Speaker 1: Hello everybody, ladies, gentlemen, brothers, sisters, comrades, friends. I really
Speaker 1: appreciate having all of you here listening so close to Thanksgiving, actually,
Speaker 1: now that I think about it, and so close to
Speaker 1: the end of my semester, which is partly to explain
Speaker 1: why I've been a little absent on the airwaves. I
Speaker 1: don't know if Internet is airwaves, now that I think
Speaker 1: about it, I don't know if that counts, but let's
Speaker 1: just call them airwaves. This is basically radio, right anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm glad to be here, and you might be surprised,
Speaker 1: some of you, at least seeing this episode pop up.
Speaker 1: Hopefully the subtitle Throwback Thursday, because it is a Thursday.
Speaker 1: As I record this and send this out to everybody
Speaker 1: might give it a clue. But some of you longtime
Speaker 1: listeners are probably very familiar with the name of this episode.
Speaker 1: I want to get to that, but I want to
Speaker 1: first thank the amazing support from my longtime loyal supporters
Speaker 1: John Andre Saither and Mike Mayleban supporting history impossible at
Speaker 1: the executive producer level over on Patreon. Without you guys,
Speaker 1: I don't even know where I would be with all this.
Speaker 1: But you know clearly you're both really integral parts of
Speaker 1: making this show happen. I mean, I always love hearing
Speaker 1: from you guys via email or DM, so please always
Speaker 1: feel free to reach out again, and same to all
Speaker 1: of you listening, whether your supporters or not. Honestly, feel
Speaker 1: free to reach out. This episode might cause that, even
Speaker 1: though it is a rerun. But again, I'll get to that.
Speaker 1: In fact, you know what, I'll get to that right now,
Speaker 1: just to explain, because I was skeptical for a long
Speaker 1: time of doing reruns of History impossible, at least of
Speaker 1: the earlier episodes, and for a while I was thinking
Speaker 1: I would do you know, the kind of thing Carlin
Speaker 1: does where he puts his old episodes behind a paywall,
Speaker 1: and you know, people who want to actually hear them
Speaker 1: can go back and pay for them. And I still
Speaker 1: haven't done that, and I don't know if I ever will, honestly,
Speaker 1: because there's just really not much return on that, and
Speaker 1: it robs me the opportunity of doing this, which I
Speaker 1: came to realize is totally fine to do. At the time,
Speaker 1: I guess, in a weird way, I was thinking I
Speaker 1: hadn't earned the right to do so because I was,
Speaker 1: you know, was and still am small potatoes all things considered.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't really matter. Obviously. It's a silly way
Speaker 1: of looking at things, and you know, to be honest,
Speaker 1: it's counterproductive, just doesn't make any sense. Like I've been
Speaker 1: saying or hinting that many of you hearing this have
Speaker 1: been with me since day one, or at least close
Speaker 1: to day one of history impossible, and many of you
Speaker 1: have also likely gone through the entire show archive, and
Speaker 1: I love all of you for it. I really do
Speaker 1: appreciate that. But then I look at the calendar and
Speaker 1: I remember that it's been nearly six years since I
Speaker 1: started this show. I mean, six years is a wild
Speaker 1: thing to think about. I was just breaking into the
Speaker 1: time period known as real adulthood in my early thirties,
Speaker 1: and I decided to start a podcast. Go figure. Now,
Speaker 1: it's certainly wild to think of about where the time
Speaker 1: is gone and all the things, like crazy things that
Speaker 1: have happened since then, both in my life and in
Speaker 1: the world around me. So I kind of figured that
Speaker 1: this was as good of a time as any to
Speaker 1: relaunch this first episode. I'm not going to be doing
Speaker 1: it with every episode, guys, This is just because of
Speaker 1: certain obvious relevance, but also because you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of you listening probably have not gone back through the archive.
Speaker 1: There's a lot there, and you know, this is a
Speaker 1: particular episode that's so far back that a lot of
Speaker 1: you might have missed it or just rolls your eyes
Speaker 1: at it. But it, honestly, especially given what happened at
Speaker 1: the beginning of November of twenty twenty four, smacks of relevance,
Speaker 1: so to speak, because that is part of the big
Speaker 1: event or events rather that have occurred since I started
Speaker 1: this podcast. It was a historic election year. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, the most superficial sense of the word is
Speaker 1: that it's only the second time in American history that
Speaker 1: a man has been elected for a non consecutive term. Sorry,
Speaker 1: Grover Cleveland, I mean, I know, you spanked Grandpa Simpson
Speaker 1: in two non consecutive occasions. There's a deep cut Simpsons
Speaker 1: reference there, guys. But yeah, you're no longer the top
Speaker 1: dog in unlikely presidential terms, I guess. But more to
Speaker 1: the point, Donald Trump's reelection in twenty twenty four was
Speaker 1: also historic because of his convicted criminal status. Putting aside
Speaker 1: obviously how one might feel about the validity of those
Speaker 1: convictions or the trials that produce them. This is historically significant.
Speaker 1: No matter how you slice it or how you feel
Speaker 1: about anything, it's significant. Now. I've had several people ask
Speaker 1: me for my take on everything that has happened, and
Speaker 1: I've given it in small doses, like in private, to
Speaker 1: friends mostly who have you know, they don't follow history
Speaker 1: like I do, obviously because they have lives to lead,
Speaker 1: and they just are curious about my take. I hate
Speaker 1: this word, but I tend to have a kind of
Speaker 1: a heterodox view on a lot of things like this.
Speaker 1: But I've also had a number of people, even people
Speaker 1: I don't no no, ask me how I feel about
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, as in the man himself. And you know,
Speaker 1: in short, I don't really have an answer that It's
Speaker 1: pleased many people, but likely only a fair few of
Speaker 1: you listening know that it really hasn't changed since twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen when I started History Impossible. Now, when I started
Speaker 1: the show, I came very close to beginning it with
Speaker 1: the Muslim Nazi series. I don't know how many of
Speaker 1: you guys know that or how often I've mentioned that,
Speaker 1: but it's true. I actually almost started that. That's why
Speaker 1: I had been researching Hajaman al Husseini as early as
Speaker 1: late twenty seventeen or early twenty eighteen. But thanks to the
Speaker 1: advice of my good friend and I guess we can
Speaker 1: call him Guru Danielle Blelli, the Italian Stallion, whatever you
Speaker 1: want to call him, I came to realize that I
Speaker 1: would be essentially imposing myself on the historical podcasting audience,
Speaker 1: my new audience, by asking them to commit to a
Speaker 1: series that at that time I assumed would take a
Speaker 1: few years. And I was obviously right about that, but
Speaker 1: more than I could even possibly have known. So I
Speaker 1: went with one offs for a while, occasionally for rain
Speaker 1: into thematic trilogies and two parters. I mean, some of
Speaker 1: those are my favorite stories that I've ever delved into.
Speaker 1: Even until this very day, I always talk about how
Speaker 1: the Great Hollywood cover Up is probably my favorite story.
Speaker 1: I guess I'll call it because it was a two parter,
Speaker 1: it's my favorite I've ever done. It's just, you know,
Speaker 1: it's scratched an itch that I hoped to scratch again
Speaker 1: one day. But my very first episode, like I've been
Speaker 1: kind of saying talking around this entire time, was one
Speaker 1: where I tried to unpack my feelings about Donald Trump
Speaker 1: from a historically comparative perspective, and looking back at that
Speaker 1: first episode, I do think most of my feelings have
Speaker 1: remained consistent. I mean, I've never liked the fascism comparison,
Speaker 1: much less to Nazi comparisons. I think that should be
Speaker 1: obvious by now. But I never really liked what I
Speaker 1: was seeing more in the broad sense, less to do
Speaker 1: with the man, less to do with his party, more
Speaker 1: just to do with everything that surrounded his ascension. Neil Ferguson,
Speaker 1: the famous historian many years ago now, he helped break
Speaker 1: this down just what kind of historical figure Donald Trump is.
Speaker 1: It was something that really resonated with me. It's a
Speaker 1: video I've linked it in the show notes, and it's
Speaker 1: a great video, very good time capsule in and love itself,
Speaker 1: and it inspired me. And after a couple of months
Speaker 1: of frantic research into the period of time Ferguson discussed
Speaker 1: in that talk that I've linked in the show notes,
Speaker 1: I was able to pull together a story about a
Speaker 1: next to unknown man from American history, the so called
Speaker 1: original Donald Trump. And then the first episode of History
Speaker 1: Impossible was born and because that was all so long ago,
Speaker 1: and because I realized that the idea of re releasing
Speaker 1: episodes is really no big deal, especially considering I have
Speaker 1: so many new listeners who might not have gone back
Speaker 1: through the archive, I figured I would re release that
Speaker 1: episode for you guys right now, that's who you're listening to,
Speaker 1: and to be honest, because it has also been a
Speaker 1: while since I've released an audio episode for the podcast,
Speaker 1: and not for lack of trying, I'm honestly trapped right
Speaker 1: now with a looming thesis prospectus in graduate school and
Speaker 1: the ongoing writing and research I'm doing for my proper class.
Speaker 1: All that has eaten up most of my time for
Speaker 1: the last month or so. And I have a number
Speaker 1: of other projects to which I've been committed and one
Speaker 1: of them actually kind of relates to this episode, and
Speaker 1: I actually really want to do my best to promote
Speaker 1: it here, which is a long form essay I wrote
Speaker 1: for this up and coming publisher of historical analysis called
Speaker 1: Kinrath Publishing. I wrote a like I said, long form
Speaker 1: essay about the eighteen seventy six election Rutherford B. Hayes
Speaker 1: and Samuel Tilden, and a lot of it gets into
Speaker 1: a lot of the material that I covered in this episode,
Speaker 1: so it's kind of related. I will obviously be blasting
Speaker 1: that out whenever it launches, but it should be launching
Speaker 1: within the next couple of months or so, maybe even
Speaker 1: couple of weeks. As of this recording, I couldn't tell you,
Speaker 1: but it's all moving very fast, and I'll make sure
Speaker 1: to share it and you guys can support kind Wrath
Speaker 1: Publishing as best you can anyway. Though this is all
Speaker 1: to say that a lot of my time has been
Speaker 1: eaten up by these projects, and I do plan to
Speaker 1: have some episodes come out before the year ends, god willing,
Speaker 1: maybe an interview or two, though those are a little
Speaker 1: less certain. But with this I wanted to give all
Speaker 1: of you who only recently found my work and or
Speaker 1: have just not found the time to work your way
Speaker 1: back through the six years of content. I wanted to
Speaker 1: give you guys something to chew on, especially given recent
Speaker 1: events that are relevant to what I talked about in
Speaker 1: this episode. Now, like I was kind of saying before,
Speaker 1: I do essentially endorse everything that I researched, wrote and
Speaker 1: said from this episode. I did so many years ago,
Speaker 1: at least in the broad strokes. I do not necessarily
Speaker 1: endorse equality, either my delivery or the production. Maybe even
Speaker 1: some of the attempts at humor, I honestly don't. I
Speaker 1: rarely ever endorse that kind of thing. After some time
Speaker 1: goes by, I cannot promise that this episode will stand
Speaker 1: to scrutiny compared to my more recent work. It was
Speaker 1: my first stab at historical podcasting, after all. But I
Speaker 1: do think this re release relevant as it is to
Speaker 1: the results of the twenty twenty four election. It can
Speaker 1: serve as a nice time capsule that answer some lingering
Speaker 1: questions that my followers and listeners might have regarding my
Speaker 1: feelings on our forty fifth and now forty seventh president
Speaker 1: of the United States and the world that spawned him.
Speaker 1: At the very least, it can serve as a nice
Speaker 1: historical comparison to the first Trump administration and the years
Speaker 1: that led up to it. Now, I do believe, for
Speaker 1: what it's worth, that things are very different in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four American society than they were in twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: to twenty sixteen, but not by much. In some ways,
Speaker 1: they are heightened. That's where I'm at, That's where the
Speaker 1: show is at. Please stay tuned for future episodes. If
Speaker 1: you have already heard this, but you know, feel free
Speaker 1: to enjoy it again. If you don't remember it that well,
Speaker 1: or if you want to, you know, mine it for
Speaker 1: stuff you can make fun of me for for not
Speaker 1: being as good at as I am now who knows.
Speaker 1: But please sit back and enjoy this throwback. Like I said,
Speaker 1: post it on a Thursday of the very first episode
Speaker 1: of History Impossible, the original Donald Trump. Well, let me
Speaker 1: to tell you what you would have seen and heard.
Speaker 1: If will not be pleasant listening, if you were at lunch,
Speaker 1: or if you have no appetite now, it is a
Speaker 1: good time to switch author radio. An ancestor of mine
Speaker 1: maintained that if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable.
Speaker 1: I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace
Speaker 1: is inside out the dream. I feel we hear for
Speaker 1: sue to guilt, We here for issue to guilt. Some
Speaker 1: say the world will end empire, some say a night.
Speaker 1: From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those
Speaker 1: of favor fire. But if it had to perish twice,
Speaker 1: I think I know enough of hate to say that
Speaker 1: for destruction, ice is also great and look sufficed. This
Speaker 1: is history impossible. When Mexico sends its people, they're not
Speaker 1: sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you.
Speaker 1: They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're
Speaker 1: bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime,
Speaker 1: they're bringing rapists. You probably remember this quote from the
Speaker 1: current President of the United States, Donald Trump, when he
Speaker 1: was on the campaign trail in June of twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: You probably also remember this one quote. We have people
Speaker 1: coming into the country or trying to come in. We're
Speaker 1: stopping a lot of them, but we're taking a lot
Speaker 1: of people out of the country. You wouldn't believe how
Speaker 1: bad these people are. These aren't people, these are animals unquote.
Speaker 1: Or perhaps this one quote, the Democrats don't care about
Speaker 1: crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they
Speaker 1: may be, to pour into and infest our country unquote.
Speaker 1: These quotes are all varying levels of notoriety today, especially
Speaker 1: among the president's most vocal critics and detractors. However, it's
Speaker 1: unlikely that this statement is as well known quote. To
Speaker 1: add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy as
Speaker 1: sent to China, the greatest and oldest despotism in the world,
Speaker 1: or a cheap working slave unquote, or perhaps this lesser
Speaker 1: known gem of a statement, let me caution working men
Speaker 1: to not employ Chinese laundrymen. They are filthy, They spit
Speaker 1: on clothes, and if they have any disease it is
Speaker 1: transmitted to men and women through such washed clothing when
Speaker 1: the body perspires. Do you want leprosy? Here? By not
Speaker 1: employing them, you can drive them from the country unquote,
Speaker 1: Or maybe even this one. A Chinaman will live on
Speaker 1: rice and rats. They will sleep one hundred in a
Speaker 1: room that one white man wants for his wife and
Speaker 1: family unquote. You'd be forgiven for being surprised at not
Speaker 1: knowing about these last three quotes coming from the United
Speaker 1: States President in twenty nineteen. Quotes you may have at
Speaker 1: first assumed were a few of the many, many controversial
Speaker 1: statements that he made during his campaign in twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: and twenty sixteen, and that perhaps God just swept under
Speaker 1: the rug. But you would be forgiven for not recognized
Speaker 1: these last three quotes. For an even more important reason,
Speaker 1: the man who said those words was not Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: In October of eighteen seventy one, a cyclone of racist
Speaker 1: chaos was about to be unleashed on nearly twenty people
Speaker 1: living in Los Angeles' Chinatown. These people were chosen at random,
Speaker 1: merely on the basis of being Chinese immigrants, after rumors
Speaker 1: began to spread around the city that quote Chinamen have
Speaker 1: been killing white's wholesale unquote in an area near the
Speaker 1: boundaries of Los Angeles Chinatown. This area was derisively known
Speaker 1: as Nigger Alley, named after the darker skinned, mixed race
Speaker 1: Californios who had originally settled there before California's annexation by
Speaker 1: the United States, and this thin alleyway like street had
Speaker 1: already held a bit of a reputation among the Los
Speaker 1: Angelinos at the time. An next saloon keeper had indeed
Speaker 1: been killed after seeing a police officer also killed in
Speaker 1: a gunfight, but the murderer had been an unseen criminal,
Speaker 1: likely tied up in a dispute between two different gangs
Speaker 1: operating in and around the Los Angeles Chinatown at the time.
Speaker 1: But nuance was not on the mind of the mob
Speaker 1: of both white and mestizo men, mostly working classmen, who
Speaker 1: stormed around the still relatively nascent city looking for Chinese
Speaker 1: people to murder after being told that quote the Chinks
Speaker 1: are shooting and carajo lachino, which is Spanish for damned Chinese,
Speaker 1: and that quote American blood had been shed unquote the
Speaker 1: last statement. According to a letter later written by a
Speaker 1: member of the mob, the writer of the letter would
Speaker 1: also say, quote we all moved in, shouting, in anger,
Speaker 1: and as some noticed, in delight at all the excitement
Speaker 1: one quote. The first thing the Chinese American inhabitants of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles heard that day as they went about their business,
Speaker 1: tending their shops, chatting with friends, was a mass of
Speaker 1: screams coming their way. They likely heard chanting, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't clear right away what was being said, just shouts,
Speaker 1: syncopated shouts. And then the mass of voices became clearer,
Speaker 1: entering focus along with the angry, perhaps surprisingly multiracial faces
Speaker 1: of the approaching mob. Hang them, hang them, hang them.
Speaker 1: Before they even realized what was happening to them in
Speaker 1: their community, Chinese American inhabitants were being yanked out of
Speaker 1: the front doors of their own homes and shot point
Speaker 1: blank in their faces, chests, and stomachs. Some were pulled
Speaker 1: out of their homes and their shops by the ropes
Speaker 1: cinched around their necks that were used to lynch them
Speaker 1: right then and there. Others were dragged by the neck
Speaker 1: to their hanging place as they writhed on the ground,
Speaker 1: just struggling to free themselves. Once the mob removed the
Speaker 1: residents from their homes, they immediately began looting, rooting around
Speaker 1: for any trace of gold or other valuables. The ager
Speaker 1: social distinction of the victims didn't matter and did nothing
Speaker 1: to halt the mob's racialized bloodlust. Most of the victims
Speaker 1: were laundrymen and cooks, but there was a cigar maker,
Speaker 1: a musician, and a shopkeeper who were later counted among
Speaker 1: the dead. There was even a well known doctor named
Speaker 1: doctor Chi Loong Tongue locally known as Jeanne, who, when
Speaker 1: dragged from his home, begged the angry mob in both
Speaker 1: English and Spanish to spare him, but it made no difference.
Speaker 1: He was strung up by his neck and killed, but
Speaker 1: not before his trousers had been yanked free and all
Speaker 1: of his money removed from his pockets. After swinging from
Speaker 1: the rope, his finger was severed to remove the diamond
Speaker 1: ring that he wore. A young boy was cornered by
Speaker 1: the mob, and a journalist at the time, a man
Speaker 1: named P. S. Dorney, who covered the incident, wrote quote,
Speaker 1: A boy was thus led to the place of slaughter.
Speaker 1: The little fellow was not above twelve years of age.
Speaker 1: He had been a month in the country and knew
Speaker 1: not a word of Inga. He seemed paralyzed by fear.
Speaker 1: His eyes were fixed and staring, and his face blue,
Speaker 1: blanched and idiotic. He was hanged when the violence finally subsided.
Speaker 1: At least seventeen Chinese Americans had been lynched or shot.
Speaker 1: Their names were doctor Gene Tong, a Wing Chang Wang Long,
Speaker 1: Tui Along, Juan Fu Tong Wan, Alu Dei, ki Awa Hohing,
Speaker 1: Lohi a Wan Wing, Chi Wung Chin Asu, and was Sinchwi.
Speaker 1: These victims had been set upon by an estimated five
Speaker 1: hundred people out of eighteen seventy one Los Angeles His
Speaker 1: overall population of six thousand, eight percent of the city
Speaker 1: of Los Angeles had murdered seventeen Chinese in cold blood.
Speaker 1: Historian Paul M. Defala described the scene of the carnage
Speaker 1: in a nineteen sixty Southern California Historical Society Journal better
Speaker 1: than most quote the dead Chinese and Los Angeles were
Speaker 1: hanging at three places near the heart of the downtown
Speaker 1: business section of the city. From the wooden awning over
Speaker 1: the sidewalk in front of a carriage shop, from the
Speaker 1: sides of two Prairie schooners parked on the street around
Speaker 1: the corner from the carriage shop, and from the crossbeam
Speaker 1: of a wide gate leading into a lumber yard a
Speaker 1: few blocks away from the other two locations. The event
Speaker 1: became notorious, especially on the East Coast, with a newspaper
Speaker 1: even referring to Los Angeles as a quote bloodstained edenot
Speaker 1: Eight of the five hundred participants were convicted for the
Speaker 1: crimes committed on that day, their charge manslaughter, their sentence
Speaker 1: overturned due to a legal technicality, letting them walk out
Speaker 1: of the courtroom as free men. This was the largest
Speaker 1: mass lynching in American history. While all of this abject
Speaker 1: horror was occurring in eighteen seventy one, Los Angeles, America
Speaker 1: was in the middle of a series of massive transitions,
Speaker 1: not least of which being an incredible influx of immigrants
Speaker 1: from all over the world. This influx actually included my
Speaker 1: own great great grandfather of nineteen year old German Jew
Speaker 1: from Prussia and self described entrepreneur who had arrived in
Speaker 1: Ellis Island earlier that same year as the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: Chinatown pogram. This rise in immigration was important because it
Speaker 1: fits nicely into the ingredients the five ingredients specifically outlined
Speaker 1: by the prolific modern historian Neil Ferguson in a talk
Speaker 1: he gave in early twenty sixteen about what he termed
Speaker 1: the Populist Backlash. He went on to describe how what
Speaker 1: was going on in American politics in twenty sixteen and
Speaker 1: the looming election of Donald Trump to the presidency were
Speaker 1: certainly interesting and even alarming to many millions of us,
Speaker 1: but that these things were nothing unique to the brief
Speaker 1: history of the United States. And he was right. That's
Speaker 1: what this story is about. In other words, as impossible
Speaker 1: as it may have seemed in twenty sixteen, around the
Speaker 1: time of the election of Donald Trump, something like this
Speaker 1: had happened before, or rather, someone like this had happened
Speaker 1: before there was an original Donald Trump. Now it's important
Speaker 1: for me to point out at the top here that
Speaker 1: this is not a podcast about contemporary politics. In fact,
Speaker 1: I find contemporary politics kind of boring on its own,
Speaker 1: simply because you can't really construct a reasonable or even
Speaker 1: that interesting of a story out of them, because they're ongoing.
Speaker 1: But contemporary politics have a funny way of opening the
Speaker 1: window to past events that we are well completely impossible,
Speaker 1: and this is why they're inevitably going to come up
Speaker 1: every so often in this podcast, though usually only as
Speaker 1: a point of comparison, a point of relation for us. So,
Speaker 1: while America's forty fifth president, Donald Trump is certainly new
Speaker 1: in terms of how powerful he's become on a platform
Speaker 1: of nationalistic populism, especially in the twenty first century, what
Speaker 1: he sold to the American people, whether it was a
Speaker 1: bill of goods or a brave new world, depending on
Speaker 1: what you believe was a bill of goods or a
Speaker 1: brave new world that had been promised nearly one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years ago by someone else, our titular original
Speaker 1: Donald Trump. In his talk Neil Ferguson neatly outlined what
Speaker 1: he called the five ingredients necessary for a populist backlash
Speaker 1: akin to the one being seen both today in the
Speaker 1: latter twenty tens and in America's not too distant past.
Speaker 1: These ingredients are all really important for us understand and
Speaker 1: what we're going to spend a lot of the story
Speaker 1: focusing on, probably the first half of it. Really these
Speaker 1: ingredients were, as Ferguson put it, quote, partly economic, but
Speaker 1: they were partly cultural unquote. This is why it's a
Speaker 1: mistake to look at the populous backlash of both the
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies and the twenty tens in purely materialistic terms.
Speaker 1: There were certainly economic concerns. You could argue that the
Speaker 1: economic situation of the eighteen seventies or the economic situation
Speaker 1: of the twenty tens were the driving forces, but that,
Speaker 1: as both Ferguson seems to end that I do believe
Speaker 1: is a limited view. You could have economic turmoil on
Speaker 1: its own, but without the other ingredients, you don't have
Speaker 1: the backlash and you don't have its usually very dire consequences.
Speaker 1: The first ingredient is evidence of that, since it's rooted
Speaker 1: in the realm of perception rather than the realm of
Speaker 1: the material. Specifically, this perception was and is the perception
Speaker 1: of rampant corruption. The perception of corruption is important less
Speaker 1: because of the question of whether or not there was
Speaker 1: corruption in the American political system of the eighteen seventies
Speaker 1: or the twenty tens, and there was, but rather the
Speaker 1: mere fact that there was a perception in place at
Speaker 1: all that things were corrupt. The fact that the perception
Speaker 1: was largely driven by reality made it just a lot
Speaker 1: easier for the perception to keep at pace, if not
Speaker 1: straight up outgrow the reality. This is why perception matters
Speaker 1: so much more to me than what's going on on
Speaker 1: the ground, because perception is really what shapes reality. It
Speaker 1: shapes what's going on on the ground, especially when it
Speaker 1: comes to politics. There were many, many reasons for people
Speaker 1: of the time to see corruption in their politics, not
Speaker 1: least of which during the eighteen seventy six election, which
Speaker 1: frankly deserves a podcast all on its own, especially for
Speaker 1: political and election junkies out there. This election was going
Speaker 1: to be seen as being rife with corruption no matter what,
Speaker 1: especially considering the sheer amount of voter fraud and intimidation
Speaker 1: that was occurring mostly in the South but also out west.
Speaker 1: A congressman from the time, a man named A. S. Wallace,
Speaker 1: put it this way, quote intimidation is the order of
Speaker 1: the day, and terrorism reigned Supreme unquote, and he wasn't joking.
Speaker 1: Racial programs against black communities were the norm for Democratic
Speaker 1: Party sponsored militia and mobs, such as the one that
Speaker 1: hit Hamburg, a small town in South Carolina in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy six. There were several black veterans of the Union
Speaker 1: Army living there at the time, and after an altercation
Speaker 1: with a couple of local white men, they were subjected
Speaker 1: to what can only be called a whirlwind of violence,
Speaker 1: very similar to the kind that hit Chinatown in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles in eighteen seventy one. Historian Michael A. Bli describes
Speaker 1: the events that followed in appropriately blunt terms quote. The
Speaker 1: following day, several hundred angry whites, led by former Confederate
Speaker 1: General Matthew C. Butler, attacked the town, leaving twelve blacks
Speaker 1: and one white dead, including the town's marshall. When asked
Speaker 1: by a congressional committee to explain his conduct, Butler said
Speaker 1: that the blacks had little regard for human life. He
Speaker 1: failed to men that Marshall James Cook's tongue had been
Speaker 1: ripped out and placed in his hands by members of
Speaker 1: the white mob. Events and threats of events like this
Speaker 1: swept across the South, all but ensuring a Democratic victory
Speaker 1: in the local elections and giving both black and Republican
Speaker 1: voters of the time a sense that there was nothing
Speaker 1: fair or legitimate about the election, at least on a
Speaker 1: local level. The frustration in fear wasn't limited to the South, though,
Speaker 1: and neither was it limited to blacks. In East Texas,
Speaker 1: there was a thriving community of German immigrants which were
Speaker 1: set upon by a mob of vigilantes who were bitter
Speaker 1: about the German American support of the Union during the
Speaker 1: Civil War and their continued support of the postwar reconstruction
Speaker 1: measures that had largely subordinated the South. Many of these
Speaker 1: Germans were killed in an ethnically motivated pogrim, and when
Speaker 1: the Texas Rangers were sent in to put a stop
Speaker 1: to it, they were unable to press charges against those
Speaker 1: they arrested due to the Democratic Grand Jury rejecting any
Speaker 1: attempts to bring in indictments. This was yet another example
Speaker 1: of what was starting to feel like a fixed election
Speaker 1: for everyone living in Democratic dominated states. That said, the
Speaker 1: election of eighteen seventy six between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes
Speaker 1: and Democrat Samuel Tilden did see the largest turnout, the
Speaker 1: highest turnout of the electorate up to that point. However,
Speaker 1: the election was a political disaster, to put it mildly,
Speaker 1: and it did its part in undermining the public's confidence
Speaker 1: in the institution of government, both with Democrats and Republicans alike.
Speaker 1: This is because it was a highly contested election, and
Speaker 1: while we definitely have had a fair few of those
Speaker 1: in recent decades, at least in my lifetime, I don't
Speaker 1: think we can say that we've ever experienced anything like
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventy six election. In addition to the many
Speaker 1: Southern states being stolen outright stolen by the Democrats, there
Speaker 1: were mixed reports about the election's overall outcome. It appeared
Speaker 1: that Tilden had claimed victory through the electoral College with
Speaker 1: two hundred three votes, but it wasn't that simple. This
Speaker 1: guy had a general named Daniel Sickles realized this as
Speaker 1: he was leaving an after party type shindig on election night.
Speaker 1: I can only imagine a few sheets to the wind,
Speaker 1: to be honest, and he went back to his office
Speaker 1: and started looking at the returns. He quickly realized that
Speaker 1: if Hayes took Florida, and I just got to stop
Speaker 1: and say, it's always Florida, isn't it. But if Hayes
Speaker 1: took Florida, if he took Louisiana, and if he took
Speaker 1: South Carolina in the electoral college, Hayes would in fact
Speaker 1: beat Tilden. Upon realizing this, Sickle shot off telegrams to
Speaker 1: the Republican committees in all three of those states and
Speaker 1: told them to hold fast, saw the results, and get
Speaker 1: ready to challenge the presumed Tilden victory. And while all
Speaker 1: of this very behind the scenes house of cards esque
Speaker 1: politicking stuff was happening, the people who had voted were
Speaker 1: getting mixed messages from the press. New York's Evening Post, Sun,
Speaker 1: and Tribune all reported a Tilden victory, while the New
Speaker 1: York Times and the New York Herald reported that there
Speaker 1: was yet to be a clear winner. If you're old
Speaker 1: enough to remember the two thousand election, you might remember
Speaker 1: that the Supreme Court resolved the Florida fiasco in December
Speaker 1: of that year. Now imagine the same thing in this
Speaker 1: situation in eighteen seventy six, but lasting until the following March,
Speaker 1: well after US Modern voters are used to seeing the
Speaker 1: new president get inaugurated. And now imagine that the efforts
Speaker 1: to determine the winner were spread across three states instead
Speaker 1: of just one, and every method under the sun being
Speaker 1: used to ensure victory by both sides was happening, as
Speaker 1: Michael Bli puts it, quote, over the ensuing weeks, the
Speaker 1: two parties use every method fair and foul to capture
Speaker 1: the votes of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. Republicans, who
Speaker 1: had the deeper pockets, triumphed in all three states. Democrats
Speaker 1: rejected the official tallies and called together their own election boards,
Speaker 1: which validated a state of tilded electors, also setting up
Speaker 1: rival government in opposition to the victorious Republicans. Nut, if
Speaker 1: you thought we had a problem with the two parties
Speaker 1: having two different sets of facts alternative facts, if you
Speaker 1: will just know that this, like everything in this story
Speaker 1: of ours, was happening nearly a century and a half earlier. Now,
Speaker 1: it's important for me to note here that the results
Speaker 1: of the eighteen seventy six election are still being debated
Speaker 1: to this day by the real historians and experts. No
Speaker 1: clear consensus has ever been reached, and as we know,
Speaker 1: historians all have their own biases and presumptions that they
Speaker 1: have to work through. But this is understandable in the
Speaker 1: contemporary context, since as the weeks continued into eighteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: something unprecedented and something the founding fathers never anticipated when
Speaker 1: they created the electoral college actually happened. Tilden was leading
Speaker 1: by nineteen electoral votes and twenty votes were up for debate.
Speaker 1: In other words, as Michael Bili puts it, quote, Tilden
Speaker 1: only required a single vote to be president unquote. This
Speaker 1: might sound silly, but take a second and close your
Speaker 1: eyes and imagine February and then March of twenty seventeen
Speaker 1: rolling around. Imagine that Obama is still the president. Hillary
Speaker 1: and Trump have been sniped at each other via CNN
Speaker 1: and Fox and Twitter and Facebook and god help us
Speaker 1: all probably their Instagram stories, and we're still no closer
Speaker 1: to knowing who won. No one in Washington seems to
Speaker 1: know what to do. Everyone is the figured of chicken
Speaker 1: with its head chopped off. This scenario happened in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven, though obviously without social or televised media, congressional investigations,
Speaker 1: and even redoing the whole thing. Holding a whole new
Speaker 1: election were things that were suggested in discussed, so everyone
Speaker 1: was going into panic mode, not least of which because
Speaker 1: the parties were starting to fragment from within on the issue,
Speaker 1: mostly along North south lines. This debate was felt strongest
Speaker 1: in Congress, where eventually the House Judiciary Committee created a
Speaker 1: commission made up of five House representatives, five Senators, and
Speaker 1: five justices, the last of whose names would be no
Speaker 1: joke drawn from a hat. This commission, as strange as
Speaker 1: it sounds, was created and agreed upon by both Tilden
Speaker 1: and Hayes in order to avoid a second civil war
Speaker 1: only eleven years after the first one ended, because that's
Speaker 1: really where this country was headed all over again, and
Speaker 1: no one wanted that, not with six hundred thousand dead
Speaker 1: Americans whose bodies were essentially still warm after all. When
Speaker 1: Tilden was told by his supporters that he should oppose
Speaker 1: the commission out of principle was by Democratic allies of
Speaker 1: this to him, he simply retorted, quote, what is left
Speaker 1: but war? Unquote. So this sense of teetering on the
Speaker 1: edge of a new civil war was felt all across
Speaker 1: the country. With the coverage of the crisis, paranoia and
Speaker 1: even calls for violence started to spread. Members of Congress
Speaker 1: were even bringing loaded pistols into session just as a precaution.
Speaker 1: Take an extra second to imagine Nancy Pelosi or Mitch
Speaker 1: McConnell addressing Congress with three fifty seven magnums strapped at
Speaker 1: their sides. And funny as that might be, the reality
Speaker 1: of the situation really starts to set in when you
Speaker 1: hear what the famous Civil War general William to comes
Speaker 1: to Sherman said about the situation at the time. Quote,
Speaker 1: the term of President Ulysses Esque ends at twelve o'clock
Speaker 1: on the fourth of March. He will then be in
Speaker 1: no position to give orders to me, and I shall
Speaker 1: receive no orders from him unquote implicit threat of military
Speaker 1: coup anyone. But something that dramatic never came to pass,
Speaker 1: because at the eleventh hour, at four in the morning
Speaker 1: on March second, eighteen seventy seven, Hayes's victory was confirmed
Speaker 1: by the commission he and Tilden had agreed to in
Speaker 1: order to avoid war. The crisis was over. But there
Speaker 1: was a cost to this crisis, one that couldn't really
Speaker 1: have been anticipated. I'll give them credit there. The cost
Speaker 1: of all this uncertainty and behind the scenes politicking was
Speaker 1: It was greater than anyone could have anticipated. Rutherford B.
Speaker 1: Hayes would only serve one term as president and be
Speaker 1: dogged by accusations of corruption for his entire tenure, so
Speaker 1: much so that he would frequently be given the name
Speaker 1: Ruther Fraud in the press, which I'm sure you pun
Speaker 1: lovers will no doubt get a good laugh at. At
Speaker 1: the end of the day, though, this automated distrust happened
Speaker 1: because this electoral circus certainly sapped the faith of the
Speaker 1: public in their political institutions. This lead to the perception
Speaker 1: of rampant political corruption as well as just the general
Speaker 1: perception that the politician the men in Washington, namely were
Speaker 1: the quote unquote bad guys. That's what happened, that's what
Speaker 1: formed that perception was created here. This perception was actually
Speaker 1: so widespread that even former politicians were calling it out,
Speaker 1: with a former Republican senator at the time named Carl
Speaker 1: Schertz recalling that quote, all branches of the municipal government
Speaker 1: were honeycombed with corruption and wickedness unquote, or as the
Speaker 1: always awesome and super quotable Mark Twain said in response
Speaker 1: to this growing populist backlash that was starting to sweep
Speaker 1: across the United States during this time. Quote where the
Speaker 1: government is a sham, one must expect such things unquote.
Speaker 1: But there was another factor, both in the eighteen seventies
Speaker 1: and in the twenty tens, another ingredient being added into
Speaker 1: what our friend Neil Ferguson calls the populous backlash soup,
Speaker 1: a stark rise in income inequality. The notion of inequality
Speaker 1: is actually tougher to measure than many people believe, or
Speaker 1: than how it's normally talked about, at least in terms
Speaker 1: of real world effects. You can look at the differences
Speaker 1: that exist in individual income and capital, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: really tell the whole story of how well or how
Speaker 1: not well someone is living. You can make a reasonably
Speaker 1: educated guess that someone working at McDonald's is probably not
Speaker 1: living as large as the head of a Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: tech giant or a Wall Street stock trader, just like
Speaker 1: you could have made a reasonably educated assumption that a
Speaker 1: labor at a canning factory working for a few dollars
Speaker 1: a day wasn't living as large as a railroad or
Speaker 1: steel or oil magnate. In the late nineteenth century. That said,
Speaker 1: it's still really tough to actually measure the effects of
Speaker 1: these inequalities income beyond the anecdotal stories of lavish parties
Speaker 1: and expenses versus abject suffering and starvation. But here's the thing,
Speaker 1: it's actually even more difficult to measure even just the
Speaker 1: numerical inequality that was occurring in the eighteen seventies since,
Speaker 1: as Neil Ferguson pointed out in his twenty sixteen presentation
Speaker 1: on the Populist Backlash, that we don't actually have income
Speaker 1: tax data from back then. However, given the economic trends
Speaker 1: pointed out by other economic historians, we do know that
Speaker 1: income inequality was at a peak in the years leading
Speaker 1: up to the First World War and the years afterward,
Speaker 1: and the data appeared to show that it was part
Speaker 1: of an existing trend that had been growing for decades.
Speaker 1: It seems to be pretty common knowledge that the latter
Speaker 1: half of the nineteenth century was a time filled with magnates.
Speaker 1: And no, that's magnates, not the thing that became an
Speaker 1: insane clown posse meme all those years ago. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about magnates, steel, oil, newspaper, railroad magnates, super wealthy, largely
Speaker 1: self made, and cut throat level ruthless men capitalizing on
Speaker 1: these relatively new economic frontiers. You had Andrew Carnegie, Scottish immigrant,
Speaker 1: post Civil War steel magnate and inspiration for Scrooge McDuck
Speaker 1: as it happens, whose his wealth would be about two
Speaker 1: percent of the United States GDP by nineteen oh one,
Speaker 1: and that, by the way I did the math, that's
Speaker 1: over three hundred and seventy billion dollars. That's of twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen when you account for inflation. You also had John D. Rockefeller,
Speaker 1: whose wealth was quote unquote only thirty billion dollars less
Speaker 1: than Carnegie's, but still massive thanks to his early investments
Speaker 1: in oil in the eighteen sixties, which actually ended up
Speaker 1: turning into a near monopoly of ninety percent by eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty with his company Standard Oil. You had JP Morgan,
Speaker 1: yes that JP Morgan of the Bank Fame, the one
Speaker 1: that the bank's named after, who bought Carnegie Steel Empire
Speaker 1: for nearly five hundred million dollars in nineteen oh one. Money.
Speaker 1: You had William Randolph Hurst, thefa mious yellow journalism magnate
Speaker 1: and the inspiration as it happens for citizen Kane thanks
Speaker 1: to I guess similar ruthless citicism and predilection for ostentatious castles.
Speaker 1: And you had Cornelius Vanderbildt and earlier member of this
Speaker 1: crew of wealthy dudes who struck it enormously rich in
Speaker 1: railroads and shipping in this case, as well as being
Speaker 1: the ancestor of a certain CNN anchor with an adorable giggle,
Speaker 1: a one Anderson Cooper. And these guys are worth mentioning
Speaker 1: for the fun trivia, absolutely, but they're more worth mentioning
Speaker 1: as sort of paragons of extreme wealth during a time
Speaker 1: when many working class Americans were, in so many words,
Speaker 1: living on bread and water in one dollar a day.
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily about these working class Americans and their
Speaker 1: families living horribly while these magnates, these robber barons as
Speaker 1: they were known, and their families were living lavishly and easily.
Speaker 1: Though this definitely was the case, it's not that this
Speaker 1: alone amplified the friction of the growing inequality in American society.
Speaker 1: It was just how much of a financial golf that
Speaker 1: was appearing between the working masses and these magnates was staggering.
Speaker 1: Both then and in the twenty first century for being honest.
Speaker 1: The mere presence of these magnates and the sheer, unheard
Speaker 1: of wealth that they possessed really gives us an idea
Speaker 1: of how the United States really became a nation with
Speaker 1: its insurmountable one percenter class that we still to this
Speaker 1: day keep hearing about in one form or another. And
Speaker 1: when you have a one percenter class, whether or not
Speaker 1: it's being abjectly felt by everyone in the ninety nine
Speaker 1: percenter class doesn't matter. There is a stark perception of
Speaker 1: gross injustice at this income inequality. You can call this
Speaker 1: perception of injustice simple resentment. You can call it an
Speaker 1: unfair distribution of resources. Whichever political bias you have informs you,
Speaker 1: you can call it those things, but it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: The point is that class differences, this stark tend to
Speaker 1: cause our pattern recognizing the million brains, a bit of discomfort,
Speaker 1: a bit of cognitive dissonance. Even cognitive dissonance actually is
Speaker 1: a really important aspect to this story and any story
Speaker 1: really that deals with income inequality, and it's one that
Speaker 1: doesn't get discussed often enough, at least not in a
Speaker 1: way that isn't depressingly informed only by Adam Smith or
Speaker 1: Karl Marx. Cognitive dissonance is simply the mental discomfort that
Speaker 1: you feel when your internal beliefs come into conflict with
Speaker 1: the reality of your actions and sometimes just your environment.
Speaker 1: It's not hypocrisy, as the way it's thrown around on
Speaker 1: social media in twenty nineteen might have you believe. Cognitive
Speaker 1: dissonance in the end is simply what I first called it,
Speaker 1: mental discomfort. But it's powerful mental discomfort. And how else
Speaker 1: would you describe the feelings of a worker on one
Speaker 1: of the railroads, or in one of the oil wells,
Speaker 1: or in one of the coal mines of the time,
Speaker 1: or one of the factories, just seeing the owners of
Speaker 1: their jobs continue to get monumentally richer and richer, while
Speaker 1: they just continue to scrape by with barely enough to
Speaker 1: support their growing families, all while they're just trying to
Speaker 1: buy into this notion that in America every freeman owns
Speaker 1: his labor and can use his labor to become his
Speaker 1: own boss and make his own fortune. How else would
Speaker 1: you explain it. I mean, maybe this cognitively dissonant worker
Speaker 1: shouldn't have had the family at the size that it is,
Speaker 1: and that keeps growing, and maybe he should should have
Speaker 1: kept his expenses down. Sure, or maybe he's not receiving
Speaker 1: the level of income that he deserves for the value
Speaker 1: his labor brings. Sure, that might be it, too, But
Speaker 1: like I was saying before, neither of those reasons, neither
Speaker 1: of those biases matter. He sees the contradiction, and more importantly,
Speaker 1: he feels it, and that cognitive dissonance doesn't feel too good.
Speaker 1: If you've ever experienced it, and you probably know if
Speaker 1: you have, you know that it doesn't feel good. And
Speaker 1: for this worker, it really doesn't feel good, especially when
Speaker 1: he feels it day after day after day with no
Speaker 1: end in sight, all while his bosses can literally sleep
Speaker 1: on a mountain of money if they chose to. That
Speaker 1: cognitive dissonance is really what people are talking about when
Speaker 1: they talk about inequality and the problems that inequality produces.
Speaker 1: This widening gulf that was full of cognitive dissonance was
Speaker 1: paradoxically actually part of a healing process, like a culture
Speaker 1: wide healing process. The era specifically, it was the healing
Speaker 1: process that existed in the era that followed the worst
Speaker 1: war ever fought in American soil, the Civil War the
Speaker 1: eight years between eighteen sixty five and eighteen seventy three
Speaker 1: were actually in some ways the best years in American
Speaker 1: history by then, at least from an economic standpoint. It's
Speaker 1: actually pretty similar to what we experienced in America following
Speaker 1: the fall of communism. It's our good friend and most
Speaker 1: recent victim of cultural nostalgia milking the nineteen nineties, and
Speaker 1: very much like the nineteen nineties and into the twenty
Speaker 1: first century. In the years after the Civil War, prosperity
Speaker 1: was on the rise. Along with economic growth. There was
Speaker 1: a rise in jobs thanks to massive projects, namely the
Speaker 1: transcontinental railroads that reached thirty three thousand miles in total.
Speaker 1: These projects are actually really important to get into because
Speaker 1: they were perceived by bankers, mostly especially bankers in the North,
Speaker 1: as being hugely profitable, just like the notion of home
Speaker 1: ownership being the great investment of the early to mid
Speaker 1: two thousands, spurred on by a strong economy left over
Speaker 1: from the late nineteen nineties. In that case, the thing is,
Speaker 1: in the eighteen sixties and seventies, railroads were not only
Speaker 1: being seen as massive cash cows for their investors, very profitable.
Speaker 1: In other words, they were also extremely expensive. And what
Speaker 1: do you do when you see a big, shiny new
Speaker 1: investment that might be a little out of your price range,
Speaker 1: but that's totally, definitely, absolutely, for sure gonna make you
Speaker 1: money at the end. You'll be responsible, gather enough savings
Speaker 1: to afford it before you make the initial investment, right,
Speaker 1: make sure you have a little safety net beneath you,
Speaker 1: just in case this prohibitively expensive and rapidly growing investment
Speaker 1: goes belly up. Shut up, you was no. You start borrowing.
Speaker 1: Come on and borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and borrowing.
Speaker 1: And this borrowing, in our story, only increased around the
Speaker 1: nation after a number of cities like Chicago literally burned
Speaker 1: to the ground in the early eighteen seventies and their
Speaker 1: governments needed to rebuild and rebuild quickly more borrowing. To
Speaker 1: give you an idea of the kind of growth we're
Speaker 1: seeing during this period that's leading to an increased perception
Speaker 1: of gross inequality as well as something far, far worse
Speaker 1: we're about to get into. I'll turn to Michael Belie
Speaker 1: again describing this eight year period of growth. Quote, the
Speaker 1: economy appeared fevered in its growth, increasing from four hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty one thousand businesses in eighteen seventy to six
Speaker 1: hundred nine thousand, nine hundred and four in eighteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: There were three hundred and sixty four railroads at the
Speaker 1: beginning of eighteen seventy three, two hundred and sixty of
Speaker 1: which paid no dividends, representing a total investment of three
Speaker 1: point seven billion dollars. That's, by the way, sixty three
Speaker 1: billion dollars in twenty eighteen. Money I did the calculation
Speaker 1: there too, Blie continues quote, tripling the industry's capitalization in
Speaker 1: just six years. Banks were low five times their actual
Speaker 1: money supply. During this period of rapid growth, there was
Speaker 1: also a massive flux of lying, bribery, and indeed speculation
Speaker 1: going on, all assisting and giving regular Americans the perception
Speaker 1: that not only were these investors and magnates far better
Speaker 1: off than they were and they were, but also how
Speaker 1: completely corrupt the political system being bribed by these investors
Speaker 1: and magnates was. Because they were being bribed a lot
Speaker 1: as well. Massive government land grants and subsidies were being
Speaker 1: given to these railroad companies, and that didn't help the
Speaker 1: perception either. But these perceptions of inequality and corruption. These
Speaker 1: perceptions effects couldn't really be felt on their own, at
Speaker 1: least not yet, because while this perception was building, so
Speaker 1: was the debt, and so was the speculation. This might
Speaker 1: not have mattered if not for a plucky new empire
Speaker 1: in Germany deciding not to mint silver coins anymore. And
Speaker 1: while this might sound like a silly ingredient to throw
Speaker 1: going to the populist backlash soup, maybe a sprinkle assault,
Speaker 1: we can call this The lack of silver mintage in
Speaker 1: Germany caused the demand for silver to drop like a stone,
Speaker 1: and since the United States was Germany's primary source of silver,
Speaker 1: this affected the United States in ways that might have
Speaker 1: been less of a big deal if so much of
Speaker 1: our economy wasn't being based on specuative deals and tons
Speaker 1: of borrowing. It threw us into a de facto gold
Speaker 1: standard thanks to something called the coinage active eighteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: also called the crime of eighteen seventy three by critics
Speaker 1: of the time. And what did this do? It completely
Speaker 1: dismembered our money supply. This is why excessive borrowing matters.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind, I do understand that this is
Speaker 1: how an economy typically functions. You can't build infrastructure on
Speaker 1: this scale without borrowing. You have to spend money to
Speaker 1: make money, like it or not. Guys, I understand that.
Speaker 1: But with the level of spending that was occurring, spending
Speaker 1: money that didn't even exist, combined with the unfortunate coincidence
Speaker 1: that the resource of value lost its value due to
Speaker 1: another country's own decisions, is what makes investments on this scale,
Speaker 1: these speculations so goddamn dangerous. Here's what happens when money
Speaker 1: supply is slashed, interest rates spike, making repayment difficult, if
Speaker 1: not outright impossible, and this in turn lowers the confidence
Speaker 1: of investors. And here's the billion dollar question, friends, what
Speaker 1: happens when everyone loses their economic confidence all at the
Speaker 1: same time. You probably saw where this was going, folks,
Speaker 1: But this is where head chef Neil Ferguson gives us
Speaker 1: his third ingredient for a populous backlash in a society,
Speaker 1: a giant economic crash. In September of eighteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: Andrew Carnegie, who we mentioned earlier, wrote in his diary
Speaker 1: the following quote. All was going well when one morning
Speaker 1: in our summer cottage, a telegram came announcing the failure
Speaker 1: of j Cooking Company. Unquote, he continued later in his diary, quote,
Speaker 1: loss after loss ensued until a total paralysis of business
Speaker 1: set in. Real historians like Neil Ferguson and actual history
Speaker 1: students unlike me, tend to point shaking fingers at the
Speaker 1: Panic of eighteen seventy three as evidence that we don't
Speaker 1: take history seriously enough. And the more I've read of
Speaker 1: both real historians and the opinions of actual history students,
Speaker 1: the more I've come to learn that they're probably right,
Speaker 1: especially when it comes to economics. We all know about
Speaker 1: the great depression of the nineteen thirties and the forties
Speaker 1: brought on by the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: and we, especially us cusper millennials in the United States,
Speaker 1: all know about and even felt, the crisis of two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven. In two thousand and eight and the
Speaker 1: great recession that followed. I can count the number of
Speaker 1: friends of mine who experienced employment trouble after leaving college
Speaker 1: on both hands and feet, so much so that many
Speaker 1: just decided to go back to school and raise their
Speaker 1: debts and hopes of increasing their job market value, never
Speaker 1: mind escaped the crushing reality of the job market at
Speaker 1: the time. But here's the thing, guys, we don't know
Speaker 1: enough about the eighteen seventy three panic and the economic
Speaker 1: depression that followed, which was at its time called the
Speaker 1: Great Depression. This was not just a big one. It
Speaker 1: was the big one. It was big, it was bad,
Speaker 1: and its far reaching effects make up much of the
Speaker 1: materialist backbone of our story. The last two ingredients we discussed,
Speaker 1: the perception of corruption and income inequality, were largely psychological
Speaker 1: in nature. And while psychology plays into every part of
Speaker 1: this story in one way or another, and really every
Speaker 1: story from history at that this ingredient is in the
Speaker 1: realm of the material firmly planted. It's the most measurable
Speaker 1: and objective of our ingredients. In a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: the populous backlash chefs Historians of different political orientations in
Speaker 1: this case can and do seem to have come to
Speaker 1: a consensus about how important this collapse was to the
Speaker 1: events of the late eighteen seventies. It began with Jake Cook,
Speaker 1: the guy mentioned in Carnegie's Journal a moment ago, another
Speaker 1: robber baron type and an investment banker really so corrupt
Speaker 1: that it is probably worth devoting another podcast to them alone.
Speaker 1: In short after being unable to get more loans to
Speaker 1: invest in the rapidly growing railroad game that he was
Speaker 1: already invested in, not to mention to bribe more politicians
Speaker 1: and continue to buy out newspapers that might have been
Speaker 1: a little bit critical of what he was doing. Jake
Speaker 1: Cook had been taking all of his client's money without
Speaker 1: saying a peep to them. Because he was pocketing all
Speaker 1: of this money for himself, he completely sucked his bank's
Speaker 1: liquid resources dry. Thanks to a recent ruling from Congress,
Speaker 1: paper money called Greenback's at the time had been getting
Speaker 1: taken out of circulation, so that the money supply was
Speaker 1: technically low for that reason as well. Thanks to these things,
Speaker 1: his outright thievery of his client's money and his ability
Speaker 1: to somehow vacuum up every dollar his company was holding,
Speaker 1: Jay Cook was eventually forced to close the doors of
Speaker 1: as many successful banks scattered across the East Coast. And
Speaker 1: this wouldn't have been a problem if his banks hadn't
Speaker 1: been so crucial to the American economy at this point.
Speaker 1: As reported by the New York Tribune. When this news
Speaker 1: hit the New York Stock Exchange quote there was an
Speaker 1: uproar such as scarcely filled the exchange since it was built.
Speaker 1: Messengers fled every way with the story of ruin and
Speaker 1: down came the stocks all along the line quote Historia.
Speaker 1: Michael Blile writes of the damage caused to American financial
Speaker 1: institutions and to the growing railroad industry thanks to the
Speaker 1: Panic of eighteen seventy three in a much more concise
Speaker 1: way than I can quote. Like many other leading stocks,
Speaker 1: Western Union lost one third of its value in a
Speaker 1: few days, and fully one half before the markets finally
Speaker 1: stabilized at the end of October. Most railroads lost one
Speaker 1: fifth to one third of their value during the same period.
Speaker 1: A total of forty financial institutions failed in September eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy three, and on September twentieth, the stock market suspended
Speaker 1: all trading for the first time in its history, remaining
Speaker 1: closed for ten days. He goes on to describe how
Speaker 1: in the year that followed the initial panic eighteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: more than half of the American railroad companies would go bankrupt. However,
Speaker 1: the rapid failure of these banks and railroad companies was
Speaker 1: just the beginning. The real world on the ground. Consequences
Speaker 1: of the panic had yet to start. A man named
Speaker 1: Alvred Nettleton, general in fact and Northern Pacific exec wrote
Speaker 1: his wife in a letter, quote, if I had been
Speaker 1: struck on the head with a hammer, I could not
Speaker 1: have been more stunned on quote. As soon as he
Speaker 1: finished writing this somber letter to his wife, he, as
Speaker 1: described by Michael Blile, quote rubbed his eyes in disbelief,
Speaker 1: and then set about firing people unquote getting fired. That
Speaker 1: was the real consequence of the panic of eighteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: of the great depression of the nineteen thirties, and of
Speaker 1: the great recession of the two thousands. It always is
Speaker 1: it in its effects are the heart and soul of
Speaker 1: this ingredient. In our populous backlash soup and the years
Speaker 1: that followed the panic, thousands of businesses would shut their
Speaker 1: doors eight hundred and thirty in eighteen seventy four, seven
Speaker 1: hundred and forty in eighteen seventy five, and a wopping
Speaker 1: nine thousand in both eighteen seventy six and eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: seven each. In eighteen seventy four, half a million railroad
Speaker 1: workers were laid off. Belyle points out that there weren't
Speaker 1: accurate statistics for unemployment rates during this time, but there
Speaker 1: are estimates that range from as quote unquote low as
Speaker 1: fifteen percent to as high as thirty percent. And it's
Speaker 1: not as if the people lucky enough to remain employed
Speaker 1: had a grand old time either. While statistics for wage
Speaker 1: rates during the eighteen seventies are apparently quote unquote notorious
Speaker 1: Belile's words not mine for being unreliable, wage reduction is
Speaker 1: generally placed at around fifteen percent during this time. Imagine
Speaker 1: that for a second. And maybe some of you don't
Speaker 1: have to if you're unlucky enough. And I'm sorry, I'm
Speaker 1: sorry to hear that if that's the case, But just
Speaker 1: imagine this for a second. Everyone around you at your
Speaker 1: company is getting laid off left and right, and you
Speaker 1: think you might be next. Your manager calls you in
Speaker 1: for a meeting, but it turns out you're fine. She
Speaker 1: says that you're too valuable for the company to lose.
Speaker 1: But there's a problem. You got to take a cut
Speaker 1: to yourself salary and say you're making pretty good money
Speaker 1: by twenty nineteen standards, at least like one hundred grand
Speaker 1: a year. Fifteen percent of that is fifteen grand. But
Speaker 1: that's not all. You can't negotiate this. You're just lucky
Speaker 1: that you're still here. And you know how bad the
Speaker 1: job market is fifteen to thirty percent unemployment overnight, after all,
Speaker 1: So what else can you do besides grit your teeth
Speaker 1: and take it. I mean, what other choice you have
Speaker 1: besides resort to begging on the street for food. And
Speaker 1: this is not an exaggeration. This is how bad it got,
Speaker 1: not begging for money food. Michael Ballile describes the pretty
Speaker 1: wretched conditions of everyday American life and some pretty nightmarish
Speaker 1: terms here. Quote. The signs of want were everywhere, with
Speaker 1: half the workers in the industrial areas of the country
Speaker 1: either out of work or only haphazardly employed, reduced to
Speaker 1: begging for food and waiting patiently for things to turn around.
Speaker 1: Anyone who looked closely at American cities would see disease, defeat,
Speaker 1: and death. Visitors to baltim may have noticed that the
Speaker 1: streets reeked of sewage, but they did not know that
Speaker 1: the drinking water was contaminated and contagious diseases found a
Speaker 1: breeding ground in the cramped apartments of the poor, killing
Speaker 1: up to one hundred and thirty nine infants in a
Speaker 1: single week unquote. While we have to take most news stories,
Speaker 1: both back then and now, frankly with a grain of
Speaker 1: salt thanks to their yellow nature. Utah's Salt Lake Weekly
Speaker 1: Tribune described the direness of the situation facing many Americans,
Speaker 1: talking of a rise in quote rape, robbery, and murder unquote,
Speaker 1: with quote women going into prostitution for bread unquote end quote,
Speaker 1: men going to vagabondage for lack of opportunity to labor unquote.
Speaker 1: Journalist left Kadio Hearn, writing in eighteen seventy seven, described
Speaker 1: the destitution he witnessed in the city of Cincinnati. Quote.
Speaker 1: These wanderings in the haunts of the poor, among shadowy
Speaker 1: tenement houses and dilapidated cottages and blind foul alleys with
Speaker 1: quaint names suggesting deformity and darkness, somehow compelled the fantasmal
Speaker 1: retrospect of the experience, which clings to the mind with
Speaker 1: nightmare tendency unquote. Hearn continues to describe, in pretty darkly
Speaker 1: poetic terms that this mass of pitiful people were just
Speaker 1: lying there in these wet, dank tenement apartments, simply waiting
Speaker 1: to die, or, as he put it, waiting to be
Speaker 1: absorbed into quote the shadow itself being led through the
Speaker 1: tenement by Cincinnati's overseer of the poor. He continued to
Speaker 1: describe the horror of what he witnessed in this tenement
Speaker 1: house quote. The scene lay in the second story of
Speaker 1: a sooty frame perched on the ragged edge of Eggleston
Speaker 1: Avenue hill. The sufferer was an aged man whose limbs
Speaker 1: and body were swollen by disease to a monstrous size,
Speaker 1: and for whom the mercy of death could not have
Speaker 1: been far distant. The room was similar to other rooms,
Speaker 1: excepting that in the center of the weak floora yawning,
Speaker 1: ragged hole had been partly covered by a broken bottomed washtub.
Speaker 1: The slowly dying man moaned feebly at intervals and muttered
Speaker 1: patient prayers in the Irish tongue. Unquote. Herne finally describes
Speaker 1: what really truly hit home for me, how truly awful
Speaker 1: things were during the Depression of the eighteen seventies, especially
Speaker 1: in these tenement houses, when he describes a horrible sound,
Speaker 1: probably one of the worst sounds anyone can hear, was
Speaker 1: coming up through the floorboards of the tenement house, he writes, quote,
Speaker 1: there came up through the broken planking, a voice of cursing,
Speaker 1: the voice of a furious woman, and a sound of
Speaker 1: heavy blows mingled with the cry of a beaten child.
Speaker 1: Some little one was being terribly whipped, and its treble
Speaker 1: was strained to that hoarse scream, which betrays an agony
Speaker 1: of helpless pain and fear and pleading to merciless ears.
Speaker 1: To the listener, it seemed that the whipping would never end.
Speaker 1: The sharp blows to sended without regularity, in a rapid shower,
Speaker 1: which seemed to promise that the punishment could only be
Speaker 1: terminated by fatigue and the part of the punisher. The
Speaker 1: screams gradually grew hoarser and horser, with longer intervals between each,
Speaker 1: until they ceased altogether, and only a choking gurgle was audible.
Speaker 1: Then the sound of whipping ceased. There was a sudden
Speaker 1: noise as of something flung heavily down, and then another
Speaker 1: horse curse. This isn't a scene from the dark Ages
Speaker 1: of Europe or from a Cormack McCarthy novel like Blood
Speaker 1: Meridian or The Road. This kind of scene, this kind
Speaker 1: of thing was happening all over America to countless families,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't even one hundred and fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: The working class was the class that was hit hardest
Speaker 1: by this constant horror, for sure, and had to live
Speaker 1: through this nightmare day after day. But the middle class
Speaker 1: was getting whipped up into their own hysteria because of this.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just about the fear of losing one's livelihood
Speaker 1: or being subjected to the horrors reported by journalists like Hern,
Speaker 1: though I do suspect that was the primary subconscious reason
Speaker 1: for this hysteria. But this hysteria turned into more of
Speaker 1: a moral panic about tramps filling every city. The middle
Speaker 1: class was treating tramps essentially like they would a zombie apocalypse.
Speaker 1: To hear many people of the time tell it, every
Speaker 1: city resembled skid row here in Los Angeles, just minus
Speaker 1: the broken meth pipes and use needles. And while that
Speaker 1: might not esthetically be far off the tramp quote unquote
Speaker 1: basically slangford unemployed worker in this case was the scourge
Speaker 1: of society and destroying it with his laziness, vice, and
Speaker 1: even violence. Like I said, it was like a zombie
Speaker 1: apocalypse as far as these newspapers and middle class panickers
Speaker 1: were concerned. The tramp was essentially the late nineteenth century
Speaker 1: version of the racial dog whistle thug that we sometimes
Speaker 1: hear being thrown around in twenty nineteen, but referring to
Speaker 1: a lower class unemployed worker in this case. It might
Speaker 1: sound strange in this day and age to use a
Speaker 1: term like the tramp scare, but that really is what
Speaker 1: this was a mass fear of the homeless and jobless. Nowadays,
Speaker 1: we either toss a book to the highway panhandler or
Speaker 1: drive on past, and you might hear the off color
Speaker 1: comment every now and then, but I can't imagine it's
Speaker 1: too often, at least if you live in a big
Speaker 1: city like I do, to hear people speak about the
Speaker 1: homeless in fearful tones. In short, the middle class, both
Speaker 1: the lower and upper middle class, which were new distinctions
Speaker 1: in the eighteen seventies, they were terrified of tramps. Like
Speaker 1: I said, they looked at them like it was a
Speaker 1: zombie infestation. But I think also what's very interesting is
Speaker 1: that what I don't find zombies scary, but I think
Speaker 1: people find zombies scary because of what they represent, not
Speaker 1: of the zombies themselves. They might be a little grossed
Speaker 1: out by them, but they're scared of what zombies represent,
Speaker 1: being dead and yet not being trapped within a dead mind,
Speaker 1: being unable to control your own behavior. I think that
Speaker 1: fear of representation is indeed why people were afraid of tramps.
Speaker 1: These tramps represented what both these lower and upper middle
Speaker 1: class Americans feared they could become if the already unsteady
Speaker 1: foundation upon which this middle class existed collapsed any further.
Speaker 1: This is why they dismissed tramps as being lazy rather
Speaker 1: than the victims of the economic circumstances they were also
Speaker 1: victims of that everyone was a victim of. Newspapers and magazines,
Speaker 1: though didn't help, because they were constantly blaring headlines about
Speaker 1: quote unquote an army of tramps and made comparisons to
Speaker 1: both the Reign of Terror and revolutionary France from nearly
Speaker 1: one hundred years earlier. Newspapers would continually produce vague headlines
Speaker 1: and stories without important details, but full of robbery, rape,
Speaker 1: and even murder, all being attributed to tramps. Looking at
Speaker 1: these kinds of headlines now, all these stories read more
Speaker 1: like the vague headlines about a Kardashian that you see
Speaker 1: in the checkout line at the grocery store. It was
Speaker 1: just gossip. There were stories of tramps who were only
Speaker 1: taking jobs, you know, the things that they wanted most
Speaker 1: ever since losing theirs, mind you, but never mind that
Speaker 1: pesky logic. They were taking jobs to serve as covers
Speaker 1: so they could steal from their employer. That was what
Speaker 1: these headlines tended to suggest. And that's so outlandish at
Speaker 1: this point in our story that I can't help but
Speaker 1: just smirk at it every time I see these headlines.
Speaker 1: There were absolutely confirmed cases where gangs of tramps did
Speaker 1: commit crimes, but these were relatively small in number and
Speaker 1: really just served to confirm a growing problem in the
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies caused by the economic collapse. This is the
Speaker 1: problem of class tension. This is what we could I
Speaker 1: guess call the I guess we could call it the
Speaker 1: dash of sauce, the dash of pepper, maybe of maybe
Speaker 1: the spices in general. I already use this salt analogy earlier,
Speaker 1: so I don't want to use that again, but I'll say,
Speaker 1: you know, the rest of the spices into our populous
Speaker 1: backlash soup. Michael Bellile explains, however, that this class tension,
Speaker 1: while relevant, wasn't meant to stay constrained simply in these
Speaker 1: class based terms. Quote. As Edmund Morgan pointed out for
Speaker 1: the colonial period see Van Woodward for the late nineteenth
Speaker 1: century and Dan Carter for the mid twentieth century, class
Speaker 1: tensions can be sidestepped by appeals to racism unquote. And
Speaker 1: this is what leads us to Neil Ferguson's fourth ingredient
Speaker 1: for his patented populist backlash super recipe arise in immigration.
Speaker 1: William Graham Sumner, professor at Yale and considered to be
Speaker 1: the father of American sociology, documented the number of immigrants
Speaker 1: who arrived in the wake of the economic collapse of
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies to be one hundred sixty nine nine
Speaker 1: hundred eighty six, sixty percent of whom came from Western
Speaker 1: and Northern Europe. No one really cared all that much
Speaker 1: by the eighteen seventies about that sixty percent. People like
Speaker 1: Sumner and really most Americans with immigration on their mind
Speaker 1: at that time, really only cared about that other forty
Speaker 1: percent who had been building up during the last couple
Speaker 1: of decades, and they were mostly made up of people
Speaker 1: coming from one place, and that one place was China.
Speaker 1: The rise of immigration in the twenty first century has
Speaker 1: only reached its current peak levels in recent years of
Speaker 1: around fourteen percent overall. At one other time in United
Speaker 1: States history, and that's the mid to late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Much of our current fourteen percent peak, which was existing
Speaker 1: at the time of the twenty sixteen election, began in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties and was largely coming from immigrants, both
Speaker 1: legal and illegal, arriving from Latin America. But the vast
Speaker 1: majority of non European immigrants coming to the United States
Speaker 1: during the first peak of the mid nineteenth century were
Speaker 1: coming from China. The primary reason for this massive influx
Speaker 1: back then was simple, since it was really the exact
Speaker 1: same reason so many Americans on the East Coast were
Speaker 1: rushing towards the West, and that was gold. The California
Speaker 1: gold Rush as we know it, began in January of
Speaker 1: eighteen forty eight when a foreman working for a man
Speaker 1: named John Sutter near what's now Sacramento found something shiny
Speaker 1: in the water wheel of Sutter River Mill. Cut to
Speaker 1: the following year, number of people coming to California to
Speaker 1: strike it rich on this gold was swelling towards the
Speaker 1: eventual peak of three hundred thousand, a massive spike in
Speaker 1: the population that would eventually include tens and then even
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of Chinese coming across the Pacific. It's
Speaker 1: often said that people come to the United States searching
Speaker 1: for a better life, and that's definitely true a lot
Speaker 1: of the time. I'd say most of the time, even
Speaker 1: and the influx of Chinese into the United States in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century was no different most Chinese peasants at
Speaker 1: the time. The primary demographic of Chinese folks who came
Speaker 1: to the United States, they were dirt poor. This was
Speaker 1: because they were still living in what we could charitably
Speaker 1: call destitute serfdom. During the nineteenth century. They were still
Speaker 1: being ruled by the Qing dynasty, which involves a whole
Speaker 1: other set of ethnic, cultural, and violent drama that goes
Speaker 1: back a few hundred years before this time that we
Speaker 1: just don't have the time to cover here. It would
Speaker 1: just take too long. Sticking to the mid nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: the late journalists and historian Ira Chang, in her amazing
Speaker 1: book about the History of the Chinese in America, describes
Speaker 1: how most Chinese citizens lived in their part of Asia
Speaker 1: during this time. In pretty vivid terms here quote, most
Speaker 1: people in China lived in the countryside as peasants, serving
Speaker 1: as the nation's raw muscle. Their costumes rarely varied in
Speaker 1: South and central China. The men wore baggy cotton trousers,
Speaker 1: sandals of leather or grass, and broad brimmed hats to
Speaker 1: protect their faces from the sun. Their lives followed an
Speaker 1: endless cycle dictated by the seasons, pushing plows behind water
Speaker 1: buffalo to break the soil and prepare the seed bed,
Speaker 1: planting rice seedlings by hand and ankle deep water, stepping
Speaker 1: backward as they progressed from row to neat row, scything
Speaker 1: the rice stocks at harvest, then threshing them over hard
Speaker 1: earth floor. In short, lives spent generation after generation and
Speaker 1: non stop backbreaking labor unquote. This backbreaking labor that Iris
Speaker 1: Chanks speaks of wasn't even the peasant's own. It didn't
Speaker 1: even belong to them. Remember, they they were living at
Speaker 1: the pleasure of their emperor, essentially a god king. But
Speaker 1: more importantly, they were living at the pleasure of the
Speaker 1: landowners and the magistrates that ruled over the landowners. Chang
Speaker 1: reports that By the nineteenth century, an estimated eighty to
Speaker 1: ninety percent of Chinese citizens were living in this quote
Speaker 1: unquote dirt poor context his peasants, and as she puts it,
Speaker 1: quote no group in China worked harder for so little
Speaker 1: than the peasants unquote. Chang also described the pretty awful
Speaker 1: living conditions, sleeping on mats with bamboo pillows and using
Speaker 1: only quote an armload of fuel to warm and feed
Speaker 1: a dozen people unquote, not to mention eating things like
Speaker 1: bark and clay during times of famine, which tended to
Speaker 1: happen a lot over the centuries. This led to a
Speaker 1: fundamental appreciation of food, especially meat, in times of plenty
Speaker 1: and in times of want. If you're Chinese or have
Speaker 1: Chinese family members, you'll know that the biggest difference between
Speaker 1: American folk and Chinese folk is just how much is
Speaker 1: wasted in American cooking, contrasted with how little is wasted
Speaker 1: in Chinese cooking. Generation after generation of thankless hard living
Speaker 1: conditions like the ones who just described, that's what allows
Speaker 1: this mentality of not wasting anything to develop in a
Speaker 1: group of people. And by thankless, I mean what I
Speaker 1: said before this labor was not even their own. Neither
Speaker 1: was their land. This was serfdom. This is where the
Speaker 1: peasants essentially use their labor and their crops to pay
Speaker 1: for the privilege of living on their land. Social advancement
Speaker 1: was basically frozen in place. It's about as conservative as
Speaker 1: you can possibly get. The only way to move up
Speaker 1: the social ladder was first to be male, and second
Speaker 1: to do well enough on these next two impossible imperial
Speaker 1: exams that would let young men become ministers for the
Speaker 1: Manchu government, making them the bosses of the backbreaking landowners.
Speaker 1: The incredibly fierce competition in these exams, as well as
Speaker 1: the unfair advantages given to the wealthy families like the
Speaker 1: land owning ones, unsurprisingly created a pretty morally bankrupt and
Speaker 1: fundamentally corrupt system. Now, granted, that was the idea. The
Speaker 1: Manchus and their Qing dynasty had been ruling over the
Speaker 1: Han majority for over two centuries, acting essentially as an
Speaker 1: occupying force. And for context, the Han make up about
Speaker 1: ninety percent of all Chinese people on the planet, so
Speaker 1: they were the vast majority. These imperial exams and the
Speaker 1: culture surrounding them were just a method of controlling the
Speaker 1: local populace by keeping all of the Han at each
Speaker 1: other's proverbial throats in constant competition to improve their social standing.
Speaker 1: But the regular Han people could also be at each
Speaker 1: other's throats in a literal sense as well, especially if
Speaker 1: a young man from the community passed his exams and
Speaker 1: became the community's governmental magistrate, which is essentially like Charlie
Speaker 1: finding the golden ticket to Willie Wanka's chocolate factory, but
Speaker 1: only if Charlie was so competitive and entitled to his
Speaker 1: achievements that he became a complete and total sociopath. Iris
Speaker 1: Chang describes these men and the reign of terror they
Speaker 1: tended to bring after scoring this proverbial golden ticket quote.
Speaker 1: Such men often ruled their districts like totalitarian despots. Virtually
Speaker 1: no redress could be taken against any official who broke
Speaker 1: the law, because he was the law. A Chinese magistrate could,
Speaker 1: with no threat of retaliation, accuse a peasant of banditry,
Speaker 1: throw him in jail, take his property, and even execute
Speaker 1: him if he proved a troublesome prisoner. If he lusted
Speaker 1: after a girl in the village, he could coerce her
Speaker 1: father to surrender her to him as one of his concubines.
Speaker 1: So absolute was his power that a Chinese man once
Speaker 1: told a Western observer, quote, I would rather be mayor
Speaker 1: in China than president of the United States unquote. So
Speaker 1: imagine that you're one of these peasants living in this way,
Speaker 1: working for nothing, constantly in brutal competition for something you're
Speaker 1: really unlikely to get, and always terrified that you could
Speaker 1: come across a government minister having a bad day. So
Speaker 1: if there's a chance to escape this kind of life,
Speaker 1: you're probably going to take it right. And that's exactly
Speaker 1: what many young men in China did, especially after opportunities
Speaker 1: for better employment in the port cities of southern China
Speaker 1: completely disappeared. That was thanks to a British cause credit
Speaker 1: crisis that disintegrated over one hundred thousand jobs in the area.
Speaker 1: And this massive escape from the destitution of Chinese living
Speaker 1: was all but assured once these young men and their
Speaker 1: family started hearing tales of gum Sum or the Gold
Speaker 1: Mountain across the Pacific in California. It's safe to say
Speaker 1: that it's not that surprising that thousands of young men
Speaker 1: jumped at the chance to strike at rich overseas as
Speaker 1: quickly as possible. Chinese people had indeed existed in the
Speaker 1: United States before the Gold Rush, but in statistically invisible numbers.
Speaker 1: Iris Chang places the estimate at around fifty people by
Speaker 1: eighteen forty eight, and most of them were really just
Speaker 1: side shows in circuses and anthropological showcases. There was a
Speaker 1: Fung Moi, recorded as the first Chinese woman ever to
Speaker 1: come to America, who was presented as part of a
Speaker 1: cultural exhibit in eighteen thirty four. And there were the
Speaker 1: famous Bunker brothers Chang and Eng, who were, as it happens,
Speaker 1: the origin of the term Siamese twins, since they were
Speaker 1: indeed conjoined and originally from the former Ssiam, but were
Speaker 1: ethnically Chinese. These guys are actually really fascinating characters in
Speaker 1: the law of American carnivals and entertainment from the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: not just for the fact that they married a couple
Speaker 1: of non conjoined white women and became filthy rich while
Speaker 1: they were doing their act, but also because they ended
Speaker 1: up owning a plantation in the South, and weird or
Speaker 1: shocking as this might sound to our modern ears, actually
Speaker 1: own thirty three black slaves and were actually pretty adored
Speaker 1: by the white aristocratic community surrounding them, despite appearing so
Speaker 1: alien to the local population. That all being said, while
Speaker 1: there was certainly a vague awareness of China itself, the
Speaker 1: Orient as it would be called, and its people, mostly
Speaker 1: thanks to diplomatic and religious missions, newspaper articles and books
Speaker 1: concerning international affairs, and really just tall tales sold around
Speaker 1: the campfire and in the schoolyard, most Americans had never
Speaker 1: even seen a Chinese person. Littlone knew anything about their
Speaker 1: rich cultural traditions or customs, or their vast history. So
Speaker 1: when hundreds of Chinese started arriving, and then those hundreds
Speaker 1: of Chinese quickly started turning into thousands of Chinese, it's
Speaker 1: not that surprising that this rapid growth started to put
Speaker 1: attension in the air, namely in California and on the
Speaker 1: rest of the West Coast. This distinction is important for
Speaker 1: the last part of our story, by the way, since
Speaker 1: east of the Rockies there was barely a perception of
Speaker 1: the rapid growth in Chinese immigration, but we'll return to
Speaker 1: that part later. By the way, this is a really
Speaker 1: hard thing for us to imagine now in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: I'd be hard pressed to find a person with an
Speaker 1: Internet connection in the United States who hasn't at least
Speaker 1: seen a picture of someone from a different ethnic group
Speaker 1: than them. That's not to say that this is some
Speaker 1: sort of bulletproof vest against bigoted assumptions, but it is
Speaker 1: to say that people in the United States will never
Speaker 1: have that blind spot ever again. But back in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, the American people definitely did have that blind spot,
Speaker 1: and it did affect their perceptions of the Chinese, including
Speaker 1: how to treat them when times got tough. It also
Speaker 1: certainly didn't help that in the mid nineteenth century, Americans
Speaker 1: had a much different sense of what a pretty famous
Speaker 1: twentieth century German demagogue will call Lebensraem or living space.
Speaker 1: Iris Chang actually describes a case that would be a
Speaker 1: lot funnier if not for the disturbing implication behind it
Speaker 1: of an Illinois man leaving Illinois itself during this period
Speaker 1: because quote, people were settling in right under his nose.
Speaker 1: Unquote right under his nose to this guy meant twelve
Speaker 1: miles away. Just try to imagine how crowded this must
Speaker 1: have felt if he had moved up to Chicago from
Speaker 1: where he was living, especially if he gotten his time
Speaker 1: machine traveled through time and then went there. Now twelve
Speaker 1: miles away. Really that's right under his nose. But now,
Speaker 1: in all seriousness, try to imagine how a guy like this,
Speaker 1: a pretty typical American at the time, how he might
Speaker 1: have felt if people from a strange land that he
Speaker 1: may have heard of in books and newspapers or had
Speaker 1: been told about by friends of his but he had
Speaker 1: never seen before. If these people started to arrive, bringing
Speaker 1: their atypical appearance, language, food, customs, customs, and all these
Speaker 1: things that were completely alien to him, he was so
Speaker 1: put off by other, most likely also white Americans, showing
Speaker 1: up arriving about twelve miles away from him, that he
Speaker 1: just up and left the state. And I'm not making
Speaker 1: excuses for xenophobia, by the way, I'm just trying to
Speaker 1: paint a picture of what America was like when the Chinese,
Speaker 1: which were the first ethnic group to enter the United
Speaker 1: States with completely unfamiliar cultural standards and physical appearance, compared
Speaker 1: to the arrivals from Europe, who had already gone through
Speaker 1: their own hurdles with the No Nothing movements pathological hatred
Speaker 1: of the Irish only a couple decades earlier. I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to paint a picture of what it was like
Speaker 1: when the Chinese started to arrive in California in search
Speaker 1: of their gold mountain. And this isn't to say that
Speaker 1: it was a holy negative reception that they received, especially
Speaker 1: not at first. Most Americans were actually fascinated by the
Speaker 1: Chinese of anything. San Francisco had actually become a massive,
Speaker 1: really extremely cultured city by the standards of the time,
Speaker 1: really quick after the Gold Rush began, largely thanks to
Speaker 1: the gold that was financing its growth. Intellectual types like
Speaker 1: Mark Twain, who I quoted earlier, He would make San
Speaker 1: Francisco his home during the eighteen sixties, along with many
Speaker 1: other famous intellectuals and writers. And Mark Twain himself even
Speaker 1: wrote positively of his first impressions of the Chinese as
Speaker 1: quote quiet, peaceable, tractable, and free from drunkenness unquote, and
Speaker 1: that quote a disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy
Speaker 1: one does not exist unquote. Kind of a backhanded compliment
Speaker 1: by today's standards, but nevertheless, it was a very positive
Speaker 1: way to look at a strange arrival for Americans of
Speaker 1: the mid to late nineteenth century. Iris Chang, to quote
Speaker 1: her again, describes what she calls the quote avid curiosity
Speaker 1: about the new ideas and experiences unquote of the early
Speaker 1: San Franciscans and how that and a common purpose sort
Speaker 1: of helped the Chinese arrivals be initially accepted so easily.
Speaker 1: She writes, quote, if San Francisco did not initially resist
Speaker 1: their arrival, perhaps it was because almost everyone in San
Speaker 1: Francisco had come from somewhere else. By eighteen fifty three,
Speaker 1: more than half of the San Francisco population was foreign born,
Speaker 1: and in a city united by the single driving obsession
Speaker 1: to make money, only one color seemed to matter, gold unquote.
Speaker 1: So there was certainly tension in those early years. But
Speaker 1: in some ways, the strangeness, the novelty really is a
Speaker 1: better way of putting it, of this new culture of
Speaker 1: men showing up in California is actually what diffused it.
Speaker 1: There's this great piece of what Iris Chang calls quote
Speaker 1: unquote gold Rush folklore in which the owner of one
Speaker 1: of the many Chinese restaurants cropping up all over San
Speaker 1: Francisco was closing up shop and a bunch of these
Speaker 1: drunk miners just crashed through his front door. Now, instead
Speaker 1: of trying to get these guys to leave or threatening
Speaker 1: them or whatever. He decides to feed them. So he
Speaker 1: orders his cook to fry up all the table scraps
Speaker 1: that they hadn't yet tossed in the trash, like shreds
Speaker 1: of veggies, pieces of dark meat, oils, and sauces. The
Speaker 1: result a little dish known as chop suey. Now true
Speaker 1: or not, this tall tale is a great way to
Speaker 1: describe what it was like to be Chinese in those
Speaker 1: early days during this spike, this beginning of the spike,
Speaker 1: I should say, in immigration, there's an atmosphere thick with tension,
Speaker 1: but the ability to diffuse it still existed. But unfortunately
Speaker 1: this was going to start changing, first into resentment and jealousy,
Speaker 1: and then into the outright hatred of the kind with
Speaker 1: which we opened our story with the story of the
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy one Los Angeles Pogram of the Chinese. This
Speaker 1: is because the American prospectors had started to resent the
Speaker 1: Chinese for and I am not kidding here, working harder
Speaker 1: than them, and not just working harder than them, but
Speaker 1: working harder than them and doing better than them. There
Speaker 1: was a story of a Chinese prospector who bought a
Speaker 1: cabin from a group of miners who hadn't had much
Speaker 1: luck in the area, and they were just happy to
Speaker 1: make a chunk of change by selling him the cabin.
Speaker 1: Shortly afterward, though, using the techniques he'd learned from his
Speaker 1: time toiling away as a peasant back home in China,
Speaker 1: this guy patiently sifted through all of the dirt the
Speaker 1: men had been shaking out gold nuggets from, and collected
Speaker 1: enough gold dust while in this cabin to make a
Speaker 1: pretty tidy sum and return home to China to be
Speaker 1: a rich man. If resentment at that kind of ingenuity
Speaker 1: can't be called entitlement, I don't really know what can. So,
Speaker 1: Like most things, while the resentment starting to be directed
Speaker 1: at these men was largely motivated by jealousy, it very
Speaker 1: quickly became cultural and flat out racial. The more alien
Speaker 1: from the majority, the easier it is to do this
Speaker 1: to a minority, hard working or otherwise. It reached the
Speaker 1: California State legislature pretty quickly with testimony that quote, their
Speaker 1: presence here is a great moral and social evil, a
Speaker 1: disgusting scab upon the fair face of society, a puturefying
Speaker 1: sore upon the body politic. In short, a nuisance unquote.
Speaker 1: This kind of hateful rhetoric would be just the beginning.
Speaker 1: After the California state government started to apply quote unquote
Speaker 1: coolly taxes on immigrant laborers, Chinese laborers specifically, the target
Speaker 1: of the populace backlash was basically identified right there. Taxes
Speaker 1: and licensing fees were common ways the government had answered
Speaker 1: people's grumbling about the Chinese, but it became legal as well.
Speaker 1: The Chinese identity was actually placed under California's Criminal Preceding Act,
Speaker 1: which made it illegal for blacks, mixed race, and American
Speaker 1: Indians to provide evidence in a criminal trial. So the
Speaker 1: Chinese were now legally speaking quote unquote colored. They were
Speaker 1: finally to fight as non white in a legal capacity.
Speaker 1: This new expansion of this law got a white man
Speaker 1: named George W. Hall off the hook for murdering a
Speaker 1: Chinese man named Ling Singh. Chinese people couldn't become citizens
Speaker 1: thanks to the infamous seventy to ninety Naturalization Acts, so
Speaker 1: they had no political recourse to fight against these laws
Speaker 1: at the polls. Reet prices also became prohibitively discriminatory, with
Speaker 1: a white man only having to pay two hundred dollars
Speaker 1: a month for a house, while a Chinese man had
Speaker 1: to pay five hundred. Despite all this, the number of
Speaker 1: Chinese appearing on the West Coast continued to just keep increasing.
Speaker 1: Some Americans were uneasy by the fact that most Chinese
Speaker 1: stayed close together, largely didn't speak very much English, and
Speaker 1: made no effort to meaningfully assimilate, at least in any
Speaker 1: way deemed meaningful by the Americans they lived with and near.
Speaker 1: And yet other Americans were nervous at the idea of
Speaker 1: the Chinese assimilating. Newspapers across San Francisco printed these editorial
Speaker 1: screeds saying that the Chinese were quote more a far
Speaker 1: worse class to have among us than the negro unquote,
Speaker 1: while the fears of quote unquote pagan hordes would pepper
Speaker 1: the Washington discourse over the years. This basically trapped the
Speaker 1: Chinese living in America just smack dab in the middle
Speaker 1: of a cultural double standard. And this wasn't just because
Speaker 1: of the gold Rush. By the late eighteen sixties and
Speaker 1: into the eighteen seventies, the Chinese were everywhere west of
Speaker 1: the Rockies thanks to something even more valuable than gold
Speaker 1: that we actually already touched on earlier in our story
Speaker 1: when we talked about the robber barons like Andrew Carnegie,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the trans Continental Railroad. The sort of
Speaker 1: cultural awareness that most Americans today have about the Chinese
Speaker 1: in America has to do mostly with the railroad, usually
Speaker 1: in passing reference at best. And there's a reason we
Speaker 1: fixate on that. This is because thousands of Chinese were
Speaker 1: ultimately instrumental in the construction of the thirty three thousand
Speaker 1: miles of railroad that snaked around our country. Iris Chang
Speaker 1: reports that at the peak of the Central Pacific Railways instruction,
Speaker 1: ten thousand of the workers were Chinese. And what doing
Speaker 1: you know it? The same resentment felt by the gold
Speaker 1: Russian forty nine ers who were suspicious of Chinese industriousness
Speaker 1: existed here too. But everyone in this case was in
Speaker 1: the same boat. Once the railroad was finished in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, everyone Chinese, white, whatever, was out of a job.
Speaker 1: That is, until the factories and other industrial professions started
Speaker 1: excitedly hiring this quote unquote COOLi labor that cost them
Speaker 1: less and was way more efficient than the labor of
Speaker 1: the white working class that was getting increasingly organized and
Speaker 1: willing to fight for their employment rights. This influx of
Speaker 1: Chinese laborers became part of what was starting to become
Speaker 1: known as the Koli trade. And I've said coolly a
Speaker 1: couple times here. You might be sensitive to that word.
Speaker 1: It is. It is and has been used as a slur.
Speaker 1: But there is a history behind it that I kind
Speaker 1: of want to get into here, just to give you
Speaker 1: some context. The term kooli is actually derived from the
Speaker 1: Chinese term kouli, which literally translates to hard strength. This
Speaker 1: term has, like I was saying, a long, storied and
Speaker 1: actually pretty dark history. But in the interest of keeping
Speaker 1: this lengthy aside brief, it was essentially exploitive contract labor
Speaker 1: organized by corrupt Chinese businessmen over in China making deals
Speaker 1: with American companies to export easily manipulated young men for
Speaker 1: cheap labor in the United States, basically a step above slavery.
Speaker 1: This kind of labor, though, undercut the worth of American
Speaker 1: workers and their labor and became central to the otherization
Speaker 1: of not just Chinese workers, but Chinese people in general.
Speaker 1: Nuance has never really been the American people's strong suit.
Speaker 1: A famous case of Chinese labor is facing the brunt
Speaker 1: of This otherization actually happened in North Adams, Massachusetts. In
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy a shoe factory owner named Calvin Simpson fired
Speaker 1: all of his employees when they all organized a strike
Speaker 1: for better wages. He couldn't hire more white workers because
Speaker 1: the shoemakers are part of the Knights of Saint Crispin,
Speaker 1: which was an extremely power powerful union on the East Coast,
Speaker 1: and they will block any attempts to hire scabs by
Speaker 1: convincing the scabs or the would be scabs, I should say,
Speaker 1: to join the strike as soon as they arrived, and
Speaker 1: they usually worked. I can just imagine, though, the light
Speaker 1: bulb appearing over Simpson's head as he read the newspaper
Speaker 1: over his morning coffee and read a story about the
Speaker 1: Chinese industriousness in a San Francisco factory. As soon as
Speaker 1: he read about that, and that light bulb went off,
Speaker 1: he immediately hired seventy five Chinese laborers through what we
Speaker 1: could probably call a coolie agency named Kwang Chong Wing
Speaker 1: and Company, which specialized in importing cheap labor from China.
Speaker 1: And when these Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams at
Speaker 1: the train station, laborers and labor supporters were there to
Speaker 1: meet them. Not exactly all smiles. The Nation reported at
Speaker 1: the time quote a large and hostile crowd met them
Speaker 1: at the depot, hooted them, hustled them somewhat, and threw
Speaker 1: stones at them. Unquote. This was as bad as it
Speaker 1: got at the time, and in the end, the East
Speaker 1: Coast was actually a much more accepting environment of Chinese
Speaker 1: labor than the West Coast was and would become. But
Speaker 1: this reaction in North Adams to the arrival of these
Speaker 1: Chinese labors can seen as a sort of a pretty
Speaker 1: dark bit of foreshadowing for the kinds of attitudes directed
Speaker 1: at a group so unlike all the other groups and
Speaker 1: so willing to do what others wouldn't for a fraction
Speaker 1: of the cost. Because out west things were getting much worse,
Speaker 1: mass violence and pograms were becoming increasingly common, especially in
Speaker 1: cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the Chinese
Speaker 1: were concentrated in California. This is why I opened our
Speaker 1: story with the particularly horrifying case of the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: Chinatown massacre of eighteen seventy one. This was starting to
Speaker 1: occur with more frequency, and it represents the true culmination
Speaker 1: of the populace backlash, where it was heading and who
Speaker 1: the target was going to be. In other words, and
Speaker 1: given what was going on, especially with the rise of
Speaker 1: immigration just happening to coincide with an economic collapse, not
Speaker 1: to mention the perception and of corruption and gross inequality,
Speaker 1: those things have been covering for the last while. Most
Speaker 1: sane historians would agree that it's not too surprising that
Speaker 1: things started turning out the way they did, especially given
Speaker 1: the nature of the times. In the nature of the nation,
Speaker 1: as Iris Chang impressively puts it, quote, racial and ethnic
Speaker 1: tensions simmerre just below the surface and virtually all multi
Speaker 1: ethnic societies, but it usually takes an economic crisis to
Speaker 1: blow the lid off civility and allow deep seated hatred
Speaker 1: to degenerate into violence. When our livelihoods are at stake,
Speaker 1: when we are desperate, when families are uncertain where their
Speaker 1: next meal is coming from, when adults fear for the
Speaker 1: futures of their children, it is natural to ask why
Speaker 1: fortune has treated us so cruelly, And in these moments
Speaker 1: we are all vulnerable to explanations that easily assign blame
Speaker 1: to some outside group. Perhaps it goes back to our
Speaker 1: primitive origins when in threatening times our personal safety was
Speaker 1: best assured by sticking with our own tribe. But for
Speaker 1: whatever reasons, a general rule of history seems to be
Speaker 1: that the more people feel insecure about their own well being,
Speaker 1: the more likely they will join with those of close
Speaker 1: affinity and striking out at some alien group. The question
Speaker 1: then becomes obvious who will they join? Because it's important
Speaker 1: for us to remember here, none of the violence that
Speaker 1: I described at the outset of our story was part
Speaker 1: of an overarching goal or campaign, and wasn't really led
Speaker 1: by anyone. When it comes down to it, things like
Speaker 1: the Chinatown massacre of eighteen seventy one in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: were simply extreme, disorganized, nebulous expressions, illogical conclusions, if you will,
Speaker 1: of the widespread existential tension that arose from this rapid
Speaker 1: increase of immigration. Alongside the other ingredients for Neil Ferguson's
Speaker 1: populist backlash, these were all diffuse hostilities, and we need
Speaker 1: to remember that diffuse hostilities toward any kind of group,
Speaker 1: whether it's racial, religious, or even simply political, it's a
Speaker 1: sign that you're only one ingredient away from a true
Speaker 1: populist backlash and its lasting effects. We're about to receive
Speaker 1: in our story that last true ingredient. So let's recap.
Speaker 1: You have the perception of corruption, you have the increase
Speaker 1: in income inequality and the perceptions that come along with that.
Speaker 1: You have the unprecedented economic collapse, and you have the
Speaker 1: first peak increase in immigration. You have these four things
Speaker 1: happening all at once, converging perfectly prepping the people with
Speaker 1: enough tension, resentment, and eventually just flat out rage and
Speaker 1: hatred to create a populist backlash. But getting people to
Speaker 1: act as one is harder than you might think. Like
Speaker 1: I said, you'll see loose expressions of organization like the
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy one Chinatown massacre, but in the end these
Speaker 1: are part of formless rage, nebulous, to use the word
Speaker 1: I used earlier. You don't actually have people acting as
Speaker 1: one with a true purpose in things like that. It's
Speaker 1: just mob not unless you add the fifth and in
Speaker 1: some ways the most important central ingredient to the populist backlash,
Speaker 1: soup that had Chef Neil Ferguson talked about way back
Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen. To preface this coming storm, We're going
Speaker 1: to turn again to our friend Michael Bellile, who writes, quote,
Speaker 1: it seemed that the whole edifice was collapsing. Depression, government corruption,
Speaker 1: racial violence, stolen elections, class conflict, and myriad forms of
Speaker 1: potential violence appeared to be tearing society apart. Numerous visitors
Speaker 1: to the United States held to the conviction that trouble
Speaker 1: lay ahead unquote, this is where we get our demagogue.
Speaker 1: A demagogue, almost by his or her very nature, is
Speaker 1: basically a clown at first, second, and even third glance.
Speaker 1: There's something kind of ridiculous about what makes demagogue so
Speaker 1: compelling to so many people. Demagogues know how to work
Speaker 1: their way into your mind with brash claims, hyperbole, usually
Speaker 1: a professed mortar complex when they're attacked, and just a
Speaker 1: bunch of wild promises that make no sense even when
Speaker 1: given just a cursory amount of scrutiny, and in some
Speaker 1: ways most importantly, catchphrases. While we have the self directed
Speaker 1: chance of build the wall, echoing a countless rallies and
Speaker 1: demonstrations all throughout twenty sixteen, there was a very different
Speaker 1: and yet strikingly similar phrase being employed at the end
Speaker 1: of every speech given by this man. The main character
Speaker 1: of our story, the Chinese must go. The man, This man,
Speaker 1: our demagogue who made that his trademark, was a man
Speaker 1: so remarkable that he was, of course largely forgotten by history.
Speaker 1: His name was Dennis Kearney. You'd be forgiven for immediately
Speaker 1: scratching your head and saying, who I mean? This is
Speaker 1: what a lot of people might have said before Dennis
Speaker 1: Kearney's rise to fame as well and in the decades
Speaker 1: after his peak, as he began his march into historical obscurity,
Speaker 1: he was the living embodiment of lightning in a bottle, or,
Speaker 1: as Neil Ferguson put it as he wrapped up his
Speaker 1: Populous Backlash super recipe during his twenty sixteen presentation, quote,
Speaker 1: Dennis Kearney was the Donald Trump of the eighteen seventies. Unquote.
Speaker 1: Kearney was the demagogue that the populace backlash was waiting for,
Speaker 1: directing the people's indignation in terms that only a demagogue
Speaker 1: could quote. These leprous chinamen are about the meanest creatures
Speaker 1: that God Almighty ever put breath into the question is
Speaker 1: are the chinamen to occupy this country or the white man?
Speaker 1: Will you assist us in ridding this country of the
Speaker 1: moonlight lepers. All in favor of the Chinaman, hold up
Speaker 1: your hands, no one, and all in favor of the
Speaker 1: white man, up hands unquote. So let's get back to
Speaker 1: the question you're most likely still wondering. Who was he?
Speaker 1: Dennis Kearney was actually not an American by birth. He
Speaker 1: was an Irishman. He had been born in County Cork,
Speaker 1: Ireland in eighteen forty seven, and was part of a
Speaker 1: stereotypically large Irish family with six brothers. Kearney's father died
Speaker 1: when Dennis was only eleven years old, and doing what
Speaker 1: I suppose is only natural for an eleven year old
Speaker 1: boy to do when his father dies, young Dennis decided
Speaker 1: a life on the ocean was for him and became
Speaker 1: a sailor on a clipper ship called the Shooting Star. Now,
Speaker 1: despite being just a kid, he actually managed to become
Speaker 1: first mate and even captain during his years on the sea,
Speaker 1: and he would later claim that he quote circumnavigated the
Speaker 1: globe and visited many parts of the Earth's surface unquote.
Speaker 1: He would eventually land in San Francisco and get married
Speaker 1: when he was twenty three, and promptly become a small
Speaker 1: business owner, purchasing a draying business, which was basically a
Speaker 1: nineteenth century version of a trucking company in which goods
Speaker 1: were hauled around by a fleet of wagons. This business
Speaker 1: that he was running became quite successful, making him pretty wealthy,
Speaker 1: and he began making enormous investments in mining companies. But then,
Speaker 1: like the thousands of other Americans we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: the crash of eighteen seventy three happened and he lost everything.
Speaker 1: It's after the crash that we see a shift in
Speaker 1: Kearney's interests in a more trivial parallel with our current resident.
Speaker 1: Kearney abstained from drinking and smoking, which was unlike many
Speaker 1: men of his day who had lost as much as
Speaker 1: he had. But replacing those vices, he made it a
Speaker 1: point to start honing his skills in public speaking fame
Speaker 1: seeking as well by participating in debates in a club
Speaker 1: known as a lyceum of self culture. These skills that
Speaker 1: he worked on and honed paid off, because as he
Speaker 1: started to show his face around San Francisco politics in
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies, he became known as a quote unquote
Speaker 1: ready and forcible speaker, especially as he started emerging as
Speaker 1: the main attraction at the San Francisco Sandlots as they
Speaker 1: were known, which became a prime venting place for out
Speaker 1: of work laborers and men who had lost everything in
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventy three crash, just as he had. It
Speaker 1: was during these sandlot rallies where Kearney would develop his
Speaker 1: build the Wall esque battle cry of the Chinese must Go,
Speaker 1: with which he closed every speech he made. It was
Speaker 1: his catchphrase. The repeated successes of Kearney's speeches and his
Speaker 1: rising popularity made it almost a foregone conclusion to his
Speaker 1: thousands of fans and supporters that he would become elected
Speaker 1: as President of the Working Men's Party of California, which
Speaker 1: did indeed happen. With this new found position of influence,
Speaker 1: he began to dedicate himself to making his chapter of
Speaker 1: the nationwide Working Men's Party the most powerful and influential
Speaker 1: populist third party in American history. Like any good demagogue
Speaker 1: who came before or after him, Kearney had a trademark
Speaker 1: speaking style and a set of identifiable mannerisms that he
Speaker 1: began to develop in those early days on the San
Speaker 1: Francisco sandlots. He would perfect them later on as he
Speaker 1: toured the United States, spreading his populist message, so much
Speaker 1: so that a lot of ink was actually spilled in
Speaker 1: the press at the time simply describing his appearance and presentation.
Speaker 1: And this appearance in presentation was for the time, to
Speaker 1: put it, mildly electrifying. To further draw our comparisons between
Speaker 1: the demagogue then and the demagogue now. Politicians, union men,
Speaker 1: popular public figures of the time, none of them spoke
Speaker 1: like this. This was new, this was novel. Kearney's extremely
Speaker 1: atypical style is what made him so popular. Historian Andrew Goyori,
Speaker 1: whose excellent book Closing the Gate contains probably the most
Speaker 1: thorough look at Kearney, describes it as follows. Quote. He
Speaker 1: dresses The New York Tribune reported, just like his class,
Speaker 1: in a dark rough jacket, a blue or checked muslin shirt,
Speaker 1: and a short silk cravat tied in a sailor's nod.
Speaker 1: One of his trademarks was, after speaking and getting hot,
Speaker 1: to throw off his coat dramatically and unbutton his collar.
Speaker 1: Gestures had always provoked a storm of applause. Then he
Speaker 1: would stand quote with his thumbs in the armholes of
Speaker 1: his vest unquote, waiting for the ovation to subside. As
Speaker 1: he spoke, the former seaman would march phrenetically up and
Speaker 1: down the platform quote as though pacing the deck of
Speaker 1: a vessel unquote. If this sort of physically conscious thing
Speaker 1: isn't sounding vaguely familiar already. Another speaking tactic of Kearney's
Speaker 1: was to use his hands in a very obvious way
Speaker 1: to make a point. Right before he made his point,
Speaker 1: he would stop talking for a second while raising his
Speaker 1: right hand in suspense, like a conductor in front of
Speaker 1: an orchestra, and then he would to quote another observer
Speaker 1: at the time quote hurl it toward the audience as
Speaker 1: though he were throwing a stone unquote, and then he
Speaker 1: would enunciate his words quote forcibly ejected like a hot
Speaker 1: shot from a battery unquote. He would eject this quote
Speaker 1: unquote hot shot from a battery in the direction of
Speaker 1: not just the Chinese and their immigration the fourth ingreading
Speaker 1: to the populist backlash, remember, and his primary target most
Speaker 1: of the time, but also the quote unquote thieving capitalist
Speaker 1: as he called them, among other things, while at the
Speaker 1: same time saying that the time had come to give
Speaker 1: all the financial power of the country to the workingmen.
Speaker 1: He spared no viciousness when he spoke of business owners, bankers,
Speaker 1: and anyone else who could be considered a capitalist, as
Speaker 1: in the men who not only caused the panic and
Speaker 1: the depression, but also who continued to get richer as
Speaker 1: the unemployed workingmen grew poorer. In other words, he used
Speaker 1: two of the main outrages ingredients remember of this populist
Speaker 1: backlash to rally his people. He even went so far
Speaker 1: at one of his Sandlock gatherings in eighteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: to recommend that every workingman watching him at that moment
Speaker 1: go out by themselves a gun, and that every capitalist
Speaker 1: should be hung from the neck until they were dead.
Speaker 1: He would bellow out claims that the mansions belonging to
Speaker 1: the upper class needed to be burned to the ground,
Speaker 1: and he would encourage everyone listening to quote cut the
Speaker 1: capitalists to pieces. And he also launched attacks directed at
Speaker 1: the other key ingredient of the populist backlash, the corrupt
Speaker 1: politicians of both parties, the Washington elite. Instead of saying
Speaker 1: that it was time to drain the swamp, he would claim, quote,
Speaker 1: they have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption.
Speaker 1: They have made speculation in public robbery as science. They
Speaker 1: have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the
Speaker 1: city with debt. Instead of saying drain the swamp, he
Speaker 1: would make threats that quote, bullets will replace ballots unquote,
Speaker 1: until the capitalists were run out of power and to
Speaker 1: be replaced with the working class. Banners and signs were
Speaker 1: being carried around by his supporters at his rallies, and
Speaker 1: these banners and sides would include effigies of bondholders and
Speaker 1: elected officials being hung, along with captions like quote sure
Speaker 1: cure for corrupt officials. Kearney has come unquote. And Kearney
Speaker 1: spared no expense with his vitriol and took no partisanside
Speaker 1: with it either. According to him, his only side was
Speaker 1: the side of the workingman, the ones forgotten by Washington.
Speaker 1: In one of his later speeches that he made in Boston,
Speaker 1: he rolled all of the grievances, all the elements of
Speaker 1: the populist backlash, rolled it all into one when he
Speaker 1: proclaimed the following quote, it will be well for you
Speaker 1: to know some of the issues that deceive the democratic
Speaker 1: thief and the Republican robber out of sight in California.
Speaker 1: The workingmen of California are becoming overpressed. The capitalistic thief
Speaker 1: and land pirate of California, instead of employing the poor
Speaker 1: white man of that beautiful and golden state, send across
Speaker 1: to Asia, the oldest despotism on earth, and there, contracting
Speaker 1: with a band of leprous Chinese pirates, brought them to
Speaker 1: California and now uses them as a knife to cut
Speaker 1: the throats of honest laboring men in that state. A
Speaker 1: Chinaman will live on rice and rats. They will sleep
Speaker 1: one hundred in a room that one white man wants
Speaker 1: for his wife and family. But as you can see,
Speaker 1: while he would use the other ingredients as a base
Speaker 1: for his vitriol, it would always come back to the Chinese.
Speaker 1: A lot of Kearny's lambassing of the Chinese is very
Speaker 1: easily boiled down to simple race baiting rhetoric, often simply
Speaker 1: employed for cheap laughs, as the transcripts of these speeches
Speaker 1: and the crowd's reactions show. During his eighteen seventy seven
Speaker 1: Sandlot harangues, he would make pronouncements that range from simple
Speaker 1: conspiracy mongerine, such as unsubstantiated claims of Chinese being secretly
Speaker 1: smuggled into America down from British Columbia up from Mexico
Speaker 1: to outright calls for exclusion and deportation. In one of
Speaker 1: his Sandlots speeches in October eighteen seventy seven, Kiarni would
Speaker 1: proclaim to a massive crowd of cheering workingmen and curious onlookers. Quote,
Speaker 1: before you and before the world, we declare that the
Speaker 1: Chinamen must leave our shores. We declare that white men
Speaker 1: and women, and boys and girls cannot live as the
Speaker 1: people of the Great Republic should and compete with the
Speaker 1: single Chinese coolie in the labor market. Death is preferable
Speaker 1: to an American to life on a par with the Chinaman. Unquote.
Speaker 1: And if you think that Kearney stopped short of invoking
Speaker 1: force or violence to achieve this end, you'd be mistaken.
Speaker 1: According to several speech transcripts and witness statements reported by
Speaker 1: Iris Chang And in her book on the Chinese in
Speaker 1: America and Betty Lee Sung in her own Kearney would
Speaker 1: outright imply extermination or at least violence to drive the
Speaker 1: Chinese out of San Francisco. He'd have ideas that would
Speaker 1: be so hair brained that they would be funny if
Speaker 1: they weren't terrifying in their implications. These included releasing balloons
Speaker 1: carrying dynamite over Chinatown and letting laws of physics do
Speaker 1: the rest of the work for them. And while it's
Speaker 1: most certainly true that it's not always fair to pin
Speaker 1: the blame of outside rhetoric for the actions of individuals,
Speaker 1: we can draw at least at least one direct instance
Speaker 1: of brutal violence to the rhetoric of Dennis Kearney. On
Speaker 1: March thirteenth, eighteen seventy seven, six Chinese woodcutters were calling
Speaker 1: it a day after a long afternoon of work at
Speaker 1: their employer's wood shopping camp about two miles outside of Chico, California.
Speaker 1: They were all gathered in the living area of their
Speaker 1: cabin that they were staying in. They were settling in
Speaker 1: for their nightly meal, laughing and relaxing. According to the
Speaker 1: sole member of the group who survived, this is why
Speaker 1: they never noticed that they were being watched from the
Speaker 1: darkness outside of their cabin. Suddenly, many shots were fired
Speaker 1: from pistols and rifles, and five men and a boy
Speaker 1: burst into the cabin and riddled five of the six
Speaker 1: Chinese men with bullets. Following the mass shooting, the killers
Speaker 1: made sure to douse all of the bodies and the
Speaker 1: cabin itself with a gallon of kerosene before setting everything
Speaker 1: on fire, basically destroying any physical evidence except for the
Speaker 1: charred remains of the men they killed, though they obviously
Speaker 1: didn't account for the testimony of the sole survivor of
Speaker 1: their mass murder, who had escaped when he heard the shots.
Speaker 1: Following the Chico massacre, the Sacramento Daily Union reported that
Speaker 1: the perpetrators were quote beyond all question, white men unquote.
Speaker 1: The article continued its analysis of the crime with the
Speaker 1: following ominous words, quote it is evident, however, that this
Speaker 1: and other crimes of the same kind, had been perpetrated
Speaker 1: by ruffians who possessed some kind of organization and to
Speaker 1: support one another in their infamous practices unquote. Sure enough,
Speaker 1: one of the perpetrators was caught, and, after some questioning,
Speaker 1: finally admitted that what they had done was under the
Speaker 1: orders of the Workingmen's Party leadership. Unfortunately, the party's leaders
Speaker 1: couldn't be convicted of any crime because the evidence remained circumstantial.
Speaker 1: Kearney would continue his anti China these stump speeches throughout
Speaker 1: the remainder of eighteen seventy seven, as working class strikes
Speaker 1: raged across the country, and its popularity would only continue
Speaker 1: to increase. Kearney's blaming of the Chinese for the lack
Speaker 1: of work for the working class in the late eighteen
Speaker 1: seventies was easy, and it was easy for a lot
Speaker 1: of reasons. One of these reasons was because it was
Speaker 1: in essence true that Chinese workers were replacing white ones
Speaker 1: in certain jobs. But the problem with this view is
Speaker 1: that it left out the important fact that the only
Speaker 1: reason the Chinese were being hired by businesses was because
Speaker 1: the businesses wanted cheaper labor that didn't have the tendency
Speaker 1: to organize and strike for higher pay or better working conditions,
Speaker 1: as we saw earlier in our story with the North
Speaker 1: Adams incident. But the important thing to remember is that
Speaker 1: while the racial and cultural quote unquote otherness of the
Speaker 1: Chinese certainly contributed to them being easily being made targets,
Speaker 1: this was just a number game, at least initially on
Speaker 1: the West Coast, because in San Francisco by eighteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: there were two whites and one Chinese for every available job.
Speaker 1: But we should be real here. If it hadn't been
Speaker 1: the Chinese, it would have been someone else. As Iris
Speaker 1: Chang said earlier in our story, quote, all of us
Speaker 1: are vulnerable to explanations that easily assigned blame to some
Speaker 1: outside group unquote. And this had been seen before. The
Speaker 1: general hostility of Americans toward the Irish, German and Italian
Speaker 1: immigrants only three decades earlier shows us as pretty clearly.
Speaker 1: And believe me, the irony of an irishman, a man who,
Speaker 1: if he'd been alive and trying to find a job
Speaker 1: in America those three decades earlier, a man who would
Speaker 1: have faced a similar level of discrimination as the kind
Speaker 1: he was currently heaping on the Chinese. This irony was
Speaker 1: not lost on contemporaries either, invoking the site of the
Speaker 1: no Irish need apply signs plastered all over American cities
Speaker 1: during the ages forties and eighteen fifties. The famous novelist
Speaker 1: Robert Lewis Stevenson, writer of Treasure Island and the Strange
Speaker 1: Case of Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde, he wrote in
Speaker 1: a piece in The Amateur Immigrant during all of this
Speaker 1: anti Chinese sentiment quote a while ago, it was the Irish.
Speaker 1: Now it is the Chinese who must go, regardless of
Speaker 1: historical ironies or the inevitability of ethnic targeting. Kearney had
Speaker 1: his targets, and he had his persona, his character, the
Speaker 1: firebrand who stood up for the working men against the
Speaker 1: encroachment of the yellow Horde from the Orient. To put
Speaker 1: it in crude terms, from that era. In other words,
Speaker 1: Kearney was well aware of how he could take advantage
Speaker 1: of the suffering and resentments of his constituents, all tied
Speaker 1: to the first three ingredients of our populist backlash, the
Speaker 1: perception of corruption, inequality, and the results of the economic crash.
Speaker 1: Remember and create a laser focus for this suffering and
Speaker 1: resentment onto the fourth ingredient, the rise in immigration. In
Speaker 1: other words, like all demagogues, Kearney possessed a keen awareness
Speaker 1: of the observation from Michael Bellile that we laid out
Speaker 1: earlier that class tensions can be sidestepped by appeals to racism.
Speaker 1: In other words, it didn't matter whether or not Kearney
Speaker 1: actually believed in his heart the things that he was
Speaker 1: saying about the Chinese, because all that mattered to him
Speaker 1: was that they worked. We know this because it wasn't
Speaker 1: always this way with Dennis Kearny as a member of
Speaker 1: the Draymen and Teamsters Union. Kearney was a union man
Speaker 1: earlier in his career, which is where he got his
Speaker 1: first true taste of political power when he became the
Speaker 1: leader of the Workingmen's Party of California in eighteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: Like we were talking about earlier, but this was happening
Speaker 1: just as the Great Strikes of eighteen seventy seven, the
Speaker 1: great insurrection of American workingmen that was actually covered quite
Speaker 1: well in Sam Davis's Inward Empire podcast. I might ass
Speaker 1: you should check that out if you want more detail
Speaker 1: on the Great Strike. But these strikes, the Great Strikes
Speaker 1: of eighteen seventy seven, they were in full swing. Well,
Speaker 1: Kearney was experiencing his rise to power. Here's a thing.
Speaker 1: It's a mistake to assume that this was because Kearney
Speaker 1: was a tried and true friend of the working man.
Speaker 1: This indeed might be sounding familiar to those of you
Speaker 1: who paid close attention to those rallies and speeches in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, But this, in my view at least, is
Speaker 1: really what takes the cake. When I invoke catchphrases about
Speaker 1: the quote unquote original Donald Trump. Kearney's words of support
Speaker 1: and even love of the working men of America were
Speaker 1: words of convenience. He had found a vibrant, fertile political market,
Speaker 1: and he had tapped into it with a vengeance. And
Speaker 1: don't think that this is just me being cynical, or
Speaker 1: even modern historians who have covered Kearney are just being
Speaker 1: cynical and using the historical twenty twenty hindsight goggles. A
Speaker 1: contemporary of Kearney's, the famous labor writer Henry George, wrote
Speaker 1: about Kearney's political opportunism as Kearney was making his rounds
Speaker 1: across the country in eighteen seventy eight. George's commentary is
Speaker 1: one of the primary sources that we can turn to
Speaker 1: for some sense, for a more accurate sense of what
Speaker 1: the pre Kearney labor movement thought of the guy who was,
Speaker 1: in essence at this time, stealing their thunder. Recalling Kearney's
Speaker 1: earlier appearances at the Lyceum of Self Culture, where he
Speaker 1: was cutting his teeth on public speaking, George wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: he was noticeable not merely for the bitter vulgarity of
Speaker 1: his attacks upon all forms of religion, especially that in
Speaker 1: which he had been reared, the Catholic, but for the
Speaker 1: venom with which he abused the working classes and took
Speaker 1: on every occasion what passed for the capitalistic side unquote.
Speaker 1: George continues with a revelation that even I have to admit,
Speaker 1: shocked me after hearing and reading all this stuff about
Speaker 1: Dennis Kearney his hatred for the Chinese immigrant. But this
Speaker 1: didn't shock me just because of the apparent inconsistency with
Speaker 1: the character of Kearney that would begin to emerge along
Speaker 1: with his fame, but also with how similar it seems
Speaker 1: to fall in line with the inconsistent ideological methodology of
Speaker 1: a certain president of the United States, say quote, with
Speaker 1: all the vehemence with which he has since invaghed against
Speaker 1: quote unquote thieving capitalists and quote unquote lecherous bondholders. He
Speaker 1: denounced the laziness and extravagance of working men, declared that
Speaker 1: wages were far too high, and defended Chinese immigration unquote. Wow,
Speaker 1: So we can see here that this guy Dennis Kearney,
Speaker 1: who spent so much energy and became monumentally successful and
Speaker 1: famous defending the American workingman and excoriating the Chinese as pests.
Speaker 1: Only a few short years earlier, he couldn't wait to
Speaker 1: call unemployed workers bums, which he did, and even defend
Speaker 1: the rights of the Chinese to come into America. Quite
Speaker 1: a change of heart, wouldn't you say. But let's be
Speaker 1: charitable for just a second. Is it possible that Kearney
Speaker 1: simply changed his mind? People changed their minds all the time.
Speaker 1: Is it possible that maybe he saw things in the
Speaker 1: culture that maybe he read the tea leaves, or maybe
Speaker 1: even experience enough rough realities that showed him the way
Speaker 1: he believed things truly were. Of course, anything is possible.
Speaker 1: Maybe he met enough out of work laborers with truly
Speaker 1: moving stories of losing their livelihoods, and he simply latched
Speaker 1: onto the most obvious solution that the men who weren't working,
Speaker 1: the white men, weren't working because of the men who
Speaker 1: were working, the Chinese men. This is certainly possible. I
Speaker 1: can't pretend it's not. But Dennis Kearney was anything but stupid.
Speaker 1: He may have been uneducated, he was very uneducated, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't stupid. He knew how to read a room.
Speaker 1: As we saw earlier. I mean, he understood what comedians
Speaker 1: today called crowd work, in some ways the most fun
Speaker 1: part of a stand up comedy show. But he understood
Speaker 1: crowd work far better than most public speakers of his day.
Speaker 1: I don't even know how many public speakers of his
Speaker 1: day understood that concept. Kearney had basically developed a routine.
Speaker 1: Like I've been saying, he developed a character. What else
Speaker 1: do you think he's doing when he strips off the
Speaker 1: more formal coat and rolls up his shirt sleeves, If not,
Speaker 1: you know, making himself more similar in appearance, at least
Speaker 1: to the men he's addressing. What else do you think
Speaker 1: he's doing when he's issuing calls and responses, you know,
Speaker 1: encouraging the crowd to get involved with his performance. He
Speaker 1: would even make direct claims of his own humility and
Speaker 1: humble status. He'd make extra effort to distance himself from
Speaker 1: the elites he that claimed they spoke for the working man.
Speaker 1: In his speech at Fanowell Hall in Boston, he proclaimed,
Speaker 1: quote my fellow countrymen, as the humble representative of the
Speaker 1: humble classes, the poor working classes. I appear before you
Speaker 1: tonight with no flowery phrases with which to garnish my speech,
Speaker 1: no classical language with which to fool my hearers. The
Speaker 1: English language, I believe, contains in the neighborhood of sixty
Speaker 1: thousand words. I am in possession of a few hundred
Speaker 1: of those words, and I use them. This is a
Speaker 1: free country, and the people clamor for the liberty of speed,
Speaker 1: I use my clamor for the liberty of speech. I
Speaker 1: use my humble, plain unvarnished words to extol virtue and
Speaker 1: condemn robbery unquote. All of these words, these quote unquote
Speaker 1: humble words of his, were interspersed with moments of uproarious
Speaker 1: clapping and applause from the crowd of thousands at this
Speaker 1: particular speech watching him speak, and it's not surprising given
Speaker 1: what he's saying. What he's saying here is that he's
Speaker 1: not like these other speakers, these elites with their stiff,
Speaker 1: rehearsed phrases about coming together when all they want to
Speaker 1: do is keep us apart. Really, he's speaking quote unquote
Speaker 1: plainly and has no desire to talk down to these folk,
Speaker 1: because he actually cares about them and knows they're smarter
Speaker 1: than the elites think they are. Yet another thing that
Speaker 1: sounds familiar, wouldn't you say? Now, someone this aware of
Speaker 1: his own performance and of his own words is not
Speaker 1: a simple bigot looking for someone to blame all of
Speaker 1: his problems on. Sure, he might have had a legitimate
Speaker 1: chip on his shoulder. He might have had actually hated
Speaker 1: the Chinese. But no one makes such an abrupt ideological
Speaker 1: about face unless they realize, as Kearney very obviously did,
Speaker 1: that his harangues about lazy workers and well deserving immigrants
Speaker 1: weren't getting through to anybody at this debate club, at
Speaker 1: the Lyceum for Self Culture, or in the unions, or
Speaker 1: to really anyone at all. He needed to change tactics,
Speaker 1: and he knew that, and that's exactly what he did.
Speaker 1: And wouldn't you know it, shortly after this change of
Speaker 1: tax who started becoming a household name, not just in
Speaker 1: those sandlots in San Francisco, but in California itself and
Speaker 1: then even the entire West Coast. Yeah, Dennis Kearney. Again,
Speaker 1: this is not historical. Twenty twenty hindsight goggles. Henry George
Speaker 1: understood Kearney's skill and appeal all too well in this
Speaker 1: flowery conclusion of the piece that he wrote about the
Speaker 1: guy quote. Whatever be his future career, Kearney has already
Speaker 1: made what will be regarded by thousands and thousands of men,
Speaker 1: many of them have much greater abilities as a dazzling,
Speaker 1: brilliant success. An unknown dray man, destitute of advantages, without
Speaker 1: following or influence, he has simply by appealing to popular
Speaker 1: discontent and arousing the uneasy timidity with which is its correlative,
Speaker 1: risen to the rank of a great leader, and drunk
Speaker 1: the suites of power and fame. He knows what it
Speaker 1: is to be the hero and the master of surging multitudes,
Speaker 1: To draw forth their applause by a word, to hush
Speaker 1: them into silence with a wave of his hand, to
Speaker 1: be garlanded with flowers, to be drawn in triumph through
Speaker 1: the crowded streets, to be attended wherever he went by
Speaker 1: a retinue of reporters and correspondents. To rise every morning
Speaker 1: to find the newspapers filled with him. To have men
Speaker 1: who would not have noticed him if he had stuck
Speaker 1: to his dray, slink by night to his house, or
Speaker 1: solicit his favors by go betweens. To look upon high
Speaker 1: officials as the creatures of his making. To be known
Speaker 1: and talked about, not merely through the whole country, but
Speaker 1: over the world. Whatever becomes of Kearney, and it would
Speaker 1: be rash to predict that his career is yet over.
Speaker 1: This lesson will not be lost. The wave rises, curls,
Speaker 1: and subsides, and where was its white crest? Are but
Speaker 1: some spumes of foam. But the impulse is perpetuated, and
Speaker 1: another wave swells up. A good demagogue, indeed, and also
Speaker 1: like any good demagogue hungry for power and influence, whose
Speaker 1: impulse is perpetuated in another wave is swelling up, Kiarni
Speaker 1: would not be content keeping this household name confined to
Speaker 1: one region, the shores of the Pacific. In this case,
Speaker 1: he needed to expand his brand. This is why in
Speaker 1: July of eighteen seventy eight, Kearney took his show on
Speaker 1: the road and landed first in Boston, where a lot
Speaker 1: of the choice quotes of his that we've gone through
Speaker 1: earlier in our story came from when he got to Boston.
Speaker 1: When he got to the East Coast, he wasn't welcomed
Speaker 1: by everybody, including all of the working men that he addressed.
Speaker 1: A lot of them actually held very little sympathy for
Speaker 1: his anti Chinese message, since, as historian Andrew Goory, who
Speaker 1: had been quoting Astuteley and frequently points out in his
Speaker 1: book Closing the Gate when talking about Kearney's tour out east,
Speaker 1: East Coast laborers and most laborers and union members in
Speaker 1: general were actually opposed to contract immigration rather than immigration
Speaker 1: in general. They were opposed to the Cooley trade that
Speaker 1: we talked about a little while ago. Now, this would
Speaker 1: change over time as times remained hard and got harder
Speaker 1: in some cases, but this distinction between contract labor and
Speaker 1: immigrant labor was something that gave a lot of the
Speaker 1: smaller populist movements out east more moral integrity and nuance
Speaker 1: in their West Coast counterparts. However, I do think that
Speaker 1: Gory misses a crucial point in probing the big why
Speaker 1: of these East Coast laborers being more tolerant despite frequently
Speaker 1: referencing this fact. However, I do think Goory misses a
Speaker 1: very crucial point in probing the sort of big why
Speaker 1: of these East Coast laborers being more tolerant. Despite frequently
Speaker 1: referencing this fact, There were hardly any Chinese laborers east
Speaker 1: of the Rockies during the eighteen seventies and even into
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties. I mean I mentioned this before. I
Speaker 1: mean it's not even just Chinese laborers. Chinese people in
Speaker 1: general were basically an alien race from another planet. East
Speaker 1: of the Rockies, people knew what they were in the
Speaker 1: most general sense. But again, most people east of the
Speaker 1: Rockies had never even seen a Chinese person period. In fact,
Speaker 1: over ninety nine percent of all Chinese immigrants in the
Speaker 1: United States were on the West Coast. I'm not making excuses,
Speaker 1: by the way, for the abject bigotry of Californians and
Speaker 1: other West Coast populis, but we do have to be
Speaker 1: real here. For a second, the East Coast populace and
Speaker 1: laborers had no incentive to blame their woes on the
Speaker 1: Chinese people coming to America. They were often being threatened
Speaker 1: by their employers that they would be replaced with cheap,
Speaker 1: cooly labor, for sure, but there were very few cheap coolies,
Speaker 1: so it was just easier for them to see straight
Speaker 1: and understand that the real villain in these circumstances was
Speaker 1: indeed the owner of the company trying to screw them
Speaker 1: out of decent pay. So, in other words, the inherent
Speaker 1: vulnerability of an aggrieved laboring class of populace to cheap
Speaker 1: appeals of natism and racism was less inherent with the
Speaker 1: East Coasters because they just simply had no group to
Speaker 1: easily other eyes like their West Coast cousins did so,
Speaker 1: like I was saying, the concept of cheap Chinese labor
Speaker 1: was essentially as alien as the Chinese were themselves to
Speaker 1: the East Coast Americans. So while Kearney initially drew crowds
Speaker 1: supportive of his racist invective during his East Coast tour,
Speaker 1: this wasn't to say that he or his racist rhetoric
Speaker 1: was largely embraced by the organized working class. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't just the inability for the working class out east
Speaker 1: to sympathize with his rhetoric's racist overtones. It was actually
Speaker 1: the lack of precision in his goals that they found
Speaker 1: most frustrating. He kept his rhetoric pretty vague throughout his tour,
Speaker 1: occasionally shouting about quote taking the life of any man
Speaker 1: who attempts to debar the voters from exercising their right
Speaker 1: of suffrage and quote hunting down and shooting unquote and
Speaker 1: he elected official who went back on its promises. All
Speaker 1: very clear and obvious ways at playing into the political
Speaker 1: corruption ingredient of the populace backlash, by the way, but
Speaker 1: he very rarely offered specific policy prescriptions. It was all
Speaker 1: about ensuring the victory of the working Man's Party in
Speaker 1: the upcoming eighteen seventy eight elections. Or, as he would
Speaker 1: put it, quote, put all of your issues into one pot,
Speaker 1: screw a cover on it, and tie it so tightly
Speaker 1: that nobody could lift it until you elect working men
Speaker 1: to office. Unquote. Pretty familiar, vague stuff, right, And while
Speaker 1: he was indeed ostensibly speaking for them, labor leaders out
Speaker 1: east started asking questions. Historian Andrew Gyori again. He describes
Speaker 1: a scene between Kearney and labor leaders in the following quote.
Speaker 1: Precisely what issues Kearney wanted workers to pool he never
Speaker 1: spelled out. In Cincinnati, labor leaders asked what he meant
Speaker 1: by the slogan Yury quotes from various eight August eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight issues of newspapers. Here, knock the first man
Speaker 1: down who disagrees with you. He told them, capture the state.
Speaker 1: But asked one of the labor leaders, suppose you were
Speaker 1: asked some plan or reason for pooling issues. Damn such conundrums,
Speaker 1: Kearney retorted, the people are starving. Ain't that enough? For many?
Speaker 1: It was not in God's name. When newspaper pleaded give
Speaker 1: us some ideas, propose something, but Kearney refused, offering neither
Speaker 1: programs nor solutions unquote. This is yet another very important
Speaker 1: mark of a demagogue, appeals to emotion, singling out the
Speaker 1: enemy and proposing very little specifically at least except victory,
Speaker 1: a general sense of victory for the cause. This is
Speaker 1: why the closest thing to a policy prescription that Kearney
Speaker 1: had while on his East Coast tour was ensuring the
Speaker 1: election of Representative Benjamin F. Butler in the gubernatorial race
Speaker 1: for message who sits in the eighteen seventy eight election
Speaker 1: under the Greenbacker banner. Though one of the many third
Speaker 1: parties of the era, Kearney would continually endorse the quote
Speaker 1: unquote chivalrous Butler in his speeches because his game, his
Speaker 1: ultimate goal in all this this is important, was very simple.
Speaker 1: Kearney wanted to establish a power base for himself through
Speaker 1: Butler and what Andrew Giory calls quote an alliance among
Speaker 1: workers and Greenbackers. With Butler and himself at the helm unquote.
Speaker 1: This part of our story is pretty fun because during
Speaker 1: his East Coast adventures, Kearney was even less welcomed by
Speaker 1: most of the press at the time. And this is where,
Speaker 1: and this is why it's fun. This is where, in
Speaker 1: my view, the parallels between Dennis Kearney and Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: and really any parallels between any populist, ostensible populist and
Speaker 1: another come into laser sharp focus. For most people I've
Speaker 1: talked to about this man and what I've admittedly like
Speaker 1: I was saying, this is fun. I've been the most
Speaker 1: excited to play with this stuff. So, like both president
Speaker 1: and candidate t Dennis Kearney had nothing but the most
Speaker 1: poisonous contempt for the press, both in his rhetoric and
Speaker 1: in his heart. I think this is actually something he
Speaker 1: did believe. The level of integrity possessed by the press,
Speaker 1: both in the eighteen seventies and in the twenty tens, incidentally,
Speaker 1: can certainly be debated, and I do have my own
Speaker 1: personal hot takes on all that, but that's a different
Speaker 1: story for a different day and probably a different podcast.
Speaker 1: The point is that Kearney's and usually most populous contempt
Speaker 1: for the press was shared by them in kind, since
Speaker 1: he was locked in what felt like a perpetual war
Speaker 1: of words with them during the entirety of his East
Speaker 1: Coast tour. For all of the current US president's contemptuous
Speaker 1: comments about the press being fake news or being unfairly
Speaker 1: treated by partisan pundits, after reading about Dennis Kearney's relationship
Speaker 1: with the press, specifically the East Coast press, I think
Speaker 1: that not only did his invective ten to leave President
Speaker 1: Trump's miles in the dust, but I think he basically
Speaker 1: laid the groundwork for how demagogus would talk about the
Speaker 1: press for the next century and a half in the
Speaker 1: United States. Donald Trump has probably never heard of Dennis Kearney,
Speaker 1: but you'd be forgiven for not thinking for a second
Speaker 1: that he might have somehow gotten a hold of some
Speaker 1: of the quotes that we're about to get into here
Speaker 1: and then maybe crafted his own more modern versions of them,
Speaker 1: Because without missing a beat during his first speech in
Speaker 1: Boston from which we quoted earlier, Kearney started going out
Speaker 1: of his way to mock and smear the press when
Speaker 1: he said the following quote, First and foremost, I will
Speaker 1: pay my respects to the newspapers. The newspapers from the
Speaker 1: earliest history of printing have been running the interest, take
Speaker 1: it down, reporters of cutthroats, political bilks, daylight thieves, and
Speaker 1: midnight assassins. A newspaper is an enterprise like all other
Speaker 1: business enterprises. For the villainous serpent like slimy imps of
Speaker 1: hell that run these newspapers, I have the utmost contempt unquote.
Speaker 1: He did make in that speech an olive branch distinction
Speaker 1: of sorts, but between reporters and the owners of the newspapers.
Speaker 1: But this was a case like it's often said in
Speaker 1: the Game of Thrones books, his words were wind. In
Speaker 1: the same speech he called the Associated Press quote a villainous, thieving,
Speaker 1: infamous band of scallowags that aim to control public opinion unquote,
Speaker 1: and in another he called them a quote unquote old prostitute.
Speaker 1: In another speech, when he mentioned the Boston Herald, a
Speaker 1: paper critical of him, the crowd started hissing, responding in kind,
Speaker 1: Kearney then shouted, quote, I now proposed three groans for
Speaker 1: that slimy sheet unquote, which was followed by three loud
Speaker 1: groans from the crowd. And in a speech in Cincinnati,
Speaker 1: he actually took a few moments to browbeat the quote
Speaker 1: line venial venereal press of the United States unquote. But
Speaker 1: and this is actually a little less funny because, in
Speaker 1: perhaps one of the most symbolic moments of the whole tour,
Speaker 1: while he was in New York City, he held up
Speaker 1: a cop of the New York Tribune. He called its
Speaker 1: editor quote the organ of the plunderers unquote, and then
Speaker 1: he tore the paper to pieces. This is where it's
Speaker 1: less funny, because the entire crowd erupted into cheers. The
Speaker 1: press did indeed respond in kind, with some pretty choice descriptions,
Speaker 1: including the New York Times calling him quote an eminent
Speaker 1: blatherskite unquote, and the Chicago Times referring to him as
Speaker 1: a quote flatulent little brat unquote. The Boston Transcript said, quote,
Speaker 1: he is simply a blatant booby with a profane and
Speaker 1: bullying rigamarole of epithets unquote, while the Philadelphia Inquirer said
Speaker 1: that quote Kearney's only talent is the billionsgate fishwife's talent
Speaker 1: for vituperation, and his head is as empty of ideas
Speaker 1: as his mouth is full of oaths and rivalry. Unquote,
Speaker 1: and the nation which we now ironically in this case
Speaker 1: associate with more left leaning, supposedly anti racist branded politicking,
Speaker 1: actually went for the racially charged at hominem jugular by
Speaker 1: saying that he looked like quote a naked bushman unquote
Speaker 1: end quote, the lowest type of demagogue that has yet
Speaker 1: appeared in history unquote. But I do think my favorite
Speaker 1: insult throwing Kearney's way during this time actually came from
Speaker 1: a guy who will come into play toward the end
Speaker 1: of our story, and not necessarily in the way you
Speaker 1: might think given what he says here, Senator James G.
Speaker 1: Blaine from Maine, when he called Kearney quote an unduly
Speaker 1: inflated sack of very bad gas unquote. Now I won't
Speaker 1: pretend that I understand every term throwing Keiarney's way by
Speaker 1: the press. I'm not even sure Google knows what a
Speaker 1: blatherskite is, and I've never met a Billionsgate fishwife. But
Speaker 1: I think the parallels between the New York Times coverage
Speaker 1: of Dennis Kearney and Donald Trump hasn't changed much in
Speaker 1: the intervening century and a half. But there's something more
Speaker 1: striking here that Andrew Gyory, in a very important reading
Speaker 1: of this story, says of the New York Tribune's coverage
Speaker 1: of Kearney that, quote, although they lavish column after column
Speaker 1: on his tour, it called him a quote particularly stupid
Speaker 1: and uninteresting creature unquote, who appealed only quote to those
Speaker 1: who like profanity, indecency, and coarse, vulgar and savage brutishness unquote.
Speaker 1: Not only are the Trump Kearney parallels obvious when looking
Speaker 1: at how the Tribune was going out of their way
Speaker 1: to insult Kearney's supporters and fans in some pretty base
Speaker 1: terms as a means of retaliating against him for all
Speaker 1: the awful things he was saying about them, but the
Speaker 1: parallels are also pretty obvious when you consider the symbiotic
Speaker 1: relationship between the press and the demagogue. How nothing in
Speaker 1: that respect changes. Jory also notes that the mainstream media's
Speaker 1: attacks on Kearney were actually motivated by a desire to
Speaker 1: skewer the labor movement. Whether or not Kearney really was
Speaker 1: a man of the people was irrelevant to them. He
Speaker 1: claimed that he spoke for workingmen. Crowds of thousands showed
Speaker 1: up to cheer for him. If so, facto, the working
Speaker 1: man was at fault for this man's popularity. As we've
Speaker 1: covered with a lot of things in this story, and
Speaker 1: specifically with labor movement, it wasn't quite so simple, but
Speaker 1: it never is with a demagogue. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: Kearney's audiences during his East Coast tour were in the
Speaker 1: class sense, pretty diverse. Some publications indicated that the crowds
Speaker 1: who appeared to see Kearney were part of the quote
Speaker 1: unquote best known citizens of their respective cities, and that
Speaker 1: quote judging from their dress and appearance, was composed of
Speaker 1: business or professional men unquote. Yori makes some very nuanced
Speaker 1: observations about Kearney's success as a speaker on his East
Speaker 1: Coast tour, and I want to get into them here
Speaker 1: because he explains that, based on the volumes of testimony
Speaker 1: and varied opinions given at the time, most of what
Speaker 1: drove Keierney's popularity on the East Coast was sort of
Speaker 1: a nice combo of boredom, curiosity, and the drive to
Speaker 1: seek novel enters. Taman, It's why we browse YouTube for
Speaker 1: hours on end and suddenly it's four in the morning.
Speaker 1: As Gjory says, quote, theater and concert halls could hardly
Speaker 1: compete with the excitement of a compelling, never before seen speaker. Quote.
Speaker 1: Jory then goes on to quote the Boston transcript who
Speaker 1: wrote of Kearney, quote, he was a circus and clown combined,
Speaker 1: and the attraction proved great enough to hold the spectators
Speaker 1: pretty well together. Unquote, despite the fact that many people
Speaker 1: saw and in some cases still see President Trump as
Speaker 1: a circus and clown combined, to quote the Boston transcript.
Speaker 1: There again, this is also where you could say where
Speaker 1: we kind of come to a small hiccup in our
Speaker 1: comparison between Donald Trump and Dennis Kearney. This treatment of
Speaker 1: Kearney as essentially a side show by the public didn't
Speaker 1: result in an overwhelming victory of his cause, unlike the
Speaker 1: victory Trump scored in twenty sixteen. While the Kearney endorsed
Speaker 1: Benjamin F. Butler, who we were talking about a moment ago,
Speaker 1: he did capture a strikingly high number of votes for
Speaker 1: a third party in the eighteen seventy eight election. It
Speaker 1: was a one hundred and nine thousand or so compared
Speaker 1: to the Republican victors one hundred and thirty five thousand,
Speaker 1: So that's not bad for a third party, but Butler
Speaker 1: still lost, and this left Kearney without a sort of
Speaker 1: official power broker on the East Coast. Not that this
Speaker 1: mattered anyway, though, since he was starting to be seen
Speaker 1: as a toxic element by both his political supporters and
Speaker 1: even his crowds, not to mention just sort of starting
Speaker 1: to be seen as tiresome and predictable. And while many
Speaker 1: of his political allies simply started quietly turning their backs
Speaker 1: on him, the crowds were much more obvious in their
Speaker 1: dismissal of him. They were bored, They were simply bored,
Speaker 1: and they wanted something new. This is because the crowd
Speaker 1: participation at Kearney's rallies had been gradually turning less into
Speaker 1: enthusiastic support and more into a back and forth heckel
Speaker 1: fest between him and his onlookers, which had in turn
Speaker 1: started to become a simple source of entertainment for many
Speaker 1: in the crowd, who were looking for a laugh at
Speaker 1: this point more than they were for a source of
Speaker 1: validation for social grievances related to unemployment and whatnot. Again, remember,
Speaker 1: they didn't really care about Chinese immigration on the East Coast.
Speaker 1: So he wasn't going to really be able to whip
Speaker 1: them up into a frenzy with that, So really it
Speaker 1: was just a sort of source of entertainment for them,
Speaker 1: of live of free live entertainment, because he didn't charge
Speaker 1: for these speeches. He actually did pass a hat around
Speaker 1: for people to give donations, like a suggested donation kind
Speaker 1: of thing like that you see at a community theater.
Speaker 1: But in the end, these were free events. It was
Speaker 1: free entertainment for a very bored populace. So this populace
Speaker 1: they would cheer every time Kierney would let loose a
Speaker 1: swear at the time, like a hell or a thief
Speaker 1: or a bondholder, very like like strong terms. And they
Speaker 1: really love these terms though, because they kind of become
Speaker 1: part of his routine. They were catchphrases. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like if you listen to those old stand up specials
Speaker 1: of Andrew dice Clay, you'll actually hear the people who
Speaker 1: really love his material shouting out the punchlines for him.
Speaker 1: Like it's just it's not common in stand up comedy,
Speaker 1: but it's definitely something that happens when you get to
Speaker 1: a certain level of success. There was actually even but
Speaker 1: in the case of Kearney, there was actually even an
Speaker 1: account from the Boston transcript again that at the end
Speaker 1: of one of his Boston speeches quote, the laughter began
Speaker 1: to predominate over the applause, and people listened and thought
Speaker 1: it fun, getting amusement not only out of what was said,
Speaker 1: but out of the speaker's manner of saying it. Unquote.
Speaker 1: No one was taking him seriously anymore, and there were
Speaker 1: even cases where his speeches had to be cut short
Speaker 1: due to the growing bored hostility of the crowd. This
Speaker 1: perfectly illustrates the problem with laughter on its own, at
Speaker 1: least as entertainment. If what's causing the laughter doesn't change
Speaker 1: its tune or its routine, that laughter is going to
Speaker 1: recede really fast, and eventually that will turn into boredom,
Speaker 1: if not outright hostility. We actually saw this play out
Speaker 1: perfectly in this classic episod of The Simpsons that you
Speaker 1: might remember, where Bart becomes a sensation for causing a
Speaker 1: disaster and crusty the clowns set like knocking a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff over and then simply saying I didn't do it.
Speaker 1: Sure enough, the culture couldn't get enough of the eye
Speaker 1: didn't do it boy, if you remember the episode, But
Speaker 1: the same culture that couldn't get enough of the I
Speaker 1: didn't do it boy couldn't care less after it was
Speaker 1: oversaturated with his face, voice, essence, everything. So when the
Speaker 1: last no longer came Bart had a door slammed in
Speaker 1: his face. And this same thing essentially happened to Dennis Kearney.
Speaker 1: On November seventeenth, eighteen seventy eight, he gave a farewell speech,
Speaker 1: made some vague claim that he was needed by the
Speaker 1: workingman back in San Francisco, and left. As The Boston
Speaker 1: Globe reported, this farewell speech was I would say the
Speaker 1: definition of a dud quote. During the speech, which occupied
Speaker 1: about an hour, the large crowd were exceedingly quiet and
Speaker 1: only a few interruptions were made. No enthusiasm was evinced,
Speaker 1: and the whole speech fell flat at the clothes. The
Speaker 1: large crowd quickly dispersed. Dennis Kearney's play for power and
Speaker 1: influence beyond the Rockies, I think it's safe to say
Speaker 1: had clearly failed. Now, wait, what I thought Dennis Kearney
Speaker 1: was the original Donald Trump. That's what you're thinking, right,
Speaker 1: And you're right. The difference here is very much. Indeed,
Speaker 1: that where Donald Trump has succeeded, Dennis Kearney had failed.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, while Donald Trump may have slightly
Speaker 1: tweaked his speeches and statements and tweets, they have all
Speaker 1: remained relatively one note. And while there is an element
Speaker 1: of unpredictability that people associated with candidate Trump, his unpredictability
Speaker 1: was actually pretty mundane and was in and of itself
Speaker 1: pretty predictable, much in the same way as Dennis Kearney's
Speaker 1: behavior became really predictable. And yet, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump became the president and Dennis Kearney became a
Speaker 1: walking joke to just about everybody east of the Rockies.
Speaker 1: He became a punchline. So not so much of an
Speaker 1: original Donald Trump, right, was this all a bunch of hype?
Speaker 1: Not so fast? Like everything in our story, everything involving demagogues,
Speaker 1: Nothing is quite that simple. Because remember, even though he
Speaker 1: was a failure on the East Coast due to the
Speaker 1: crux of his arguments, Dennis Kearney was still the voice
Speaker 1: of the people out west, and he would continue to
Speaker 1: deliver hundreds of speeches in support of workers and back
Speaker 1: to opposing the continued immigration of the Chinese. He would
Speaker 1: even be arrested for his trouble, making him kind of
Speaker 1: a folk hero. But again, this was all confined to
Speaker 1: the West Coast. And while it might sound silly given
Speaker 1: all the mockery he'd endured that drove him home to
Speaker 1: San Francisco and his subsequent confinement there, his rhetoric had
Speaker 1: been and would ultimately be, far more successful and influential
Speaker 1: than anyone could have possibly imagined. Andrew Giory, in summarizing
Speaker 1: Kearney's impacts, says the following quote. In one crucial respect,
Speaker 1: Kearney was a dazzling success. He showed that a forceful
Speaker 1: speaker could stir a crowd to its feet in the
Speaker 1: East by mouthing virulent, racist, anti Chinese epithets. No matter
Speaker 1: that the crowd embraced many classes and segments of society,
Speaker 1: No matter that people came to laugh and shout, No
Speaker 1: matter that numerous workers in labor leaders had renounced Kearney
Speaker 1: and his anti Chinese message to people trying to gauge
Speaker 1: public opinion, the spontaneous agitation of the quote unquote rabble
Speaker 1: carried more weight than all of the scattered voices from
Speaker 1: the working class community that rose up in protest the
Speaker 1: divergence between public opinion and perceptions of public opinion would
Speaker 1: have tragic consequences in the years to come unquote. Before
Speaker 1: you think this is overstating it, consider this one of
Speaker 1: Dennis Kearney's stops on his East Coast tour earlier on,
Speaker 1: in fact, before he was reduced to a quote unquote
Speaker 1: laughing stock, as a number of sources at the time
Speaker 1: put it, and probably his most important stop was with
Speaker 1: none other than the President of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes,
Speaker 1: while meeting with Hayes, or a meeting between Denny and
Speaker 1: Ruthy or Denny and Ruthie. I'm not sure how they
Speaker 1: pronounced it. As one newspaper pudd it at the time,
Speaker 1: Kearney really only spoke about one issue, which was really
Speaker 1: because it was the only issue he knew anything about
Speaker 1: as a West Coast populist demagogue in the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: the issue of Chinese immigration. Hayes's response to Kearney's concerns
Speaker 1: on the issue, though he said, quote, I think Congress
Speaker 1: next winner will come to a definite conclusion favorable to
Speaker 1: your people on this question unquote, and unlike Kearney's words
Speaker 1: ninety nine percent of the time the president's words were
Speaker 1: not winned. One month after Keiarney's unceremonious exodus out west,
Speaker 1: the San Francisco Chronicle reported the following quote, the Chinese
Speaker 1: question has of late excited a great deal more interest
Speaker 1: among public men at the Capitol than it has ever
Speaker 1: before been possible to arouse. Unquote. Only one month after that,
Speaker 1: the tiny snowball began rolling down the hill. On January
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, eighteen seventy nine, the House of Representatives passed
Speaker 1: something called the fifteen Passenger Bill. This restricted the number
Speaker 1: of Chinese immigrants on ships bound of the US, as
Speaker 1: the name of the bill suggests, to fifteen maximum. Any
Speaker 1: number over that would subject the owner of the ship
Speaker 1: to one hundred dollars a head per person over the
Speaker 1: fifteen limit. This act and the acts and treaties to
Speaker 1: come would be justified in purely racial terms that senators
Speaker 1: and congressmen would speak of as if they were foregone conclusions.
Speaker 1: The Republican senator from California, Newton Booth, would say, quote,
Speaker 1: the darkest passages of human history have been enacted when
Speaker 1: alien races have been brought into contact unquote. Democratic Senator
Speaker 1: Lafayette Grover from Oregon would say, attempting to evoke scary,
Speaker 1: horrifying images that were the result of misagenation, quote, we
Speaker 1: want no more mixture of races. No strong nation was
Speaker 1: ever hone of mongrel races of men unquote. Oregon's Republican counterpart,
Speaker 1: John H. Mitchell would describe Chinese immigration as a quote
Speaker 1: unquote great anaconda while trying to give face to quote
Speaker 1: the contaminating, corroding, and destructive effects of the Asiatic barbarians
Speaker 1: in his home and in neighbor states out west, and
Speaker 1: Republican John P. Jones of Nevada, along with many other
Speaker 1: senators in Congressman over the next few years, would pretty
Speaker 1: much give Kearney a run for his money in racist
Speaker 1: rhetoric by explaining the real reason for opposing Chinese immigration
Speaker 1: when he said, quote, we oppose their coming because our
Speaker 1: sturdy Aryan tree will wither in root, trunk, and branch
Speaker 1: if this noxious vibe be permitted to entwine itself around
Speaker 1: it unquote. But here's the striking thing. In the wake
Speaker 1: of the fifteen Passenger Bill and in the years that
Speaker 1: followed it, wasn't just the Western members of Congress who
Speaker 1: took to the podium to decry the evils of Chinese immigration,
Speaker 1: because out West, Kearney and his brand of racist rhetorics
Speaker 1: still had influence. Like I was saying before, so it's
Speaker 1: pretty unsurprising that they'd be pushing for a bill like
Speaker 1: the fifteen Passenger Bill and everything that came afterward. Right,
Speaker 1: But how does that explain the multitudes of East Coast
Speaker 1: politicians expressing similar sentiments. Republican James G. Blaine of Maine,
Speaker 1: who we mentioned earlier and also partly famous for supporting
Speaker 1: Chinese immigration earlier in the eighteen seventies, had suddenly made
Speaker 1: a politically convenient about face, especially with the eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: election looming on the horizon and talk of who was
Speaker 1: going to replace Ruther Fraud as he was being called. Still,
Speaker 1: I mean, that does matter. It might be cynical, but
Speaker 1: that does play a part for why James G. Blaine
Speaker 1: decided to make this about face, because he addressed Congress
Speaker 1: in February of eighteen seventy nine invoked images of quote
Speaker 1: the vast and calculable hordes in China unquote that would
Speaker 1: quote throttle and impair the prosperity of the United States unquote.
Speaker 1: And this is really key here, that the West Coast
Speaker 1: was facing the choice, the supposed choice of living in
Speaker 1: quote the civilization of Christ or the civilization of Confucius.
Speaker 1: Further justifying the violation of the treaty that the United
Speaker 1: States had long established with China and pushing closer toward
Speaker 1: a complete halt of immigration, he concluded his speech to
Speaker 1: Congress with the following quote, The Asiatic cannot go on
Speaker 1: with our population and make a homogeneous element. The idea
Speaker 1: of comparing European immigration with an immigration that has no
Speaker 1: regard for family, that does not recognize the relation of
Speaker 1: husband and wife, that does not observe the tie of
Speaker 1: parent and child, that does not have, in the slightest degree,
Speaker 1: the ennobling and civilizing influences of the Hearthstone and the Fireside.
Speaker 1: I am opposed to the Chinese coming here. I am
Speaker 1: opposed to making them citizens. I am opposed to making
Speaker 1: them voters. Quote. The point here is this, all of
Speaker 1: these men knew an opportunity to take advantage of racial
Speaker 1: tensions to get things done, because when it came down
Speaker 1: to it, this was never actually about race for the
Speaker 1: United States Congress. The fact that it wasn't was why
Speaker 1: things got as bad as they did. The fact that
Speaker 1: there was no principle is why things got as bad
Speaker 1: as they did. This was all about fear, Washington's fear,
Speaker 1: fear of the working class. Because remember, we're in the
Speaker 1: middle of a populist backlash, one that resulted from everything
Speaker 1: wretched and violent and awful that we got into earlier
Speaker 1: in this story. Almost all American politicians were terrified of
Speaker 1: another working class revolt, similar to the one that had
Speaker 1: occurred a few years before, in which the rumblings of
Speaker 1: the populist backlash that had been brewing reached their breaking point.
Speaker 1: The Great Strike of eighteen seventy seven was a dark
Speaker 1: cloud hanging over Congress, and politicians were looking for any
Speaker 1: way too. As Michael Belile puts it, sidestep issues of
Speaker 1: class with simple racism. Class was not workable in the
Speaker 1: political realm as far as they were concerned, race was.
Speaker 1: And since these Chinamen weren't the recently liberated and politically
Speaker 1: valuable former slave class of Black Americans, and since these
Speaker 1: Chinamen were really just an unassimilated, strange looking race of strangers,
Speaker 1: from across the sea. They were fair game, right, And
Speaker 1: if they could frame the loss of jobs and poor
Speaker 1: livelihood of the agitated working class as being one directly
Speaker 1: related to the spike in Chinese immigration, even if it
Speaker 1: was only confined to one part of the country, all
Speaker 1: the better. Right. It wasn't the fault of corrupt business
Speaker 1: practices in backdoor legislation. It was the fault of these
Speaker 1: immigrants working on the cheap right. As our frequently cited
Speaker 1: historian Andrew Giori puts it, quote, rhetoric, bigotry, and national
Speaker 1: policy would at last converge as the Chinese temporarily replace
Speaker 1: blacks to become the most officially despised people in America.
Speaker 1: After a brief hiatus inspired by Civil War idealism, racism
Speaker 1: was back and fashion. Only the target had shifted on quote.
Speaker 1: Such was the mentality of hundreds of scared, shitless cynical
Speaker 1: politicians in Washington. President Hayes would ultimately veto the fifteen
Speaker 1: Passenger Bill. But as we can see, members of Congress,
Speaker 1: both both prominent Easterners and devoted Westerners, they weren't about
Speaker 1: to let this issue die. They'd gone too far. Messages
Speaker 1: were being sent clearly by both politicians and their company
Speaker 1: owning friends and cronies. As stated by Andrew Yori in
Speaker 1: his book, quote, you are replaceable and your replacements are
Speaker 1: ready unquote, referring to the hypothetical multitudes of cheaper, non
Speaker 1: unionized Chinese labor that would put all these white and
Speaker 1: frankly black and all other races, all these workers out
Speaker 1: of a job. This was designed to raise tensions, and
Speaker 1: it did work, because in the first month of eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty you actually start to see labor groups finally flip.
Speaker 1: They begin to speak out against Chinese immigration in general,
Speaker 1: opposed to just imported contract labor, Congress's side stepping of
Speaker 1: class issues with appeals to racism. To use that phrase again,
Speaker 1: they were working and the alienated working classes could now
Speaker 1: rush to the comforting bosom of their representatives, who claimed
Speaker 1: that they had the solution to all their problems. None
Speaker 1: of this was helped by typically hyperbolic and opportunistic press,
Speaker 1: who didn't miss a beat to completely forget all the
Speaker 1: criticism they had of Dennis Kearney and stir up the
Speaker 1: tension with quotes like this one from the Chicago News
Speaker 1: in early eighteen eighty quote the Mongolian is taking his
Speaker 1: cue and heading eastward well New York of Voca Dennis
Speaker 1: Kearney unquote. All of this fed into the presidential election
Speaker 1: of eighteen eighty and beyond. Really James Garfield was elected president,
Speaker 1: all while being implored by the California Republicans, all of
Speaker 1: whom were emboldened to out Kearney, Dennis Kearney and his
Speaker 1: even more powerful Workingmen's Party to come out strong against
Speaker 1: Chinese immigration. President Garfield didn't have much of a chance
Speaker 1: to act on the anti Chinese sentiments swarly to the
Speaker 1: country that he did sort of tepidly support, But he
Speaker 1: didn't really have a chance to do anything about it,
Speaker 1: seeing as he was assassinated in the summer of eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty one, leaving his vice President Chester A. Arthur in charge.
Speaker 1: He was the one holding the reins on the Chinese
Speaker 1: immigration question, and after a treaty with China making immigration
Speaker 1: restriction legal, I'm part of the US government, so nothing
Speaker 1: illegal or untoward legally speaking, could happen if they decided
Speaker 1: to suddenly close immigration to China. Exclusion advocates within Congress
Speaker 1: just wasted no time in drafting what would become probably,
Speaker 1: if not the most infamous, one of the most infamous
Speaker 1: pieces of racist legislation in United States history. That's the
Speaker 1: Chinese Exclusion Act. The obvious congressional supporters of the Chinese
Speaker 1: Exclusion Act came from out West, like California's Republican Senator
Speaker 1: John F. Miller, who made the argument during the deliberations
Speaker 1: that the Chinese living in his state were quote inhabitants
Speaker 1: of another their planet unquote, and that they were quote
Speaker 1: machine like of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat
Speaker 1: or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron. They are
Speaker 1: automatic engines of flesh and blood. They are patient, stolid, unemotional,
Speaker 1: and heard together like beasts. He continued to evoke images
Speaker 1: of an America quote resonant with the sweet voices of
Speaker 1: flaxen haired children unquote, and would call to maintain quote
Speaker 1: American Anglo Saxon civilization without the contamination or adulteration from
Speaker 1: the gang green of Oriental civilization unquote. And when making
Speaker 1: his case for passing the act that would completely exclude
Speaker 1: the Chinese from entering the United States, Miller said, quote
Speaker 1: why not discriminate? Why aid in the increase and distribution
Speaker 1: over our domain of a degraded and inferior race and
Speaker 1: the progenitors of an inferior sort of men unquote. You
Speaker 1: would think that there would be descent to sentiments like
Speaker 1: this in Congress by the time the Chinese Exclusion Act
Speaker 1: of eighteen eighty two entered the debate stage, and you'd
Speaker 1: be right. There was descent, but it was muted descent.
Speaker 1: It was always preceded or closed with a lot of
Speaker 1: throat clearing about how the senator or congressman opposing the
Speaker 1: Act wasn't too fond of the Chinese, or their inability
Speaker 1: to assimilate, or their heathen or pagan ways, and was
Speaker 1: usually followed by more practical than moral reasons for allowing
Speaker 1: the continuity of immigration, like the one Southern Democrat who
Speaker 1: opposed the bill, Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, who simply
Speaker 1: said that the United States should continue its relationship with
Speaker 1: China since it was a fertile market or as he
Speaker 1: put it, quote a wide open field for US unquote,
Speaker 1: and that there was quote unquote boundless trade, and that
Speaker 1: this was necessary. But some of the reasons for opposing
Speaker 1: the act were made. They were made as matters of
Speaker 1: moral principle, especially from the pro abolition types, the Republicans
Speaker 1: who ostensibly still followed in Abraham Lincoln's footsteps. This is
Speaker 1: why the speech given by Ohio Republican Ezra Tailor, who
Speaker 1: is an important figure of the time because he represented
Speaker 1: the slain President Garfield's district, so people were paying extra
Speaker 1: attention to him at the time, But the fact that
Speaker 1: he was a pro abolition old school Republican in that
Speaker 1: sense makes his speech extra depressing because while giving his speech,
Speaker 1: Taylor initially invoked the images of walls being built as
Speaker 1: he expressed his opposition to the bill, and even harangued
Speaker 1: against the racist tone being set by the overall discussion
Speaker 1: of exclusion. He said, quote, we know not when the
Speaker 1: next wall will be erected. I would deem the new
Speaker 1: country we will have after this bill becomes laws changed
Speaker 1: from the old country we have today, as our country
Speaker 1: would have been changed if the rebellion of eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: one had succeeded. We talk in regard to the differences
Speaker 1: between races, and I am astonished at the way we talk.
Speaker 1: I know our books speak of it learnedly. There are
Speaker 1: heaps of nonsense in some books. Others may say, throw
Speaker 1: sentiment aside. But the Republican Party is founded on sentiment,
Speaker 1: and it cannot throw sentiment aside. And that sounds great, right,
Speaker 1: noble even, And yet the noble principled Ezra Taylor couldn't
Speaker 1: help himself as he closed his speech with the following
Speaker 1: remarks quote, I hope my remarks have not been understood
Speaker 1: as favoring a further immigration of the Chinese. I want
Speaker 1: no more of them, But I talk only of this bill,
Speaker 1: and I do not mean to be in the least
Speaker 1: understood as favoring that immigration. I deplore their presence here
Speaker 1: as much as any man. Unquote. This would be really
Speaker 1: funny in its irony if its implications weren't so cruel.
Speaker 1: But in my view, it was probably the famous Republican
Speaker 1: abolitionist from really back in the day at the time
Speaker 1: and civil rights advocate George F. Edmonds, who gave probably
Speaker 1: the most telling speech of all for this part of
Speaker 1: our story, for this sort of epilogue, I guess, like
Speaker 1: the other two guys I've quoted, he came out in
Speaker 1: opposition of the bill, though his opposition was mostly over
Speaker 1: the specific of the initial time frame of the exclusion.
Speaker 1: He suggested five years instead of ten. This gave his
Speaker 1: testimony a bizarre having his cake and eating it too,
Speaker 1: kind of stank on it. And believe me, the press
Speaker 1: took note of this too at the time, because he
Speaker 1: still supported exclusion despite coming out against the bill. And
Speaker 1: yet I think Edmund's speech also had probably the most
Speaker 1: important representative point of view of what everything we've been
Speaker 1: talking about, this idea of a populist backlash, and what
Speaker 1: it all amounts to, what it all leads to, the
Speaker 1: policy that emerges in response to the malformed, malignant anger
Speaker 1: of the people. The policy that gets formed by the elites,
Speaker 1: but whose responsibility can be conveniently passed on to the
Speaker 1: very people that demanded action from these elites, but didn't
Speaker 1: bother to hold them accountable for their cynicism. This was
Speaker 1: all made crystalline when Edmunds made his clothes remarks in
Speaker 1: the matter of the Chinese Exclusion Act quote, no republic
Speaker 1: can succeed that has not a homogeneous population. That was,
Speaker 1: for so long a time the curse of the Southern States.
Speaker 1: It was the want of homogeneity that has promoted political
Speaker 1: discord and discontent among our fellow citizens. Every people and
Speaker 1: every church, every little community must decide what persons other
Speaker 1: than itself are to be received into it and become
Speaker 1: part of it unquote. In other words, this isn't our problem,
Speaker 1: and it isn't really our decision. This is what the
Speaker 1: people want. Populism I Principle zero, many sentiments supporting white labor,
Speaker 1: and admissions that quote the gate must be closed unquote. Later,
Speaker 1: the Chinese Exclusion Act was approved on March twenty third,
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty two, at a vote of one hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty seven in favor to sixty six opposed, with with
Speaker 1: fifty seven members of Congress not even voting. Two months later,
Speaker 1: President Chester A. Arthur signed the bill. Through repeated renewals
Speaker 1: and additions to this act and its precedence, the Chinese
Speaker 1: would no longer be welcome in the United States for
Speaker 1: another one hundred years. Those Chinese that remained in the
Speaker 1: United States, mostly on the West Coast, they be hounded
Speaker 1: and harassed out of their homes and many times openly murdered,
Speaker 1: mirroring the anti Chinese Los Angeles pogram of eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: one with which we opened our story, and or the
Speaker 1: Workingmen's Party ordained massacre of the Chinese miners in Chico
Speaker 1: that we talked about earlier. Oregon Snake River masacer of
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty seven comes to mind, in which thirty one
Speaker 1: Chinese miners were as a federal official investigating it at
Speaker 1: the time, put it quote shot, cut up, stripped, and
Speaker 1: thrown into the river unquote by a mob of ranchers
Speaker 1: and school aged boys. Historian David Stratton, when writing about
Speaker 1: the pogram, described victim's body parts having been taken as
Speaker 1: souvenirs by the mob, with quote, A Chinese skull fashioned
Speaker 1: into a sugar bowl graced the kitchen table of one
Speaker 1: ranch home for many years unquote. The Chinese Exclusion Act
Speaker 1: didn't cause this massacre, but the political realities that the
Speaker 1: acts passage had created certainly made it easier for the
Speaker 1: state to justify acquitting the three perpetrators of this mascre
Speaker 1: that it brought to trial. Whether or not this was
Speaker 1: hardwired racism was irrelevant. Taking the side of some slain
Speaker 1: Chinaman in the years following the Exclusion Act and everything
Speaker 1: that had led up to it was politically inconvenient at best,
Speaker 1: but more likely political suicide at worst. It was a
Speaker 1: perfect political confluence, a populist backlash made useful by the
Speaker 1: elitist political class, But it wasn't that clear at the time,
Speaker 1: and arguably still isn't. Andrew Giory very astutely points out
Speaker 1: that by the time the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty two, and after its effects had begun
Speaker 1: to spread outward, it was increasingly difficult to see where
Speaker 1: this all came from. He writes, quote who was behind
Speaker 1: the Chinese Exclusion Act? Was it simply the work of politicians?
Speaker 1: Or were the nations elected leaders responding to the will
Speaker 1: of the American people? After so many years of agitation
Speaker 1: on the subject, it was no longer easy to tell.
Speaker 1: Politicians angling for office had, no doubt, swung many people
Speaker 1: to their side, and the momentum, in turn, had forced
Speaker 1: other politicians to fall in line. Public opinion and politicians
Speaker 1: fed on each other, and by eighteen eighty two it
Speaker 1: had become difficult to separate the two forces unquote. Here's
Speaker 1: the thing, though, If we examined this movement and the
Speaker 1: many other movements born from a populous backlash closely and together,
Speaker 1: we should realize that it will always be impossible to
Speaker 1: say whose quote unquote fault. Things like the Chinese Exclusion
Speaker 1: Act or the Trump administration's twenty seventeen travel ban are
Speaker 1: seeking to find fault in stories like this is a
Speaker 1: fool's errand they come from a confluence of factors and
Speaker 1: forces that take place over a wide span of time.
Speaker 1: But one thing is for sure. If you have head
Speaker 1: chef Neil Ferguson's five ingredients for a populous backlash, it
Speaker 1: is all but certain that things like this will happen,
Speaker 1: regardless of you, or your parties, or your country's political bias.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter if you have a demogogue like Dennis
Speaker 1: Kearney or Donald Trump running around while you have the
Speaker 1: other four ingredients present the perception of rampant corruption, the
Speaker 1: gross inequality, the effects of an economic crisis, and a
Speaker 1: rise in immigration. If those other ingredients are there, the
Speaker 1: demagogue shaped void will be filled by someone in the
Speaker 1: stead of those unwilling to fill it themselves. And even
Speaker 1: if that demagogue arrives and is quickly laughed off the stage,
Speaker 1: there's no reason to sit back and automatically breathe a
Speaker 1: sigh of relief. We can see from this story that
Speaker 1: the effects can linger on for a very very long
Speaker 1: time without anyone being the wiser. After all, all of
Speaker 1: the politicians involved in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion
Speaker 1: Act had either completely distanced themselves from Dennis Kearney, forgotten him,
Speaker 1: or had never really even been his ally to begin with,
Speaker 1: He'd essentially become a non entity in Washington. And yet
Speaker 1: during this whole legislative process, this march toward the exclusion
Speaker 1: of an entire race of people from entering the United States,
Speaker 1: a House representative named Martin Townsend out of New York
Speaker 1: was quoted as saying the following, Dennis Kearney is now
Speaker 1: represented in the National Halls. So, as you have probably
Speaker 1: noticed at various points actually throughout our story, Dennis Kearney
Speaker 1: is not a one to one carbon copy of the
Speaker 1: forty fifth President of the United States. He is the
Speaker 1: original Donald Trump. But Donald Trump is not a clone
Speaker 1: of him. I mean, Kearney's origins were obviously far different.
Speaker 1: He wasn't American, and he was born quite poor and
Speaker 1: could very easily be described as a self made man
Speaker 1: who had no advantages granted upon him. He also, probably
Speaker 1: most importantly, never became president. As I mentioned earlier, Ny
Speaker 1: continued his political activities with the California Workingmen's Party throughout
Speaker 1: the lead up to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which he
Speaker 1: did support, and he would make hundreds of relatively well
Speaker 1: received speeches throughout the early eighteen eighties. But eventually he
Speaker 1: would return to operating his business, and he would buy
Speaker 1: himself a valuable plot of land where he would quietly
Speaker 1: retire until his death in nineteen oh seven, after which
Speaker 1: he would be largely forgotten by anyone without an interest
Speaker 1: in California labor history, at least quite a far cry
Speaker 1: from President of the United States. However, it's not simple
Speaker 1: biographical information that creates our story's main through line of
Speaker 1: pinpointing this quote unquote original Donald Trump. It's the historical
Speaker 1: circumstances in which they both existed and of which they
Speaker 1: both took advantage that makes these men tethered through time.
Speaker 1: Despite never becoming president, Kearney did set the tone. He created,
Speaker 1: the rhetoric, he crafted, the excuses and the justifications, and
Speaker 1: all of these things turned into more rhetoric from higher
Speaker 1: and higher offices and eventually turned into cold, hard policy
Speaker 1: policy that lasted well into the twentieth century and arguably
Speaker 1: affected the racial demographics and attitudes of the United States
Speaker 1: for even longer. This isn't necessarily just about Donald Trump
Speaker 1: or Dennis Kearny, though the parallels are striking and fun even,
Speaker 1: But this is really about populism and its inherent vulnerabilities,
Speaker 1: whether we're watching it gained steam with the working class
Speaker 1: in the eighteen seventies or watching it gain traction with
Speaker 1: both political parties in the years since twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 1: without missing a beat, potentially being molded into something ugly.
Speaker 1: Populism is a force. It's not a person. It's a
Speaker 1: culmination of circumstances and realities. We can see this with
Speaker 1: what happened in twenty sixteen, and we can see this
Speaker 1: happen in eighteen seventy eight. The language was there, the
Speaker 1: feelings were there, all of it was in place, and
Speaker 1: all it required was a strangely gifted outsider who could
Speaker 1: whip the people listening up into a frenzy. Whether that
Speaker 1: person is a self made Irish American dray Man who
Speaker 1: whipped resentful broken in the end really just scared Americans
Speaker 1: into a nativist frenzy before fading into obscurity, or whether
Speaker 1: it's a coddled, thin skin new York or real estate
Speaker 1: magnate who did the same and became elected President of
Speaker 1: the United States. So yes, unlike Donald Trump, Dennis Kearney
Speaker 1: never became president. But when we look at Dennis Kearney
Speaker 1: and the effects of his demagoguery that were the culmination
Speaker 1: of the populist backlash of the eighteen seventies, it shows
Speaker 1: us that you don't need to become president for your nativist,
Speaker 1: populist rhetoric to become policy. In fact, if that rhetoric
Speaker 1: is coming from the office of the president, one could
Speaker 1: even say that there is a certain disadvantage to that you,
Speaker 1: as a citizen, know where that rhetoric is coming from.
Speaker 1: The spotlight is always on the guy saying it. Everything
Speaker 1: he says is quoted and requoted, tweeted, retweeted. It's always
Speaker 1: on display for the world to see and more importantly,
Speaker 1: to challenge, unlike when the rhetoric comes from someone smaller,
Speaker 1: from strikingly effective opportunist who knows how to speak to
Speaker 1: and ostensibly for the people, and who manages to fade
Speaker 1: into the obscurity of history. So when someone starts echoing
Speaker 1: his sentiments nearly a century and a half later, all
Speaker 1: we can do is sputter and disbelief. And then when
Speaker 1: someone starts winning elections with those ancient, forgotten sentiments, all
Speaker 1: we can do is weep and moan and declare. But
Speaker 1: that's impossible. All right, Hey, everybody, glad to have you
Speaker 1: still listening, if you're still here. I just want to
Speaker 1: give a quick shout out to all the people who've
Speaker 1: been supporting this show over on Patreon and substack at
Speaker 1: the comrades and friends level or a bar that includes
Speaker 1: Bob Downing, Eric Hodges, Greg Hunter, so so Skipachaco, Molly Pan,
Speaker 1: John Pisano, Anna r PJ Raider, Matthew m Rice, Emily Schmidt,
Speaker 1: and of course f you. I really appreciate all the
Speaker 1: support you guys have been giving me over the years.
Speaker 1: In many cases it's been incredible, and I was really
Speaker 1: happy to share this old episode with all of you guys,
Speaker 1: as embarrassing as it might be to a certain degree
Speaker 1: to hear myself six years ago talking with any sort
Speaker 1: of authority, but you know, I had a good time
Speaker 1: with this episode at the time, and just thinking about
Speaker 1: this stuff these days. For obvious reasons, eighteen seventy six
Speaker 1: was a long time ago, but in the grand scheme
Speaker 1: of things, especially in the timescale I've worked with with
Speaker 1: this show, not that long ago. It's kind of wild
Speaker 1: right anyway, Hope you're all staying safe out there, and
Speaker 1: please stay tuned for the next proper episode of History Impossible.
Speaker 1: Thanks again