a strong economy for everyone. I've written much about worker insecurity, including insecurity related to jobs, income, and retirement. I've also written a lot about the changing economy after World War Two. And then in the late 1990s, friends asked me to pull all my work together into a book on the erosion of the American Dream. I didn't have the time, partly because of my own job insecurity, but the economic problem didn't go away. Then the pandemic struck, and I had the time for several projects, including sorting through about 100 boxes in my home office. Boxes of papers and research material accumulating since the 1970s. And then it hit me. The way to address the American Dream wasn't to write another purely academic book. It was to tell a story that connects with a wider audience by drawing on my own experiences. So the book explores that long erosion of the American Dream through the lens of a career narrative or a career memoir. It mixes the profile, the professional and the personal. And now that it's done, I can begin, perhaps, to toss some of those boxes.

GR: Yeah. Well, good luck with that. I want to say, you know, you mentioned COVID being your opportunity moment to do something like this. And I've heard that from a number of authors who have written things that are different. And someday somebody has to accumulate all those and sort of look at the look at the impact. But let me ask you this, getting into the substance of the book, as you just mentioned, both parts of this book, your story and the broader story of the economy, they’re driven by this concept of the American Dream. That's your organizing principle, and you have a pretty extensive and I thought interesting discussion of different views about that dream in your footnotes. But you use the term in a particular way, and without getting too far into the economic weeds, just tell us what are the basic contours of some of the main sort of ways that people have argued that the American Dream needs to be seen. And then, leading to that, your definition of it and why you chose the definition that you did.

CW: Well, if you don't mind. Let me focus first on my own definition.

GR: Sure, absolutely

CW: We can talk about some others. I think mine is a modest definition. People want steady jobs, family-supporting wages, health care and retirement security. They want an improving standard of living as they gain more experience, and they want a chance for their kids to have a better life in the future. And I think this is a modest version, but it's also widespread, and it's grounded in an assumption that hard work pays off for individuals and for society. And there certainly are many other definitions out there. Some focus more on aspirations or great wealth. Others look at the questions through the lens, and some of my footnotes do this through the lens of race or gender or other considerations, or even religion. But for me and for my purposes, it's what I've described. And the only variation for my own conceptually American Dream is that, in part because of my religious experience, is my upbringing in Catholic school and so forth. I have a conceptual American dream that says, yes, we should put food on the table and we should achieve all those things that I described a moment ago, but they're also should be service to humanity. And so for me, I tried to find a way that would allow me to put food on the table, but would also allow me to serve others through a professional work. And so that's the only variation on my theme, on my conception of the American Dream, is that I have this service component that may not be the same for everyone.

GR: Yeah. That's interesting. So you write about the American Dream slipping away. What are the most important, I guess external indicators that that has been happening? What are the sort of the data types of data that that, that you looked at as an economist to say, here's how we know this has become a problem?

CW: So I think sluggish wage growth, stop, stalled up mobility, the erosion of employer-provided pensions, health care and other benefits, increasing corporate hostility to collective bargaining and unions in general, the spread of unstable work schedules and endless rounds of workforce cuts. I think those are some of the things we've seen since the 1970s, and those really get to the heart of some of this erosion of the American Dream.

GR: Yeah, yeah. And so this would be something we could probably talk the rest of the program about. But what are the causes of those things? You could take that at any level of proximity that you like, you know. But I'm just curious, what do you think drove those things?

CW: Right. well, of course, there are many factors at play. And in fact, in the book, I say a comprehensive discussion would be sort of like the "Murder on the Orient Express." They all did it.

GR: They all did it.

CW: Right, but at the heart of the problem, I think, was an intense business focus on generating short-term returns for shareholders. And I think that largely is because of the pressure from institutional investors such as managers of mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, private equity. And that business focus has caused companies to do whatever they can to cut costs. And it's led directly to the reduced worker well-being and greater worker insecurity. And of course, institutional investors are major campaign donors and lobbyists. And they also often hold positions in top top positions in administrations, both Democratic and Republican. So institutional investors affect both business and government. And so I think that's the center of what I'm describing. But one of the things I might add is that I believe that worker insecurity is a defining characteristic of this new era, of this new sort of shareholder-driven era. But at the same time, I think that this shareholder focus has made our daily life more precarious in many ways, in many aspects of our life, ranging from air travel to health care. The demands for greater financial returns compel firms to scrimp on operational capacity, on quality controls and even standards of care. But the book focuses primarily on the worker insecurity, which again, I think is sort of like the flip side of this rise of shareholder value. There are two sides of the same coin.

GR: Interesting. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Charles Whalen, who's just published a new book titled "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." You know, one of the things I want to come back and explore with you a little bit at length is something you said just a minute ago about stability. But before I get into that, I wanted to ask you this as a follow-up to what you just said. A lot of folks, if you ask them what is behind this, they'll immediately go to globalization and saying, that's the thing that really triggers all this, particularly in the manufacturing sector. You didn't do that. And I was curious, how does globalization fit into your story?

CW: Well, I think that the globalization, the outsourcing, offshoring is part of this new era of institutional investors and shareholder value. It's in part because of the drive for this increasing shareholder value that we see companies willing and trying to find a way to offshore and to encourage the public sector to engage in trade policies that allow that to be a more smooth process. So I think that the globalization is one piece of this new era, and I think that some of the reasons for it are directly related to both the business side and the public policy side that I described. So we see policy focus on free trade policies. We see policy focus on deregulation of finance and so forth, which also makes that enables that to be more globalized. And so I think that that that's that's the best way I can describe what you've asked.

GR: That makes sense. Yeah. Thanks. Well, I want to come back to this stability thing. And it really struck me how much in your book you emphasize that, in addition to just, you know, what a family can have materially, it's how they generate it and how they experience it. And this may be an example of great minds thinking alike. You and me. But I've, I've always thought that the stability and the reliability and the stress issue in a family's economic life are arguably even more important than their overall income and wealth indicators, particularly if we're thinking about political, how they experience it in a way that comes out politically. And I think you emphasize that, too. So I was curious to hear you reflect a little bit on this central role that stability plays in your narrative.

CW: Well, as academics, we know that if you don't have a bit of stability, it's extraordinarily hard to engage in scholarship. Yeah, and I think that's true for everyone. If you want to start a business, develop your talents, become an entrepreneur. It's incredibly hard to do any of those things when you don't know for sure what your work schedule will be tomorrow, whether you'll be employed. So I think that that foundation of stability is, is something that a society needs for people in order to pursue the American Dream. It's a foundational element that we require. And so many of the things that we attempt to do, it provides for families to build and so forth. And if we take that away, then we have diseases of despair. We have public health problems of a variety of sorts. And when I was working on this someone who I know who teaches at a school of public health, pointed out that folks in the public health area are doing research on this now. And for example, there's a new research report about Stuckism and how if you feel stuck. So it's back to the psychological dimension. If you feel stuck, that can have adverse consequences on your well-being- your physical and mental well-being- and that can affect your family; it can affect your community. And so, Stuckism, they argue, this is some work done at the University of Pennsylvania by some public health scholars that Stuckism can have consequences for the society in general. They argue that addressing that is an important part of restoring the American Dream.

GR: You're listening to "The Campbell Conversations" on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Charles Whalen. He's a research fellow at the Baldy Center at SUNY Buffalo, and we've been discussing his new book. It's titled "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." So I want to ask you about your argument for a new social contract. But before I do that, I want to pick up on something that we were talking about before the break. And that is this problem of stability and the stress that it puts on families, even though if we looked at their overall income, we might not see a great difference, you know, over 15, 20 years. But the way that they make that income and the reliability of it has gone down. I've had these conversations with an economist friend of mine, and one of the things that he says back to me is he says, Grant, you have to look also at not just their income, but the absolute material things that they are able to buy. And the example that gets used often is televisions. So, you know, he reminds me, look, when we were growing up, you know, getting a color TV in a middle-class house it was a big deal. And they were very expensive. You know, in today's dollars, they were hugely expensive. And you got this crappy little television. Now you can buy this huge flat-screen beautiful thing for, you know what, for $300. So you have to factor that in. What is your how do you take that into account?

CW: Well yes, you're right. This is talked about in the book, and I just think it's an absurd yardstick. Workers care about having a job, being able to support their families. If there is a television or two in the house, that pales in comparison to their ability to to put their children through school or to have enough money to go to the doctors on a regular basis and so forth, or to have enough in their retirement savings that they don't have to worry about how they can afford to live and feed themselves in retirement. So at the same time that I was hearing some of these questions from people, as you described, my, I was talking to my dad, who was a machinist, who told me about his colleagues on the factory floor who were training foreign workers, then taking the machinery and stripping them from the factory floor, sending the machinery abroad. And then, of course, you know, the next step, which was they lost their jobs. Now my dad didn't lose his job at that point, but my dad eventually lost his too. And then the email or the letter, excuse me, came in the mail to all of them that said, "Your health care for life that we promise you is expiring, terminated effective today.” So it doesn't matter how many televisions people have or that they have a smartphone; that's not a very useful measure in my mind. At the same time that I was hearing this, I was on, I think, the eighth year of, of 1 or 2-year contracts. After having my PhD and I, I was an accomplished doctoral candidate. I had academic articles published. I had several milestones and achievements. And here I was going from job to job and my parents thinking from that old economy of mindset, they said, well take this non tenure track job and you'll get your foot in the door. Well, I think you know that, Grant, and the other academics know that's not the way that academia works. And that's not the way that most of the new economy works for, for anyone, even outside of academia. And so my experience, the experience of so many other people indicates that televisions is a poor yardstick.

GR: Okay. Fair enough. So you argue that we need then, because of all these problems, a new social contract? What, briefly, because I know you could talk for very long about this, but what is the social contract you want to see?

CW: Well, I think we need to start by recognizing that capitalism comes in many varieties. Right now, we've got this turbocharged, shareholder-driven economy. And we have to recognize that capitalism has existed, does exist and can exist in different forms. Recently in "The New York Times," Nicholas Kristof wrote an article saying, “If you want to live the American Dream, move to Sweden or to the Nordic countries.” And so I think that we need to have greater security, for greater security for workers, a greater ability for workers who lose their jobs to transition to something else. We need healthcare security for workers, and we need to find a way to provide that health care security. It doesn't have to be Medicare for all. There are many, many other approaches out there. And when I ran for Congress, in fact, I didn't talk about Medicare for all. But I did bring up the fact that there were many other approaches that could get us there. But what we have now and now getting into the politics a little bit, but we have now and we had at the time that I was running for Congress, and even since the Affordable Care Act was passed, we've had pressure upon pressure to reduce that security, to erode those benefits, those protections. So I think the new social contract would recognize that it would recognize the importance of full employment. At the end of World War Two, we tried to have a guarantee of a job for people who were unemployed, which really means that you could get public service employment if you need it. And certainly we have plenty of things in this economy to do with the opioid crisis, with climate change, not only mitigation but also prevention. There's so much that we need to do. But so I think public service employment would be fine, we can find ways to do that. Instead, ever since the Reagan era, those things have been eroded. And I think that what I would call for it would be, job security for people, health care and retirement security. And again, this gets back to what we said before. Those things are a springboard for success. They're not what some might argue would be just an opportunity for lethargy.

GR: So what do you make, then, of this new popularity in the Democratic Party of Democratic Socialism and socialism? It sounds like there's obviously similarities to what you're sketching forward about the new social contract. Do you think that's evidence in the country of a hunger for some kind of movement toward this reestablishment of this version of the American Dream?

CW: Yes, but I think that sometimes folks on the left don't really articulate what it is that we're facing. They talk about greed and oligarchy and so forth and the wealthy. But I think we need to be more specific about the problem. And one of the reasons for writing the book is if we don't understand what the problem is, and if we don't get beyond scapegoats or broad generalities, then we won't really have a chance to effectively address the problem. And so that's what I guess I would say. I focused a lot on workers. In fact, again, a broader discussion of the point you asked me earlier. The question you asked me earlier would include treating workers with dignity, but also to recognize that they are a valuable resource that can be the source of competitive advantage. Instead, these days we look at in business, we look at workers as a cost to be minimized. And so that's, you know, I think that having workers' voice in economic decisions in the business world and also in public policy is an important thing. And also just treating government as a creative and constructive force. So I guess there could be overlaps. But the Democratic socialists, as I understand it, they themselves argue they move beyond the Michael Harrington era. And I guess I'm stuck in the Michael Harrington era. Michael Harrington could walk into a union hall, and if people came and heard on the way in that this guy was a socialist, they would walk out saying, “Oh my God, if this is socialism, sign me up.” Michael Harrington talked about working on the left wing of the possible. I would argue that many people on the left these days have sort of lost touch with the left wing of the possible. And again, one other thing I would argue is, this is not crazy radical what I'm suggesting. In 1944, in the State of the Union address, FDR talked about a second Bill of Rights, and that second Bill of Rights emphasized opportunity for a job, family, supporting wages, health care, retirement, a place to live, support for farmers. That's where I come from. Defunding police or eliminating prisons? That's not on my agenda, and I don't think it's on the agenda of most people.

GR: Okay. If you just joined us, you're listening to "The Campbell Conversations" on Public Media. And my guest is Charles Whalen, the author of "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." So there are a couple of things I wanted to ask that are a little more personal about you. And we have starting to have a little bit of limited time. So this next question, I know you probably have a lot to say on, but if I could try to get you to condense that, because I want to make sure that I'm able to come back to these other things. But as you mentioned, you ran for Congress in 2018. Tell us about that experience. How far did you get, and what did you learn from it?

CW: Well, I learned that, perhaps giving you a short answer is that I'm best suited to using the pen. And so that's fine. Also, timing is really important, you know, and this was the time of the MeToo movement. And you know, people come up to me and say, Charles, you know, you have great ideas. In fact, the other candidates in the Democratic primary were stealing my ideas. I was like, the think tank idea, think tank for the whole party at that time in this congressional district. But it just struck me that, you know, people come up to me and say, “Charles, this is just not the time for a guy, you know.” And in the end, it turned out that the party did nominate a woman, which is fine; I understand that. So it was a matter of timing, but in the end, I think that it's, you know, it's important that I find a way that I can get my ideas out. I thought that I'd try that, and it, you know, it wasn't successful, but that's fine. And now I go back to what I've always done, which is write.

GR: Well, I have to ask this next question because I'm curious. And also you're so open about it in the book because you talk about and you are you mentioned it in the interview already, but you talk about your own economic struggles and your own, you know, your own your own instability. And as you pointed out, I mean, you earned a PhD in economics at the University of Texas. That's a great school. By all accounts, you wrote a fantastic dissertation, but you never got on a stable career path for tenured professor or other kind of research and policy work that would provide that stability. Nasty question, perhaps, but what went wrong?

CW: Well, remember, I come from a blue-collar background. My parents never went to college. I had no mentors, no people to guide me through the process. I went to the University of Texas at Austin because I wanted to study with Ray Marshall. He had been the Secretary of Labor for Jimmy Carter. That term had just ended because Ronald Reagan came into office, and I desperately wanted to study with him. It was the right move. I mean, he was one of the founders of the Economic Policy Institute. I did work with him, but I just walked down there and plopped myself into his classes and tried to rely on grit, determination, and in good work. Mentorship. I think I talk about that in the book. It's vital. And so mentorship is vital. And also timing again, you know, at the time that I came out, there weren't the jobs that there may have been. If I come out ten years earlier, it might be extraordinarily different. So mentorship, timing and timing. There were academics who were looking for something different. And the things that I offered, no matter how much I try, were not always the things that they wanted. So what can you do?

GR: Yeah, there are fashions in academia, and that's a good point.

CW: May, I just add one thing about that?

GR: Absolutely. Yeah. And then I’m going to ask you my last question.

CW: Yeah. So economic history was something that I was extraordinarily interested in. In fact, when I started teaching in Hobart, Wayne Smith, I contacted a Cornell University professor who was world-famous in economic history and said, “Can I come down and take your graduate seminar? He said, I don't offer it anymore.” People aren't interested in economic history. But he gave me the syllabus and I worked on it and taught a course using that. Economic history now is everywhere. And that's the difference. Is this timing right?

GR: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've only literally got a couple of seconds left. So I'm going to ask you this question. And it's going to be sort of like a lightning round. So having said all that, what would you tell a young person from your type of background getting ready to graduate from college or university? Sounds like the first thing you'd say is get some mentors.

CW: Choose the right mentor from the very beginning. That's the most important thing I can say.

GR: Okay. All right. We will leave it there. That was Charles Whalen. And again, his book is "Fighting for the American Dream: From Blue Collar Kid to Maverick Economist." Charles, thanks so much for talking with me. I want to say, as I read through the book, he really did a nice job of weaving your own story. And with the broader story, that's a tough thing to do. You were very deft at that, but thank you.

CW: Thank you, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to "The Campbell Conversations" on WRVO Public Media. Conversations in the Public Interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. We know that older people accumulate more money and vote more regularly than other people. And there's a lot of them in political offices, but has the imbalance become a serious problem? My guest today has a new and provocative take on that. I'm joined today by Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale University, the co-host of the podcast Digging a Hole, and the author of a new book titled, "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It." Professor Moyn, welcome to the program. At age 66, I'm approaching this conversation with a little bit of trepidation, but I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

Samuel Moyn: Well, thanks for having me, I'm just behind you at 54, so, we’re all aging.

GR: (laughter) 54 sounds young to me. So let me just start with a general pushback on the title. You know, there are good and entirely non-sinister reasons why people tend to accumulate wealth as they age and also why they vote more regularly than other people, particularly after they reach the age of 50, we see, you know, political scientists have seen a big shift up. And at least they do that until they get really, really old. So why do you say that they're hoarding power and wealth?

SM: Well, in a word, it's getting worse. You can make a claim, and it's understandable that it's natural or almost natural that as we age, we accumulate more. I don't think that would explain the voting behavior, but it's also well attested since the beginning of so-called democracy, you know, mass suffrage that, you know, younger people vote less readily. So, then the question, I think a reasonable one, is what's different? And the answer is it's worse across all fronts. And, I think that's true when it comes to politicians very glaringly and many Americans are accepting that fact more than ever. What I'm trying to add is to show that it's worse on the other fronts in electoral gerontocracy and I don't know what you want to call it, capitalist gerontocracy.

GR: Okay, I want to come back to that and explore that in depth with you. But let me just set the table by asking you, in your book and in the way that you think about it, who are the old?

SM: There's no bright line, you know. Are you old? Older than me, but not a lot. Am I old? My daughters say so. I think, you know, we're dealing with flexible lifespan. So, in my view, we have to treat old as a comparative or relative category. So, wherever we cut, you know, the distinction between the younger and the older my claims hold. And so I, you know, I also think that on the remedial side, that there's not going to be like an obvious place to draw limits on power, you know, like 69.5 is when Cambridge and Oxford faculty have to retire. But it was 65 before, and maybe someday it'll be 72. And so I don't think it's of great use to, like, draw a line in a continuum because the point is, it's a continuum.

GR: I see, okay, fair enough. So, tell me more about when you say things have been getting worse, you're referring to kind of the relative imbalance between wherever, you like you say, wherever you draw the line in terms of wealth and electoral power. So, tell me a little bit more about that.

SM: Absolutely. Well, I'll give the examples of the politicians and the, you know, income and wealth examples. You know, of course, it's true that in a way, we've had older men in power for all of human history, so what's new? I think the difference is we have more older people relative to younger ones because the extension of the lifespan doesn't mean there are old people for the first time, it's that almost everyone can count on getting old, and there are fewer young people at the same time. So, what we're seeing in the history of American politics, and it's been graphic at the level of Congress and the judiciary for a long time is many more folks, in their 70s and even 80s in power than ever.

GR: Okay.

SM: And then we also look at the lower limits. There used to be more young people in political office, in part because the old men died more readily. But now we're looking at a situation where I think there's one senator under 40 for five more minutes, but half the US population is under 40. Very few congressmen in their 30s and congresswomen, almost no judges. So, that's a representational imbalance, even if you filter out the extreme end. Now on the wealth front, you know, you point out that we should expect an age in common age wealth gap, at least up to a point, especially if people retire and spend down their, you know, their stash. But both of those numbers have grown substantially. In other words, the old rich are getting richer relative to the young, less rich, both on income and wealth. Take housing, a commodity, you know, the age group likeliest to own a home in our country is now the age 70 to 74 age group, second most likely 75 and above, the age of the average homeowner has gone up by two decades in the last few. So, we're dealing with change over time. It's not, gerontocracy is not static, it's getting far worse, even if you think it's quasi-natural.

GR: I understand the distinction you're making. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Yale University Law and history professor Samuel Moyn, and we're discussing his new book titled, "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It." So, you anticipated one of the things I wanted to probe you on, which was how you control for the fact that life expectancy has gone up during, you know, the last 100 years. And even though I guess it's ticking down now, but, and you get at that with this phrase used, the representational imbalance, you know, looking at looking at this. But I just want to drill down on it a little bit without getting too much in the weeds. So, you have found that that imbalance has gotten more pronounced. In other words, you know, if we go back to, say, 1950, there were more people representing whatever, however we wanted to slice the population up age wise.

SM: Oh, absolutely. So, that's just like, you know, one of the clearer parts, I mean, clearer, least deniable parts of the story that, I do think that we're getting older, there was a brief reversal in our average life expectancy in the pandemic era.

GR: Right.

SM: And we're behind other countries, in average life expectancy. But ours is on the way back up to about the mid-80s. And, you know, that doesn't mean that people don't die young still, although few do. And like, we're shocked when Lindsey Graham dies at 71 because that's kind of unexpected now. Yeah, but I think it's, you know, if you look at these federal office holders, we're dealing with next to no young people. And so, a lot of the debate, if we're going to start with politicians, is about the risks of cognitive decline or outright death, which are very real and consequential. Think about Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Democrats who died in Congress and the last one to facilitate the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill. But I would say the much bigger issue is the lack of younger age cohorts in power. And that is, like that has been an extraordinary change just because even though we'd expect in an older country the average age of our political representatives to go higher, we wouldn't expect younger politicians to be almost locked out of those offices. Now there's promising change with, you know, Zoran Mamdani and so many others, primarying old Democrats and old Republicans, but it's not enough so far.

GR: Well, so, the bottom line question on that, if we look at elected officials, and I suppose also people in economic power, you know, running corporations and controlling lots of capital, does it matter? You know, there is a pretty robust debate in political science about whether demographic characteristics for elected officials really matter in what they do. So, have you found that it matters?

SM: I think it matters at the margins. I mean, I'm not at all claiming that age in any social setting is like the overriding criterion. And often age is really like a proxy for what political scientists call a cohort effects or historical effects, like, you had a formative experience that you carry with you the rest of your life and / or you experienced a certain historical moment, World War II or 9/11 and that affects you ever after. But those are in a sense themselves age related, and if you like, it means that older people become, yeah, like memories of an earlier moment. In a sense, it's even worse because even if we said, like, the aged are defending their interests, that might make sense because they actually are old. If we say that cohort in history effects are dominant, that's kind of worse because they're responding to past things that might no longer obtain and yet, like, it's all bad and it's all age related. I think that it's much worse that, and it's, I really pivot from politicians to the voters and those who hold wealth because in a sense, it wouldn't matter if there are young politicians on my theory, because politicians generally are doing the bidding of the powerful in their society, those who put them in office, those who funded their campaigns, those who call the shots. I do think the fact of older politicians matter. I think Trump and Biden are nostalgic politicians, both for approximately the same era often, the 1950s, in their different ways. On the other hand, if Trump doesn't make it till next June, we immediately have the youngest president in U.S. history. But I wouldn't claim that gerontocracy will have disappeared in that scenario. Rather, it's much in a sense worse because it's now masked again by the fact that younger politicians can serve old voters and money too.

GR: Well, so, let's take a different cut at this, and you've already intimated this a couple of times, but the patterns that we see for policy, public policy, you know, it seems pretty clear, I mean, you know, you refer to, people refer to Social Security and Medicare as the third rail in American politics, you don't touch them or else you die. Have you tracked out over time that the elderly are getting a bigger cut of the governmental pie?

SM: It's modestly bigger. You know, the that One Big Beautiful Bill I mentioned cut SNAP benefits for children in poverty, but didn't touch elder benefits. And that modestly increased the extreme mismatch, I mean, but for decades now, it's been on the order of 6 to 7 federal dollars spent on seniors for every 1 on children. So, I'm not claiming, I actually, I mean, if you want, going to get into entitlements, I think, like, focusing on entitlements misses the point of gerontocracy. I think we should be looking both at the level of policy preferences of the politicians and more important, those they serve at things like climate change, immigration, you know, pro-growth policies, the national debt. All of these things are, in a sense, much bigger and more consequential. You know, entitlements come in because we have to fund them. And I think a lot of people who, like me, have been concerned about intergenerational equity, have fastened on entitlements, in part because some people have always been against them, whereas I think we might have to increase them. It's just that we're going to have to access the disproportionate means that older people have accumulated. But that's true when it comes to climate change and all the other policy issues that get scanted in a gerontocratic polity.

GR: I want to come back and ask you about that after the break. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Samuel Moyn. He's a professor of law and history at Yale University and the author of a new book titled, "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It." And we've been discussing the book. So, before the break, you were talking about how these other issues like global warming, environmental policy, the national debt may be the bigger things that might be at stake for the imbalances that you're tracking out. I just want to probe what you mean by that, to make sure I've got a good understanding of it. When I heard that at first, what popped into my head is something that, I have to confess now at my age, I have begun to say as a sort of a dark comedy joke, which is, you know, okay, you know, global warming ,that's going to be somebody else's problem. I say that to my students sometimes, you guys are going to have to solve that because we have completely blown it. You know, the national debt, I say you're welcome, you're welcome, here's what we’re giving you. So, is that what you're getting out there, or is it something else?

SM: Absolutely. That's it. I mean, you know, and there's kind of the conceptual side and the empirical side. It does stand to reason that age affects policy through having a kind of dynamic of postponement. If you're not going to see the big effects of some problem, you're going to die in time, you let it fester. And in fact, that's what we see, that when it comes to climate change, the older you get, the less you prioritize it. And that's very well documented, which doesn't mean there aren't exceptional green seniors. And so that's, you know, that's one reason I think we should be concerned both about the age of the politicians and the age of the voters. You know, the old French king who was part of the monarchy that would was overthrown, famously said after me, the deluge.

GR: Yeah.

SM: And I feel like the gerontocratic syndrome is seniors in power saying after us, the deluge. And it's highly selfish and obviously unfair to foist these big problems on people who didn't create them in the first place.

GR: Now this sort of goes back to the entitlement discussion, but I have heard some people blame AARP for some of this, and they do figure in your book.

SM: Yeah.

GR: What are your thoughts on that? I mean, they are constantly sending me things. (laughter)

SM: Yeah, yeah. Well, when I turned 50, I started getting the mailings, but I haven't joined.

GR: Ah. (laughter)

SM: No, it's not a boogeyman, but it, I take it as more like, symbolic. It's not harmless, it's done a lot of, I think, bad things. It was the main actor in the abolition of mandatory retirement a couple decades ago. I think it's so gargantuan now, it's the biggest, or one of the biggest voluntary organizations in history and certainly in our country and easily one of the wealthiest lobbies, political lobbies that's ever been created. But it's mainly rearguard. I mean, it's not even trying to expand senior benefits, it's basically a kind of age in a policy stasis. In fairness, it's got a lot of, you know, liberal members, a lot of, you know, conservative or neo-liberal members, and they don't agree about much fiscally. So, I think at a certain point, like, the AARP reflected a gerontocracy and became kind of a gerontocratic entity itself, meaning that it couldn't innovate and it couldn't reform itself, so it just became a kind of obstruction. Where I think it matters is that it can make the claim that it stands for the overwhelming voting power of older people, and in a sense, threaten anyone it doesn't like or who promises change with disaster. And if the question is whether it could really provide it, but it's sort of never comes to that because, as you mentioned, no one's going to cut Social Security. Now, it's going to run out in six years, and begin to become insolvent, not like, you know, over one day, but then there's going to be a big national debate when the so-called trust fund runs out. I assume Congress will save Social Security, but the question is, when is it going to be forced to confront these larger issues about gerontocracy, including the suffering of elderly poor? And my worry is that it's never happening, thanks to the AARP.

GR: Okay. Going to come back to the, you talked about the, you know, the voting power of the elderly. I talk to a lot of elected officials, you know, off the record, and they regularly cite this.

SM: Oh, yeah.

GR: You know, and we'll talk about something that has to do with younger people or, you know, things that younger voters want, and they'll just say flatly, these people don't vote, I'm not, that's not the way I'm going to get defeated.

SM: Totally.

GR: So, how does that factor into this broader argument that you're making?

SM: Well, you know, I think that it's completely rational for politicians to do the bidding of the old and their advocates because they just are powerful and they will keep you in office or, you know, kick you out. Younger people will not. And a question is, why is that? Why do we see the growing abstention from politics of the youth, and what should we do about it? And I guess I would say, that of course we can blame and shame younger people for not showing up, but I think we have to reflect on a few reasons for this. Some are boring, but they do prompt easy policy change. Like, you know, we punish the comparative mobility of the young through registration requirements. We, in a sense, help older people vote more readily, either because they're retired and have time, or they're powerful enough in their jobs to leave work to vote. Same might not be true of younger voters. And we might have mandatory voting, as in many countries or things like, you know, voting holidays for voting.

GR: Right.

SM: I think that the deepest part of the syndrome in this domain has to be that, you know, at a certain point when you look out and see all the politicians generations older than you and the policy outcomes of benefiting other people than your age cohort, you begin to become alienated and abstentionist. And so, I would think the theory would correctly predict that you have maybe some, yeah, like, disaffection with the whole idea of democracy when it's actually gerontocracy instead.

GR: Just to put a different point on that, I'm teaching a large introductory class right now, mostly freshmen. First day I asked them, I gave them all a card, I said, write down your earliest political memory. And almost all of them, it was the 2016 election.

SM: Yeah.

GR: It's, this era that you and I probably regard as a long aberration is all they've known.

SM: Oh, exactly, yeah.

GR: And that probably contributes to some of that alienation and disaffection.

SM: I think that's true. I mean, now, you can have, like, the Mamdani election shows that young people can actually help determine the outcome of election when they're enthusiastic and engaged. They're not like the boomers in the sense that, even were they more rebellious, they're not numerous enough to shake the system on their own. That's why my own strategies always involve more intergenerational coalition building. But absolutely, they are depressed and resigned, and it's easy to see why.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Yale professor Samuel Moyn, the author of, "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It." Well, I feel guilty, we've only got about four minutes left, and now I want to ask you, okay, what do we do about all this? (laughter) You mentioned intergenerational coalition building, what are the big strategies that you put forward to try to fix this?

SM: You know, I feel the book fell short here in a way, just because it's very hard to imagine change once you've depicted so powerful a syndrome.

GR: Yeah.

SM: Getting out of it could seem hopeless. But what I do in response is just to give a million possible policy fixes, a kind of technocratic, wonkish spirit while also saying we do need to think in terms of intergenerational fairness brought about by an intergenerational coalition, in part because not all of the old are well off under gerontocracy, but also because the young aren't numerous enough without cross-generational alliances. So, I mean, the fixes run the gamut. They do involve things like age limits and youth cohorts in political representation. Those fixes I mentioned for the voting system or even things like proxy or weighted voting. On the biggest and deepest issue, wealth, I basically call for mandatory retirement in some sectors and reforming the tax system to reverse the perverse incentives that older people have to hoard. And to, you know, hasten, intergenerational wealth transmission.

GR: And would those include, for example, the bringing back of significant taxes on inheritance?

SM: I think that's fine. But, you know, the question there is, does that, you know, are there better ways to hasten, you know, inter vivos transfer, meaning like, the transmission of resources down the generational chain earlier. Because I think the long term rap against gerontocracy is that, you know, that younger generations will come into power and wealth just very late in their lives. And, you know, we are in the midst because the boomers do finally die of the greatest wealth transfer in human history. It's just a wealth transfer, let's say, among seniors, you know, the very old transmit it to the old. And so, a wealth tax wouldn't, I'm sorry, an inheritance tax, although very important, wouldn't necessarily deal with that as well as some other fixes.

GR: Tell me what those are real quick.

SM: Well, I mean, just as an example, I think we, right now most of the tax system is organized to let people keep their houses for as long as they like and preferably until death. And we should reverse those incentives and basically say, if you want to keep your larger house, you don't need, you can, but you have to pay higher taxes on it, not lower taxes on it as you age. And that's not expropriation or anything close to it, it's more money for the state which you could use for, you know, people across the lifespan, but it would encourage older people to begin thinking about downsizing and stopping their, you know, most flagrantly gerontocratic behavior, which is blocking new builds by going to town meetings and basically, you know, saying no. So that would be just an example. But, I basically, an income or wealth tax, a much higher than one we have would disproportionately affect older workers and older hoarders, if you will. And so indirectly, it would probably make the biggest difference.

GR: Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, I've often wondered in my, when I'm in a fairer minded mood, you know, why I should get lower property taxes just because I turn a certain age.

SM: Exactly, exactly.

GR: Yeah. Well, we'll have to leave it there. I can see that there's going to be a tough political pushback on the things that you are proposing. But that was Samuel Moyn, and again, his new book is titled "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It." Professor Moyn, thanks so much for talking with me. And I have to say, I'm more convinced by you than I thought when I started speaking with you a half hour ago. (laughter)

SM: Well, that's, it's a privilege to chat with you. Thanks very much.

GR: Thank you. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. This September, we'll see the 25th anniversary of 9/11. What serious threats have we faced since then and how safe are we now? My guest today is Michael Lebowitz, an attorney and a former counterterrorism prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. He's also a combat veteran and a former senior legal advisor to the US Army Cyber Command. And he's the author of a new book, it's titled "Second Wave: Inside Al Qaeda's Post-9/11 Attack Plan and America's Secret Effort to Stop It". Mr. Lebowitz, welcome to the program. And I have to say, I'm not sure whether your book scares me or reassures me, so I guess we'll figure that out in the next half hour.

Michael Lebowitz: Well, thank you for having me.

GR: We're really excited to have you. So, let's start with your book and then we'll broaden the conversation more to current day security risks, get your reflections on those, but the book is really fascinating. First of all, what was the stimulating event in 2003 that gives rise to this book?

ML: So, in 2003, many of the al-Qaeda operatives that were tasked with carrying out the 9/11 attacks started getting captured, and they started going to these black sites overseas, which are like, CIA run. And that's where the waterboarding, the enhanced interrogation techniques, also known as torture, occurred. And what happened was these operatives, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's the mastermind of 9/11, started naming names in very like torture conditions, so is it ambiguous? And this one name came out and then another operative said the same name. It was a guy who was a lawful permanent resident of New York who had an import export business. And then it also tied into nuclear weapons. So the concern was, was that this father and son duo with US ties and legitimate business were plotting with al-Qaeda to smuggle nuclear weapons or radiological material into the US through unsecured ports.

GR: Wow. And so, what was the US government's initial response to getting that information?

ML: So, it was almost hysterical in many ways in how the US reacted because they knew the ports weren't secure as well as they should have been. They knew that this plot for nuclear weapons came straight from the top, from Osama bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda along down to the 9/11 plotters. And they knew that the individual that was identified as potentially helping al-Qaeda, was connected to Pakistan's nuclear program and the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, as well as weapons proliferators in Pakistan, because remember, in 1998 Pakistan became a nuclear power. And so, the US, it became one of the most secretive and important manhunts in modern US history, trying to stop this plot before it occurred because they really thought that this individual, because al-Qaeda didn't have its own, you know, shipping company, right? They didn't know how to navigate maritime shipping and international trade. But this individual that the book describes that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and bin Laden knew about to help them, he actually had a shipping company, and he knew how to smuggle explosives into the US ports.

GR: And so, the idea, and this is where I have to apologize for my lack of sophisticated knowledge about different ways that nuclear material, nuclear weapons can be used, but the idea was to smuggle this material in and somehow set it off or put, it wasn't like an atomic bomb that was going to go off, but it was what, making this nuclear material sort of spread in a way that would contaminate large areas of the United States? What was the actual plan?

ML: So the plan that al-Qaeda had and the operatives that were involved, they had some sleeper agents. A lot of them had US ties to al-Qaeda and specifically tied to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, again, the mastermind of 9/11, because he didn't stop at 9/11. He was actually grooming this guy named Saifullah Paracha, who was the shipment guy prior to 9/11 in the spring of 2001. So, what the plan was, he was grooming individuals, including a refugee who went to high school in Baltimore named Majid Khan, and there were other individuals that they were going to case targets in the United States. They eventually were going to go to the ports and retrieve smuggled materials and whether it's radiological material that was smuggled to the ports or nuclear material, I think it was still up in the air how they were going to assemble that, in 2003 it was still not known. And one of the plots was, Majid Khan, for example, the Baltimore native, his family owned several gas stations up and down the East Coast in the Baltimore area and he had ties in Northern Virginia, the D.C. area. And his plan was to set off these bombs up and down the East Coast at gas stations, targeting the underground tanks, and also looking at things like shopping malls and make it a very coordinated attack using whatever explosive material, including weapons of mass destruction that they could obtain through the shipping company.

GR: And so, this was also a direct follow on in a way, to 9/11. I mean, it wasn't like a different effort, this is the same effort continued. Is that correct?

ML: That's correct. So, Osama bin Laden had this idea, and the book describes, he called it the ‘United States Hiroshima’. And he wanted to cause at least 20,000 to 100,000 casualties in an instant, in the most horrific way possible. So, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, he came up with what they called the planes operation, which is what became 9/11. But once that kind of got into motion, KSM, as his acronym is known, he kind of had his operatives really, kind of facilitating the hijackers and keeping things going. And KSM moved on, whether it's managing the money, the logistics for the second wave. And there were many al-Qaeda plots out there, some came to fruition and others got foiled that were designed for post 9/11. But the second wave plot, and the one that I really focus on in the book is the one from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, because unlike many of the other al-Qaeda operatives, KSM was the most vicious of all of them, the most calculated and kind of the one that could actually prove that he could actually get something so horrific done and navigate the red tape of al-Qaeda itself.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with former counterterrorism prosecutor Michael Lebowitz, and we're discussing his new book titled, "Second Wave: Inside Al Qaida's Post 9/11 Attack Plan and America's Secret Effort to Stop It." So, one of the most intriguing figures in your book is a particular FBI interrogator, who was especially adept at extracting information from suspects. Tell us about that person and the secret to that person's success.

ML: So, if there's a hero in this book, it's FBI special Agent Janelle Miller. At the time, she was a younger-ish FBI agent, and she was doggedly determined to stop this plot. She also had a moral compass that was impeccable and she was probably one of the best FBI agents as far as interrogations that I've ever spoken to and seen the fruits of her labor. Because when this plot came out, the entire U.S. government, I'm talking the CIA, the FBI, the military, the White House, even Congress, they were all trying to catch the Saifullah Paracha guy, the businessman who was the center of this nuclear plot. And they could not catch him because he was a really rich, wealthy man that lived in Pakistan. But his son became the CEO of his New York based company, and he was in New York. So, Janelle Miller was like, I'm going to go straight from Pakistan, where she was based, flew to New York, and she had a little conversation with Uzair Paracha, who is Saifullah Paracha, the father’s son. And she was so good at her job that she got him to admit things, she got everything she could out of this son, and she did it all on the up and up. There was no coercion, there was no need to do what the CIA was doing with torture. Because at the time, and the book describes this, when it became time to try to catch the father, the CIA openly advocated to torture the father, knowing that he was a lawful permanent resident. You know, he was, for all intents and purposes, he was an American, but the CIA wanted to torture him. And the book shows quotes from the CIA, saying that they wanted to do that. But the FBI, led by Agent Miller, said, you are not going to torture an American. One, we don't think that's actually going to get the job done, we're not going to solve the plot, so how about we come up with a plan? The CIA objected, they wanted to fight it, they really wanted control of the father. But finally, the FBI, CIA, the military, the White House all came up with this really elaborate ruse. It's one of the most fascinating ruses or trickery that the FBI has, and this is really, hasn't really been reported, where essentially, the FBI, again, led by Agent Miller, came up with this plan that in order to get the father out of Pakistan where he was being protected, they had to lure him out with business. So, they created this fake business opportunity, you know, an offer that he could not refuse. They had a guy who was close to him kind of, you know, convey that. And then the book describes the rendition process where, which is the first time, I think, really you get into, you know, getting someone throwing a black bag over his head, tossing him into a, you know, a truck. And then that was the CIA part of it, they transferred him over to the military, and then enter again, Janelle Miller, who interrogated the father in Bagram Air Base, in one of the most fascinating interrogations, because the father spun the most amazing story. You know, I mean, some crazy stuff he was trying to say that was based in truth, but also sounded so crazy like, that he was trying to convince Osama bin Laden to do a video where we can all try to coexist and get along with the Jews and the Christians. And Agent Miller came prepared, she brought receipts, she had financial records. She didn't need to do any torture like the CIA wanted to do. She was just like, okay, I have a receipt telling that you gave al-Qaeda $500,000, what were you doing with that? And he's like, no, I'm just a businessman. But she broke him down, and this guy, and he was a tough nut to crack, and she finally broke him down where I think tortured never would have been able to do that. And if it wasn't for other conditions, because at the time, the US government was trying to reestablish its counterterrorism strategy on the fly, and it was trying to do more of the military toolbox instead of the law enforcement toolbox. So we had military investigators in the room at the FBI and they were a little green, you know, they didn't really have the experience that Janelle Miller did. And that really comes to a head because the military investigator, I would say completely botched all of the work that Janelle Miller did. And I talked to her in late 2005 and Agent Miller still says that 20 some years after this interrogation in 2003, what the military investigator did was one of the most shocking moments of her entire career.

GR: Well, say more about that then. I mean, what exactly happened in that regard? And I also want to, well, I'll save the other question, but let's start with that one. What was so shocking?

ML: So, and this is something that it's never been reported, you know, publicly this is the first time it's out there. But in FBI circles and in CIA circles, this story is definitely up there with one of the most shocking and notorious events in interrogation history. I mean, this was a big deal, because what happened is, it botched the entire quest to find out where the nuclear weapons were, how far the plot went, were there explosives shipping to the United States at the time? It's messed up. And here's what happened, so, there was a military investigator that I described through the book, she was very ambitious, she had worked on low level cases. And, so because what happened was the military created this brand new investigation unit to handle 9/11 or post 9/11 war crimes cases like al-Qaeda guys. The acronym was CITF, and it was a task force for like counterintelligence, counterterrorism task force for al-Qaeda and Agent Ruby was one of those people. She was at Bagram, and she, so at Bagram, they got word that a high value detainee was going to come to the military zone, which never happened because the high value detainees were the CIA people, the ones that were like the big wigs of al-Qaeda. Usually at Bagram the military got the lower level people, the smaller people. Maybe they were ratted out by, you know, like a rival tribe in Afghanistan or something like that. But Agent Ruby got wind that a high value person was coming to military zone. She didn't know why, but she wanted to be part of it. And the government said, hey, FBI, you're going to need to have CITF, this military investigation team, you know, on your interrogation team. You could do whatever you want, but they need to be involved because this is the new way we're doing it, we just started it. And so, Agent Miller was like, whatever, fine, but Agent Ruby, you're going to be a note taker. Agent Ruby did not want to be a note taker, she wanted to take the lead. She thought that she could break Saifullah Paracha this bigwig al-Qaeda guy, you know, and she thought that she was going to be the hero. Then the interrogation goes on for weeks, and it was very calculated. Agent Miller was an expert, and she slowly started turning the screws on Saifullah Paracha and finally she broke him. She caught him in enough lies, the room clearly, and there were three people in the room, there was a CIA agent, there was Janelle Miller and Agent Ruby, that's the name I've been calling her. And they all said that the room changed. He was about to break. He started, you know, closing his eyes, sweating, and he said, okay, here's what happened, and as he opened his mouth to say what happened, all of a sudden, Agent Ruby says, we need to take a break, I gotta pee. And the room just, stunned. And Saifullah Paracha, when the spell was broken and he blinked a few times and he just kicked back in his chair, all relaxed. And Janelle Miller told me that that was one bell that could not be unrung, she was never going to be able to get back to that place. And that was to her and the CIA agent, I talked to him, too, that was the most shocking thing that they have ever seen in their careers.

GR: Wow. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Michael Lebowitz, the attorney and former Guantanamo Bay prosecutor has written a new book titled, "Second Wave: Inside Al Qaeda's Post-9/11 Attack Plan and America's Secret Effort to Stop It." So, Michael, one of the things that I want to get into is obviously the question of the relationship between this book and sort of where we are today. Let me ask, though, one more question, it's more rooted in this particular case. What are the most important things that we as citizens should know about that investigation and that effort to interdict that plan to bring in those kinds of materials to the United States?

ML: Right. So the second wave investigation came at a time of great, kind of upheaval and change in the intelligence community and law enforcement and the military, and how it was handling these counterterrorism exigent cases where kind of like, because this case was a ticking time bomb case, that they thought these explosives might be on the way. They didn't know what type of explosives, they were catching operatives left and right that were involved in that. So, what people really need to understand is that the ports then and even today are still not 100% secure. That some of these materials can still sneak their way through, and if you have someone on the other side, a terrorist operative or a maligned force that is knowledgeable, and that's what al-Qaeda was doing, and that's what was so unique about this plot, was they were actually cultivating an import export shipping. You know, they weren't trying to reinvent the wheel because Saifullah Paracha, the import exporter, his business card, his emails, his advice was being found in safe houses throughout Pakistan, from top al-Qaeda operatives, including people that were involved in the 9/11 attack plot. And the book also talks about an undercover investigation that was conducted by agents of Congress, to investigators from Congress to see if the ports were secure and that the borders were secure and it proved that they weren't. These people created fictitious companies, and they were actually able to talk their way into the borders, the northern and southern border with radioactive material.

GR: Wow.

ML: And even though we have sensors and things like that now, you know, and we had it back then too, but there's still ways to, kind of whether it's under the cover of legitimate business or completely bypassing the sensors, there are ways to smuggle, you know, weapons of mass destruction through the borders or through the ports. And that is an issue that was prevalent back then, it was a national emergency in 2003, but it's still a real concern right now.

GR: Is that particular method our biggest threat right now? Is that our biggest weakness, the borders and the ports, in terms of importing those kinds of things that could really do some serious damage?

ML: So, for the importing part, if you're talking about weapons of mass destruction, then yes, the borders and the ports are definitely the biggest part. But if you're talking about more conventional attacks, whether it's a coordinated attack, almost like, like a 9/11 type attack, but maybe not with planes, but you know, something else that's equally vicious, then that's something that's really need a focus on other places. The book talks about in 2026 that some of the biggest terrorism threats come from Africa right now. There's a group called JNIM, for example, that is literally on the march throughout several nations in Africa like Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, things like that. They're kind of taking, they're an al-Qaeda offshoot that's following somewhat the ISIS playbook of consolidating territory. But the concern is, is that JNIM, they're having the space that's still under the radar and that they are getting training because they're fighting Russian mercenaries right now. So, they're getting the combat training and if they really get this kind of, hey, we want to make a big statement, we want to attack the United States, then that's an issue where we really need to worry about. And just to really hammer that home, just recently, the Washington Post did an article, an exclusive article that President Trump was considering military action in Africa to combat JNIM because this is really a bipartisan issue. This goes from like project 2025, which is conservative, you know, document to military documents to liberal documents. You know, whatever political persuasion it is, they're saying that the biggest terrorism threat right now comes from Africa. And I think that's where we really need to focus and worry about as far as these al-Qaeda offshoots doing the next big thing.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Michael Lebowitz, a national security expert and the author of, "Second Wave: Inside Al Qaeda's Post 9/11 Attack Plan and America's Secret Effort to Stop It." So, I want to go back to the Middle East, I guess, for a moment and think about Iran. And Iran's leadership has been making threats against the United States in response to actions taken by the Trump administration against it. And in fact, you mentioned the Washington Post, I read a piece in the Washington Post that Trump to took a secret flight back from Turkey because he was worried about an attack on Air Force One from Iran. So, he actually flew on a different plane and that was a ruse to fool the Iranians. So how seriously should we be taking these threats from Iran right now?

ML: Oh, we have to take the Iranian threats very seriously. Because they have proxies, you know, throughout Iraq, you know, Lebanon, you know, Yemen, everywhere around there that a lot of them have an international component. In fact, a few months ago, an Iranian proxy group from Iraq was actually arrested and extradited and brought to New York for plotting to attack Jewish targets. And the day of the Ayatollah’s his funeral, his son, who became the supreme leader of Iran, and this went really under the radar, he actually said that, essentially gave a tacit permission for, you know, proxies to activate, you know, worldwide was the word he used. So, you know, Iran, we know has this proxy terrorism, you know, bent, and if they choose to, you know, escalate and take the fight to the US or to other Western targets, then they'd have a huge target list to do it, they have the means to do it, and they have the operatives to do it. And this could be targeting Jewish targets, it could be targeting government or military targets or even soft targets, Iran has been known to target all of the above on that. And so that is something that we have to take seriously. And that has to be, you know, our top counterterrorism threat that we need to focus on besides, of course, Africa and the al-Qaeda offshoots and things like that, they're always percolating and growing. So, we're kind of at a point in some ways more dangerous than we were prior to 9/11, but we're at a pre-9/11 sense of vulnerability in many ways, and that's the scariest part. Because if you look at what's going on in the intelligence community, and in law enforcement, the FBI, after 9/11, they created the 9/11 Commission. The FBI had a lot of recommendations, and those recommendations were designed to stop exactly what you're talking about, state sponsored terrorism or terrorist groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS or something like that. And for a long time that was successful. But around 2016, at the end of the Obama administration, you started seeing a bit of complacency where maybe certain funding mechanisms might not be funded to counterterrorism or protect or to provide grants to localities that are prone to terrorist attacks. And then you go to 2025, 2026 and all the recommendations are being reversed. Now instead of, you know, retaining and maintaining and training, you know, analysts, you know, law enforcement and intelligence analysts and translators and agents, they're being fired or they're being coaxed to quit or resign, or they're opting to quit for whatever reason. At the office of Director of National Intelligence, they got rid of a huge chunk of their workforce, and it sounds like they're going to continue doing that. The whole point of ODNI as it's called, was to kind of be a clearinghouse so that all of the intelligence information goes to one place to be analyzed so we can identify threats, that's not stuck in a silo like at the FBI or the CIA.

GR: Yeah, that was one of the big conclusions from 9/11, that was the problem, that silo. Yeah, so, interesting.

ML: And one thing I could do if you want, if I could give you a, I tell a story in the book and I think it's relevant to today in many ways is, five weeks before 9/11, in August of 2001, there was a man who flew into the Orlando airport, his name is Mohammed al-Qahtani. And, he was kind of a jerk, you know, he was kind of rude to the customs agent at the at the thing. He had a one-way ticket and $3,000 in cash. So the customs agent said, okay, you're going to go talk to this guy in a little room. And Qahtani didn't have a good answer to anything. He's like, he was asked, what are you here for? Business. What kind of business do you do? Business. You know, like just kind of ridiculous answers. So like, he's like, somebody is waiting for me here. Who's waiting for you? I don't know. So, they treated him like a migrant. They were on the immigration bent. So, they sent Qahtani home. They gave him a choice, you can stay and talk to us some more, you can take your $3,000 and buy another one-way ticket back to Dubai where you came from, so he left. And what the agents had in their possession when they were talking to Qahtani was a travel itinerary. Again, this is five weeks before 9/11, it had the contact information, including the phone number of the main al-Qaeda operative, a guy named Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who was literally financing clothing and feeding the hijackers inside the United States. And then he had a prepaid calling card. That calling card was directly connected to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and the individual, there was an individual who was at the Orlando airport waiting for Qahtani, that was Mohamed Atta, the commander of the hijackers. He actually got a parking ticket and he, Atta, when Qahtani was a no show, actually used his calling card and called al-Qaeda 9/11 operatives to say, hey, he was a no show. So, you can see why the story is important, because today there's a big focus on immigration enforcement and sometimes, and what's happening is investigators are being dual tasked so that their focus might be on immigration enforcement, even though their day job is counterterrorism. And the issue is, things might fall through the cracks. In 9/11, Mohammad al-Qahtani, he was the 20th hijacker. He was meant to be the fifth hijacker on flight 93, that's why that flight only had four. So the concern is we don't want another Qahtani moment where something falls through the cracks because the law enforcement is focused and DHS now are focused on counterterrorism and at the same time doing counter immigration.

GR: Wow. Well, we'll have to leave it there, unfortunately. However, you have answered the question I started with, I'm more scared now, so thank you very much. (laughter)

ML: Sorry about that, I am a Debbie-downer.

GR: No, very important information and a fascinating book. That was Michael Lebowitz and again, his new book is titled, "Second Wave: Inside al-Qaeda's Post 9/11 Attack Plan and America's Secret Effort to Stop It." It reads like the thriller that it is. Mr. Lebowitz, thanks so much for talking with me. And I also want to thank you for your service to the country in many different areas that you have done, both in the military and out of the military.

ML: Thank you so much.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Do you like murder mysteries? My guest today is a historical sleuth and she's unearthed a particularly intriguing and gruesome case from our distant past. Katherine Grandjean is a history professor at Wellesley College, and the author of a new book. It's titled, "Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution." Professor Grandjean, welcome to the program, it's a really, really interesting book.

Katherine Grandjean: Oh, thank you so much. Glad to be here.
GR: Well, we really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with a very basic question. How did you get put on to the trail that led to writing this book?

KG: Well, the truth is, I just could not resist this story. I mean, that's the very candid answer. So, "Kingdom of Devils," is, it tells the story of a brutal series of murders, as you said, on the revolutionary frontier committed by two brothers named Wiley and Micajah Harpe. And cutting across hundreds and hundreds of miles of territory in the early west, they killed about two dozen people.

GR: Wow.

KG: And the sort of incredible, one of the incredible things about this story is that no one has ever really explained why they did it, or why this all happened. And that was the riddle that sort of drew me into it. As a little bit of further background, I'm a historian, I've written about other frontiers and Native American history, and you know, encounter, generally. So I was sort of primed, I think, for a frontier story to come along that would allow me to unpack the darker sides of early American history. And what happened was, I happened to be teaching a course that's about early American violence. And in that course, I assigned kind of an old roundup, an article from the 1960s that just sort of gave an overview of violent episodes in American history. And my intention, I had not read it, my intention was just to give my students a way of thinking about what they might want to write about in their own research projects, just kind of a list of things that had happened. It so happened that in that piece, the Harpe’s were mentioned, very briefly in a couple of sentences, they were called the ‘brutal Harpe brothers’ who were responsible for something like 20 or 30 deaths in frontier Kentucky and Tennessee. And I just was sort of blown away because I had never heard of them, I had never encountered this story. And at this point, I had already been reading and writing and thinking about early American history for years. So I just thought to myself, how in the world do I not know about this case? And that was the beginning of it. I just fell down the rabbit hole of trying to understand what these murders were all about. That's really what caught me. Why? Why did they do this? Why did they commit all these murders? And, you know, it wasn't very long before I just could not put it down.

GR: Well, I want to unpack some of the things that you threw out there, in particular the question of why, but I have some other questions first. So, one was about the way you went about writing it. You had, your reviewers had some very high praise for the book in advance. And one of the reviewers used something that really caught my eye, which was, compared your book to, "In Cold Blood," which is one of my all-time favorite books by Truman Capote.

KG: That’s great.

GR: And he claimed, Capote claimed to have invented a genre, I think he was over claiming for himself, but the genre of nonfiction novel. And I was wondering if you had that type of consciousness when you were writing this, that you, because every, all the reviewers praised your writing and said that it was, you know, it read like a really great mystery novel. Did you do that consciously?

KG: Yes. And thank you for sort of highlighting that, because I think it was very important to me to tell this story in a way that would be compelling and sort of plot driven, even as it does make some important points. I think about the early Republic in the years after the American Revolution. You know, we're in this moment where there's a lot of uncertainty and nobody really knows what the United States is going to be or look like. And so, it is a serious history book in the sense that it sort of interprets some of what's happening in these years. But having said that, I wanted to write a good story, you know, and I wanted to sort of, ensure that my readers wanted to keep turning the pages and that I would sort of develop some of these characters and places and the world around them in really rich, kind of immersive detail. So, I think the "In Cold Blood" comparison is an apt one in certain ways. Not just stylistically, but, you know, that was also, in some ways a book that pushed the limits of genre and I think mine does too. You know, I mean, it's sort of sits somewhere, it's a marriage of true crime and history, and it is sort of novelesque in its in its sensibilities and in its structure. And so, I hope it succeeds on the level of sort of murder spree thriller as well as, you know, a portrait of post-revolutionary America.

GR: So, let's do something similar to what you see in like a traditional British murder series, detective series, just to give us an idea. Let's start with a couple of bodies, you know, you mentioned that these guys killed about two dozen people, but what was the nature of the victims being discovered and the circumstances of the deaths, were there any shared characteristics as people knew it at the time?

KG: There are some shared characteristics. You know, the first murder that seems to be the one that's sort of, the way when people narrate the Harpe murders, they usually begin with a victim named Thomas Langford, who was sort of an affluent, you know, very well to do man from Virginia traveling into Kentucky, kind of silver jangling in his pockets. And the Harpe’s encountered him, it seems, in a tavern and what was called the Wilderness Road, which was sort of the way everyone went to get to Kentucky in the sort of settlements in early Kentucky. And he's representative in some ways, mostly the Harpe’s killed men, and they killed boys, I think even more specifically, many of the victims were well-to-do, sort of affluent, men who had done really well and prospered in the years after the American Revolution. People like Justices of the Peace and Continental Army, veterans and men of substantial property. So there are some clues in that, you know, there are some indications I think of what they're up to when you start to see that pattern. Having said that, and this was sort of a very hard-won lesson for me working on this case, there really is no one murder that unlocks the entire thing. I mean, there's not exactly one profile because they killed people they knew, they killed people they didn't know, and I ultimately decided that, you know, the victimology only takes you so far, and you kind of have to step back and see the wider picture, which in the 1790s was not easy to do because they're covering hundreds of miles. I mean, they just, they took advantage of the fact that they could keep moving and spreading terror. And, you know, the county sheriff is sort of the face of law enforcement in these years. His jurisdiction ends at the county line, so if you keep moving, you know, there's really no ability for law enforcement in the late 18th century to sort of work across wide swaths of territory. And there were coroners and there were, you know, deputies and kind of lesser peace officers that sort of swarm to the scene every time one of these murders happens. But their ability to sort of conceive of it in a wider way or have any hope, really, of catching these fugitives, even once they become kind of notorious and there's a little more public awareness of what's happening, their ability to do anything about it is sort of hamstrung.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Wellesley history professor Katherine Grandjean and we're discussing her new book. It's titled, "Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution," So how did the public at that time become aware of who was doing this? How did they get found out?

KG: That's a great question. And another thing about this story that sort of surprised me was that, you know, despite the kind of haplessness of law enforcement, the media, you know, the sort of nascent newspaper and print networks in Kentucky and Tennessee and in the early Western territories were much better about gathering information and sort of printing information almost in real time. The publishers, men like John Bradford, who published the "Kentucky Gazette," and George Ralston, who published the "Knoxville Gazette," had surprisingly effective networks of post riders and sort of men who distributed their newspapers. And so, they were better, in fact, at collecting clues about these murders and then presenting them to the public than law enforcement was. So, at the same time that there's this kind of ongoing spiraling of terror in the public consciousness and knowing that law enforcement can't really do much about it, there is a kind of growing notoriety around the Harpe’s. Even as the murders were unfolding, they sort of gained, you know, and I will say it took a little bit of time for that to begin happening because the first couple of murders, nobody knew that they should be afraid, you know? A murder here or there on the American frontier is not out of the ordinary, it's not out of the question, right? So, it's not really until it's sort of started to sink in I think that it's the same two men who are responsible for a lot of these deaths, and where are they going to turn up next? It's probably a couple months into it, really, before the public begins to sort of conceive of the fact that this is something pretty novel and a kind of threat that has not really been confronted before.

GR: So, I'm not going to ask you what ultimately happened to these two.

KG: Thank you.

GR: I'm going to preserve that reveal for when people buy the book and read it. But, you mentioned that, you know, that this information does get passed along and shared through news publications and, you know, the word of mouth and all that. Did it did it affect the area in a certain way that, you know, people like, men started staying up all night to make sure that, you know, their families were safe or what? You know, how did it affect the general area?

KG: Yeah, it did affect the general area, I think psychologically, you know? I'm not sure I can argue that it had any kind of long term implications for, you know, the building up of law enforcement. But certainly as the murders were unfolding, there are many accounts, I mean, quite a few records capture the fact that these little frontier villages sort of convulsed with fear. You know, there are stories about, you know, children being told not to stray too far and men kind of putting a pocket pistol into their trousers on the way to do business in a different part of Kentucky. So, yes, in real time, there was really serious sort of shock waves of fear in society. And this is a place and time where it's not necessarily the case that people are unafraid. They're not used to being kind of complacent and comfortable. It's just that, you know, the threats that they're more accustomed to worrying about are things like Shawnee raids or a Cherokee attack on the Wilderness Road. That kind of thing, these people have been sort of bred for generations to fear. But the idea that, you know, ordinary looking American strangers might knock on your door and be a lethal threat to you or your family, that's really not something that they have any natural immunity to. So, I think the sort of emotional and mental repercussions of this spree are pretty profound for the time.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Katherine Grandjean, the Wellesley history professor has written a new book titled, "Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution." So, let's get into the topic that you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation about the motives for these murders and how you discovered that they were more complicated than a lot of people assumed. So, this wasn't just two guys that kind of went off and became serial killers, there was something other than just pure bloodlust that was driving them. Tell us what you discovered.

KG: Yeah, and that's exactly what I instinctively felt at the beginning. You know, historically, when people have tried to make sense of these murders, they have said things like, well, these two brothers were just bloodthirsty or they were monsters. That never felt fully satisfying to me and I felt like there had to be more to it. There just, you know, there had to be more to the story. And so, to say that they're monsters, I think forecloses on the possibility of understanding better. And what I ultimately came to conclude is that there really is a deeper meaning. And they, I believe they thought they were doing something more profound and meaningful than just this kind of, you know, improvised and like, spasmodic explosion of violence. I think they really were making a statement. And that insight came to me after, you know, several years, frankly, of trying to reconstruct their background, their experiences before the murders began, what happened to them in Knox County, Tennessee, which is where they were living before the spree. And I uncovered a kind of, without giving everything away, you know, some challenges and misfortunes and a kind of almost a cascade of problems that began to accumulate for these two brothers. And then I started to also kind of put that into view with some of the things that have come down to us about how they talked about the spree and what other people sort of said they said about the spree. There is some surviving evidence about that. Things like, they declared war on fellow American citizens, and they were doing this in retaliation for some fancied injury. Okay, so, think about whether that feels kind of familiar and resonant in some way. So, sort of bringing in criminology and other sorts of disciplines even than just history, I concluded, really what they look like are rampage killers, this is a rampage. And rampage killing comes from sort of a different place. It's very often about revenge, grievance, having the last word and sort of like, protest is a strong word to use, but…

GR: Well, is there a class component to it? I mean, it's not, you know, looking at this, you say they encountered all these difficulties, and they often murdered well-to-do men. It almost sounds like this is like they're engaging in sort of a class warfare at the individual level. Does that capture a bit of it?

KG: I think that's fair to say. I mean, I think that I wouldn't necessarily sort of reduce it to just that, but I do think there is a class component to it. I mean, I think these are two men who felt pushed out of opportunity in ways that, you know, while they were watching other people really benefit in some ways from all of the promise of the post-revolutionary years and the sort of expectation coming out of the revolution. And so even the politics of Kentucky and Tennessee in these years is very much about haves and have nots. It's, you know, in the legislatures, it's sort of very fissured along those lines. And I think when you put the Harpe murders in the same arena as that story and kind of see them as embedded in the social politics of the era, yes, you can see that this is about, you know, the losers, if you will, sort of having their way with the winners.

GR: And so what do you think this tells us about the founding era in America that we may not know or fully appreciate?

KG: Well, this is a darker picture of what independence meant and what the American Revolution meant. I mean, I think of this book as, in the broadest sense, really being about the long legacies of the American Revolution. And the revolution, you know, was an absolutely momentous, inarguably profound thing, historically, politically, but also personally for Americans, because it was not just a political experiment. You know, it's not just sort of the political separation with Britain, the creation of the United States. Those things are profound, I won't take any meaning, or I won't take any sort of significance away from those things. But that's part of it, right? Because the revolution also taught Americans to think about themselves in new ways and expect new things for themselves. You know, under monarchy, most men are just subjects, and they didn't expect to become gentlemen because they hadn't been born to that, right? But the revolution says pursue happiness to the extent that your own abilities and merits can take you, you know, go sort of chase your dreams. And so, what the book does is sort of say, there's a little bit of a price to that that I think we have not acknowledged, which is that, you know, inaugurating this new kind of society, which is in many ways magical and incredibly empowering, but also competitive and, you know, organized in such a way that people will succeed and soar in this new republic, but also kind of fail in some cases and not be able to realize their dreams, and some of those people act out violently. So, I hope at the end of the day, what I'm uncovering is that there is that threat, there is that sort of unseen, violent legacy, which I think we have not grappled with as Americans.

GR: And a real dislocation to it sounds like from what you're saying, you know, it created I mean, the old thing that was always said about the British system was, you know, there's a place for everyone and everyone in their place.

KG: Correct.

GR: So this completely upends that.

KG: Correct.

GR: But that puts pressure on you then, yeah, very fascinating. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. My guest is Katherine Grandjean, we're discussing her new book, it's titled, "Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution." You know, in terms of this argument you're making regarding the violence on the frontier and during the founding era, do you think there's something fundamentally different about that era regarding that frontier in contrast to as it expanded further west? I mean, we're more familiar with stories of lawlessness and violence and the quote unquote, “wild west”, but is this something, I don't know, more raw? How would you explain the difference?

KG: I think yes and no, I would say. I mean, I think it is qualitatively different than other frontiers in some ways. You know, you're right, we are more familiar with the sort of wild west of the Jesse James era.

GR: Billy the Kid, you know, yeah.

KG: Right, right. I mean, and that feels more known and familiar. But, you know, so I think in the revolutionary era, it's the first west, it's Kentucky and Tennessee, it's the Trans-Appalachian West. Part of what's different about it is the fact that the American Revolution has just tossed the chessboard, I mean, it is in some ways more destabilized and more new and more kind of confused than it will be in future years. I think nobody knows quite what to expect and one of the things that happens in the aftermath of the revolution is that, you know, this proclamation line that the British have sort of instituted down the spine of the Appalachians and said, there will, you know, everything west of this is Indian country, and there will be no further western settlement. Well, when the revolution ends and that's removed, there are just sort of gushers of streams of migration, I mean, people pour over the mountains. And so, there is this kind of carnival of mobility and rootlessness and breaking of ties from families and villages and just a kind of loss of traditional safety nets in ways that probably really had not been true in many ways in other eras, and maybe wouldn't necessarily be true in the trans Mississippi West either. There's some novelty to that in the sort of quickness with which it happens and the unfamiliarity with which it happens, and the people who are just kind of disoriented and destabilized in the midst of living through this tornado. So, you know, having said that, there are some things about it that are, of course, familiar. Grinding warfare with native people, obviously the absence of sort of strong structures of state and law enforcement and court systems that kind of corral the people who are moving into these new territories. So there's some resonance, I think, you know, with future wests. And Turner, for all his flaws, I mean, I have to confess, I am sort of a Turnarian in some ways, you know, I think there is something…

GR: Yeah, it seems like he’s captured something there that you're exploring, yeah.

KG: Yeah. I mean, look, the West is a crucible in American history in many ways.

GR: Yeah, no, it's fascinating. So, do the people living in the areas of Kentucky where these murders were concentrated, today would they know the name Harpe’s? Is it part of the local lore or not?

KG: Yeah, that's a great question. Mostly not, I think, though it has survived as a kind of folk story and folk tradition in some places, particularly in the places that are associated with, you know, the major episodes of this series of murders. So there, you know, there's some kind of folk memory that has survived, but it's surprisingly has been forgotten even in Tennessee and Kentucky to a large extent, I found. I mean, it's just sort of staggering, I think that these murders are not better remembered even in the locales where they took place. And they have been lost for about 100 years. I mean, the last books really to cover these crimes in any detail were written about a century ago.

GR: Wow. Well, yeah, this is my last question, we only have about a minute left, but, I'm just wondering, why do you think that's the case? Is it, I mean, one thing that occurred to me was, well, maybe it's the Hatfield and McCoy feud that kind of colonized the memory of those folks in that area and drove out the… why do you think they don't know about it? It's weird, you’re right.

KG: Yeah. Why have the murders been forgotten? This is a thing I've wrestled with a lot. I think there are a couple of ways of thinking about this. One is, the Civil War really kind of crashed like a giant wave over southern folk tradition. Two, Appalachia became branded as kind of aberrant by mainstream America, people became uninterested in studying it. And the third thing, though, I think is, look, there's been a kind of strange squeamishness about looking too closely at the Harpe’s all along, I think. You sort of sense Americans have been worried what might happen if they sort of stare too long at these two brothers and what they did. We don't want to sort of own and recognize them, I think.

GR: Well, so we'll have to leave it there. And that's the intriguing thing about your book, you invite people to stare at them and it's quite interesting what they'll see. That was Katherine Grandjean. And again, her new book is titled, "Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution" and if you'd like to upgrade your current beach reading, but still keep that reading interesting and bloody, this is choice. So, Professor Grandjean, thanks so much for talking with me, really had a lot of fun with this.

KG: Thank you so much.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Class politics seems to be back in political style, and my guest today has an interesting take on it. Stephen Young, executive director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism and he was a former dean and professor of law at Hamline University School of Law. He has a new book out, it's titled, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them." Mr. Young, welcome to the program, very provocative book.

Stephen Young: Thank you so much, glad to be here.

GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with a very basic question, how did you get the idea to write this? And in addition to that, as kind of an intro, you write about the United States as being founded upon a covenant, that's kind of how you set this up. So, tell us where this book, it's the book's origin story and then how a covenant figures into it.

SY: Actually Grant, part of the thinking about this book has been in my mind for a long time. It kind of got started when I was a college student at Harvard. But particularly the notion of a covenant, which is very New England, and I can't remember who, but Bernard Bailyn and some of the other writers on sort of the founding of the American culture. And then I think it was Professor Be er who assigned de Tocqueville, written in 1835 on, “Democracy in America”. And I remember picking up from de Tocqueville, a Frenchman, this notion that there was something different about these Americans because they had this sense of individual responsibility, which I thought, you know, that’s pretty cool. This was in the 60s, so it brought to mind JFK, his inaugural address about don't ask what your country can do for you, etc., etc. Also in particular, one of them, a professor who became my friend and mentor, David Riesman, he had come up with the theory in 1950 in his book called "The Lonely Crowd", that there was a new kind of American culture emerging, which was different from this older inherited culture from the Puritans. And that came up with this notion of inner-directed Americans who have a sense of focus and self-confidence and the work ethic, really, those old fashioned Protestant work ethic which is less popular these days as it once was. And then what's more popular these days is ‘other direction’, I don't particularly have any purpose in life, I don't really have a work ethic, and it's me-ism. So those things came together. The other thing about the class side, it's a personal anecdote. When I graduated 1967, Harvard class, 1200 young men who are now, they're all retired now, I think most of them, I can't even track them all. They’ve made a lot of money, they've been across our elite, across America, they are our elite, and of those 1200, 10 went to Vietnam, and I was one of the 10. And that just, that graduation day when they listed where everybody's going, I suddenly realized that I was the odd man out. Just put something in my mind about what is happening to us.

GR: Yeah, yeah, well that's interesting. And, you know, you mentioned Riesman, a towering figure in social science and certainly a classic of all time, that “Lonely Crowd”. So, after you talk about this covenant and maybe you could say a little bit more about it, actually, so you have this sense of individual responsibility, it's rooted in and these older religious values in part. What is the nature of the mutual obligation that you see as being the foundation here?

SY: I see sort of two things. One very specifically in this, it's a Calvinist Protestant tradition, which to me is very Old Testament. It's like God made a covenant with you, we make a covenant with God. And the best expression is John Winthrop's, I think, you know, sermon on board the Arbella sailing, where the pilgrims are sailing into Boston Harbor. He basically says, we have a job to do, and our job is, this is not perfectly, you know, correct, but our job is to serve the Lord. So we are not here to have fun, you know, we are, and Puritans were pretty dour people, I have some in my ancestry.

GR: (laughter)

SY: But the sense of responsibility then I think, and this goes to sort of the interpretation, Calvin is in there a little bit and Martin Luther is in there, is that we have a responsibility to others in God's creation, we are not here to enjoy ourselves. We are not here to make a mess of his creation either. And so, to some extent, life is not fun. But on the other hand, if you feel good about yourself, then life does become, fun is not quite the right word, then life becomes something that's reassuring and affirming of you. But it's based on this notion of a job to do. We can also see this, Grant, I think, and I so rarely hear people in these days talk about it, in Abraham Lincoln. I mean, in the Gettysburg Address in his second inaugural where he's talking about our responsibility to free the slaves, our responsibility to have a new birth of freedom. So, I think that's what I sort of consider the core part of America. Two quick points. One, there were there were parts of our people who were left out of this covenant. One is the slaves. And we're still suffering, I think from that non-inclusion to this day. Secondly, the southern slave holders, the gentry who then led the South away from union in the Civil War. They had they had a different, they were not really part of this covenant as believers. So, that's I would say, that's to me, the starting point of who is America? Where do we come from? Where should we be going?

GR: Interesting. And I have to say, this is an interview of you, not me. But you put chills down my spine when you mentioned John Winthrop in the Arbella. Because when I give talks to people from outside the United States trying to explain what is distinctly American about our political culture, that's where I start, and I'm very familiar with that speech that that you referenced. Yes, I think you've got it right. So, all right, so after that the book's main preoccupation then is about this notion of an overclass in American society and how this has changed as you argue for the worse in recent decades. So, what is the overclass, first of all? Let's just take it out as a concept. What is an overclass and how does it differ from a word that we're probably more familiar with, which is elite? You know, what's the distinction?

SY: Well, I would say the overclass is an elite. But the important thing, particularly these days with the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, is that in my analysis, following other people, Bakunin, Trotsky, Hegel, is that the overclass is a managerial class. But as managers, they are neither capitalists or nor are they proletarians or workers. Because the overclass, basically college educated Americans, Americans with degrees who have white collar positions in government and business across the board. They live, in a quasi-Marxist sense, their relationship to the economy is rent extraction. These are salaried people, and some of them have very, very big salaries, which they can invest in the stock market, which is a money process, but they're not capitalists. They don't run businesses, they don't take risks, in fact, they're risk averse and they're not workers. And the idea for this class, I traced back to Hegel in the early 19th century in Germany, and it comes to the United States after the Civil War, first with Johns Hopkins University. It came with, it created the university movement. Prior to this, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia were old fashioned, sort of Puritan Calvinist colleges whose mission was to create good citizens and good people, not to do research, not to have tenured professors who write books and peer reviewed articles. But to deal with sort of the quality of the young man as a student. By the time you get to 1890 and when you get to Woodrow Wilson, 1912, we have a whole university system which is based on research, training and creating experts who can manage us for the better.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Stephen Young of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism and we're discussing his new book titled, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them". Okay, so that's a pretty broad definition. I don't know if you're familiar with this book, I spoke to the author about a year ago, but it reminds me in some ways of this book, titled, “We Were Never Woke”. And he breaks out, you know, the different and academia figures into it the media, this kind of managerial class with this kind of education that you're talking about. Okay, so it's this group, but it's pretty broad. They don't create, and they manage, and they have a certain attitude toward risk and sort of putting themselves out there. What are the main tenants of the things that they stand for and against politically? I mean, for example, you say they have an ideology of decadence that's very provocative, so explain that.

SY: Well, my sense of decadence is, picking it up from just older writers, about the sort of rise and fall of nations and kingdoms and things like that, is decadence is sort of when you care about yourself and you don't really care much about other people or your country or your duties or your responsibilities. One thinks of the Russian aristocrats at the end of the, you know, Romanoff dynasty, one thinks of the French, Marie-Antoinette, let them eat cake, that kind of a feeling. It’s, I don't have a sense of responsibility, I think that to me, is core. And therefore, if I don't have a sense of responsibility, I don't really deeply care about other people or what they think or this, which puts me in a position of telling them what to do. I think the class has this function of telling us what to do. But there's a problem in the middle of this, because if they are, as Reisman said, other directed, which means they're always looking to somebody else to tell them what to do so they can then turn around and pass it on to, you know, to whomever they're listening. I also associate the culture of this overclass with, particularly Carol Gilligan's, sort of, I don't, feminist or, the feminine mode of thinking and acting, particularly an ethic of care where she argues against Kohlberg that the feminine instinct is to care for other people. But caring is also very close to managing other people. If I care about you, then I'm going to make sure you live right, according to what I think is right. And so the center of, I'd say the overclass is to create political, governmental, administrative structures which allow them to, quote unquote, “improve people, improve society”. I just read a review of a new book, I can't remember the name, but it was stunning. It was somebody out there, is arguing that that the destruction of the African-American family, which is not a good thing, can be traced back, he traces it back to the 1930s under the New Deal, the creation of housing projects, using architecture. And Le Corbusier, the famous French architect I remember is building at Harvard, and I was there, the architect is part of the overclass because they understand how many square feet you should have, this where the playground should be, you know, you should have no problem living in a 30 story building. I didn't know this, in some of the early projects, the elevators only stopped at every other floor so that you’d have congregations of people at different floors who were not really neighbors. That to me, is an example, the, I associate the federal debt, I mean, our total federal debt, what, $38 trillion is government expenditures on programs starting in the 1930s. And all those programs were designed by members of the overclass, in theory, to make America better. We are not a happy people. I try to bring that out in the book. I think we have identity, we just saw it with the 250th, we Americans are not happy. We’ve got problems all over the place, particularly with young women and particularly with young people, etc., etc. So, what have we got? What have we purchased for $38 trillion?

GR: I want to come back and follow up on some of those things after we take our break. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Stephen Young. He's the executive director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism. And I should say, by the way, if you're going to look that up, it's a French word, c-a-u-x, the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism. And he's the author of a new book titled, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them". All right, so there's a lot that you said before the break I want to unpack. First, you're tracking, I would say, the unintended consequences or maybe negative externalities, if I want to use those two phrases, of some of the New Deal policies and probably Great Society ones as well, and I can see that critique. At the same time, people are going to hear that I think and think, oh, wait a minute now, is this guy a conservative or a neocon dressing his anti-government desires in some covenant rhetoric? I have the feeling, though, there's something more going on here. So let me just put that question to you, because people are going to want to put you in a box. And I'm not sure you fit neatly in there.

SY: No, and I have felt more and more, and I'm really worried about the country, that putting people in boxes and then not liking them and then not listening to them is a form of decadence. It's a form of cultural and political decadence. And I've been very influenced, you know, I don’t know, sort of intuitively I guess, my dad was Jack Kennedy’s ambassador, the notion of the meeting of the, I’m a lawyer too, the meeting of the minds, which means I have to listen to you and you need to listen to me, and I might learn something from you, and you might learn something from me. The word I'm putting on it outside of the book, but I do talk about at the end of the book is being centered. And I think part of the traditional inner direction, going back to the sort of the Calvinist and it's very Protestant, but Catholics are centered in their own way, so were Buddhists by the way, Buddhists are very, they really believe in centering through meditation, right? But if you're centered, you're open to both sides. And what we're seeing in America, and particularly with our current president is a breakdown in compromise, a breakdown in Americans ability to say, okay, you give me two, I'll give you one, or whatever it is. Or let me point out the word you used, Grant, let me point out some negative externalities of your proposal that I don't think you're paying enough attention to. And I'm also a believer. And this goes back to the law, in each of us, we have our own truths, understood, but we also have a burden of proof to defend our truth. So I should come forward and not just say I'm right and you're wrong. But I have some obligation to say I think I'm right because, one, two, three. So, I worry about the breakdown of the sinner. Now I've grown up. I'm a baby boomer, grown up with protest movements and the notion somehow the people in the center are wishy washy. They don't have strong feelings, the center is not good. You've got to be principled, say Ronald Reagan on one side or then we have other people on the other side. Now we have the democratic socialists, which is all about me and my principles, I'm not going to meet you anywhere. So, I like to feel, and I try to live as a centrist, if you will.

GR: Interesting. And you've certainly got, a lot of different people factor into your book. I mean, you mentioned some of them, but we've got Carol Gilligan, we've got Leon Trotsky, you know, it's a varied group of luminary names. So, you just mentioned this, ‘it's about me’ and I did want to push back on that too and see how you reacted to it. It seems to me you could make the argument, though, that the, whatever we’re going to call these people, democratic socialists, new progressives will fit more people in under that title, folks that are really concerned, they do seem to be very empathetic and very concerned about others rather than themselves if you listen to them. I mean, they're, the protests over the Israeli war, for example. You know, there's a, there is an express, the protests over ICE, there's an expressed concern for others that these folks are embodying. So why do you see them as more self-oriented? I'm curious about that.

SY: Because my own feeling is that that expression of concern, we have this notion, which is around a lot these days, of virtue signaling. I tend to lean toward the idea that these are people, if you're other directed and you really have no strong sense of yourself, you're pretty risk averse. The second thing is you need a sense of power, a safe space to protect yourself. When I hear safe space, I don't hear nice fuzzy things. When I hear safe space, I say someplace I can stand it, it's my castle, and it's a power thing. But then, I need to tell myself that I really am a good person by virtue signaling. How do you signal your own virtue? You care about other people, and this is a great moral tradition. I mean, I could give you an argument from Kant. You know, I mean, to never use another human being as a means, right?

GR: Right. The only pure good is the goodwill.

SY: Right, right. Something like that. And you know, what is Jesus teaching us with the Beatitudes? He's talking about, or the parable of the Good Samaritan? But on the other hand, if I can very easily and I see this a lot, when we usually see this in people who are ideological, I don't care whether they're Jesuits on one side or Trotskyites on the other. If you've got an ideology about what is perfect in heaven and earth, you're going to impose your ideology. So you need to justify your ideology. So what you do is you say, I'm helping the victims. There’s also a theme which I talk about in the book which people are not talking about, but I sense it's deeply human. It's the old word Gnosticism for a certain kind of religion, Gnostics. Gnostics get very extreme, but my take and what I want to suggest in the book is Gnosticism starts with the evil. The first thing is, Star Wars is a movie really about, the first one, about Gnosticism. There's evil and there's good. Start with the evil, because that's what you get your focus on, then your mission in life becomes the extirpation, the wiping out of evil, which can easily put you in the position of using power or misusing power.

GR: Interesting, interesting. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Stephen Young, and we're discussing his new book, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them." So, let's dig more into these, this overclass. And you use the term in your book and you used it again in our conversation at the beginning that I think it's important to unpack, to understand sort of what their M.O. is, according to you, and that's rent seeking, you know, these are rent seekers. That phrase is not going to be familiar to a lot of our listeners. So, just quickly give us a, what is going on with rent seeking? How is that different from making stuff?

SY: Well, a classic example, and let me put it in a political context of Donald Trump and his father. Rent seeking is when you extract money because you have a position of power. I think the economic or the legal origin of the term is I'm a landlord, you want to rent my farm, so I, the law gives me power over my land, right? I say it's going to be $100 a month, and you say that's too much, and I say tough. What I'm interested in you, is, I'm not building anything, right? You're the guy who's going to do all the work in the farm, I want your money. And the money that you get because you have a position of power is rent.

GR: And the legal system that allows you to do that.

SY: The legal system, but also, I mean, think of, well, Don Corleone in the mafia, the young mafia don when he's walking or when he walks into a store and says, I want my $10 this week. And the guy running the store, you know, he's a poor little Italian immigrant or something like that, but if he doesn't give money to the future, don, right, he's in trouble. That's not the law, but that's what, I should say, that's the law of power or something like that.

GR: Right. Okay, all right. So, if I then want to spend my money lobbying to change a law or to stop a law that privileges my position, that's a form of rent seeking.

SY: That is exactly rent seeking. And the scholars who talk about it, and a lot of the things I’ve read on rent thinking about like third world country dictatorships, kleptocracies, crony capitalism. You're the minister of the economy, I go to you and I say, I got this beautiful resort in the mountains, you and your family can go there any weekend you want, I'll pay for your transportation, you can eat steak. On the other hand, I would like a government license to be the sole importer of Palmolive soap or something like that. And you smile and you say, Steve, you're a good guy, I think we can work that out.

GR: Yeah, okay. And so, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm thinking of your broader argument here about this class of people. So then to paint in very broad brushstrokes here. So I'm in this class, I've got this education, I've got this managerial position I'm in mid-level management that I enjoy. Then a legal framework that is very favorable to landlords, the tax code is very favorable to landlords, by the way, you never earn any income as far as the IRS is concerned, if you're renting places. And I am able to benefit from a fairly generous tax code more generally. And at the same time, I am virtue signaling by saying, I'm worried about this, I'm worried about that, all the while my bank account is growing and I'm quite comfortable, okay.

SY: And I tend to live in a nice house and my kids get to go to good schools.

GR: That's right.

SY: Oh, and by the way, I'm going to retire, and I really shouldn't talk about this because my wife was a civil servant for many years and she has a very nice retirement situation.

GR: Yes they can.

SY: But your entire position, Grant, removes you, protects you from risk.
GR: Okay.

SY: Two things, from risk and from hard labor. Real work.

GR: Right okay, right, that comes through in your book. So, all right, so we're about 2 or 3 minutes out, but I do want to squeeze in a couple other questions here. One in particular was I do have some counterfactuals to throw at you and I'll just throw out the biggest one for today's, you know, today's culture, today's life, and that is Elon Musk. Okay, so he's the richest man in the world. He does make stuff, right? He is not part of this overclass the way you've defined it in a sense. I mean, he certainly has done rent seeking with the Trump administration, there's no question about that. But you know, he's made these cars, made these rockets, you know, he's an entrepreneur. How does he fit into your model?

SY: Well, I think he's a fascinating case because I think he challenges the model, but it's not a clear, simple picture. I would put him partially in the overclass. I sense a conflict in Musk. Part of him is a real capitalist who makes things, who takes risks, who runs companies. The other part of him is an overclass guy who's using intellectual property law to defend his, everything he does, he gets some sort of patent to or intellectual property, that's rent seeking. The entire Silicon Valley, high tech is built on rent seeking. And so, if Musk was, for a short time, a trillionaire, that's because of the stock market. That wasn't any cash he was getting, it was a whole bunch of other people where they were predicting that his company was going to make a lot of money for them. So, the (unintelligible) or they were just the classic rent seeking, they were just trading stocks, you know, I buy low, I sell high.

GR: So, I'm being very unfair on my last question, but we only have a few seconds left. We didn't really get to, what do we do about these people? So, what do we do about these people? I'm taking his.

SY: We restore a covenant.

GR: You don't want you don't want to take them out and shoot them, what do you want to do with them?

SY: Well, I think with all Americans, it's going back to the Constitution, democracy, people, bottoms up. Let's redo a covenant that we Americans, are going to work hard and we're going to care about people through open politics and free markets.

GR: So, last question. You only have 15 seconds, even harder. How do you do that now? The minute you try to have that conversation it's going to get hijacked by partisan, polarized debates, right? How do we break the barrier?

SY: I don't have a good answer to that other than you got to get out and try. You’ve got to start somewhere. People tell me, Jesus Christ started with 12 followers, right?

GR: Okay, all right. Well, that's fair enough. I wish you well in this endeavor, but it's going to be tough. That was Stephen Young. And again, his new book is titled, "America vs. the Overclass: How a New Elite Corrupted Our Nation and What We Can Do to Stop Them." And again, it's a very provocative book, it's not going to be what you predict it to be. Mr. Young, thanks so much for talking with me, I enjoyed this conversation. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. David Bowie and Prince are two iconic figures in music who pushed cultural boundaries while also generating large popular followings. And of course, both of them were consummate musicians. My guest today has edited and contributed to a new book that considers both of them together. Daphne Brooks is a professor of Black Studies and Music at Yale University, and her book is titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince.” Professor Brooks, welcome to the program, very interesting book.

Daphne Brooks: Thanks so much for having me, Grant.

GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So let me just ask a very basic question at the beginning: how did you get the idea to put this book together? How'd that happen?

DB: Oh, I mean, it was really a calling. And in many ways, the book kind of sprouted out of this moment of just collective cultural grief. Beginning with David Bowie's passing two days after his birthday on January 10th, 2016, which was, you know, shocked the world, and several months later, with Prince's passing in April. And I'm a professor that does a lot of work in public humanities, a lot of public programming designed to bring together our greater community in New Haven with the Yale campus. When I first came to Yale, I organized an event with the great Jack White around blues records and the Blues Record Archive, and 800 folks showed up at Battell Chapel for that. So, kind of my organic sort of place to go was to think about putting together a conference. But really just, you know, a gaggle of my closest friends, fellow compatriots in music writing, to just, you know, kind of hold an intellectual and cultural wake for these two figures who shaped our lives. And then the event just kept growing and growing and growing. We ended up holding it in January of 2017, marking the first anniversary of Bowie's death, and it was a three-day international conference.

GR: Wow, wow. And, I know you could speak about this for the entire time that we have, but what, I guess, sort of briefly, what do Bowie and Prince share beyond the proximity of their passing that would put them in the same volume? Are there certain things about their impact, the nature of their music and so on that you think make them a pair?

DB: Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm a proud Gen-Xer, although I have questions about my generation now.

GR: (laughter)

DB: That's a separate conversation. But, I did feel drawn to the both of them, not only with regards to the fact that they, now dominated the soundtrack to our lives as we like to say, but because of what each artist represented in terms of, a kind of politics and poetics of freedom with regards to identity formations, world making practices, as we like to say in the academy, but also outside of the academy. So, what they each represented aesthetically was a kind of will to invent these alternatives to normative ways of being, that historically, one could argue were oppressive to folks in the margins. So, when we think about, you know, gender liberation, sexual identity liberation, Bowie is a real beacon of light. And with regards to Prince, NPR's Marketplace, I mean, so many different press outlets were contacting so many of us who are music writers in the early hours of Prince's passing. And I got a call from NPR Marketplace asking me if I could be on the air with them. And, at first, I didn't believe them. But the first kind of gut reaction I had to the question about what does Prince mean to you, as I said, well, he is the voice of the post-civil rights freedom struggle. And the person on the phone kind of went, what are you what are you talking about? I was like, well, you know, I'm a post-Civil Rights baby. My parents, you know, came of age as Bay Area Civil Rights, local educational pioneers. And for me, you know, they bequeathed to me and my generation the world in terms of what we thought was possible. And Prince culturally represented that in terms of the sonic boundaries that he transgressed. So, the two of them were transgressive figures in terms of the ways in which we, who see ourselves in the margins, who experience ourselves in the margins, you know, they offered us a way of thinking about what was possible.

GR: This follow-up question may seem a bit almost crude in a way, but does it have any significance for the book or the way you think about them, that one's Black and one's white?

DB: Well, another really important part of the project, and this came up organically in the conference, is that we were really trying to reclaim the roots of Bowie's passion for Black culture and Black music in particular. You know, if anyone went to the historic David Bowie Is exhibit, which originated at the V&A museum in London and became that, sort of the foundation for what is now the David Bowie Archive in London. And the two curators of that exhibit were presenters at our conference, and they're in the volume. But if anyone is familiar with that exhibit, they'll know that the exhibit begins with these kinds of images of David Bowie's fandom and attachment to Little Richard. And you can really hear that, especially on the "Let's Dance" album, but even Young Americans. And he was a long-time champion of the ways in which Black music held the seeds to modern music-making, is one of the arguments that he made across the course of his career. So, we really felt like there was a kind of kindred spirit, you know, way in which to think about Bowie and Prince together, what they embraced about the history of rock and roll, as Black music.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Yale University professor Daphne Brooks, and we're discussing her new book titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince.” So let me get into your title here about the afterlives. What, after Bowie's passing, what do you think, looking back now, what has been his effect on music and culture? What were the permanent, or more lasting contributions that he made?

DB: Yeah. I mean, I think that one of Bowie's central idioms is the spectacular, and the ways in which his storytelling practices wove together the sonic and the visual, the performative. Again, you know, drawing through lines from early rock and roll pioneers, all the way to his own present-day, you know, landscape of glam rock, which he pioneered, and lionized and experimented with aesthetically. So, you know, he's just inescapable in terms of how we think about popular music culture today as being sensorial, as being, having a kind of this, sort of, politics of sublimity. As being someone who is thinking expansively about what it means to be able to remake the world through the sonic. So, I see him as inextricable with regards to popular music culture, and how we consume it today, how we define it.

GR: And how about Prince? What would you add to what you just said about Bowie in terms of thinking about Prince?

DB: Yeah, I mean I think that, you know, Prince, his radicalism had so much to do with rejecting the constrictions of how Blackness has been defined historically in this country. The boxes that Black musicians have been put into by the recording industry, by fan cultures as well. He very famously, when he was signed as a teenager to Warner Brothers, said, you know, I don't want to be perceived as a Black artist. And people kind of misinterpreted that statement as a rejection of Blackness. But what he was doing was rejecting the category of Blackness as it had been just defined by, you know, these corporate logics. So, I think that, you know, Prince is someone who, you know, talks about Bowie being an influence, but the ways in which he kind of seized back the expansiveness of Black expressive practices, as being tied to, sort of narrative authority, about claiming one's own terms of what it meant to be Black in America makes him an extremely powerful singular artist of his generation.

GR: Yeah, that makes sense. I was wondering, I was thinking back on how musicians and bands sometimes ebb and flow in their popularity and their significance. And I think I remember this right, you would be the expert, but I think there was a time, for example, when I can remember that the Rolling Stones kind of faded and then they came roaring back with “Some Girls.”

DB: Tattoo You, right? Oh right, and "Some Girls," right. "Some Girls," which has a really problematic history. I mean, you know, the Black press really, you know, attacked the Stones, critiqued the Stones for "Some Girls," but, yes, that was one of their comebacks.

GR: Yeah, and so did Bowie or Prince ever go through something like that? And did they do something to kind of get back into, get the public's attention again?

DB: Oh, God, yes. I mean, they had they each had such long careers and they each took so many risks. I mean, one of the other parallels is that they had, you know, these kinds of, you know, projects that some would consider artistic failures, like Bowie's “Tin Machine” project, you know, is one infamous one. And even people found his late 90s work, you know, with techno to be, you know, polarizing. I think polarizing is a word that is used a lot with regards to their work after their major breakthroughs. You know, for Bowie had several different breakthroughs, beginning with "Space Oddity" and throughout the course of his career. His biggest comeback, so to speak, was "Let's Dance." And, you know, "Let's Dance" was a collaboration with Nile Rodgers. And in many ways it was, for him, a return to form, having grown up, first playing the saxophone, being able to sort of reclaim this music of the 50s and the early 60s, early rock and roll, and infuse it with this kind of modernist new wave sensibility. So, you know, it's interesting to think about him kind of continuing to revisit these different points in his career and remake them. You know, there's, we could just talk about Bowie, you know, all day, and we can just talk about Prince. But I mean, another moment to think about with Bowie is the fact that he very famously has this drug addiction in the late 70s. He goes to Berlin to clean up, so to speak, and he gives us the Berlin albums, which includes "Heroes." So he's, you know, and then with "Ashes to Ashes,” he's kind of, you know, critiquing Major Tom and critiquing his own addiction arc and clean-up. So, you know, the template for, kind of the ebbs and flows of his career are tied to his aesthetic rebirths. And with Prince, it's sort of like, you know, he has this enormous breakthrough with "Purple Rain" in 1984. And then there's a way in which Prince, you know, being so incredibly prolific, you know, he kind of flooded the airwaves with his own experimentalism and it really challenged listeners to follow him on these journeys through all sorts of trials and errors with his own artistry. Some would argue that Musicology, which was a huge stadium tour, some called it a comeback, was a turn away from the kinds of challenging, more challenging music that he'd made earlier in his career. But he did reach a new generation of listeners. So, I think the story that we're telling with each of them and thinking about, you know, who they were as artists is that they never walked away from their music entirely. And it was really about a lifetime of relationships with fans who had to kind of reckon with all of the different sides of Bowie and Prince.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Daphne Brooks. She's a professor at Yale University and the editor of and contributor to a new book titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince.” You obviously have a great expertise going into this project, but I'm curious: as you worked on this book, did you learn things that surprised you about these two figures that you didn't know before?

DB: Oh, that's a great question. Well, I do want to emphasize that this is an anthology. There are over 40 contributors; I'm only one of the contributors. And so I learned something from everyone. I mean, there are six different sections of the book, and, you know, it spans topics from spirituality and utopia in the work of Bowie and Prince to thinking about their regionalisms from Bowie's downtown New York and London to, of course, Prince's beloved Minneapolis. There's a section on, you know, Bowie and Prince and the spectacular. There's a section on Bowie and Prince and their sonic experimentalisms. There's a section on Bowie and Prince in thinking about intersectionality, how important Black and brown women creatives were to their own aesthetic vision and the collaborations that they, the collaborative journeys that they went on with Black and brown women. So, it's a book that really, I think, is trying to honor both their artistry. And also what they, again, what they meant to us in terms of their iconicity, and to a range of different kinds of listeners coming from different places around the world. You know, I guess the biggest thing that I learned about each of them is that, and this is a journey that we all went on as we mourned them, and as we move into deeper and deeper into the 21st century and think about racial and gender liberation politics, is that they were, you know, flawed icons. I think that was always there in front of us. You know, there have been a number of stories, especially with regards to gender politics, that have just been complicated to think about. So, we didn't want to do a hero worship kind of project, but say, for instance, Ezra Edelman, who is also who's a Yale alum, who's an Academy Award-winning documentarian, he did the massive, epic documentary about O.J., which she won the Oscar for. He has an unreleased multi-hour Prince documentary that he originally made for Netflix, which has not been able to air yet for a variety of different reasons, and The New York Times covered that story. You know, just complicated stories about Prince that are included in that project. And that's a story for Ezra to tell. I haven't been able to see the material, but it is something that we wanted to be really mindful of and that I wanted to be mindful of as editor of this project. That and the many stories of David Bowie and, you know, at the pinnacle of his fame and, you know, quite a bit of coverage, even at the time when this happened of his cocaine addiction and how that was entangled with several, you know, infamous incidents tied to Nazism, Nazi salutes. You know, really, really just complicated anecdotes about each of these individuals. The thing about Bowie that's interesting is that he really did reckon with that kind of period. And by the time he got to Berlin, and many different Bowie scholars who have thought about this deeply, those Berlin albums have a lot to do with a kind of cleaning up, you know, both physically in terms of his substance abuse and thinking about, you know, a romanticism that was tied to ideas about authoritarianism and rock and roll and glam. So, Bowie is somebody who kind of came back to these issues at different points in his life. And Prince is complicated because, you know, even though we have these anecdotes about gender politics and gender abusiveness, he also was someone who very famously, you know, championed gender non-normativity, kind of pushing of the boundaries in terms of gender formations and a complete adoration of especially Black women's genius and musicality that was so central to his own repertoire. So, the takeaway was that they each were deeply complicated individuals, and we wanted to be able to think about the art on its own terms, but to not ignore these other stories about who each of these men were.

GR: Yeah. There's a powerful picture in the book of Prince; he's photographed from behind. He's watching, I think it's Patti LaBelle in a tribute to him.

DB: Yes!

GR: Yeah, that speaks to what you're saying. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Daphne Brooks. We're discussing her new book, it's titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince.” So, one thing that you did have in the book, structurally, that I was curious about was these recurring, shorter pieces that are in between the chapters called ‘Critical Karaoke Interludes’. Tell me what the purpose of those were. They were a lot of fun, but tell me what the purpose of those were.

DB: Yes. Well, the origins of that genre, as we like to think of it, a genre of writing, come from the late poet and scholar Joshua Clover, who died tragically just a year ago, but he's a colleague of mine. And we met at a conference that's dear to many of us music writers, scholars alike, musicians. The conference originated at what was then called the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle early in the 21st century, started in 2002. The museum opened under the stewardship in the education department of Eric Weisbard and his life partner, Ann Powers, who were each celebrated music critics in their own right. We would gather each year at this conference that still lives on in a different form now, but we'd gather in Seattle each year and, you know, come together on these different panels and roundtables to think about different themes in popular music culture each year. I mean, it really was and continues to be one of the most important intellectual spaces in my own professional life. But the second or third year of the conference, I believe it was a second year, Josh Clover, who was a regular attendee, tapped a cluster of us, including the legendary rock critic Greil Marcus, who's a wonderful colleague and mentor of mine. Ann Powers was on this roundtable. He wrote to us and said, you know, I have this idea, I'd like for us each to choose a song, any song, that at some point in our lives we absolutely felt, you know, deeply connected to, had a passion for love it, hate it, whatever you feel, I'd love for you to write about this song in a style that's a combination of memoir, but also music criticism. And there are only two catches: when you read your piece, you're going to be reading it to the music, and it cannot be any longer than the track itself, so I'm calling it ‘critical karaoke’. And, you know, it's my favorite writing exercise; I use it in the classroom, I use it in my own writing. When we did it at the Bowie and Prince conference, it was the largest critical karaoke that we'd ever organized. There were about a dozen of us at the time who chose Bowie and Prince songs, and it was just round robin. People are reading, Matthew Fred Jacobson, historian here at Yale, did a reading of, and it's in the volume, of Prince's legendary performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the George Harrison tribute…

GR: I was going to ask you about that; you anticipated that.

DB: Yeah, and I mentioned his critical karaoke at the conference because people actually got up and started cheering like they were at the Prince performance, right? So there is an energy to critical karaoke that's incredibly powerful. And, you know, I wanted to be sure to include that in the volume to give people these snapshots of our critics’ intimacies with the music itself in really concentrated spurts. So you'll find these critical karaoke’s in pairs and sometimes in trios interspersed throughout the volume.

GR: Well, it's no surprise to me, then, that I found a lot of that writing, very lyrical, and I can see why that would come out of that. We've only got about two minutes left. This occurred to me, from what I learned about the artists in reading your book, it's the big question about work ethic versus natural talent and the equation that equals greatness. And, you know, Prince, for example, obviously had this huge amount of natural musical talent playing all these different instruments, but it sounds like also he had a really killer work ethic.

DB: Yes.

GR: And so, I'm just wondering if you had briefly, any thoughts about how those two could go together in the equation for greatness?

DB: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I've talked a lot about world making, and I think both of these artists were so immersive with regards to their craft. I mean, it just, it was, it constituted their entire life worlds. And so, the way in which they accrued a kind of prodigiousness in terms of their instrumentality, their song making practices, their performative aesthetics, which were virtuosic, had a lot to do with, you know, this just kind of complete, you know, porousness between the art and their lives, you know, and there are sacrifices that are made, you know, along the way in being that kind of an artist. But I do think that there is a relationship, you know, between that kind of deep connective tissue of, you know, artistry and life worlds and the ways in which the two flow into each other reciprocally.

GR: So, I'm going to do a version of the critical karaoke for you at the very end. We only have a few seconds; I can't resist this, but let's just say, I'm not going to ask you to, but let's just say you have to pick one song from each artist to take with you in your life; what are the two songs?

DB: No! It's the Stephen Colbert desert island slash question.

GR: Yeah, yeah.

DB: Oh my God. I mean, for Bowie, it has to be, "Heroes."

GR: Okay.

DB: And for Prince, probably one of his early tracks, which is "Free."

GR: All right, great, we'll have to leave it there. That was Daphne Brooks. And again, her new book is titled, "Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince.” It's a fascinating read and you can digest it in smaller bites if you like. Take it to the beach, you'll be the coolest person out there. Professor Brooks, thanks so much for talking with me, really interesting book.

DB: Thanks so much, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. We used to hear a lot about long Covid, but not so much anymore. Is it still a problem? And also, what does it have in common with other similar so-called invisible illnesses? My guest today is Emily Mendenhall. She's a medical anthropologist and professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, and the author of a new book titled, "Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid". Professor Mendenhall, welcome to the program.

Emily Mendenhall: Thank you for having me.

GR: We really appreciate you making the time, very interesting topic in this book. Now, I want to start with what may seem like a dumb question, but I want to ask it anyway. What's a medical anthropologist doing at a foreign service school?

EM: Oh, that's a great question. You know, they were looking for someone who worked from biology to politics and someone who could teach global health politics, and who could also really think deeply about the science. And I think that's what made, we actually have several anthropologists in our department, I think because we think so widely and deeply across history, but also across different levels of thinking and ways of thinking. So, it works really well in an interdisciplinary school.

GR: Oh, it's good to think that our foreign service folks are, you know, broadly educated that way. So, tell us how you decided to write this book.

EM: Well, you know, I've been studying chronic illness and women's health for about two decades. And I started working in Cook County Hospital, now Stroger in Chicago. And I started interviewing people about, specifically, Mexican immigrant women about living with diabetes. And I realized then that, you know, living with chronic illness is never just an individualized experience, it's very social. And it also is very complicated, it goes well beyond the biological. It is a social experience, there are emotional and interpersonal experiences that go with it. And also, no one's ever diagnosed with one condition. I've lived and worked in India and South Africa and Kenya, and as I was wrapping up some work in South Africa, Covid hit. And during that time, I had small kids. So, I went out to Iowa, to rural Iowa, and Okoboji, where I'm from, and I arrived in the middle of an outbreak. And my brother in law was leading the Covid response. So, I actually rolled up my sleeves and I started digging in to think about how Covid was affecting the community. And that ended up being a book I wrote called, “Unmasked: Covid, Community and the Case of Okoboji”. And as I was finishing that book, I actually had a student who became really sick with long Covid. After Covid he just couldn't recover, and I kind of walked with him through that recovery. And I just became more and more interested in the fact that long Covid is not just one thing. And I started digging into the literature to understand his experience. And it became, everything fell out in front of me of like how long a history there is to living with complex chronic conditions and how varied these conditions often are.

GR: Yeah. It really expanded then into this broad history that you wrote.

EM: Yeah.

GR: It does seem like we don't seem to be hearing as much about long Covid as we did before. Is there any particular reason for that, or is it just because we tend to think that this thing is behind us? What is it?

EM: Well, you know, from my viewpoint, as a scientist, a social scientist who lives in Washington, DC, there are so many crises right now in science that I think that some of these more, you know, niche priorities are really getting drowned out because the broader project of protecting science funding and protecting the integrity of science, keeping labs open, providing funding so anthropologists like me can do field work. They've actually closed down the anthropology section, social and behavioral sciences section at the National Science Foundation. There are enormous challenges right now. And so, I think it's just drowning out patient activist groups who have had a lot of visibility from the beginning of the pandemic. So, I think that's really what's happening. I definitely don't think they're being quieter and I think they're really organized and getting visibility. And there's some, RFK actually, has given long Covid some legitimate legitimacy. And they keep advocating, the groups keep really advocating and pushing in a way that's really effective. There's some really amazing scientists committed to understanding long Covid. But I think in the mainstream, in like the general media, it's impossible to breathe. So, I think that's more of the issue.

GR: Yeah, that makes perfect sense that it's been just pushed out by so many other things that seem to be coming every week. I want to come back to the long Covid a little bit later in our conversation, but I want to fill in sort of the other things that your book treats first. And, you know, hysteria is right in the title. Briefly, remind us the story regarding hysteria, how it fits into this invisible illness.

EM: Well, you know, the book isn't about conflating hysteria or long covid or myalgic encephalomyelitis, or endometriosis or any of the conditions I talk about. It's more of a critique of the health care system that for so long, you know, system, obviously cultural misogyny, thinking about women as not having real symptoms, dismissing women from the health system, but also having a system that doesn't care for complex chronic conditions very well. In biomedicine itself, the focus is narrowly on biology on one system or another, thinking about the body as a car. You know, if you have a broken arm, let's break the arm, but not thinking about it as a system. And I think that's what makes conditions, many that women experience, specifically that are more common in women, misunderstood or little understood because so little research has been focused on them. And in some ways, they're trickier to find because it's not just a quick fix. There's not necessarily, although, you know, in some cases, there have been diagnoses like, you know, like MS diagnoses have emerged when they were unexpected. It used to be called hysteria. Now, multiple sclerosis is diagnosed by plaques in the brain. That's a really good example of something that people didn't understand. So, they threw it, you know, into the wastebasket of complex chronic conditions. But then they realized, oh, there's this physical diagnosis. And I think with every condition, including long Covid patients would say, well, I have all these biomarkers that say that I have long Covid, that can prove to you that there's something wrong, but it doesn't mean there's like a quick fix for it. It's a complex, chronic condition that unravels all of these systems at once.

GR: So, what would you say would be the, you know, the greatest hits in the last 50 years of these kinds of conditions that meet the criteria that you're putting forward? I mean, MS sounds like a really important one, long Covid would be another one. What are some of the other ones that have been kind of ignored or discounted in recent decades?

EM: So, in the book, I start with hysteria and neurasthenia, which are two kind of complementary conditions that have been used to explain all sorts of conditions. But I spent a little time in the book specifically talking about infection associated chronic conditions. So, for years, for example, syphilis was one of the greatest causes of dementia, for example. There's all of these complexities of viruses and bacteria, and also genetic conditions that come together to create these complex chronic conditions, and, you know, complex systems that are really hard to pin down and easily explain. And I think what this means is that medicine doesn't do a good job of, people are not trained to identify and care for these multi-system conditions. So yeah, the conditions today that I think are most common is Lyme disease.

GR: Yeah.

EM: Lyme disease is so contested. Some people think it's, you know, chronic Lyme disease is a real challenge, others don't believe it's a thing. And I think that comes back to this idea of visibility and not believing patients. If you are deeply, you know, ill and you have all of these complex systems, your diagnosis is going to be made based on a, you know, a collection of symptoms, and you're going to try every type of intervention you can to try to help people, lift people out of bed, right? Enable people to live a semblance of the life they want to live. So, it's really complicated. Sorry, I missed some of your question, so I hope I answered it.

GR: No, no, you got it. I was thinking of chronic fatigue when I first saw the title and I remember I knew someone who was convinced they had that. And obviously something was wrong with her. But it kept being diagnosed as Lyme disease.

EM: Yeah, you know, and I talk about myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome because that diagnosis itself and so many of these diagnoses, and this is where I put my anthropology hat on, they are culturally constructed. And the way that they live in society are very different in the United States compared to how they are elsewhere. For example, I was just in Japan, I actually took this wonderful trip to Japan to give a couple talks with my daughter, my 13-year-old, it was very fun. But what was so interesting in the talks is we discussed how people thought about complex chronic conditions, how it interacted with a very different health system, how people thought about their illness in relation to society and the health system, and also how they thought about masking. There’s in, you know, a lot of the long Covid community or people who are chronically ill or living with a disability, have particular views on masking that the general population does not. And that's very different in Japan. Just because people think about masks and half thought about masks for a long time in a different way as more of a protective mechanism. So, if you see someone masking, it's really they're not feeling well, they're trying to protect you. And here it's more I'm trying to protect myself from others. And so that kind of frame of masking is very much culturally constructed. And I don't think specifically with long Covid, people are thinking about it culturally, specifically within the long Covid community. I would say there is this narrative that this is what it is, and this is how we do things and this is how we should think. But it is so fascinating to think about. And, you know, I did this study on long Covid in Kenya. And the experience there is so dramatically different how people think about long Covid and what it means and what it does. So, you know, thinking about how infections live in the world are different based on individuals and populations and cultures. And recognizing that, I think is really important for moving through the kind of bio-psychosocial dimensions that people really contest.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Georgetown University professor Emily Mendenhall, and we're discussing her new book titled, "Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid". You mentioned women being heavily represented in this category of being discounted or not being listened to and then things being not understood very well or, you know, again, the idea that, you know, it's just invisible or they're making it up. Are there other demographic groups in the United States that have been particularly vulnerable to that kind of treatment and misunderstanding?

EM: Yeah. So, historically the conditions have been called like yuppie flu, associated with like, middle class white women. But what we know is that characteristic is based on a cultural construction of chronic fatigue syndrome itself, which was pretty problematic. And then there have been many journalistic and also scientific accounts of how problematic that study was, which I really kind of talk about in the book. And I just tell the story of how harmful that narrative has been for many patients. And there's lots of elements of that story and I encourage you to take a look at it. But I would say that the problem with these kind of conditions is that we have so little understanding of the deep interactions, specifically among women, specifically among women of middle age, between neurology, immunology and infection, particularly when there is a confluence of infection such as in, you know, microbiomes like, how do we live sometimes, you know, we have autoimmune diseases, we have different microbiomes that are changing through time. And also we know that, you know, if you have Epstein-Barr virus antibodies for example, and you get long Covid, you get SARS-CoV-2, if they sit in the nerves, for example, they could, make you much sicker. So, and that's one example of many, but there's many situations where women may be differentially affected. Now, the important aspect of my book, I think, and there are, Chimére Sweeny is a black long Covid activist who I would say is really doing incredible work. And she would say that long Covid communities have largely blocked black voices, for example, black and Latinx voices. But the complexity of the condition is across all ethnic and racial groups, it's across all classes. It's across all genders. And it may actually be higher rates among black Americans, higher rates among trans Americans. There's a lot of theories about why, maybe some argue because, you know, more oppression over time has prevented people from seeking care and so their conditions get worse. There's lots of theories about who is affected and why. But we don't really have the robust data to, especially people who are maybe not seeking care. We're living in an environment where people are avoiding hospitals, in part because they don't feel safe in institutions like hospitals right now. So, you know, really having that data about the number of people who are affected or whose existing conditions are worsened because of the effects of SARS-CoV-2 sitting in the body and disaffecting multiple systems at once. We just don't have that data. But we do know that, you know, millions of Americans, for example, are out of work across categories, you know, across ways in which we categorize people. People around the country and around the world have become really disabled by this condition. And long Covid is not new, right? It's one manifestation of these kinds of complex chronic conditions. So, this isn't a new challenge. There are people I think, I talk a little bit about the book with myalgic encephalomyelitis, how it was starting to become recognized and there were increasing infective outbreaks that were causing people to have, you know, chronic fatigue, MECFS, in the 80s at a time when HIV was also emerging and there's this really interesting narrative. Emily Lim Rogers is an anthropologist who has a really great book coming out that tells the story, and how, you know, people with HIV got a lot of attention. There was a lot of money, a lot of attention, in part because people could fight and protest in the streets and be visible until they were too sick and passed, while people with MECFS at the time could not be visible, you know, be out in the public space to demand political, you know, funding, political recognition. So, there's such interesting stories from political activism, along with these kinds of cultural constructions of illness. So, there's parallel stories going on in the book because you can't understand one illness without thinking about the system, both the physical, the body, but also the health care system and our cultural kind of nuance in the United States.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Emily Mendenhall. She's a medical anthropologist and professor at Georgetown University and the author of a new book titled, "Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid". So let me ask you, kind of a more medical question about long Covid, because I don't know a whole lot about it. I mean, I've obviously read about it, but, do we have a better idea now than we had at the height of the pandemic of what factors cause people who get Covid for it to stay with them so long and create this kind of havoc for them long term?

EM: I think one of the issues that has been difficult in medicine is that long Covid affects different groups of people really differently. For example, there are groups of athletes who have been really affected by long Covid, who've gone into a-fib, for example, several times because of long Covid. There are people who've had pulmonary issues because of long Covid, or they may categorize their long Covid in terms of, you know, lung dysfunction because they were maybe intubated for a really long time and that, you know, conflated with all these other issues. And there are some people who present, more like having MECFS with different types of dysregulation in the body that cause, you know, dizziness, headaches, migraines, cognitive decline, you know, and these challenges, and of course, fatigue, which manifests in really different ways. And post exertional malaise, which is when you, you know, some people take a shower and be exhausted and need two days to recover because that physical exertion makes them sicker. So, there is such a heterogeneous presentation of the condition, that, you know, what it is, is, you know, not very narrow. And I think that understanding that is really important because if you can have this broader understanding that, you know, one of the, a clinician I talked to at University of Texas, she said, Covid is like a fire that lights whatever is vulnerable or preexisting within to complicate and unravel. And so, I think that's a really helpful way of thinking about it. I think some patients would be, there are patients who've been able to recover and gone on and maybe not lived at the same energy level, or they may have some lingering symptoms that they've gone on to live a pretty healthy life after being sick for a year, 18 months or 2 years. And there's others who are really, really sick. So particularly the category of patient who is still bedridden or is still having severe symptoms, who I have absolutely interviewed people who have, are still really, really disabled from the condition. And, I think that is the area that needs the most focus, biologically, biomedically, to figure out how to help those patients. But the diversity of experiences is a characteristic of the condition.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Emily Mendenhall, the author of, "Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid". So, do we still have people, let me rephrase the question. Is the incidence of this as far as we know, I understand what you're saying about the complexity of this and how difficult it is to get a good handle on it, but is the incidence of this condition of long Covid lessening or are the, you know, is it that newer infections of Covid are less likely now to produce this case of long Covid? Have the vaccines had any help with that? Because one of the selling points of the vaccines is that if you do get the disease, it won't be as severe. I just, you know, where is the trajectory going on this if you know?

EM: Yeah, I think we know that some most severe cases, especially those people who are still sick, were infected during the first year of the pandemic. And, you know, the fact that we had vaccines and we introduced vaccines, did protect some people, did protect many people. And, you know, the infection, like all infections, is changing. There's many variants that we've had, but the first two years of infection were the most severe. And, you know, some people are still having long Covid or prolonged symptoms after a new Covid infection. And, you know, some people I interviewed maybe didn't have a severe case, their first infection, but they were working like a low, like working as a nurse in a nursing home or as a bus driver in a place where they were constantly with the public and they were infected again and again and again, and their work was pretty arduous. And so, by the fourth time, one woman I interviewed, she was working in a casino, and after her fourth infection, she became so sick she couldn't get out of bed. So, in many cases, some of these severe cases, some are just one infection, some are multiple. Some people have reported vaccine injury, you know, there's a lot of complexity, which I actually don't dig into a great deal in the book. But there are people who report that ,they have long Covid from that. And so, you know, there's a lot of complexity about what the illness looks like today. But I would say incidence is much less now.

GR: Well, that's good news at least. Let me ask you this now, think about it from the patient's perspective. Let's say, you know, I'm having problems. I think maybe I have some sort of combined set of chronic conditions, but I'm not getting, I don't feel like I'm getting the right attention and the health care system for this, I'm not being heard. Do you have any advice for people that find themselves in situations like that?

EM: You know, there are so many people who take different approaches to some people really go online to online communities and seek support from Reddit to Facebook communities. Or there's long Covid advocacy groups to find support to identify other people with similar symptoms. I actually just published on my blog recently, information from this organization that seemed really interesting. It's an app, it's called Atlas. It's an app for you to connect with other people who have similar symptoms. You can kind of disentangle what's going on and actually work with clinicians and experts to help you along with connecting with patients. So that's kind of interesting. So, looking at, you know, there's lots of tools now, I think that one of the biggest challenges that people face is finding a clinician to believe them. So, what I would do actually, there are great clinics. There are clinicians who are written up as people who really care about complex chronic conditions and are working in these conditions and I would try to find someone near you. And if you can't find someone near you, I would just kind of, you know, throw some whispers out to figure out who is the best clinician, who's most open, maybe someone who works with, does women's health specifically or works on, or if you're, you know, if you're presenting differently, looking for someone who cares and works on complex chronic conditions. Maybe your general practitioner, your family doc, or your internist is really good at this. So, you know, if you feel dismissed, go on and seek help from the community. There are other people who refuse to do, kind of online groups, and they look in different ways. So some people go to a naturopaths, some people go to seek integrated medicine, some look to functional medicine. You know, people have really different approaches, and a lot of the people who've recovered who I've spoken to do multiple things at once. They might, you know, one woman I spoke to who had chronic Lyme, she had, you know, high doses of antibiotics, she got on hormones that were really causing disruption and dysfunction in her body. And then she had another medication for her heart. So, you know, all of these, and she also did, a heat / cold kind of process that kind of rebalanced her systems, which had gotten really out of whack. So often those who do recover and the recovery stories I have heard are people who try multiple modalities at once. And it's, I haven't heard ever of anyone who just tried one thing and got better. I think these are multi-system. So, it's really trial and error that people seek.

GR: So, we've got about two minutes left and I would like to try to get to two more questions in if I could. The first one, I know you could probably speak for a very long time on, but that was advice for patients. But more briefly, if you could, what would you say to the medical community about being more sensitive to this kind of stuff? Just listen better, or something else?

EM: So, I'll try to say it quick. In the book I say there's two problems. There's this issue of structural silencing. So structural silencing means the system's broken, which, you know, if you read Sanjay Basu's essays in my new journal, Science Politics, which we will talk about minute, you'll see the insurance system is broken, the way medicine is taught is broken. We really need to rethink what medicine in America means in general. But the other thing is that in medical school, you aren’t trained to work on complex chronic conditions. And students are so stressed out and worried just to pass their boards, they're going to focus on what's on the boards. And those are often very discrete, specific problems that are not using these complexities and, you know, these kind of difficult, you know, cases to disentangle. So, without the training and, you know, #MEAction is an organization that has this thing called Teach M.E., Treat M.E., which is trying to elevate this education on complex chronic conditions in medical schools. So that's really important work. And so, yeah, dealing with those two issues are critical.

GR: Well, I want to give you just a few seconds at the left to talk about the thing you introduced us there, but the thing that you're working on this effort with Science Politics, just tell us super quick about that.

EM: Sure. Partly because of my work on Covid, and long Covid, I launched a new publication called Science Politics. You can check us out at sciencepolitics.org. We work with experts, academics and policymakers, and leaders to help people write for the public about their important work, work that usually gets buried. We're a little bit like the conversation, but more solutions oriented. So, check us out, send me an email, sciencepolitics.org. And you know, let us know what you think, submit your work, we'd love to work with you.

GR: Well, you're working on some really important and difficult things to sort of wrap your your mind around your hands around, but I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. That was Emily Mendenhall. And again, her new book is titled, "Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid". Thank you very much.

EM: Thank you.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.