The History of the Americans

David T. Beito’s most recent book, and the subject of this conversation, is The New Deal’s War On the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (buy it through the link!), published by the Independent Institute in 2023.

The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal have now largely passed from living memory.  When I was in junior high school in the 1970s, however, many of the teachers had not only lived through the New Deal but remembered it as an almost sacred moment.  We watched scratchy black-and-white movies in class about the great success of FDR’s New Deal in ending the Great Depression, the soundtrack blaring with “Happy Days Are Here Again.”  David Beito’s book is about the dark side of all that, the almost crazy abuse of American civil liberties under FDR’s administration.  FDR’s Congressional allies, including future Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and Sherman Minton, rifled through individual tax returns and more than 3 million Western Union telegrams to find dirt on outspoken opponents of the New Deal. They proposed criminalizing “false” news. They used regulatory power and private coercion to drive virtually any criticism of the New Deal from the new medium of radio.  And, finally, they put more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps built by the famous Works Progress Administration, and kept them there long after any argument for military necessity had passed.  And that isn’t the end of it by any means!

And please listen to the last part, in which we discuss the frosty even if perhaps unsurprising silence with which academic historians have responded to David’s excellent book.

Listen on Apple, if you prefer, or Spotify.

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In August 1664, an English fleet acting under the orders of James, Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II, materialized off Manhattan and forced the bloodless surrender of New Amsterdam and New Netherland. It is easy – too easy – to conclude that this was inevitable because New England had roughly 17 times the population of New Netherland. It was in fact a foundational move in the construction of the English empire of the 17th century, and the product of the machinations of first cousins in conspiracy with each other: Sir George Downey, the “second” graduate of Harvard College and one of the most devious people in English politics ever, and John Winthrop the Younger, the pious Governor of Connecticut Colony, son of the leader of the Puritan Great Migration, and a stone cold operator of the first order.

In the end, Peter Stuyvesant was out of moves.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664

Richard Nicolls, Proposed Terms for the Surrender of New Netherland

Grant of March 12, 1664 from Charles II to his brother, James, Duke of York

L. H. Roper, “The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654-1676,” The New England Quarterly, December 2014.

Jonathan Scott, “‘Good Night Amsterdam’: Sir George Downing and Anglo-Dutch Statebuilding,” The English Historical Review, April 2003.

Steve Martin, “Mad at my Mother,” Let’s Get Small.

List of most populous cities in the United States by decade (Very interesting Wikipedia page if you love data and history)

While the English were consolidating their territory on most of the eastern seaboard of North America in the 1600s, Spanish Florida plugged along with its sole city at St. Augustine, with little European population growth. That simple fact obscures remarkable changes in the civil society of the future Sunshine State. From the 1570s, after the Jesuits had given up, until the 1720s, a small band of Franciscan friars, at no time numbering more than around fifty, built a network of wood and thatched missions throughout the region. They converted tens of thousands of Florida Indians to Catholicism, many practicing with such diligence that a visiting Frenchman wrote that the Apalachee were “scarcely distinguishable [in their practices] from Europeans who had been Christians for centuries.” 

The relationship between the Franciscans in Florida and the indigenous peoples was not only different than anywhere in English or Dutch North America, it was different from everywhere else in the Spanish New World, including New Mexico at the same time, and California and Texas in the following century. As a result, the relationship between the Spanish and the Indians of Florida was symbiotic, one of shared religion, trade, and mutual support rather than conquest.

Unfortunately, it would all fall apart when the English Carolinians marched south looking for people to enslave.

Map of Spanish Missions in Florida 1560s – 1720s:

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Michael Gannon (ed), The History of Florida

Wreck of the La Nuestra Senora de Atocha

We are back to Spanish Florida after a long hiatus, with the story of St. Augustine, La Florida after the founding of the city and the slaughter of the Huguenots at Fort Caroline until the construction of the Castillo de San Marcos in the 1670s. The city would almost fail, and in 1607 the Spanish Crown ordered that it be shut down and that Spain withdraw from Florida all together. That order would be promptly rescinded when the English landed at Jamestown.

It is a story of courageous Catholic evangelism, Indian wars, relentless epidemics, and pirates, climaxing in the raid of the dread pirate Robert Searles in 1668. That attack would, ironically, result in a renewed commitment by the Spanish government to sustaining the city which would ensure its long-term survival as the oldest continuing town in the United States.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Carrie Gibson, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America

Michael Gannon (ed), The History of Florida

Susan Richbourg Parker, “St. Augustine in the Seventeenth-Century: Capital of La Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014

Diana Reigelsperger, “Pirate, Priest, and Slave: Spanish Florida in the 1668 Searles Raid,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014

List of Cuba–United States aircraft hijackings

In March 1663, after 97 years of failed attempts by first the Spanish and then the English to establish settlements in North Carolina, King Charles II granted eight aristocrats a vast territory extending from the coast of today’s North and South Carolina to the Pacific Ocean. These eight Lords Proprietor – George, Duke of Albemarle; Edward, Earl of Clarendon; William, Lord Craven; John, Lord Berkeley; Anthony, Lord Ashley; Sir George Carteret; Sir William Berkeley, who was again the governor of Virginia; and Sir John Colleton – would almost unwittingly authorize in their new colony a remarkably free and democratic society of small farmers, rivaled only by Roger Williams’ Rhode Island in its respect for individual liberty.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729

Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713

George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, Vol. 1

Charter of Carolina – March 24, 1663

Charter of Carolina – June 30, 1665

On July 29, 2024, President Joe Biden visited The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The President referred to LBJ as “master of the Senate,” which reminded me of the opening pages of Robert Caro’s book of the same name. That introduction is itself a masterful description of the suppression of Black voters in the South, the meaning of voting, the history of the Senate, its historical resistance to civil rights, and LBJ’s role in changing all that. It is also filled with interesting observations about timeless aspects of American politics, and since I enjoyed re-reading it I’m going to read it for you with some annotations along the way. 

Oh, and it turns out that President Biden, who knows a thing or two about the Senate, left a few things out for the audience in Austin.

Finally, I again recorded early in the morning outside in the Adirondacks, so there are a lot of tweeting birds in the background. Non-birdie recording will resume next time.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 3)

Remarks by President Biden Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act | Austin, TX

The other volumes in Caro’s biography (I highly recommend the first two, and haven’t yet read the fourth):

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 1)

Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 2)

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vol. 4)

In the early 1660s, a motley crew of free-thinkers, republican veterans of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, and Quakers would build the freest place in all the English world, the County of Albemarle in northeastern North Carolina. Protected from the north, and incursions by Virginia royalists, by the Great Dismal Swamp, from the east by the treacherous waters of the Outer Banks, and from Indians by the skilled diplomacy of fur trader Nathaniel Batts, the settlers would prosper as small farmers and free tradesmen. Their leaders would include John Jenkins, veteran of Fendall’s Rebellion in Maryland, and a dissident Virginian planter and sheriff named William Drummond. Together they would resist attempts by the proprietors to exert control over their land and lives, and would extend the franchise to all free Englishmen in the colony. This is their story.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Noeleen McIlvenna, Early American Rebels: Pursuing Democracy from Maryland to Carolina, 1640-1700 

Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729

Albemarle County, North Carolina

Francis Yeardley

Map of Albemarle County in context

Early North Carolina, originally part of a territory called Carolana, is all but ignored in most surveys of American history.  After a fast start – both the Spanish and the English had short-lived settlements there in the 16th century before anywhere north of the future Tar Heel State had been settled by Europeans – a long period of failure followed until the late 1650s, when it hosted a quirky rural society of free-thinkers, democratically-inclined veterans of the New Model Army, and Quakers. In this overview episode we’ll bring together those long decades of failure!  Longstanding and attentive listeners will have passing familiarity with some of this, having heard it in bits and pieces since very nearly the beginning of this podcast, but since I benefited from reviewing it I thought you might too.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the website)

Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729

Lindley S. Butler, “The Early Settlement of Carolina: Virginia’s Southern Frontier,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Jan. 1971

Sir Robert Heath

Late in the morning on June 7, 1663, soldiers of the Esopus Indians attacked the fortified Dutch settlements of New Village – now Hurley, New York – and Wildwyck, now Kingston.  New Village was fundamentally destroyed.  Wildwyck, more populous and better defended, fought off the attack but not before suffering grievous casualties.  At New Village, three Dutch men were killed, and 34 women and children were taken captive and carried away.  In Wildwyck, twelve men, including three of the garrison soldiers, died immediately, along with two children.  Eight more men were injured, including one who died a few days later of his wounds, and the Esopus Indians took ten women and children prisoner.

So began the Second Esopus War.

Map of the Indian nations and language groups in the area, discussed in the opening minutes of the episode:

Selected references for this episode (Commission earned on Amazon links)

Martin Kregier, Journal of the Second Esopus War (Translation of the diary kept by the captain of the Dutch military response to the attacks at the New Village and Wildwyck)

Robert S. Grumet, The Munsee Indians: A History

Marc B. Fried, The Early History of Kingston & Ulster County, N.Y.

Amanda Bellows is a U.S. historian who teaches at The New School, a university in New York City. She is the author of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination, and a new book that is the subject of this interview, The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions. Amanda received her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Explorers is a series of biographical essays of people most of you have heard of – Sacagawea, John Muir, and Amelia Earhart – and people most of you haven’t heard of – James Beckwourth, Matthew Henson and William Sheppard – sewn together with the common theme of exploration. The book had come recommended to me by a couple of fans of the podcast so I jumped at the chance to have Amanda on.  I learned a lot from The Explorers, and of course have a link in the show notes on the website if you want to buy it after hearing our conversation.

Books mentioned in the episode (Commission earned)

Amanda Bellows, The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions

Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind

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Errata: Jean Nicolet went to Green Bay in 1634, not 1624 as I said toward the end of the episode.