ChatChat - Claudia Cragg

@claudiacragg speaks here with J Chester Johnson about a side of his grandfather, Lonnie Burch, that he never knew and only discovered late in his own life. His new book is Damaged Heritage and is he says a 'story of reconciliation'. The 1919 Elaine Race Massacre, arguably the worst in US history (see more details below), has been widely unknown for the better part of a century, thanks to the whitewashing of history. In 2008, Johnson was asked to write the Litany of Offense and Apology for a National Day of Repentance, where the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils. In his research, Johnson happened upon a treatise by historian and anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells on the Elaine Massacre, where more than a hundred and possibly hundreds of African-American men, women, and children perished at the hands of white posses, vigilantes, and federal troops in rural Phillips County, Arkansas. Johnson would discover that his beloved grandfather had been a member of the KKK and participated in the massacre. The discovery shook him to his core. Thereafter, he met Sheila L. Walker, a descendant of African-American victims of the massacre, and she and Johnson committed themselves to reconciliation. Damaged Heritage brings to light a deliberately erased chapter in American history, and offers a blueprint for how our pluralistic society can at last acknowledge—and repudiate—our collective damaged heritage and begin a path towards true healing. The Elaine Massacre occurred on September 30–October 1, 1919, at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas. Some records of the time state that eleven black men and five white men were killed.[4] Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred".[5] Walter White, an NAACP attorney who visited Elaine, AR shortly after the incident stated "... twenty-five Negroes killed, although some place the Negro fatalities as high as one hundred"[6]. More recent estimates of the number of black people killed during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, recently ranging into the hundreds.[2][1] The white mobs were aided by federal troops (requested by Arkansas governor Charles Brough) and vigilante militias like the Ku Klux Klan.[7] According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, "the Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States".[8][9] After the massacre, state officials concocted an elaborate cover-up, falsely claiming that blacks were planning an insurrection.[7] The cover-up was successful, as national newspapers repeated the falsehood that blacks in Arkansas were staging an insurrection.[7] A New York Times headline read, "Planned Massacre of Whites Today," and the Arkansas Gazette (the leading newspaper in Arkansas) wrote that Elaine was "a zone of negro insurrection."[7] Subsequent to this reporting, more than 100 African-Americans were indicted, with 12 being sentenced to death by electrocution.[7] After a years-long legal battle by the NAACP, the 12 men were acquitted.[7] Because of the widespread attacks which white mobs committed against blacks during this period of racial terrorism against black citizens, the Equal Justice Initiative of Montgomery, Alabama classified the black deaths as lynchings in its 2015 report on the lynching of African Americans in the South.[10]

A graphic novel adaptation has just been published of This important work by Sandford and Cynthia Levinson is disccussed here for  @KGNU with @ClaudiaCragg in view of the fact that, now, each day seems to bring another Constitutional crisis in the US.    With so many contentious issues seemingly shaking the very foundation of its Democracy today, many citizens are asking, "How did we get here?"     by author Cynthia Levinson and constitutional law scholar Sanford Levinson and illustrated by Ally Shwed, selects current problems and ties them directly to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers' thoughts and challenges. The book also offers alternative ideas pulled directly from other countries' governments. The medium of graphic novel brings these ideas to life and makes this book a fun, digestible lesson in history and civics.    The idea of using graphic novel to convey important but somewhat dense information to engaged readers is a growing trend. Titles such as Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, The Mueller Report Illustrated, The 9/11 Report, and The Warren Commission Report are all examples of books aimed to inform and educate citizens in a way that is easier to absorb. Topics covered are:- Scheduling the Federal Election Gerrymandering and Voting Rights The Census The Electoral College Presidential Impeachment The DREAM Act Confirming Supreme Court Justices Presidential Pardons  Why they decided to publish a graphic novel and more. . .   With colorful art, compelling discourse, and true stories from the United States' past and present, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Graphic Novel (First Second; September 22, 2020; Adult Graphic Novel; Hardcover; $28.99; ISBN: 978-1250211613) sheds light on how today's political struggles have their origins in the decisions of our Founding Fathers.

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here for @KGNU with Lacy Crawford @lacy_crawford about her memoir, 'Notes On A Silencing'. One night in October 1990, a young Lacy Crawford took a phone call at her dorm, surprised to hear an older boy pleading for her to come help him. Crawford was mystified but convinced there must be a reason, so she slipped across her boarding school campus and met the boy at his dorm window. When she climbed inside, she was confronted by the boy and his roommate, both stripped down to their underwear. That night would haunt her for decades to come. Crawford emphasizes that the sexual assault she experienced was not unusual. "It's so simple, what happened at St. Paul's. It happens all the time," she writes. "First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me." She describes St. Paul's as a lauded, sometimes lonely place where privileged teens were obsessed with their academic futures. (The author, when faced with the possibility of not returning for her senior year, pleaded with her parents: But what about Princeton?) Crawford, a novelist, uses her storytelling skill to illuminate the myriad ways female students were taught that their desires and bodies were less valuable than—even subject to—those of their male peers. She'd had other sexual experiences as a teenager, a fact her teachers later used against her. When she began to experience physical ailments because of her assault, Crawford was certain it was a result of "what she had done." She was so wrecked by the experience that she saw herself, not the boys, as the one to blame. Crawford's detailed account of her assault and its aftermath relies on an indelible memory as well as careful research. Medical reports and other documentation help her piece together the school's reaction when she revisits it decades later, after other victims began holding the school accountable. Notes on a Silencing is a ghastly account that all would wish Crawford would never have hard to write, of a teenage girl learning that people in power often value reputation above all else.

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Larry Tye about his new book, . This is a definitive biography of the most dangerous demagogue in American history, according to Tye, based on first-ever review of his personal and professional papers, medical and military records, and recently unsealed transcripts of his closed-door Congressional hearings. is a New York Times bestselling author whose latest book, a biography of Senator Joe McCarthy, will be released on July 7, 2020 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His last book was a biography of Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general, U.S. senator, and presidential candidate. Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon explores RFK’s extraordinary transformation from cold warrior to fiery leftist. In the long history of American demagogues, from Huey Long to Donald Trump, never has one man caused so much damage in such a short time as Senator Joseph McCarthy. The term "McCarthyism" is used to stand for outrageous charges of guilt by association, a weapon of polarizing slander. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy destroyed many careers and even entire lives, whipping the nation into a frenzy of paranoia, accusation, loyalty oaths, and terror.   When the public finally turned on him, he came crashing down, dying of alcoholism in 1957. Only now, through Tye's exclusive look at the senator's records, can the full story be told. Demagogue is a masterful portrait of a human being capable of immense evil, yet beguiling charm. McCarthy was a tireless worker and a genuine war hero. His ambitions knew few limits. Neither did his socializing, his drinking, nor his gambling. When he finally made it to the Senate, he flailed around in search of an agenda and angered many with his sharp elbows and lack of integrity. Finally, after three years, he hit upon anti-communism. By recklessly charging treason against everyone from George Marshall to much of the State Department, he became the most influential and controversial man in America. His chaotic, meteoric rise is a gripping and terrifying object lesson for us all. Yet his equally sudden fall from fame offers reason for hope that, given the rope, most American demagogues eventually hang themselves.

When our younger son finished reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar some years ago, he commented that it was not only an extraordinary literary work but also, of course, a source for rare insight into the complications of mental illness. This reminded me of a conversation (not so much a formal interview, you understand) I had a few years ago with the fabulous and extraordinary author, Joanne Greenberg, who as Hannah Green wrote I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. This work is a fictionalized depiction of Joanne Greenberg's own treatment experience decades ago at Chestnut Lodge Hospital in Rockville, Maryland, during which she was in psychoanalytic treatment with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The book takes place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at a time when Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Clara Thompson were establishing the basis for the interpersonal school of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, focusing specifically, though by no means exclusively, on the treatment of schizophrenia. Greenberg has written that :- "I wrote [I Never Promised You a Rose Garden] as a way of describing mental illness without the romanticisation that it underwent in the sixties and seventies when people were taking LSD to simulate what they thought was a liberating experience. During those days, people often confused creativity with insanity. There is no creativity in madness; madness is the opposite of creativity, although people may be creative in spite of being mentally ill." (From the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy website)

With all the #Chinabashing going on, it's perhaps important to remember why the #PRC, its people and culture rather than its national entity, matters to the rest of the world. It is easy to lose sight of now but that is why perhaps in June 2020 it's a good time to reprise a previously broadcast interview with Simon Winchester @simonwwriter. @claudiacragg speaks here with Winchester about Joseph Needham and 'The Needham Question'. The subject caused the most tremendous brouhaha in The New York Times over a decade ago (Simon Winchester, New York Times, Op Ed, May 15th, 2008). At the time, I commented that I can only think those who responded with such vitriol to Winchester knew absolutely nothing at all about Winchester and his work, nor anything about the subject of his new book. In this latest opus, the award-winning Foreign Correspondent, Simon Winchester returns with the remarkable story of the growth of a great nation, China, and the eccentric and adventurous scientist who defined its essence for the world in his multi-volume opus, 'Science and Civilization in China'. Winchester relates how most of us know that the Chinese invented a great variety of objects and devices long before they were known of in the West. Not simply famous things like gunpowder and paper, but also harnesses for horses which had a huge effect on the West when they arrived. Why, though, did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is the so-called 'Needham Question', after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it. Needham was a British biochemist and was elected a fellow of both the Royal Society and the British Academy. In China, he is known mainly by his Chinese name Li Yuese He was also cited by the United States during the McCarthy era for his investigation into the use of illegal weapons by the US on the Koreans in the Korean War. Winchester, The New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa is a writer and adventurer whose articles have appeared in such publications as the National Geographic and Conde Nast Traveler . He has now written well over a dozen books on travel and history.

@claudiacragg speaks here for @KGNU with about the updated and expanded edition of his book with Donald L Bartlett, a New York Times No. 1 bestseller -  [Mission Point Press: June 15, 2020]. Long before COVID-19 ravaged the economy, millions of middle-class Americans were struggling with another crisis — stagnant earnings, unaffordable health care and the prospect of an impoverished retirement. In this work, winning reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele explain with human stories and authoritative statistical findings how specific actions by Washington and Wall Street are systematically dismantling the middle class.,  Steele is the co-author of eight previous books, including two New York Times bestsellers and has extensive experience in reporting and writing about the most important issues of our time.  Topics covered include;- Income inequality: How government policies have created the most unequal society in America in 100 years, and why the wealth gap is widening. America’s middle class: How government policies are shrinking the middle class and why the percentage of Americans in the middle class is smaller today than at any time in more than half a century.  Poverty: Why more and more Americans are trapped at the bottom, unable to provide basic necessities for their families. Wages: How federal policies have intentionally held down wages for millions of working Americans –  long before COVID-19 decimated jobs. Trade: How global trade has eliminated millions of good-paying jobs, and  how  Trump’s trade policies are making things worse. Retirement: How millions of Americans face a bleak old age because of federal programs allow corporations to eliminate pensions and replacement measures don’t come close to providing a secure retirement. Taxes: How tax policy has consistently rewarded the wealthy and created the most unequal society in the last century. Covid-19: How the U.S. response to the virus illustrates the weakness of the U.S. health care system which relies on the private market to manage health care, when an overall authority is needed. Health care: How corporations and private insurers are shifting more costs to families. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele are the nation’s most honored investigative reporting team. Their work has received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Magazine Awards and upwards of 50 other national journalism awards. They began working together at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and their writing has appeared in Time, Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The Washington Post. The American Journalism Review has called them “almost certainly the best team in the history of investigative journalism.” They live in Philadelphia.

Walter Schaub @waltshaub speaks here with @claudiacragg for @KGNU @KGNUNews about ethics in government and the filing of a complaint with regard to the management of #COVID19 and a member of the administration. Schaub is a senior advisor to CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington who previously served as director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE). He is a frequent cable news contributor and has also worked at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Campaign Legal Center @OfficeGovEthics

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Nancy Maclean @NancyMacLean5 on her book #DemocracyInChains. What follows is a reprise of an interview a while back with Maclean about a book she wrote which offers an explosive exposé of the Right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education and change the US Constitution.  While Maclean's 'Democracy in Chains' was much vilified, it is surely becoming more clear to many that the content in her book was not only spot on when she wrote it, but can be seen to be a very specific foreshadowing of what has come to pass since.  Because, behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government, Maclean maintains that there is a political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has, she argues, been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires, she says, did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect - the Nobel Prize-winning political economist - and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. This is perhaps especially relevant to all those who have watched George Floyd's unnecessary and unnecessarily vicious death.  In response to the widening of American democracy, Buchanan - and through his disciples now, AG Barr and the 45th President, developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan's, and Trump's, work in teaching others how to divide America into "makers" and "takers." And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. Nancy K. MacLean (born August 22, 1959) is an  . She is the  Professor of History and Public Policy at . MacLean's research focuses on race, gender, labor history and social movements in 20th century U.S. history, with particular attention to the . That plan, all can now clearly see in practice, includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research,  tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

Claudia Cragg, @claudiacragg (all comments greatly welcomed) speaks here with Jonathan Hennessey, @iamaraindogtoo filmmaker and documentarian. He is the author of several books addressing American history, including: The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation, Alexander Hamilton: The Graphic History of an American Founding Father and The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation and more. His new film is called You Don't Understand the Second Amendment.