154: An Epilogue Discussion with Ben Sawyer
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Hello, my friends, and welcome to an HTDS epilogue. I'm playing this a little differently than we have in the past. I have invited my dear friend, a former guest, Ben Sawyer, to join me. Ben, would you like to go ahead and say hello to the fine folk listening? I would like to say hello to the fine folk listening. And Greg, that last episode we did, episode 99, which seems like forever ago now in the HTDS universe. Yeah.

Man, I do public speaking events and things like this and speaking conferences. And so many people have come to me and said that they knew me from your show. Are you serious? Yes. And so many people have told me they listen to The Road to Now because they heard me on your show.

And that is amazing. So thank you for that. And yeah, it's just an honor to be a part of this. I love this podcast. Hey, man, it's an honor to have you back. One of the things I love about doing this podcast are the amazing friendships I've made across the country. And Ben, I count you as an important friend. Thank you, man. Likewise.

So, let's give you a proper introduction, though everyone, of course, remembers episode 99. I think it's memorized for most listeners. Probably go to sleep with a plane in their ears. Can't imagine another way to spend their lives. But in case anyone's forgotten the one, the only, the illustrious Ben Sawyer. Ben, you are a senior instructor in history at Middle Tennessee State University. You are...

Also a co-host, we'll say the more important host because you're the one who's here, of The Road to Now. Yes. And you are also, I mean, no bias here whatsoever, the finest stand-up in Tennessee, right? We can go ahead and say that. The problem is that Nate Bargazi lives here, and he's my age, so I can't wait him out. You know what I'm saying? So that's hard, but perhaps the best history professor stand-up comic ever.

I think that's a very large circle that we're pulling from there. I like to tell people that I am perhaps the funniest college professor and the most well-educated stand-up comic. I like that. I'm sure there are a lot of people that fit this Venn diagram in that middle section.

Yes. I should also add, Greg, out of a note of gratitude that I am also a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt this year. And I say that because I have, this is an incredible community over there and I want to give them a shout out. Absolutely. Let nothing I say here convince you that that is not one of the best history programs in America because it is.

Perfect. Well, okay. Introductions accomplished. We're going to talk about these last few episodes that we've done on HTDS, episodes 150 through 153. We've really been in the early 1920s, haven't really gotten to much of the roaring of the 1920s yet. Frankly, we've had some pretty depressing stuff to discuss. Everything from the largest insurrection post the Civil War, the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor movement, to the second KKK, not exactly interesting.

uplifting material. So on that, though, we'll go ahead and jump into one thing that you brought up to me, something that

I think we could hit more of, and it's part of why I wanted to do this with you. Party realignment. You mentioned to me as we were discussing epiloguing, as I like to put it, that this is a good point to discuss some of the shifts that are happening in the parties as we're coming out of the progressive era and stepping into the roaring 20s. So Ben, go ahead. Yeah, this is one of the things, because Greg and I have talked about this a couple of times before this, what do we want to focus on?

But the thing I love about Greg is that we are both academically trained, but we think about our audience being our students or the people that are out there. And so we're hitting on a point where in my classes, where I teach in the South at Middle Tennessee State University, one of the most common questions that students have when they come in, and it's a very particular Southern way that they phrase it. They tend to ask, when did the party switch?

And that is a question a southerner would ask because there's one thing we know, Greg, it's that for 100 years from the late 1840s until the mid-1940s and really into the 1960s, it's that the South is solidly democratic. Right. Solid South. With the exception of the moment where you have actual voting rights for black Americans. Right.

You know, you've got this kind of critical moment in 1874 with that election where there's a, it's clear that they're not going to enforce protections for black Americans in the South. Right. But after that, you know, it's solidly democratic. And we also know that by the time you get into the 1980s, 1990s, for a long run, we've had some recent exceptions here, but the South has been solidly Republican. And so it's kind of a very fascinating switch. And that, I think the question though, is, is a little bit off because it doesn't switch

It's more that the party's ideology changes. And we've gotten to a point where this is subtly happening in the background in a really profound way with World War I and Wilson's presidency. And if you notice something from the trajectory of these last few episodes, I mean, the progressive party, that is the progressivism. Mr. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt is the face of this. Right. And this is the Republican Party's mission.

And the strange thing is that you go from him leaving office at the beginning of 1909, and then you're looking just three elections later, and you've got the same Republican Party running on return to normalcy with Harding and then probably more Representative Calvin Coolidge, who want to completely dismantle the federal government. And that's a quick change for a period of just 12 years. And it all comes back here to what happens with the election of 1912 when Mr. Roosevelt himself splits the votes.

Wilson is not necessarily the person the Democrats would have loved to run, but he is a compromise in 1912 because he at least will be on board with the progressive agenda in a way that a lot of Democrats won't, which means that he essentially gets past this torch of progressivism.

And from all we've seen in these last few episodes, Greg, from what happens with World War I, you know, the promise turning into almost nothing, feeling of betrayal, the horrors that Americans see abroad. You've got back home the uncertainty that comes from soldiers then returning and trying to reintegrate. And then this, you know, quick downturn of the economy in 1920. We could get into a lot of other reasons, including the fact that the Wilson administration tried to cover up the Spanish flu.

by telling Americans that it was not anything but a regular flu, and Americans could see that. By the time you get Wilson out of office,

You're looking at a situation where people have so hard turned on the idea of progressivism and the federal government being the primary actor that the Republicans have managed within eight years to completely turn their ideology around and come out the other end of the Wilson administration, the party of small government. And while there is certainly a shift with the Republican presidents, like with Eisenhower and with Nixon, remember, who was Ronald Reagan's favorite president, Greg? Do you know this? He was a big FDR fan.

He liked Calvin Coolidge. Oh, I didn't know that was his favorite. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it wasn't his favorite. But he held up Calvin Coolidge as a model. Okay. And in that sense, you can see that the ones that win don't hold this up. But you can still see this like in Goldwater in 64. Yeah.

This legacy is around there. And while Americans sour on that after the Depression, you know, after everything kind of falls apart, they bring that small government legacy to the Republican Party. And that brings a lot of people around to the Republicans that previously wouldn't have been there. Okay. So we're coming out of World War I. Wilson's been riding the progressive train. He—

Had his own weird kind of weird. I'll say weird because what I mean is it failed. Right. He was trying to do this like small government form of progressivism that he realized didn't really work. And he basically ended up doing what Roosevelt said. Well, well, he embraces the thing about Wilson is that he does embrace the federal government as an agent of change.

The problem is the most famous ways he does that are probably associated with his biggest failures, right? I mean, leading the United States into World War I, I mean, that is the most progressive move possible in terms of his ambition, right? That the federal government can enter this war and then spread American ideology across the world and end all wars. I mean, there's honestly nothing more probably progressive than that. But you also have him using the federal government for the Palmer raids. You have, you know, in the Sedition Espionage Acts.

So you have the federal government there. And then again, this handling of the Spanish flu makes a lot of American suspicions of the federal government. I still want to see that book be written, by the way. This was brought up by John Barry, who wrote the book The Great Flu. We had him on the road to now. And he talked about flu.

The cases that he looked at where people were absolutely like the mental gymnastics people had to go through where they were watching people die from this flu and they were watching people who lived get such high fevers that when they came back, they weren't the person they were before. Well, at the same time, the federal government basically was saying, don't acknowledge this as any different because they were worried it was going to cause some type of upheaval at home that would distract from the war effort.

And it's just fascinating, the story. And I asked John how much he thought that had to do with this return to normalcy in the 1920s. He said he wasn't sure. But if you're listening right now and you want to write a book, there's a good question to follow up.

So, look, let's dial it a little bit. I mean, we haven't quite gotten into Harding's administration yet, but we have referenced the return to normalcy. Americans, that pendulum is swinging in the 1920s, right? I mean, they they're afraid of the globalization that they've experienced with World War One. The doors have been kicked open in a way that, well, America wasn't ready for. The federal government did expand in a big way.

And often after two steps in one direction, it kind of scares any nation, right? Whatever the shift is to want to kind of recoil and step back. So I think we're seeing a lot of that. Why don't we go ahead and step into Russia a little bit? Yeah. I mean, the Russian revolution, it has a profound impact on the whole world. America is watching it and it's got its own ideas. Why don't you take us there, Ben? Yes, Greg. Russia is a part of this whole story. Um,

because Russia, well, you've got the uncertainty that happens back home. I mean, World War I, people don't come home feeling great about it. And they come back home to find that jobs have been taken in factories by people that, in some cases, Black Americans, in some cases, women. They come back. This isn't World War II, where you're going to turn around and just amp up the army. I mean, the few million people that end up serving in the armed forces, they stand down the army right afterwards. So they come back home to find

Not only are there jobs in question, there's a brief economic downturn that happens after the war with the agricultural glut. And this shakes people up. And this is a moment, Greg, where we see this, and you know this. This is one of the things historians, we see over and over again. It's when people are shaken and they're a little bit agitated.

They will cease asking the real question we should ask, which is what happened. And they will fall for people who phrase the question as who did this to us. A nice, simple scapegoat. Yes. Who did this to us? I say that's the question of a demagogue. What happens is a good question, right? But who did this to us? When you start with that, that's always trouble. And the Russian Revolution, it feeds into the anxiety completely.

Now, there's a lot of different reasons we could talk about because it's not simply the radicalism. There's a financial element to it as well because what the Soviets actually do that infuriates the world most has to do with nationalizing property and taking property from some of America's largest corporations at the time.

And repudiating all of its foreign debt, which means that millions of dollars of bondholders in the former Russian government are not going to get repaid. Right. Well, don't tell them that. They still think that the Russian government owes them this over 100 years later. What? The research I've done. Okay. Yeah. That's novel and new to me. J.P. Morgan, or was it Citibank?

It was Citibank, I think, floated over $100 million of dollar bonds to back the Russian government in 1916 on American markets. And they bought them and they paid them off for a while. But once the Soviets come into power in January of 1919, they say, we're never going to pay back any debt. And that's when you infuriate all the wrong people. Sure, sure.

And yeah, I mean, obviously I understand that the connections we can get to the ideology part, but that happened as well with the French revolution where there were multiple changing regimes and, you know, Louis the 18th, he was no fan of paying debts incurred by a regime that

overthrew and killed his brother and nephew. Yes. Anyhow, sorry. There's your token little. No. Yeah. In terms of international finance, this is referred to as odious debt. This is when you claim that debt was acquired and very rarely has it worked. I think the case of Portugal, some point in the 19th century, they got away with it. And the most famous, Greg, you know, from the 14th Amendment is the repudiation of Confederate debt. Oh.

Which Davidson College, Greg, this is a side note, where Woodrow Wilson attended his first year of college was at the beginning of the 1860s as one of the most well-endowed universities in the world. But its president invested heavily in Confederate bonds.

and lost the endowment for the university. Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, that's a little gem. Thanks for sharing that, Ben. A little Southern perspective for us. So back to this, the Bolsheviks claimed that all this debt was lent to the czar. Sure. And then later on to the provisional government in between to force a war on the people that they didn't want.

And so they say, why should we, of course, the Bolsheviks representing the true people of Russia. That's right. Why should we? Sorry, you go ahead. The real ones, right? Yep.

Why should we be forced to pay off debt that was forced by an illegitimate regime upon the people? And they cancel that. They cancel all foreign ownership of property. And this infuriates folks. And all of this happens at this kind of interesting moment where communication between Russia and the United States gets completely shut down in almost every channel.

So it leaves people in the United States, regardless of their opinion on what the Soviet Union might be, to glean information and then make up the wildest stories about what's going on in Soviet Russia in ways that you might not even expect. It's kind of hilarious, honestly. Well, by all means. I've got some examples here. An example or two? Oh yeah, absolutely. When you said we were talking about this, I was like, it's time to pull some newspaper articles out. I'd expect nothing less. This is my favorite myth that comes out. Now, the thing you gotta get

is that at this time, there's a lot of pretty positive relationships between people who own the big newspapers and the people that own big corporations. This message is sponsored by Greenlight.

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And collectively, that means that once they realize their property is under threat, they've got no space in their newspapers for anything positive about the Bolsheviks. They do, however, have space for things like this. And this is a New York Times, October 26th, 1918 article.

Uh, the, uh, the headline is Soviets make girls property of state, uh, decrees, compel them to register at quote, free love Bureau on attaining 18 years of age. This makes its way all through the United States that, you know, since the Bolsheviks are taking everything over as state property, they also have issued a decree nationalizing women, uh, under the Bureau of free labor. Wow. And, uh, under the decree, this is from the newspaper and the decree, uh,

A woman having registered, quote, has the right to choose from among men between 19 and 50, a cohabitant husband. The consent of the man chosen is not necessary, the decree adds. The man chosen having no right to make any protest. A similar privilege of choosing from among the registered women is given every man between 19 and 50 without the consent of the women. That's in quotes, without the consent of the women. This provision is described as, quote, in the interest of the state. Now, Greg, we could simply get at the fact that

It doesn't seem to be possible to give both men and women the right to force themselves to be with someone else at the same time. But more than anything, this is meant to, you know, one of the things you know, and this comes up with the KKK as well, you talked about this in Birth of a Nation.

It's the idea that women are under threat, that this sacred, beautiful woman who needs to be defended is under threat. And this story right here makes its way through the newspapers all across the country about how they're nationalizing women. And it just makes them seem irrational, nuts, and in this case, simultaneously after women's chastity, but also feeding into the fear that comes with those great anti-woman suffrage

Right. Cartoons where they're like, if a woman gets to vote, then the man will have to do laundry, you know? So I don't want to derail from the point at all. I am, as a historian, my brain is just burning with how I never heard anything like this before. Dude, where did they even get the origin to run with this story? I mean, do we have any idea or just nope, super made up, full stop?

I've never found, I mean, you know, I, for those of you guys who don't know me, I spent, I spent about two years living in Moscow from 2010 to 2012 and worked in, you know, in Russia.

Good gracious, hundreds of files relating to Americans who went to the Soviet Union and operations of Soviet offices within the United States, all of which are in some of the economic archives, some of the party archives, some of the state archive. I never found anything about the Soviets referencing this even internally as a problem to put out. Wow. Of course, this happens in this moment where the communication breakdown is real because the transit routes and everything get knocked out.

But these types of rumors and just what's going on in Russia, if your newspaper is run by people that don't like the idea of their property being under threat, boy, they'll publish anything. And this is just like one extreme example. You know, Ben, I just have to ask for the source because, you know, I'll say this tongue in cheek. You can see me smirking. I realize our listeners can't. We know that fake news is an entirely new phenomenon, right? Yeah.

Well, this is in print, so it must be true. There we go. Okay. Yeah. So we're solid. A major newspaper would not publish here, so that's for sure. That could never happen. Okay. I'm sorry, man. Another one here. This is from March 11th, 1919. This is also the New York Times. And a lot of this stuff is coming through London. Okay. Because the information is sparse. Yeah.

So this is Russia under Red's gigantic bedlam. Escaped victims say maniacs stalk raving through the streets of Moscow. Fight dogs for carrion. Starving crowds devour flesh torn from the carcasses of worn out horses. And this is actually this one's coming through Geneva. And this is another industry that these newspapers love, which is finding people who have been to Russia, who have fled and

And the, it's kind of interesting because some of these folks figure out that they will get attention if they make up these stories. Yeah.

Okay. And there are several people who go through being like, oh yeah, it was horrible. It was horrible. And they just make things up. Not to say it wasn't bad. They're right. There's a famine that sits in in Russia almost immediately that comes along with this. And then Russia goes into three years of civil war. So it is miserable over there, but these stories always seem to strike at things that would really upset Americans. Right. Well, and you know, the thing that I think is often, well, either these sorts of people, they just don't care or they're not thinking, but

The irony is that when you start going into hyperbole and you make up stories, you actually undercut the very real problems that are there. Yes. I was just talking about this. You're eroding trust. Yes, with the Red Scare. I was talking about this with McCarthy in class the other day. We're getting ahead of ourselves in terms of the timeline. But the reality is we all look back and go, wow, what an insane moment. I'm sure I'm glad we got through that.

But the reality was the Soviets got the plans for the atomic bomb through espionage. And instead of focusing energy on figuring out how that happened, we go into this massive witch hunt. And you see these things happen over and over again. Right. Again, Greg, people asking who did this to us, not what happened. Well, that is, you know, we could also connect that to the Palmer raids that we just got through. I mean-

there are legitimate things that are driving those fears. You can, there are anarchists who are trying to blow people up and whatnot, but how much of that is, is real, right? What are the proportions? And that's the thing that Palmer just goes crazy with, right? He's ready to cast a massive net over pretty much anyone who's connected to Russia. Anyone who's Eastern European in pursuit of what is really a boogeyman when you take it to that level. Yeah. And that's the thing, Greg, is that is, is,

The threat of the Bolshevik Revolution in the United States, even the Soviets understood the United States is not like other places. I mean, you talked about this briefly about the problems of trying to apply Marxism to anywhere, really, because it's kind of a model, right? It's not the nuts and bolts and nitty gritty of life. But in the United States, everyone realized that this place doesn't work socially the same way most other places do.

I mean, you go back to like Americans origins are in people trying to get away from big government in that way. The distrust is real during World War I. And as you pointed out in your episode, people join organizations, but you even said like the Russian Workers Club was mostly just people trying to meet women, not a radical organization. And so the fear is overstated here. Nevermind the fact that this is one of the funniest things I learned getting into the archives is

Eventually, Stalin comes in and it's a complete change. I mean, the man is a monster and he dominates and he figures out ways to really seize control over the landmass. I mean, this is one-sixth of the world's landmass that the Soviet Union is in control of eventually. That's just, yeah. Thank you for sharing that statistic. When that hits you, wow. Yeah, but I think the reason people are so shaken by the Russian Revolution is that, I mean, if you would have put a dollar down

on a betting app about the Bolsheviks winning the Russian civil war and coming to power, you'd have made a millions of dollars, which would have immediately been nationalized by the Bolshevik government. But nobody saw this coming. The way I tell my students is like, it's like if the radical wing of the college Democrats that none of the other ones would talk to said, we're going to take over the university. And then somehow they did.

Okay, that right there is like, what the hell just happened? What the heck just happened? But it's also like, those guys don't know how to run a university. They've mostly been sitting around giving speeches and writing political tracts.

Right. They can't get anything done. And how could this go wrong? Yeah. And, you know, you've got I mean, these are professional revolutionaries. That's not I don't know what a resume looks like for that, but it certainly doesn't involve like thorough economic planning, institution building. It's mostly trying to tear things down and so not build things up. Yeah. Right. So, Ben, you mentioned some of the experiences that American expats had.

In the 1920s in Russia, when we were talking earlier, could you take us down that road a little bit? Yes, this is the flip side of the lack of information coming back and forth. Okay. If you were someone who was worried about money, if you were wealthy, if you had any ties to someone who invested in it, then Russia was the worst investor.

On the other hand, because Russia, the Bolsheviks, what they get out of these grand proclamations of fulfilling human accomplishment, of creating a world where the workers could run their own enterprise, a world free of masters,

Americans then imagine this in so many remarkable ways. My favorite example is what eventually becomes called the autonomous industrial enterprise at Kuzbass, which is in Siberia, where a group of a few hundred Americans team up. This includes Big Bill Haywood, the American labor organizer who helps promote this.

They then go into the middle of Siberia into a half-developed coal mine that had begun being developed by the French and abandoned during the war. And they themselves set out to build this entire thing into a finished coal mine. And while most of these stories don't turn out with them actually doing it, these guys get it most of the way there before Stalin, and they manage to leave some long-term effect. But I've been and I've worked in the papers of the leaders of this organization, and

And yes, some of them are socialists, but one of the biggest leaders, this guy named Calvert, he says in his notes from the time that he's from the West. He was from California.

And this is the 1910s, going to the 1920s. And he had grown up with grandparents who told him stories of the Wild West, of going out and taming the fields, right? Bringing this into American civilization, all of that, the manifest destiny narrative. And that when he found he himself could go to another frontier, Siberia, and that the land was being opened up for settlers who wanted to come bring modernization, he

His version in his mind of what led him there wasn't to go there to be a radical Bolshevik. It was essentially to go out there and be a pioneer in the same sense that he had grown up hearing his parents, you know, the stories from his parents. And this doesn't fit in our minds because, of course, as Americans, we have a monopoly on frontiers and transforming them. Right.

But also because, I mean, Russia, Soviet Russia, that seems like the opposite place that would happen. Right. Yet they managed to do it. That's one of the few cases where it works out. A lot of times they just...

farmers will pull their money together. A couple hundred of them will go over there to set up a farm and find out that once they get to the local level, the land they've been promised was taken back by the local folks, again, because the Bolsheviks can't run anything. And their modern farm that they're supposed to set up to show the peasants how to farm will get moved down to some mosquito-infested land with rocks in the soil. Their tractors will break, and within a year, they'll be begging the peasants for food, which is not a good look if you're trying to convince the peasants to use tractors. Right. Right.

So it all goes absolutely haywire. But it's fascinating to me to hear you basically say that you've got Americans who are going to communist Russia in pursuit of an American dream, of their version of the American dream, right? Yes. I mean, that's wild. And that's what's wild.

This is something I've thought about a lot, you know, just the way that these ideas can transfer and the way that they frequently do not, Greg. Because as you know, sometimes the narrative we imagine about the past might not even have lived up to the way it really was in this country. Sure. Applying that to a place on the other side of the world is not usually going to work. Right. Greg, do you want to talk about U.S. intervention in Russia, the American soldiers who landed in Russia during the end of World War I? Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Beyond settlers, beyond these expats who, whether it is ideological or having dreams of go west, really, really far west over the Pacific West, young man, to paraphrase Horace Greeley, taking us all the way to Siberia. We also had American soldiers who were serving in Russia. That's kind of a lesser known component. I touched on it briefly in one of the episodes, but can you take us deeper on that, Ben? Yeah, this is one of the fascinating side stories here because, again,

As a part of World War I, just to back up a little bit about why the Soviets in particular and Lenin are seen as immediately an enemy from a lot of perspectives, the Germans do help him get back to Russia to stir up trouble.

And in an absence of information, one of the early problems that the Americans and the British have with what happens is the Bolsheviks follow up on the previous promise of the provisional government in Russia to get Russia out of the war. And the Bolsheviks actually deliver on that. And by March of 1918, they've signed a separate peace with the Germans.

Which this is everything the Americans were trying to stop them from doing because it stops being a two-front war when you get to that point. Because of this, a lot of people see the Bolsheviks as German agents, as essentially this war itself now Russia not allying with the Germans, but certainly being pro-German in the war.

So on two different fronts, the United States sends soldiers to Russia to invade the country shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. One group goes to the north, the Polar Bear Brigades, which land in Arkhangelsk around the Arctic Circle. And they're under the command of the British. They don't seem to know what they're doing there. They're there for a short-lived period of time, and they come back. To me, the more fascinating story is the American expeditionary forces that land in Vladivostok on the Pacific coast.

Which Vladivostok is this interesting city where today China, North Korea and Russia all come together. It's the home of Russia's Pacific Fleet. It was a closed city during the Soviet Union. It is incredibly, incredibly important for Russia's strategic position in Asia. When everything breaks down and Russia goes into a civil war, the United States lands almost 8000 U.S. soldiers there.

And establishes a presence. In these years, you end up with a separate republic being formed out there called the Far Eastern Republic. The president of which is an American who's moved there. What? Yes. And I think this goes until the first couple of years of the 20s.

And why is the United States invading Vladivostok, Greg? Do you have any idea? No, you've taken into a corner. I definitely do not know. Please bring your Russian-ness to bear. What's the answer, Ben? Well, there are a couple of threads here. The first one is,

Remember 1898, whenever the Secretary of the Navy left the office for the day and our boy Teddy Roosevelt pulled the hammer back on a full-fledged invasion of the Philippines? Yes, I do. Well, we've suppressed the rebellion there to the tune of many, many lives, and the United States is interested in expanding its presence in the Pacific. Who is the largest competitor, Greg? In the Pacific? And we're talking back into the 1920s? Yes. Japan? Yeah.

Absolutely. And what does Japan need? Japan's going to need some oil. That's exactly right. It's going to need raw materials. Just across from Japan is where Vladivostok is, and a weakened Chinese government sitting there cannot hold them off.

We've already seen that the Treaty of Portsmouth, where Teddy Roosevelt went in and helped negotiate and ended the Russo-Japanese War, which he wins the Nobel Peace Prize for. Right. On its surface, it looks like a very kind gesture. On the flip side of it, we know that Roosevelt was worried a weakened Russia would not be able to stop an expanding Japan. And again, we have the similar issue here. Okay. Okay. In the breakdown of the Tsarist government, the Americans are worried that Japan is going to use this as an opportunity to jump across and

and gain a powerful position in Asia. So by moving in there, much to the anger of the Japanese government, the Americans are able to kind of play a power broker position to make sure the Japanese don't get too much leverage in the region. All right. Game of chess, not checkers. Yes. The other side of it, Greg, is that tens of thousands of Czechoslovak soldiers have revolted against the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

have been moving their way across the Trans-Siberian Railroad to be routed around the world to fight Germany and Austria-Hungary in Europe. And the Americans help oversee their transit there out of Vladivostok, where the Trans-Siberian Railroad terminates, across to the western coast of the United States, across the United States, then across the Atlantic to then take up arms against Germany on the other side of the world. Well, that is a circuitous route. It is. Holy crap. Okay.

So, I mean, this is an incredibly globalized world. I mean, World War I is just exploding the way that these nations are interacting and the United States' role in it.

All of which are things to freak out Americans a little bit. Yes, because who saw all of that coming? And again, the soldiers that come back from Vladivostok, they're undersupplied, they're under-resourced, even they're not quite sure why they're there. There's a mission to it right at the higher level. Right.

it also makes people kind of resent dealing with Russia. Sure. And last thing, it also makes the Bolsheviks, which become the Communist Party, pretty sure the United States wants to overthrow the revolution, which will have long-term side effects in terms of the U.S.-Soviet relations from early on. Absolutely. Even when we get into World War II, we have this odd frenemy ship, right? Yes. I mean, Stalin is not exactly known for being a forgiving guy. He has memories of U.S. troops from back in the 20s.

Let's take some of this ideology and let's connect it. I don't think we're going to have time or means to get into the nitty gritty of Blair Mountain and the coal mine wars, but it definitely connects with political ideology.

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Bolshevism slash communism, the Red Scare, all of this connects with the labor movement and this big, broad blanket that's being thrown over the entirety of the labor movement.

So why don't we go ahead and kind of in broad strokes delineate where and how communism sits on the political spectrum versus socialism, Marxism, right? I mean, we did break some of this down in episode 151, but let's talk about how that applies specifically within or rather how it gets framed around the labor movement in the 1920s and where this all ties into the Red Scare and

the swing against these progressive policies that were very welcoming to unions. And now we're going into a very anti-union space. Well, can I just say this, Greg? You're asking me to follow what I think was one of the most beautifully executed jobs of differentiating between these groups in your episode on the farm. I couldn't believe it. We shot back and forth about this before. And when I listened to that episode, I was like- We did. It must've been like finding out about the first atomic bomb and being like, that could be done?

I mean, I knew the material might be there, but that could be done. You're too kind, man. I think the most important thing here is that by the time you end up with the Bolshevik Revolution working and the Soviet government entrenching itself in the 1920s, essentially there's not much space within the left-wing movements for anything that operates outside of the sphere of the Soviet Union. There are certainly significant movements that don't want that pull, but the problem is throughout the Western Hemisphere,

There have been people talking. You went back into this like utopian socialism for 100 years before this. Nothing had ever worked. Right. And so now they look at the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union needs outreach. And, you know, the American Socialist Party, which kind of splinters what forms this American Communist Party and a lot of these movements, they find themselves subject to infiltration and consolidation under the Soviet Union through the, you know, through the common turn. Right.

And so that's one of the real problems that's going to pop up with the Red Scare later on when people are like, well, were you affiliated with a group of the Communist Party? These folks had been maybe members for a while, but first of all,

The meaning of these groups changes over time. By the 1930s, it's clear the Soviet Union is leading this stuff. And secondly, that information gap I told you about that's intense early on after the revolution, it maintains. Most of these people don't know what Stalin is doing inside the Soviet Union. When they find out, they want nothing to do with it. To me, one of the most important things to keep in mind with the whole labor movement, Red Scare, just as you're saying these terms, they're changing, they're dividing.

is that big division that comes between a communist and a socialist during World War I, the way that communism becomes basically the ardent, the revolutionary, the super hardcore socialism. Yeah, I mean, the problem with it comes down to definitions here, Greg. It's like, I mean, the way I explain it in my classes is that like, if you want to just kind of a general understanding of the development, it's like that human beings, most of our dominant struggle in our existence has been against nature, right?

Fire and things like this and high water, these things destroy human society. And what happens in the Industrial Revolution is that we begin to master those things and use those things that had destroyed us to become the most powerful species on Earth. And as we do that, what replaces – this would be a socialist perspective. The tyranny and uncertainty of nature becomes replaced with the tyranny and uncertainty and arbitrary allocation of power that comes with the market.

And that then the idea of socialism, right, if capitalism makes capital the most important aspect of an economy and your government legal structures are going to be centered around the facilitation and the promotion of capital, that socialism would then take a next step and say, no, we need to have the ends here, not the means, but the ends be guiding us.

So the idea would be that your legal and economic structures are centered around the good of society. The problem becomes a lot of people have a lot of disagreements about what that means. Hence, yeah. Right? So what's good for society? Hence, we get to this very big, broad tent. And I think in the 1920s, early 1920s, when Palmer is just drawing zero distinctions between

a revolutionary, an anarchist or a Bolshevik, very different things, but both on the very far left and both willing to take violent steps to overthrow society, to capitalism, to bring about a revolutionary regime compared to on the other end of the spectrum, say a union member with the AFL who's like,

No, I'm a fan of capitalism. I mean, I just would like to get paid a little bit more. I just want to make sure I'm not forced to work over eight hours a day. And I mean, as I tear through the sources in my mind, those are significantly different camps to be in. But the distinctions are just completely lost, even in the way that the news is covering it. Right.

I mean, I remember reading through as I was preparing that episode, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, they had no problem describing these long old standing unions with American workers as Bolshevik in this moment. Yes. Somebody's like, hey, I was thinking that maybe you shouldn't arbitrarily change the length of our day and cut our wages whenever your profitability goes down. Maybe we could get like a fixed workday and maybe I could like get enough to live off of. And they're like, how dare you, you radical communists.

These guys aren't challenging the capitalist system. They're simply challenging the allocation of wealth and the allocation of the benefits of

That's something we all do today, I would argue. We say we deserve to get paid a certain amount. And while we have more workers protections we take for granted, you've got to imagine the people that are doing this in the 1920s are doing it in a world where nobody imagines retiring. Sure. Children work. Right. A large number of the time you're getting paid in company money. It's like working at Best Buy and getting paid in Best Buy gift cards. Right.

And, and, and you, how are you going to, your house is a lot of times either owned by the company in a company town, or you're paying by the day at some living squalor in New York. These aren't people who were trying to overthrow the government. They're like, Hey, what if we could afford to eat? And if we lost an arm, that didn't mean we were fired. Right.

I think I'm still processing the paid and best buy gift cards. That's good. I'm stealing that. You don't mind, right? Not at all. Not at all. You know what? I'll be very socialist about this. You can nationalize it along with your women there, Greg. Oh, I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I can comment, but we'll go ahead and leave that one alone.

True bullshit.

business needed to have enough of a carrot out there to continue to innovate, to continue to invest. He grasped what drives innovation, the self-serving aspect that gets someone to say, I'm going to start a business at the same time saying,

And we can't have monopolies take over to such an extent that the worker can't feed themselves. Right. I mean, that in my mind kind of sums up what his idea of a square deal was that no one was getting screwed at the end of the day. And he was struggling through not taking this ideological. It's always the workers that are right or it's always big business. That's right. But really trying to do the hard work.

to not be some mushy middle either, but that hard work to try and get it right in the various iterations as things arise. And I feel like that's what we're seeing that, I mean, I guess you could say we're still doing that today, but in the 1920s, as that pendulum swings, it's these attempts during the progressive era to try and

protect the workers. And now you have this, the swing going back the other way. I mean, when we get to, to touch on the, the Coalfield mines, right? The things that business is saying that they need, well, in reality, they've deprived their employees in West Virginia of basic rights guaranteed by the constitution. I mean, when you have private agents that can arrest people for gathering in groups of three or more, I mean, it's,

what happened to the First Amendment? Well, we're not even talking about economic policy anymore. You've got vassal lords feigning to be employers. Yeah. But it's such a swing, right? I mean, you guys, you know, you did the episodes on, you know, on the 1877 railroad strike and then on the, you know, on the, um,

the Pullman strike and all this stuff. And, you know, people always say the federal government, you know, the government didn't used to get involved in people's lives. I would ask a person who was shot by a member of the U S military during one of these strikes, if they felt like the government had intervened in their lives, I suspect they would say yes, even though this was the Gilded Age. Right. But the reality is you,

You see, you're right. Roosevelt comes in anthracite coal strike, right? Exactly. The company wants a 10 hour day. The workers want an eight hour day. Roosevelt settles on a nine hour day. And besides Greg, how could either the company or the workers be totally right when Teddy Roosevelt knows that Teddy Roosevelt is always right? That's an excellent point. Greg, can I ask you some questions? Yeah, man, fire away. I want to ask you some questions because I was telling Greg earlier, I love this podcast and

I recently listened to the episode on the KKK and what's going on then. And it is in a series of impressive episodes. I feel like it might be the most impressive. It is such a hard topic. And you know this, Greg, when you walk in a classroom and you got to get through a hard topic. Oh, yeah. And you do it so artfully and you do it so well. And I wonder what guided you as you were writing that script. Man, what guided me? You know...

I wouldn't say that there's anything different in terms of what guides me on that one versus any other. And that's not a dodge. The answer is historical empathy. I mean, any time I sit down, I mean, for instance, that episode, it opens with the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man in Georgia. And that is, I mean, it's gruesome. It was gruesome to write, you know, gruesome to go through the editing process.

As I'm writing that episode, as I'm getting into the story of Leo, I'm not entirely dispassionately. As a historian, you got to kind of, I think, go back and forth between two hats. When you're doing the storytelling, you need to be able to connect on an emotional level with the historical figures. But of course, your analysis, that needs to be dispassionate. I think both of those things have to happen at the same time.

So, you know, as I'm getting into Leo's story, I mean, I try to, to whatever extent I can, I want to put myself in his shoes. And I mean, that's what I do in every episode. I always strive to do that. But thinking through what the Jewish community is feeling in this peaking era of anti-Semitism. And then, you know, as I continue through that, I likewise want to try and connect with and think through what

our Black Americans thinking and feeling. They're coming back from World War I, you know, these war heroes, some of whom are at the Tulsa Race Massacre, and I made sure to highlight them. That was something that stood out to me. After a year of World War I episodes, right, to read about these Black veteran doughboys who are ready to defend the courthouse and are ready to stand down when their services are rebuffed by law enforcement, you know, no problem at all. They try to extricate themselves.

Yeah, I always want to try and imagine what it is like to be in their shoes. I think that's crucial. You can't tell a good story if you're not able to really get into that headspace. It's good. I think it's an art.

Greg, you nailed it there. It's, you know, we live in a time where people are divided. And I heard you tell a story that it doesn't matter. I don't know how you would come to this story and not walk away with a feeling of pain when you hear the story, you know, where they try to stop them from tearing the body apart. Yeah. And he says, this man has a mother. This man has a family. Well, you know, likewise, right? When the judge, as he enters the story at that point, right? Leo's body is still suspended in the air. Right.

And you've got this crowd calling for desecrating it. And at that moment, I'm trying to get into the judge's head. And, you know, things that don't come into the episode, things that I read a lot about, I mean, for hours, I poured over everything.

And they just, they don't make it onto the page, right? An episode is much like an iceberg. That tip that sticks out, that's what I record. All that background information that was required for me to get that. And, you know, I write about this judge. He's a local boy, right? It is clear as day that this man is committed to,

to the greatest ideals that the United States has to offer. He is not okay with this sort of vigilantism, with this anti-Semitism, with racism. And I, you know, even thinking about, I mean, this whole episode, right? We're talking about the second KKK and it rises out of Georgia. And yet here is also an opportunity within this terrible, horrific tale of Leo to highlight, you know, a local Georgia boy

who rejects all of that. And he's doing his best to try and lead his community to embrace their better angels, to be the best that they can. He comes into this situation. He's horrified that Leo's already been killed. He raced there. That's one of the things I didn't get to touch on. He hears that this is going down and he books it, trying to get to the site, hoping he can save a life. Of course, finding he can't. And

I mean, I just don't even know if I'd have the presence of mind that that judge did to immediately throw himself in and go, okay, here's where we're at. What's the best I can do? I can try and stop this desecration. Yeah. Anyhow, all of that's floating in the back of my head as I'm writing up that scene. This is, you know, Greg, we've talked about this before. It's a...

You look at the world and when you start studying history, stories like that will break your heart. It's not the way you want to imagine the past, you know? But then we have, as historians, we have this obligation to tell this story because it's incomplete without these dark moments.

And turning your back to them is not a way to understand the world. I tell my students that saying that you love this country, if you haven't seen the light and the dark in the country, is like telling me you're in love with a girl you just saw on Tinder. It's like, I get it. It's very fascinating. She's only shown you pictures that she selected, and you should probably get to know her first because I'm convinced that true love only happens when you find out she snores and you still cuddle up close. It's not easy. Yeah.

I like that, man. And for all of the dark moments like this, I love your listeners because they go with you on these trips that you paint so beautifully. But it's this thing that we share, which is when you recognize all the dark paths that were open in this country and you find somebody who did the right thing.

And you find that in spite of the fact that there's this moment where the clan is surging and they're against anybody who's different. Yeah. And people turn from that path. It's understanding that every time that we could have gone a worse path, people have brought us back here. And that sense of gratitude, I think, comes from really tackling and looking into the darkness so that you can appreciate when the light returns. And we live in this great inheritance, Greg. It's amazing. Ben, I completely agree with all of that. I mean, that to me is the great part of

Even these dark chapters is that in those moments, I don't mean this in a take it for granted sort of way. There's always that one or that group, you name it, that they step up. They do more than is expected of them. History will show us the full gamut of the human experience. And we could say the American experience, but it is more than that. I happen to be telling the American story, but you're going to find the same ugliness and beauty. You

Different stories, of course, different characters, different protagonists and antagonists who come and go. But all of that still comes to bear regardless of which nation or subgroup you might be looking at. And in these darkest hours, yes, it's whether it's the Civil War and, you know...

the reins fall to someone like lincoln who dares to bring in disagreeing his own rivals right people who think they're better than him and he says come into my cabinet because the nation deserves the best or as it was this gruesome day out in the woods of georgia when a an exhausted but daring judge saved leo's body if he couldn't save his life at least his body

Again, some of the details from that scene of his heroism just couldn't make it in. Yeah. Initially, I had the full dialogue because that was reported in the newspaper. Now, of course, as you know, as a historian, we have to take that as the language. But I'm always thinking, yeah, I wonder how accurate that language was. But it's the closest we can get.

But picture this, you know, I summed it up in one sentence in the episode of, yeah, these, the cops won't stop him, won't take him to jail for speeding, but they end up escorting him. The way this scene played out, Ben, he's driving down the road, two cops on motorcycles pull up on either side of him, right? Because he's not stopping. He's got,

Who knows how many angry Georgians following him, trying to overtake him. Who knows what they'll do to him at this point, right? And they still want to desecrate this body and the judge is refusing to let that happen. So this is a yelling situation, as I read it, between the judge and these two motorcycle cops who are on either side of them saying, pull over. Okay, you're going to jail. You will not stop. And he's yelling, I have a body and a mob behind me. I can't stop.

I mean, it's just an incredible, sorry, I'm kind of off in the weeds here now, man. No, no, I love this, Greg. And this is, this to me is like, this is, I like talking to you about this. I think, you know, we've talked before. I remember one time we talked about you making episodes and you showed me this, I mean, these stack, the stack of materials, right?

that look like, I was like, what? It's like, you're like, this is what I've got for this next episode. And it was piles of books. And I, myself, they teach us how to get through books when we're in graduate school. That they do, man. But I was blown away by it. And you looked at the story, which in American history, we always come across this lynching case. It looms large in American history. Yeah. But I just felt like the way that you pulled the story out was remarkable. I would say to the listeners, it's

You find yourself on the judge's side in the end, don't you? You listen, you should find yourself on the judge's end because he's the guy who's doing the hard thing. And at the end, he can't even save the man's life. There's just some degree of honor that he's willing to put himself at stake for. But remember, there were more people there in the mob. And the thing that I always tell my students is you've got to acknowledge that everybody in a scenario is the same species you are.

They made a series of decisions that got them on one side or the other. And in retrospect, you can't go back and change it. But this divide and conquer, and we see it in all the episodes with the Red Scare, with the KKK, what do they do? I'm glad. I mean, it's amazing with the second KKK, they eventually go away because it's clear after a while that they don't get anything done. Like pointing to an enemy, ask Stalin, you can't purge yourself out of a situation.

No matter how many people that you go through, it's not going to fix the absolute problem. It will just give power to the people that want to stoke that. And from my perspective, study in history, when you see this and you go, everybody in that mob thought they were on the right side of things. They did. And as you said, later on, 90% of the people in the KKK would be like, I didn't really know what it was about or it wasn't like that where I was. But there's that might not be the whole story.

Just remember that racism and divide and conquer of any group in America, when you study history, it becomes like playing Madden against that guy that does the same play over and over again. You ever play a guy, same play, it's usually shotgun over and over and over again? What I say is, you know, for the first half, that's on them. But if you lose that game in the second half, it's because you haven't had the wherewithal to figure out what's going on and protect yourself. You know...

As you say all that, Ben, and I think I'm halfway saying what you just did, so forgive me if that's the case, but one of the things I really find myself latching onto as I go through these many iterations, right, as we continue to play this game of Madden over and over, is noticing that, well...

The situation's changed, of course, but you do see these same patterns. I mean, to point to Lincoln yet again, but I could also point to Washington. I would point to TR, to the judge at Leo's lynching.

There are always these people who are, they're not looking to define more outgroups. They're not othering. They're not talking about, right. To get back to your earlier point about the questions that are being asked it, who did this to us? The leaders that we end up looking at in history and appreciating, they're not asking who did this to us. They're asking, how do we move forward together? It's always about unifying. It's about building on common ground and

It's never about some villain. You know, I think about Lincoln's constant overtures of, you know, with malice toward none, with charity for all, the idea of forgiveness and healing. So I guess maybe we end on this note when we think about the present.

I suppose we should just be asking, where do we see those patterns playing out in our day-to-day lives? If we want to know, if we want to try and figure out what's a historian 100 years from now going to be saying about our present? Well, I am looking for those who are looking to unite, to bring about healing.

and provide a path forward rather than telling me about boogeymen. Yeah. Greg, this is what I love about your show. You create an honest history that in hard times like these, an honest history, you've proven that Americans from a variety of different perspectives will listen when a person shows love for their audience and a person shows academic rigor. And, you know,

Much like the judge that nobody had heard about until your episode probably listens to this. We all play small roles and sometimes we never even pop up on podcast episodes later on. But the world we live in now is the aggregate legacy of everyone who has made the right decision and the wrong decision. And fortunately for us, it's more of the former than the latter. I'm with you, man. Hey, thank you. You are far too complimentary. I mean, I think my listeners are just going to wonder if I put you up to all that. Oh.

No, I teach American history to hundreds of students every semester. It's so hard. It's so hard. Oh, thank you. Well, Ben, thank you for joining me. And hey, I look forward to having you back again. We'll have to do this more. Anytime, man. And I look forward to finding out more about pole sitting in an upcoming episode of History That Doesn't Suck. Yes. Spoiler, Sawyer out. I got it.

History That Doesn't Suck is created and hosted by me, Greg Jackson. Special guest, Professor Ben Sawyer. Production by Airship. Sound design by Molly Bach. Theme music composed by Greg Jackson. Arrangement and additional composition by Lindsey Graham of Airship.

History That Doesn't Suck is created and hosted by me, Greg Jackson. Special guest, Professor Ben Sawyer. Production by Airship. Sound design by Molly Bach. Theme music composed by Greg Jackson. Arrangement and additional composition by Lindsey Graham of Airship.

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