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We open with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" performed by Odetta off of the 1959 album My Eyes Have Seen. The "Battle Hymn of the Republic," also known as "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," is a lyric by the American writer Julia Ward Howe using the music from the song "John Brown's Body." The final stanza includes the line "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free."

The lyrics were first published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862.

In November 2016 today's guest, Bruce Laurie, published an essay called '"Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: The Origins of an Iconic Image.' This image is of a badly abused enslaved man called variously “A Typical Negro,” “The Scourged Back,” “Gordon the Slave,” or “Poor Peter," who is turned away showing his badly scarred back to the camera. Laurie reaches forward to compare it to the photograph labelled “Napalm Girl” from the Vietnam War in order to take the measure of its reach and value as abolitionist propaganda. Utilizing new photographic technology, the picture of “Poor Peter” quickly found its way into hands and homes all over the nation. It further gained wide exposure in the pages of Harper's Weekly in the July 4th, 1863 edition.

The context of that image and the power of that image to affect those citizens living as if on a different planet from that of the Slave South is our subject for this Interchange.

We’ll begin with a brief history of Abolitionism and the way the North was deeply interested in the maintenance of the economic system that required the forced free labor of enslaved men and women.

GUEST

Bruce Laurie is an Historian and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst whose most recent work is devoted to abolitionism before the Civil War. This includes the books Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (2005) and Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists (2015).

RELATED

Lynchings On Loop (Interchange with Courtney Baker)

MUSIC

"Battle Hymn of the Republic" performed by Odetta

"J'ai fait tout le tour du pays" (I Went Around the Country) by Jimmy Peters recorded by Alan Lomax

“Get Off the Track!” (Hutchinson Family Singers)

"Rockaway" by Jimmy Peters recorded by Alan Lomax

"Battle Hymn of the Republic" performed by Jon Batiste

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

In a piece called “Jazz Democracy,” a Slate review of The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, January 1965-June 1968, Adam Shatz writes: It’s a commonplace that jazz is the musical expression of American democracy. The unfortunate truth is that jazz more often resembles the daytime talk show: Everyone gets his or her …

In a piece called “Jazz Democracy,” a Slate review of The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, January 1965-June 1968, Adam Shatz writes:

It’s a commonplace that jazz is the musical expression of American democracy. The unfortunate truth is that jazz more often resembles the daytime talk show: Everyone gets his or her say before the floor passes to the next soloist. The Davis quintet was the rare exception, a luminous example of participatory democracy in jazz.

Our music sets the stage: On “Nefertiti,” off of the 1968 album of the same name by the Miles Davis Quintet, the horn section repeats the melody numerous times without individual solos while the rhythm section improvises underneath, reversing the traditional role of a rhythm section. It’s been called a paradox. It ought to seem boringly repetitive, but even though the head is just repeated over and over it’s really never played exactly the same twice, especially by the rhythm section. The dynamics and the “attitude” are constantly shifting, ebbing and flowing, rising and falling. The theme is never presented the same way twice.

Democracy, never presented the same way twice, is our topic and joining us live via Skype is Nicholas Xenos.

Our primary task for this 90-minute Interchange, and it seems a kind of irony, is to find a way to define Democracy away from our current conceptions. And in so doing we’ll also try to understand where it is we might come into contact with democracy–how we come to know what it is. To this end we’ll take a look at teaching and political science in theory and practice. We begin with Sheldon Wolin’s concepts of “managed democracy,” “inverted totalitarianism,” and “fugitive democracy.”

DISCUSSED (Essays by Nick Xenos)

“Civic nationalism: Oxymoron?”

“Liberalism and the Postulate of Scarcity”

“Individual Character and Political Ethics”

“The Austere Life”

RELATED

Selling Democracy: Part One of The Way of Neoliberalism (Wendy Brown on Undoing the Demos)

We, the Shackled (Democracy in Chains - Nancy MacLean)

Just a Spoonful of America (George Blaustein on American Studies in Europe)

GUEST

Nicholas Xenos is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Director of the Amherst Program in Critical Theory. He is author of Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy and Scarcity and Modernity, and has contributed essays and reviews to The Nation, Grand Street, The London Review of Books, and other periodicals. His most recent book is an edited volume of Sheldon Wolin’s essays, Fugitive Democracy, just out from Princeton University Press.

MUSIC

All by The Miles Davis Quintet

“Nefertiti” (Nefertiti)

“Petis machins” (Filles de Kilimanjaro)

“Circle” (Miles Smiles)

“Agitation” (E.S.P.)

“Riot” (Nefertiti)

“Masqualero” (Sorcerer)

“Black Comedy” (Miles in the Sky)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Our opening song is, rather mischievously, “Snowflakes and Sunshine,” from the Ornette Coleman Trio, live in Stockholm in 1965…they got there before the neoliberal economists. Last week’s show with Rob Larson on the Intellectual opportunism of libertarians who sing holy praise to Capitalism pointed out the ways in which actually existing capitalism keeps most of us …

Our opening song is, rather mischievously, "Snowflakes and Sunshine," from the Ornette Coleman Trio, live in Stockholm in 1965...they got there before the neoliberal economists.

Last week’s show with Rob Larson on the Intellectual opportunism of libertarians who sing holy praise to Capitalism pointed out the ways in which actually existing capitalism keeps most of us in chains; and that those who hold the keys must employ relentless propaganda against our becoming aware of the illusion of freedom. The propagandist extraordinaire was Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1976 and the Reagan Era rhetorical pitbull, who promoted deregulation, anti-union policies like the so-called right-to-work laws, and school vouchers which are, incidentally, also aimed at destroying labor unions. In the name of freedom, Friedman supported business hegemony over citizens. If government was the problem, business was the solution.

And it’s to this solution, which is actually just another problem for the workers of the world, that we’ll turn for this Christmas Day show. It turns out, we’d already exposed the lies of neoliberals and libertarians back at the very beginning of the year. So as we say goodbye to 2018 we return to what I think is an especially good dissection of the idea of freedom as it pertains to labor in America. In her book Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, details what can be called a legitimate idea of freedom in the United States--the yeoman farmer with a plot of land--set to oppose the monopoly of state power (which was essentially Monarchical power, including Church power). This included the egalitarian notion of individual social dignity...no one should lord it over any other person. Well, except if you were a woman, a child, a black person...you get the picture. But that this idea, no matter how marginally plausible, was immediately made ridiculous by the industrial revolution and capital intensive production. But guess what, the Libertarian Right continues to cast individual freedom in the same agrarian terms as it was cast prior to the US Civil War. Makes you wonder. Snowflakes let’s have some sunshine.

GUEST

Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Imperative of Integration (Princeton) and Value in Ethics and Economics. She joined us via Skype.

IMAGE

Elizabeth Anderson tells us that the Yeoman Farmer was the ideal of freedom in the United States in 1776.

MUSIC

"Snowflakes and Sunshine" by The Ornette Coleman Trio

R.E.M.

“Exhuming McCarthy”

“Disturbance at the Heron House”

“Fireplace”

“Strange”

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

In his new book Capitalism vs. Freedom, Rob Larson goes after the high priests of Capitalism, those deep thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand. But more directly and pointedly, Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize Winning economist, and debate society pugilist who did the heavy PR work for Reagan era deregulation …

In his new book Capitalism vs. Freedom, Rob Larson goes after the high priests of Capitalism, those deep thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand. But more directly and pointedly, Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize Winning economist, and debate society pugilist who did the heavy PR work for Reagan era deregulation and who offered the Right Wing Business Roundtable rationale for corporate power and greed.

In Larson’s new book he quotes liberally from Friedman’s own 1962 volume Capitalism and Freedom, as well as the book Friedman penned with his wife Rose, Free to Choose, which was also made into a ten-part television series in 1980.

Using their own words to condemn them, Larson exposes these intellectual opportunists for what they are: defenders of cruel power systems. Men and women such as these once supported slavery, the divine right of kings, and Nazism and Rob Larson puts the Libertarian defense of Capitalism on this same list.

Capitalism is indefensible as a system that promotes freedom, no matter how folks like Milton Friedman define that word. And as we careen toward climate disaster with no political will to take action we must find a way to speak with one voice and declare that money is not freedom and that power is not the ultimate aim of every man or woman. That is the call of the Capitalists, and they are ruthless. Further we must be very clear about what can offer us a path forward even if the best we might do now is marginally mitigate impending catastrophe. For Rob Larson, Socialism is that path.

RELATED by Rob Larson

Frackonomics

The 1 Percent’s Houses Are Getting Bigger and Swankier While Average Americans Struggle To Make Rent

Pharmageddon

RELATED Interchange programs

Freedom to Exit with Elizabeth Anderson

Employer Activism with Rosemary Feurer

GUEST

Rob Larson is a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College in Washington State and author previously of Bleakonomics: A Heartwarming Introduction to Financial Catastrophe, the Jobs Crisis and Environmental Destruction.

MUSIC

"Miss America" by David Byrne

"Money Machine" by James Taylor

"Kiss Me, Son of God" by They Might Be Giants

"When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich" written by Yip Harburg (Finian's Rainbow)

"After the Gold Rush" by Neil Young

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Studio Engineer: Wes Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Next time on Interchange, For Love of Money: or Libertarian Intellectuals. In his new book, Capitalism Vs Freedom, Rob Larson puts on display the words of such deep thinkers as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand in order to expose them as simply a defense of cruel power systems. Intellectuals such as …

Rob Larson (not John Galt)

Next time on Interchange, For Love of Money: or Libertarian Intellectuals. In his new book, Capitalism Vs Freedom, Rob Larson puts on display the words of such deep thinkers as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand in order to expose them as simply a defense of cruel power systems. Intellectuals such as these once supported slavery, the divine right of kings, and Nazism. Larson puts the Libertarian defense of Capitalism on this same list. 

Tuesday, December 18 at 6 p.m.

The title of our show, “Just a Spoonful of America – Prescribing American Studies to Fight Fascism,” might be more than a little ironic given that fascism currently stands astride the planet once again. Perhaps our music tonight would offer a better chance at a cure. It comes from James Booker’s album Let’s Make a …