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Our opening song is "The Day After the Revolution" by Pulp...The Revolution begins and ends with you. Today we highlight four past programs on Revolution. This is our Fund Drive Show. Please support Interchange: call us at 812.323.1200 or make a secure online pledge. Thanks!

SEGMENT ONE: France (The Terror and the Revolution)

Our first Revolution is the paradigm for all others it seems: the French Revolution, which lasted for about ten years, 1789 to 1799. We’ll focus on the Fall of Robespierre and the counter-revolution which gave the world Napoleon Bonaparte. Our guest, live in the studio, was Indiana University Professor Rebecca Spang whose latest book is Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution, published by Harvard University Press.

SEGMENT TWO: Haiti (Confronting Black Jacobins)

Our next clip is from our show with Gerald Horne about the Haitian Revolution and his book Confronting Black Jacobins. We begin with Jefferson’s ”Cannibals of the terrible Republic” and the fear of Africans "on the March." Horne makes explicit the links from hierarchies of color born in the French "Black Code" on Haiti, that traveled to New Orleans and South Carolina, to the police murders of black citizens in the present-day United States. Gerald Horne's new book, out from Monthly Review Press, is The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean.

SEGMENT THREE: Cuba (José Martí: The Whole Revolution)

Cubans and Americans share one explicit defining characteristic...the absolute belief in their exceptionalism. This exceptionalism is marked out in the historical narrative that each constructs, often out of the same material. It was the example of labor and suffrage movements in the US that inspired Cuba’s most iconic figure José Martí to fight against Spanish colonial oppression to secure self-determination and to form a nation committed to racial and social justice. Our guest is Susan Babbitt and our focus is on Martí’s rejection of Liberal Philosophy and Individualism. Jose Martí, the philosopher of revolution and Cuban nationalism...what can it mean to build a nation, to become a people out of the ashes of hundreds of years of slavery? Martí’s dreams were stolen by the United States until 1959 and the successful revolution of Fidel Castro. For this so-called “thumb in the eye” of the US which had been using Cuba as a playground for the corrupt and corrupting master class...the US would starve Cuba through sanctions for the next 50 plus years.

SEGMENT FOUR: Russia (The Revolution Betrayed)

We close tonight with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the man who literally wrote the book on it. We know it in the translation of Max Eastman (and I’ll suggest here that this might be as much due to Eastman’s Russian wife Elena Krylenko--but as I am no historian and am acting irresponsibly). The show we’re hearing is "The Revolution Betrayed" and our guest was Paul Le Blanc, a prolific author whose book on the Revolution and what followed is called October Song.

PITCH BREAK MUSIC

“Blame it on the Boers” by Johnny Dyani. We used several Dyani compositions in the show about the play My Children, My Africa, by South African Playwright Athol Fugard (The Stones of Reason<...

In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist; in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifist is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity.*

A.J. Muste was referred to throughout the world as the "American Gandhi,” and he’s probably best known, if at all, for his leadership of the peace movement in the postwar era.

But he was also one of the most influential of labor organizers of the early 20th century.

Our GUEST for this hour is Leilah Danielson, author of American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century. Danielson is a professor of History at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and she joined us by telephone from her office.

A. J. Muste was a pacifist preacher who lost his pulpit during World War I; an organizer of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers strike of 1919; a pioneering labor educator at Brookwood Labor College; and the founder of the American Workers Party, which sought to create a Marxist-Leninist movement as militant as the Communists yet thoroughly American in its culture. After turning back to Christian pacifism in 1936, Muste became the beloved elder statesman of American pacifism, mentoring leaders of the civil rights movement and the New Left.

We find Muste at the center of most of the “radical” actions and social movements in US History in the first half of the 20th century; and it’s because of this that he offers us an opportunity to reflect upon the pertinent activist question: “what is to be done?” Surely a question many of us are asking today.

Tragedy is piled on tragedy for our country and for the world because the progressives, liberals, unions, and farm organizations, which ought to be flatly opposed to the nation’s war-course, are so uncritically anti-Russian...and so ignorant of how really to overcome communism that they support the war policy...these forces line up with the Right, with reaction, with violence, though they do not man to do that and try to make themselves believe that they do not.**

MUSIC

Ernie Lieberman, Goodbye, Mr. War (1955) - Special thanks to Robbie Lieberman for providing the music.

"Spring Song"

"Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier"

"Strangest Dream"

"Quilting Bee"

"Study War No More"

* "Pacifism and Class War," The World Tomorrow (September, 1928)

**"A Vote for Wallace Will Be--A Vote for the Communists," Fellowship, XIV (July, 1948).

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Studio Engineer: Wes Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist; in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifist is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity.* A.J. Muste was referred to throughout the world as the “American Gandhi,” and he’s probably best known, if at all, for his leadership of …

In the late 60s, one man imagined creating a place that would radically undermine the societal values of his time—an alternative space that subverted color lines, gender norms, and war.

That man was Fred Rogers and that place was Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

Our opening song is, of course, "Won’t you be my neighbor?" Composed by Fred Rogers and performed by the music director for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and live in-house jazz pianist for every show, Johnny Costa. All of our music this hour will come from the mind of Rogers and the hands of Costa.

Fred Rogers was a complex iconoclast: a television host who hated most television, a soft-spoken Presbyterian minister who purposefully addressed thorny topics others wouldn’t touch, a broadcaster who insisted on speaking as if to a single child watching in his living room.

Rogers’ style was subtle, but his politics radical: in 1968, the Vietnam war raging, he devoted his show’s first week being nationally broadcast to the conflict, telling children “war isn’t nice.”

What can we learn from Fred Rogers and his work?

How do we make use of his impact on the culture—and on many of our young lives—rather than simply beatifying him, and thus setting him on the pedestal of the improbable, the inimitable, the irrelevant?

We’ll start by looking at Rogers, the flawed human being, and the idiosyncratic personal, academic, and theological roots that catalyzed some of his most fundamental beliefs.

RELATED

The Fred Rogers Center

A Revealing Question About Mister Rogers by Michael Long

The Quietly Radical Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (The Atlantic)

The Gay ‘Ghetto Boy’ Who Bonded With Mister Rogers And Changed The Neighborhood

The Best Argument For Saving Public Media Was Made By Mr. Rogers In 1969

GUEST

Michael Long is an associate professor of Religious Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He's the author or editor of several books on civil rights, religion, and politics, including Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers, Beyond Home Plate: Jackie Robinson on Life after Baseball, and I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters.

MUSIC

by Fred Rogers and Johnny Costa

"Won't You Be My Neighbor"

"It's You I Like"

"You Are Special"

"It's Such a Good Feeling"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Edited by Rob Schoon

Special Assistance: Calin Neely

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

In the late 60s, one man imagined creating a place that would radically undermine the societal values of his time—an alternative space that subverted color lines, gender norms, and war. That man was Fred Rogers and that place was Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Our opening song is, of course, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” Composed by …

Today we explore the menace of secrecy with Bloomington's own Eisner- and National Book Award-winning writer/artist, Nate Powell.

Powell’s newest book, Come Again, is both dream and nightmare set in the '70s on a commune in the Ozarks. In our conversation we also explore the didactic nature of his work nicely exemplified in his collection You Don't Say.

In addition to original graphic novels like Swallow Me Whole and Any Empire Powell is the artist of the March series of books about John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

You can find an Interchange interview with Powell and March co-author Andrew Aydin on our website: Necessary Trouble: March and The Example of John Lewis.

MUSIC

David Bowie’s "Memory of a Free Festival" from 1970, a song that makes an appearance in Come Again.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Today we explore the menace of secrecy with Bloomington’s own Eisner- and National Book Award-winning writer/artist, Nate Powell. Powell’s newest book, Come Again, is both dream and nightmare set in the ’70s on a commune in the Ozarks. In our conversation we also explore the didactic nature of his work nicely exemplified in his collection …

While citizens are encouraged to fear and blame so called outside agitators the real menace lies within...A business community committed to the rancor of class and racial divisions with the intent to keeping labor powerless and in the chains of wage slavery.

In our two previous programs we’ve detailed a kind of localized “Mccarthyism” BEFORE Joseph McCarthy took center-stage which highlighted with way anticommunism was used as propaganda against labor activism...promoting and solidifying the idea that collective action is a subversion of what it means to be American.

But the truth is that collective action is exactly what is employed AGAINST the so-called “working class.” Employer activism is deeply collective and is American as apple pie, napalm, and atomic bombs. If you think Charles and David Koch have brought us something new to contend with then you haven’t read any labor history--the Kochs are deeply American it turns out.

And, let’s be honest, not studying labor history is a feature of our educational system, not a bug.

In this program we’ll learn about the deep history of “doublethink” in the American past as we examine concepts like “right to work” which entirely upend the democratic process to claim the privilege of the “one” against “the many”; we’ll look at union busting techniques that stem from the civil war which include the private security agency established by Allen Pinkerton, demonizing immigrants, and fomenting racial divisions among workers; And guess what, “astroturf” groups like the current Tea Party have a long history also as quote unquote citizens associations.

We begin tonight with a look at why this history is hidden, or better, buried, and kept from the country’s citizens.

GUEST

Rosemary Feurer is an associate professor of History at Northern Illinois University. She’s the author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest: 1900-1950, and along with Chad Pearson, co-editor of the essay collection Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism.

RELATED

The Red Scare Playbook: Vermont Chapter

The Red Scare Next Door: Anti-Communism in Evansville, Indiana

Undermining Zinctown: The Feminist Socialism of Salt of the Earth

MUSIC

"The Powers That Be" by Roger Waters

"Picket Line" by Robert Calvert

"Never Cross a Picket Line" by Billy Bragg

"Sweetheart On the Barricade" by Richard Thompson

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

While citizens are encouraged to fear and blame so called outside agitators the real menace lies within…A business community committed to the rancor of class and racial divisions with the intent to keeping labor powerless and in the chains of wage slavery. In our two previous programs we’ve detailed a kind of localized “Mccarthyism” BEFORE …

An example of the anti-Semitic attitudes of Bethel resident Lucille Milller who "exposed" suspected Communists.

We’ll say goodbye to the "Red Scare Next Door" in Evansville, Indiana and travel East to the Green Mountains of Vermont where it turns out that even Republicans can be Red-Baited. We can turn the page in the anti-labor playbook but all we’ll find is the same old story featuring Henry Wallace, the Communist Party, red-baiting politicians, and smear tactics aimed at the heart of Academic freedom as another university professor bites the dust. But there is one new imposing element to the story, Mao’s China, seen through the amazing Hinton siblings, Joan and William; Joan was a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project; and William documented the unfolding of China’s cultural revolution in Long Bow Village, published in 1966 as Fanshen. Both were, of course, targets of HUAC, The House Un-American Activities Committee

Our GUEST tonight is Rick Winston whose new book, Red Scare in the Green Mountains, explores some forgotten history as we see how a small, rural "rock-ribbed Republican" state with a historically libertarian streak handled the hysteria of the time.

Now, as we again experience a political atmosphere charged with intolerance, condemnation, and widespread falsehoods, Winston’s Red Scare in Vermont, like that in Evansville, Indiana, shows us that truth is the first victim of power.

Historian of the Left Paul Buhle writes that the book takes us back to the dark days of the downward turn of American politics toward repression and persecution, but also of extreme bravery of many of New England’s best, under terrible political pressure.

We begin with Winston’s parents who, to use the words of Philip Roth in memory of a blacklisted mentor, were impaled on their moment in time, caught in the trap set to ruin so many promising careers of that American era -- a casualty like thousands of others of the first shameful decade in his country's postwar history -- expelled as a political deviants, dangerous to let loose on the young.

RELATED

The Red Scare Next Door: Anti-Communism in Evansville, Indiana

The Bluff of the Century: Nixon, Alger Hiss, and the Cold War

Tracking Subversives: Alan Wald On the Development of the Literary Left

In Memory of a Friend, Teacher and Mentor by Philip Roth

MUSIC

"Unwelcome Guest" by Billy Bragg

"Joe McCarthy's Band" by Joe Glazer

"Days Like These (DC Remix)" by Billy Bragg

"I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister" performed by Barbara Dane

"Hell is Chrome" by Wilco

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Editor: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin