test. test.

captioning performed by vitac >> -- the polling place was in the center of the building, but to get to that polling place, to get into the center of the building, you had to pass by two tables, one was staffed by a republican, one by democratic operatives, and they were the ones who gave you your ballot, the ballots were printed by parties, there was no official ballot, and the operatives who worked for the republican party at that polling place happened to also work for a man named thomas kingsford who owned the kingsford mill, you might use kingsford starch in your cooking or to keep your clothes stamped, still a large company today, and

it was widely known that as the kingsford employees, as the many who worked for kingsford walked into the building the republican operatives would hand them their tickets and remind them that they were expected to vote the way that kingsford wanted them to. they had to go straight on in. as one of the democratic observers testified, the workers dare not do it, they dare not change their ticket, they dare not try to fight against thompson kingsford because they're watched. that was the key element, they are being watched as they walk into the polls. because they were working in these tough economic times and also insecure at the polls workers often had little recour recourse. this happened throughout the country and the crisis blew up in part because it was a politically useful crisis for some people. while these events did happen, while there were thousands of people being intimidated, it was also useful for the partisan presses of the time to accuse the other side of doing this, even more than they were.

so gradually democratic presses began to accuse republican employers of intimidating their employees all out of proportion with what they were actually doing. this is kind of a difficult element in my work in that this is a real crisis, this is really happening, but in the same sense it is also a rhetorical crisis and it becomes an even broader rhetorical crisis because these forms of intimidation, threatening to fire someone if they don't vote the way you want to, struck deeply at what a lot of these workers believed was their manhood, their independence, their ability to provide for their families. just as one example, in portland, maine, in 1880 the road workers on road working -- a road working municipal crew in portland were especially worried that year because there was going to be a tough winter coming, the election would be taking place this september as it always did in maine at the time but they knew the winter was coming and they didn't want to be out of work in the winter. their foreman yelled out to them as they walked to the polls at work, mind how you vote, boys,

vote for your bread and butter, if you cut my throat now i will cut yours thereafter. i am on your track and i will camp on it. they walked to the polls, watched as they took the ticket he wanted an voted. one person actually refused to do so and went home and was never employed on the road work crew again. what's most remarkable about this form of intimidation is that it could inter lace with other forms of coercion, other violent forms of intimidation. this was especially true in the south where in virginia in one example in 1896 the black workers of the local insane asylum were marched down to the polls by their boss. now, in virginia at that time there were two lines to vote, the white line and the colored line and the remarkable thing about this incident is that the employees of the asylum were allowed to skip both lines, they didn't have to wait in either line. of course, the white line was allowed to vote before the colored line as long as there was anyone in the white line no one in the colored line would be allowed to vote. these men were allowed to vote

but they absolutely were not allowed to vote for the candidates they wished to vote for, in this case they were told to vote for the democratic ticket and they did. that's the way that these forms of intimidation can be interlaced on top of each other, the legal intimidation, the legal separation and suppression into different lines is overlaid on the knowledge of the violence rendered against african-americans in the south and then add to that the coercion, the intimidation of losing your job. now, states tried to fight against this kind of intimidation a number of ways, in the state of connecticut which experienced a great deal of economic intimidation they passed several laws making this kind of intimidation illegal and in 1884 they actually attempted to enforce those laws. the state of connecticut arrested a man who had intimidated his employee in a mill in water bury, connecticut, and the man seems to have had perfectly happy to admit, yes, i intimidated him, i told him what to do when he went to vote, but the course dismissed the case. the judge determined that the employer had simply been using his first amendment right to

tell his employee how to vote. attempting to solve this problem through a punitive law, through a law that punished you didn't seem to be working. so gradually and this happened in the late 1880s states began to adopt secret ballot laws and the secret ballot was invented, the modern secret balance that we used comes to the united states shortly thereafter and the first american to advocate for the secret ballot in print with a man named henry george who is a reform advocate, this is 1871 before he was fully famous for his reform advocacy. he advocates for a secret ballot because it would end bribery and he put it another form of election corruption which is even worse and more demoralizing than bribery, the coercion of voters by their employers. the secret ballot the first time it's mentioned in the united states this particular form is coupled directly with economic voter intimidation. george's allies in reform and labor circles took up the call

and advocated for labor secrecy. the socialist i can labor policy the first national policy to include secrecy in a national platform in 1885 and in a rush of legislation between 1888, 1891 most states passed secret ballot laws finally separating employers from their employees when they went to the polls. but those laws weren't passed in all states, particularly in the south secret ballot laws lagged, north carolina, for example, didn't pass a secret ballot law until 1929. but also secret ballot laws are not necessarily useful to protect against generalized form of intimidation. they don't really protect african-americans going to the polls, this he protect specific workers from their specific employers. it breaks a chain of information and so the secret ballot laws are never going to be effective at preventing generalized intimidation, but after all that's not what they were designed to do. when we talk about secret ballot laws as my research argues we should remember what they were first enacted to do, prevent bribery, intimidation and

specifically this chain of knowledge between an employer and an employee about how they were voting. especially now as we're doing away with ballot secrecy in a number of ways through allowing ballot selfies in a polling place, oh, yes, the supreme court refers to ballot selfies as taking a picture of your ballot whether or not you are in it, they don't seem to understand what selfie means, but also through no excuse absentee palleting which solves problems with voter suppression reintroduces the possibility that you are voting in the presence of someone who might have a course of influence on you. a core element of into i research that kind of brings it up to the present is that we need to understand why we have the laws we do before we decide to do away with them. i think the secret ballot is one of those most important laws, too. thank you. [ applause ] >> as you can tell perhaps i'm

getting over a cold so i'm a little karaoke, that's one of the reasons why i will keep my formal comments brief, the other reason being that i want to get to our conversation. really this is just so that we can understand and convert the context in which i'm approaching these questions and this issue. my research focuses particularly on the ku klux klan of the 1920s which is really when the organization was at the height of its power in the united states. it's when the organization is breaking sectional boundaries, moving outside the south to establish a nationwide power base, one of the strongest, most kind of powerful and influential klan strong holds, for example, was right here in indiana, of course, and the klan of the '20s peaks in membership numbers in 1924 with an estimated 4 million

members nationwide. those members are drawn to the organization not just as adherence to the ideology, to the tenets of white spremism, but also the klan of the '20s candidly sells itself as the answer to a variety of ills or supposed ills. so it's a fraternity organization that protects against the feminization and the breakdown of mass clue masculine society, it's a law and order group, they are moralists defending against the apparent evils of modernism and jazz. oh, no, they're very upset at jazz. they are nativists particularly picking up on popular

anti-catholic and anti-semitic sentiments to really drive calls to restrict immigration or halt immigration entirely. and far more than this, really the klan is very responsive to local concerns and tailors itself in those ways. so we have this kind of interesting phenomenon with the klan of the '20s where even as this membership grows, klan violence declines. in fact, racial violence overall declines through the 1920s after the kind of sharp spike in lynchings post world war i. certainly compared to what's effectively the paramilitary klan of reconstruction or the terrorism of the klan in the civil rights era, historians

have generally written about the klan of the 1920s as less physically violent, though, of course, still driven by the same fundamentally violent ideology. that's not the whole picture, though. and to correct that misunderstanding what we need to do is look at the klan's political involvement. i think it's particularly interesting to look at this from the federal level. now, if we focus on electoral success, it's pretty easy to dismiss the influence of the ku klux klan on the politics of the 1920s, which is what historians have generally tended to do. they are very, very good at drawing a lot of attention to themselves, they are generally very, very bad at actually

getting a klan candidate or a candidate tagged as affiliated with the klan to be elected to office. they have successes sporadically generally in local strong holds, indiana, of course, one of the most notorious strong holds of klan power, as i mentioned, and, therefore, some relative success in electing local officials and state officials, but very rare at the federal level. what my current research focuses on is the fact that that electoral success isn't really the key to understanding the klan's influence on federal politics. the key to understanding the klan's involvement with federal politics in the '20s is understanding the ways in which the klan functioned as a political lobbying movement. not to think about what the klan

is doing at the ballot box, but to think about what the klan is doing on a yacht on the potomac filled with senators and chorus girls. real situation. and it's there that the klan is tremendously impactful in shaping legislation that is directly relevant to klan interests and particularly klan ha hate reds. it's there where the klan will help shape what federal prohibition legislation is going to look like. it's there that the klan is going to help shape what the immigration restriction legislation over the 10920s looks like. because of this the klan doesn't need extra legal vigilante

violence to achieve their goals, instead the klan of the 1920s is very effective at shaping policy to support their violent ideology. political power meant the klan violence expressed itself as state violence. it expressed itself not through robed klansmen, but through federal prohibition enforcement agents, it expressed itself through the border patrol created in 1924, the same year that the klan's membership peaks. and so if we are to understand the enduring legacy of the klan, it is that intersectional nexus between bigotry, violence and politics that we need to understand. thank you.

[ applause ] >> well, that is a pretty good place to jump off about a broader conversation about violence in political history. i think that the first thing i'd love to hear you all talk about is the relationship between violence and politics from kind of a broader level, which is to say i think that there is often this idea that violence is a failure of politics and somehow exists outside of politics and that in some cases it seems like violence is kind of a core component of politics in a lot of ways. so where do you see violence fitting into political history and into the practice of politics? >> well, i can say my own classes i talk about violence really -- violence is how we understand history in a lot of ways. that every significant moment in history we benchmark with violence.

so even if you think about how classes are taught, it's like from the slave trade to the american revolution, the american revolution to the civil war and then we teach classes, you know, on the war, in between the wars, the cold war, world war ii. all of these moments. 9/11. like all of these moments are violent moments and that is how we mark turning points. so in a lot of ways i see violence as this great like accelerator or this fluid that sort of moves political movements or social movements along. and i think it's a great way for looking at how we examine change because i think a lot of times there is a tendency to have this idea that change comes about through nonviolence or that when we look at the civil rights movement, oh, see, they pushed nonviolence and that's sort of how we get these great changes, but what they're responding to is violence, very much so in every aspect of their lives. so i'm constantly pushing students to sort of nuance how we understand violence, not to

sort of dismiss it as something that's fanatical or peripheral or just is an episode that happens, it's just a moment, but really as an explanation for how policy is made or not made in terms of how progress is developed or not developed. and i think violence is the perfect framework for that. >> so i think -- this is an excellent question. obviously -- i mean, where does violence fit in? if we need to think about violence as a political language, that violence has meaning, specific acts of violence have meaning and they can be used for political purposes. very rarely is violence unrestrained, unrestricted. it's usually focused for a particular purpose and groups will use violence, specific acts of violence, to try to get their political point across.

so that's one thing i have students think about, what does it mean? what does a lynching mean in the 1920s, right? what are they trying to say? what does a cross burning mean? what are they trying to say? there's a sort of ritual to this. who is their audience, the audience of an act of violence, the sort of performative nature of it. i think we also as political historians need to think about the role of violence and the state and the growth of the state, right? talking about the border agents, right, the violence of the state, violence is embedded in the state. the idea that the modern state has monopoly on violence and what constitutes legitimate violence, thinking about police violence, police brutality, the violence of the state, et cetera. if you get students to think through that as you were saying i think it's an enormously useful exercise, but also we should continue to be attentive to in our scholarship as political historians. i think we can't ignore that

violence is at the very heart of american political history. >> one element as well that i've come across in my research and in teaching students is that it's very easy to play a what aboutism game with forms of political violence. to say, oh, because this party used this form of violence and this party got into a scuffle, they're both violent, to put the label of violence -- i think this is what you were talking about earlier about antifa. one thing that i noticed in the gilded age in particular was that being able to claim that the other party was also doing bad things was a way for you to excuse your much worse things. thomas bracket reed the republican speaker of the house in the 1890s when talking about lynchings and violence in the south and economic intimidation in the north said, yes, these are both crimes but murder and catching fish out of season are both crimes, too, no one would ever confuse them. keep that in mind that when we are talking about violence we need to be very clear about what kinds of violence we're talking

about, historical actors are using, how they compare to each other and not to just label each interactions between people as violence. to dig deeper into that. >> i teach a class on terrorism in the united states, the fun never stops in my classroom. i think i do so as a way of getting -- addressing with students the idea that not just violence, but fundamentally political violence has been a through line in american history. when we look at obviously definitions of terrorism are going to be crucial within that, but ideas of legitimate violence, illegitimate violence, state violence, individual violence, they really do often function as driving questions

in, as we kind of said, change or moments of change. actually to kind of do the terribly uncouth thing and respond to a question with a question. something that i was thinking about as i was listening to everybody talk was this kind of almost myopic place we are in today with regards to the use of violence and political violence particularly. it's interesting -- this is, again, off the top of my head, just kind of thinking about this, but do you think we've come to a place where reform is associated with nonviolence, but revolution is associated with violence, and that that's why kind of political violence is seen as beyond the pale now? >> yeah, what do you guys think of that? does violence sort of render

whatever the political aim is i will illegitimate? is revolution considered illegitimate today in american culture? >> i would say in some ways yes. for my own work, you know, i think it's very easy for us to look back at slavery and say that it was wrong, hopefully. i think it should be easy to say that. but i think that, you know, a lot of the stories in my book are about black abolitionists who are fighting back, who are protecting their communities and using force and violence to protect their communities. everyone loves hearing these stories because they are like, yeah, slavery is wrong. i think in some ways you can even support that in talking about segregation or jim crow, hopefully we can all agree that that was wrong and that people will see that even, you know, taking up arms in self-defense might be, you know, rational, but i think that today the way

that a race is sort of reincarnated itself and the way that it looks, it's extremely difficult to take up those same sort of stances to use protective violence or self-defense in a way to purport, you know, a revolution or change. people think that you're radical, people think that you're crazy. it's funny because in the civil rights movement they thought they were crazy, too, and even the an ligsists they thought that they were crazy. so i feel like maybe you need distance in order to accomplish it, but, no, i don't think that people -- i think that people believe that you can accomplish anything through nonviolence and while i agree with that to some extent there is a little bit of, i think, historical naiveté in terms of how we really see change come about throughout this country. >> excellent. that's a great question. i'd like to just jump in there and take us back to the founding moment because i think that we're living with the legacies of that. this is a nation that was born

in violent revolution, civil war fair, yet the founding fathers a shoed that because the flip side of revolution is rebellion, slave rebellion, insurrection, illegitimate, must be suppressed by the state. who you do you justify the foundations of a new nations state that was founded in an act of illegitimate violence to overthrow the sitting government. the way that you do that is in part rewriting the history of that initial revolution, but then also combating -- becoming rather counterrevolutionary -- i think there is an argument to be made that the united states is one of the most counterrevolutionary countries in history, especially considering slave rebellion, but also around the world. i mean, they come out of

vietnam, this is a counterrevolution. so i think that we as political historians sort of need to think through that perhaps a bit more and maybe trace some -- historians we love to explain change, right, but to think about some of the continuitiees that exist as well. >> i think some of this can be explained in a way through the recent rehabilitation of john brown and the fact that he's now being reintroduced into the american cannon as the most american of all heroes when that would seem like in part because of the aftermath of the civil war and white supremacist efforts to paint him as a crazy person but also at the time he was considered quite the radical. so now to have him discussed as, you know, at the forefront of american liberty is a kind of remarkable moment. i wonder what it might say about the people who are understanding or putting him back into the american cannon in that way,

what do they think about political violence if they're making john brown their patron saint. >> just to pick up on that for a second as well, it's interesting that we're seeing that the mainstreaming of that john brown idea now, right, but the people who have most often in the recent past compared themselves to john brown have been those attacking abortion clinics and abortion providers. >> yeah. yeah. >> and that is this very specific form of political violence that they do see themselves acting within the tradition of. >> absolutely. >> one of the words that keeps coming up is legitimate and illegitimate, what's interesting about the question of violence is that aside from a very, very few committed pacifists, there aren't that many people in the united states hong that all violence is illegitimate. so how do you see historical actors making the case for their

violence being legitimate? because i think that as historians it often changes over time which actors we think are -- john brown is a great example of this -- which actors are using violence legitimately and one ones aren't. so how are your people making their cases? >> i can tell you my black abolitionists i have found no other group of people who have a moral sort of i'm pettus for using violence. they talked often about american hypocrisy, about the american revolution being uncomplete, that the haitian revolution in haiti is where the real revolution takes place because they actually freed their slaves and put in place equality. so i think that black abolitionists are saying since slavery is wrong, slavery is violent and that we have a moral authority, a god-given right and that's really important that when they can sort of solidify their legitimacy with biblical

tenets, who can argue against the bible, right? certainly in the 19th century you can't really do that. and so they're using these, you know, biblical al gears to justify using violence, to justify using force, and they're using revolutionary language -- i love the idea -- i talk about this in my book as well, violence as a political language, they're using that language of give me liberty or give me death. he who would be free must himself strike the first blow. they are using this language over and over again to threaten and provoke, you know, the abolition of slavery and they feel justified in that because they believe that they are most oppressed. i think, again, it's very easy for us to look at this from a 21st century perspective and say, of course you're justified in this, but i also think that legitimacy comes through winning. so we look at the american revolution as legitimate because

they won. we look at, you know, the civil war is legitimate because the north won, right? but what happens when you don't win? does that mean your cause is no longer legitimate? i think especially when you are looking at black freedom and black liberation there has not been a lot of victories but that doesn't mean that these actions are not legitimate. >> that's excellent. the american revolutionaries were masters of this, of this game of legitimate versus illegitimate, right? because from the very beginning of this process they used the press, right, to -- they mobilized the press, were really quite effective way to paint their enemies, those who opposed the glorious cause or common cause as illegitimate, inherently illegitimate. if you think of the declaration of independence it's this masterful political document justifying american nation hood on the grounds that the british violated the laws of nations,

respectable nations and they were guilty of these barbaric acts of violence that made them outside of the political sphere, right, and that this new nation would be respectable in the eyes of the world because it had -- it played by the rules, right, and so that's why very early on you see washington is so animated by the desire to turn these ragtag massachusetts militiamen into what he calls a respectable army. this he need to sort of look the part of the your meaneuropeans,d to play by these rules that would be understand in european eyes as a ways of lejt mating what was illegitimate. the british had suppressed countless domestic insurrecti insurrections, slave you are sur recses, jacker bite scottish and irish inn certificate recses, by labeling them as others they

were illegitimate. so the revolution is really very quickly joined to that and this political game and justifying their own actions. >> that's good. >> i think it's interesting to consider the legitimate/illegitimate question with how it intersects with another question that i see brought up with this a lot as well which is effective/ineffective and this is particularly something that you see over and over again with the question of how to respond to white supremacist violence, is it effective not just is it legitimate but is it effective to respond to that violence with violence. and there is a fascinating debate that rages around that in the black press of the 1920s that says what is the best way to respond to this? do we ignore it, do we just deny it, the oxygen of attention and let the fire burn itself out. well, we could do that, but

while we're ignoring it the fire is burning and is causing preventable devastation, so presumably we have to do something and what is that something? certainly there are those in the black press like "the messenger" who say simply, no, they already sent us a severed hand in the mail, we are not carrying on a debating society, we are encouraging our readers to carry a gun or a brick or a bat and if you encounter a clansman you don't try to reason with them. so i think there is a really kind of interesting question there as well about not just how do we defend violence as legitimate, but how do we defend violence as effective at the same time. >> that's good. >> so employers in the late 19th century legitimized their coercion of their employees by what they call claiming the persuasive right. they say because i give you your bread and butter, because i pay for you to live in a house, i

have the right to persuade. in different places they.enforced that right differently. in the south the persuasive right is taken to mean that that persuasion will have an effect. like you will do what i have said. in some places in the north and especially in the west, that persuasive right is considered you will have to listen to me, i will give you my opinion, but i won't necessarily follow it up with discharge from employment. so in some places those threats are less aggressive than others, but always the right is claimed because i pay you, you have -- i have gained an extra political right because i pay you your wages. so that's where the legitimacy comes from to be able to make these claims. it doesn't work the same way in all parts of the country, but generally the idea that i've paid you and, therefore, i have that right. >> it does strike me that one other missing lejt mating tool for violence is the claim of self-defense, which is used

quite broadly across the spectrum, whether we are talking about black panthers in the late 1960s or talking about white supremacists in any period of american history that there is sort of an inherent legitimacy to i am defending myself or defending my country or defending a set of beliefs or institutions that has been wielded effectively in the past. i'm going to ask one more question and then i'm going to open it up to the audience, and it's -- i don't know that it's a good question, so you can tell me, but it does seem like one of the things that came out earlier in the conversation was about state violence and violence almost as a tool of state building. i think that forces our eyes to this centrality as few of you have suggested, the centrality of violence to american politics and american history. how does that change the story we tell about u.s. history to

put violence at the center of it because i think that that is very contrary to the story americans like to tell themselves and we don't always tell like self-comforting stories as historians about the nation, but it seems like a particularly disruptive move to put violence at the center of that story. >> i mean, i feel like that's what i'm trying to do in my work and it's incredibly hard to do to sort of flip the script a little bit in terms of how we understand violence and how we've been told, i think, these really romantic stories about the underground railroad or about the civil rights movement that feel very nostalgic and sweet. they are stories you can tell to kids, you know, rosa parks refused to give up her seat, you know, and that's very like, oh, yay. or you can talk about harriet

tubman and she rescued these slaves and did it without hurting anyone. we can, i feel like, tell these stories and you can package them so well, but what i try to do is to tell the stories that are like in order to flee a lot of times you had to fight. so i tell the story about a man who was running away from slavery and this man was pursuing had i'm and he was like stop chasing me, if you don't stop chasing me i'm going to kill you. he kept chasing him so he killed him. he tells this story and the audience is like applauding and they're like you did right, but, i mean, i tell this story to show that the whole system of slavery is inherently violent and that oftentimes in order for people to bring about their own freedom they had to employ violence and that how do we understand that in terms of black freedom and black liberation? how do we justify that and how

do we take it into the present? one of the concepts that i'm trying to work with is this idea of like protective violence. which to me is more than self-defense. so it's not just protecting yourself, but protective violence is protecting your family, your community, but even strangers, right? you're protecting marginalized people, oppressed people, people who don't have access to the ballot, people who don't have access to these traditional channels to bring about reform. how do we examine protective violence as useful and as something that is also legitimate and it's -- i don't know if i'm answering your question, but it's a really hard exercise to do because there's this paradox, right, in one stance we hate violence, with he an who are it, we think it's awful, on the other hand we love the american revolution, we love reenacting the civil war, we love like -- you know, like doing these really violent things and reenacting them.

there is this love/hate relationship with violence that i have not yet been able to reconcile. >> that brings up a great question that i deal with a lot in my classroom actually is that for my students unlike the history ogg gra ever that i talked about, for my students the war for independence and the american revolution are synonymous, they are the same thing, you know, they are not aware of the republican synthesis. for them it's just, you know, shooting red coats at lexington and concord and then washington crosses the delaware and suddenly we are a nation. that's good, right, this is like -- it's like reenacting the civil war, that's a good violence. we like that, right? and what i try to do with my book is that's what the revolutionaries wanted us to think, but, in fact, that fails, right? sort of like restrained battlefield, you know, victory story, remember roque story degrades over the course of the

conflict of the revolution is we lose control of the war. i think there is -- i think that we need to sort of in some ways rethink the constitutional moment, right, as an effort by these -- we can call them nationalists in this period to sort of reassert -- to reassert monopoly on violence. this new state, we need to control this. we need to control violence because that was messy and bad and we are going to take charge of it. as we saw there is some great debate over this. this is one of the origins of the second amendment, right, an armed populous. it's a very contentious issue and we are still dealing with the reverberations of that debate. does the state have a complete monopoly on violence or are the people allowed to self-defend? i think we need as mris cal historians to engage with that. >> i think about the election of

186 1860. have any of you heard the phrase lincoln wasn't even on the ballot in the election of 1860. there was no official ballot. people had to hand out party ballots outside the polls. lincoln wasn't on the ballot but it's because it would have required republicans in the south to stand outside the polls with tickets with lincoln's name on it handing them out and when you think -- when you really think about that historical moment, there is no way that would have been allowed to happen. those people would have been beaten up, they would have been driven out of town, they wouldn't have even existed. so the way in which that simple phrase lincoln wasn't on the ballot in the south, the republican party was a sectional party actually conceals a great deal of violence that would have happened had they attempted to hand out ballots in the south. so just in that one moment you can see that we've managed to talk our way past a moment of pretty extreme violence or potential violence. >> that's good. >> so i think there's kind of two things i wanted to respond to there a little bit, which is first of all the idea of the

self-defense violence or violence in self-defense, and similar in terms of thinking about that that's a difficult question because it then asks us to determine what counts as self-defense. i'm thinking particularly of something like kathleen blue's book who of course unfortunately can't be with us today, but her point that the kind of paramilitary white supremacist movement post vietnam is in large part new because it breaks with the state and starts to see the state as the threat, and as such needs to defend itself against the state. so i would argue that they are acting in self-defense, very much so, in a way of that protective violence. the other kind of, i guess, definitional question that i

struggle with this is then this relationship between political history and violence, going back to dr. candy's keynote from last night, he discussed the idea of political history really being the history of power, and at that point then we have to determine what is the relationship between power and violence, and i think that is a huge question that i am in no way prepared to kind of provide a definitive answer to. what i will say is that jacquelyn jones' biography of lucy parsons, the radical feminist black anarchist in the late 19th century talks a lot about parsons' approach to violence and her belief in violence as legitimate because

within that anarchist i can framework the state is inherently violent, all politics is inherently violent. so i think there's certainly an argument to be made there for kind of viewing it through that lens. >> to go back to what was said, it's not violence, it's anti-racist violence. so if you can call it, you know -- it's not discrimination, it's anti-racist discrimination, given his talk last night, it kind of goes into the same thing. >> absolutely. >> right. >> so i guess you could say it's racist self-defense and anti-racist self-dense. >> anti-racist self-defense. yes. >> with that i'd like to open it up to the audience. two ground rules, introduce yourself, also wait for the microphone since they're filming. >> hi. i'm elhe wilelie shermer. you did a great job of going from the revolution until about the 1920s but then we get into

the rest of the 20th century and my question is actually picking up on gideon's idea about do we need to expand the definition of violence. i think that's particularly clear after particularly the new deal and the question of labor. i'm going to actually not do sort of labor because even though it may not be as physically violent, the kind of clashes that do, you know excite us and we can turn these sort of narratives, what about the work of nathan connelly about the violent destruction about putting a freeway right through black communities. he says it is no less violent. i think he is a he right there. or how about the tax policies that rip whole communities apart in the central areas, completely dislocating those communities. labor laws, you're right we don't have the violent clashes as much anymore, the intimidati intimidation, but we have basically taken away your right to join a union and have that ability to right to work laws, the right to starve laws and that kind of question. we have the questions about

voting, you know, just -- but now we can blame you for not getting to the polls on time or registering. how about the zoning that goes along with not allowing the multi-family units that might be possible for those dislocated or actually enabling them to have food in their actual neighborhoods that we have whole food deserts. the lack of healthcare questions and that there seems to be a real -- there are real casualties to this trade wars, that rural america has been devastated. what was shocking over the last three years, we have across the entire board a decline in life expectancy. for the irs tifirst time since 1930s. we are dealing with levels of depression and suicide and how much can we incorporate that as a violence not only by the state but corporations and how does that framework and if we are going to expand the definition of violence for the 20th century does that help to change about where we might be seeing other aspects of violence in maybe the

18th and 19th as well? i'm sorry. >> that was a great question, it tackles a lot. i think i will stick with voting since it's what i know best. >> sure. >> methods of preventing people from voting or taking away the right or making it more difficult in all these senses will always try to adapt for whatever we do and so any law that we pass has to always think about not just what does it solve right now, but what are the ways that the people who are going to try to get around this, what are they going to do to get around it? a lot of scholarship on the secret ballot law now emphasizes the progressive nature of it, the fact that you have to be able to read and write and there are all these things that make voting by secret baltimore difficult than taking a piece of paper and dropping it into a box, but this is one of those areas where i think, yes, that's absolutely true, but if we're going to try to get rid of the problems of ballot secrecy or voting in a polling place, a

physical polling place, we have to remember the ways in which the people who will try to get around these things, the people who will try to subvert or undermine any ballot protection law we have, they already have a blueprint for what they can do when there is no ballot secrecy. we have done this already. and the idea that we might say, oh, well, we don't need ballot secrecy anymore, justice ginsberg compared getting rid of the voting rights act when it was working to closing your umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet. it's the idea that we do actually know a lot of these things could happen and so focusing on, okay, if we're going to solve the problems that exist now we also need to be thinking about how those solve the next problems and how they all chain together. that's just the voting aspect of it, you guys can handle the rest, right? >> i don't know that i can. i mean, that's a lot. i mean, everything that you said is a lot, but it's sort of violence in slow motion, right? it's playing out in this very

insidious, silent, subtle way so that when you call it violence people are like, oh, you are overreacting, oh, my gosh, you know, it's just a policy, but those policies are destructive, intensely destructive, not just destructive for a generation but for generations, and it's really hard, i think, because we think violence is immediate and in your face and aggressive and, you know, flashing all of these things that we have with violence, when we -- we don't recognize it when -- when it plays out very slowly. >> i think for me i think in some ways it's time to start thinking about our definition of war, too, and for a part of that is that i argue very vociferously that there is a war at home during world war ii. we cannot pretend otherwise, those violent labor struggled continue after into the 1930s to be sure, but now what we're dealing with is like what does

war look like now? it's not the kind of combat situations we are used to talking about that are easy to talk about. we -- drone, drone attacks that we've left that human act, but i do think that we need to think about -- i kept thinking is this the turn of millennium warfare, an inn personal drone attack, it's harder to call it violence, someone is pressing a button somewhere. i don't even know how that works. but then also but the trade war and you think about the devastation that that will cause on folks in the rural communities who are still struggling to making a culture work. how do we sort of grapple that and begin to think about that there might be a casualty to this kind of warfare even though it seems kind of like a joe he can to call it on far with something like the war in iraq or the war in afghanistan. if we are going to start thinking about a definition of war and violence that it can happen at home, that it can be sort of inn personal, it can be

about -- economic, can that be something that might be interesting to think about with the 19th and 18th century. i'm not sure. i don't know. it's an idea. >> it will be interesting to think through like to what extent -- how you define extent how you define violence, where you draw lines around it. what is the utility of either expanding the definition or sometimes it is -- i don't know the answer to this question. is it a metaphor of violence in some situations or is it actual definitional violence. there's a trade off for which one of those it is. yes, it is a great question. >> thanks for the great panel.

he gestured about dr. kennedy's talk, i was thinking your panel like his talk overturns an older narrative, perhaps a nonviolent american past. he also focused on why that old narrative persisted and cole, you gestured, kelly, too, about sort of like how rosa parks or the founders wanted us to think the revolution was nonviolent. i am wondering how through time you think this narrative of political violence central to american history was papered over, and sort of who was -- how was it papered over, especially big synthetic histories, why is it papered over, who is doing the papering over to sort of get this narrative that's in i guess most americans' heads of the kind of american history driven not by violence but by something else. >> i think part of it, and

perhaps a small part, perhaps i am overestimating the influence the academy has. part of it is that historians don't tend to be particularly violent people. the reason i study violence is because i don't understand it. i don't understand why you would -- it is hard for me to understand how you would hurt another human being. so i am trying to figure it out and figure out what it means at the time. i think violence in part has been written out of history. you have the triumphant battle of gettysburg. military history had its own niche and following, but i think in that book, how much violence is there. i don't know. when we're writing synthetic

histories, are we a little to blame for that. i haven't thought through it, it is a thought. >> we've definitely sanitized history. there's no question there. i think the benefit in that is -- i hate using this, because we use it all the time, white supremacy. but you know, in white supremacy, the villain is the slave holder, the clan, easy things to attach to being bad, right, but the hero part of it is also the savior, the lipping on that frees the slaves, william lloyd garrisons, like the person that sort of intervenes. we tell these stories because

they perpetuate ideas of whiteness being the villain, but then the hero, right? if you can show something bad happened then show another good white person that did something to replace it, to remove it, to cure it, then you still get to be the hero at the end of the day. and i think a lot of the stories that we get, one, they push people and in particular black people to the periphery of their own movements. i can't say how many times we talk about frederick doug last, harriet tubman, or we talk about rosa parks, but there's no other civil rights leaders. i think that's very intentional. we don't want you to know multiple people were involved or that hundreds if not thousands of people were involved. and we don't want you to know that it was not a white person who didn't do the right thing at the end of the day, or who

didn't tie it in a nice bow at the end of the day. that's a way to enkul patriot ideas of patriotism and whiteness being supreme. we can all buy into that story because it makes us feel very good, feel very empowered, feel like we can play a role in solving these issues because it feels easy to play a role. you can throw a hash tag on something and now you're progressive. i think there are real reasons as to why we do this. and none of them are very effective at actually solving problems. but they're very effective at making you think you solved the problem. so you can look at the civil rights movement and say racism is a thing of the past, we solved that, nonviolently. why black lives matter, why are you so angry? because we don't want to acknowledge the anger. having to acknowledge the anger or rage or harm or brutality forces us to have to answer questions that we have never

wanted to answer which is how white supremacy stays supreme. >> i guess just to continue full speed ahead on the white supremacy train, that feeling goode good element is crucial. when we come to right histories, violence is seen as something unsavory, often left to the side. but at the same time, when we're looking at self definitions from historical actors, i think rarely we find people that define themselves as violent. right? you look at the klan of the '20s, white supremacists or slave holders, they're not defining themselves as violent people. maybe say they used violence but they deploy violence to achieve

goals. they are not themselves violent people. and therefore violence isn't their story. so it becomes this interesting question when we're writing histories, how do we sense violence in a story in which the subject themselves denies the centrality of that violence. do we have to write the history of george washington as a violent man. he is a military man, he is a slave holder, violence is integral to his life. we never talk about him as a violent person. when we talk about violent white supremacists, george washington is the first name comes to mind. but why doesn't he fall in that category and what does that say about willingness to use and define violence within the life of the historical actors. >> good point. >> absolutely echo all that's been said here and also that

military history is not exactly a popular sub field in history these days, it is kind of outside history, changing to some degree. but to specifically focus on military history and violence, in some ways makes it feel like you're not within the academy when you talk about these things. i experienced this to some degree, i am currently a graduate student. i mention in seminars talking about violence, particularly about wars, most people won't say we don't want to talk about that. they'll say i'm more interested in these other areas, and that's fine. military history has been covered in american history, but just the idea that it is something that we can put aside, the fact that anyone would think we can put aside violence or war fare in american history is i think incorrect. >> thank you so much for this panel. it has been thought provoking. i am still kind of processing a lot of it. one thing i want to ask about is

democracy. i think in authoritarian regimes, we expect violence and expect that's a violent state, that it is a violent environment. what i found suggestive of the panel is that maybe there's something here about democracy that makes it also violent or violent in different ways. and actually, cole, something you said about popular sovereignty leading to a new kind of violence or particularly intense violence, i was wondering if you all might be able to comment more on that. is there something about democracy or popular sovereignty that leads to a particular type of political violence and how is that different from violence in other types of regimes? >> that's a great question. get to the heart of my book. when we think of democracy, we think of the democratic piece. if only we could export democracy around the world, right?

just make a racket of democratic powers, no one would ever go to war. it is a noble dream. so democracy in many ways has been divorced of its historic violence. but there's one thing founders were very concerned about, tyranny of the majority, 51% that can use that power then to coerce others, coerce the minority, and you see that happening very clearly. it is one of the great ironies i discuss in my book, at the beginning of the revolution, elite founders, people like washington, men of violence, it was a particular type of european style violence, right? violence was enacted in specific ways, specific context, where it was acceptable and legitimate, but in other ways it wasn't. and that violence, that sort of restrained order degrades over

the process because ordinary people finally have a voice in this and are mobilized through rhetoric and part through the newspapers, part the actual violence of the british army they view as legitimate to demand revenge and demand their government engage in revengeful practices. i think we need to do more to think through ramifications of violence and democracy throughout american history. and i'll turn it over to my colleagues to see what they think. >> i mean, yes. i agree. i don't think that we should think that democracy is not violent or that, you know, democracy has this moral high ground that doesn't allow for

violence to take place. i think that's a falsehood. in a lot of ways, democracy is a double edged sword that you have to almost use violence to employ your means, to get your means across. and we've seen it play out in history time and time again. but even just introducing that concept of or the idea that democracy can be violent or democracy has violent tenets is something i don't think americans would be comfortable hearing, but i don't think it is far from the truth. >> i am inspired by my colleague's comment in the corner and just reflecting on even the conversation last

night, and in light of this conversation, i find it kind of wanting. we're speaking about democracy, speaking about the state, and then violence and the extent to which american society has been democratic, considering the nature of how democracy works. what i think is missing, i was struggling when she made this comment and reflecting on remarks last night, this idea that the response to racism is anti-racism. going back to when we have the first democratic assembly, laws they're passing are about violence that citizens can enact towards africans. so creating scarcity and greed was missing as a critique of capitalism. racism and violence were born in this country, what became this country. racism, capitalism, violence put together. we can critique democracy, but i

haven't heard, last night was absent, critique of capitalism. so i'm inviting you to muse on that a moment. we had an intensely capitalistic state and it is intensely violent and intensely racist. i think they were all born together around 1619. i'm inviting you to muse on that. that's the root of deprivation, scar scarcity and greed that binds our society. >> absolutely. thank you for the question. well taken. my work focused on late 19th century, massive industrialization and capitalism expanding into methods and ways, there's a crisis. usually called the labor crisis or labor problem.

people worried about newly industrial capitalism, what it will mean for democracy. what's shocking now is we don't seem to have a sense of crisis when capitalism is changing rapidly. democracy is just as under threat. yet the labor crisis of the 19th century, people were discussing it, it was driving elections. pretty much everyone had an opinion on the labor question. the fact that now we don't -- like there is discussion, it is absolutely out there, but i don't think anyone would say it is a crisis of democracy and capitalism the say way they would explicitly use those terms in the 19th century. >> i think it is a great question. it is something that again, turning back to the klan issue,

historians of the klan haven't dealt with all that well, even though there is a lot of material on this from the time, particularly from somebody like randolph or other radical black organizers in the '20s and '30s that see the violence of the klan as fundamentally a tool of capital in order to divide and suppress labor. and that's why i think seeing the influence of something like the klan in federal politics is significant because then you see how that's used not just as the violence on a personal level to kind of bring up the distinction we were looking at before from personal violence versus impersonal violence, not only are you sending the klan in on strike breakers, as means to

divide unions, but also that they are starting a crusade against socialists and bolshevics, that they're taking into political lobbying, that will become formized, become things like the house on american activities committee where john rankin, one of the most noxious people to silt t i the house and declare the klu klux klan is an american institution, even as he turns the state's attention and violence on radical change, radical organizers, particularly within the african-american communities. >> and i think it is an important question. i was tuning into the question, so many things you were citing as a labor historian were the extreme violence at the heart of everything from slavery through to the labor union battles of the entirety of american

history, 150 years or so. but that is so core to -- that's how capitalism works in the united states, through various forms of violence. workers' health and safety. >> that's the point for me. this is something we need to be atuned to as historians. we have to watch our words we're using, that they shift over time. for me, the labor question continues. it stopped being asked perhaps in public spirit and language that we're talking about, but it has evolved, robin muncie just published a great article, we have to redefine. we have to stop using the word class. that's a word that comes at a very particular industrial moment that americans stopped

using in the course of the 20th century. we now have working families. we need to be more atuned and start updating. part of the reason thinking about some conversations we had at this wonderful conference about how to connect outside this academic jargon. if we start talking in the way that americans have talked over time, not just today, about the kind of qualities and violence and that stuff, i feel like we have a better way of reaching and making larger connections on how violence has always been endemic to this imperfect supposedly democratic republic. that's something we can think about, why the language isn't there, but the discussion. the teacher uprisings, and i call them uprisings, look at the discussions they have, heart wrenching stories how much they're struggling to make basic ends meet, is right there. it could be there are important analogs to discussions of the late 19th and 20th centuries,

about abuses in sweat shops, in terms of poverty and not public employees trying to do their best by children. things to think about. >> all right. in order to keep the trains running on time, we're closing it there. help me thank the panelists for a great discussion. all week, american history programs that are available every weekend. lectures in history, american artifacts, reel america, the civil war, oral histories, the presidency, special event

coverage of our nation's history. enjoy it now and every weekend on cspan3. saturday on book tv at 7:00 p.m. eastern, in her latest book "our women on the ground", she looks at the challenges female arab and middle eastern journalists face while reporting. >> all authors were able to push through whatever barriers they had and write openly and honestly about their deepest struggles. one of the essays, an account of grief and loss and reflects state of the arab world today. this isn't an uplifting book. >> sunday, at 7:45 p.m. eastern, princeton university professor on race, gender, class in america. her recent book is breathe, a letter to my sons. >> the reality is that i have to

arm them not simply with kind of a set of skills and intellectual tools that allow them to flourish in school and ethics and values, but also a way to make sense of the hostility that they encounter every day, from people at times whose responsibility is to treat them as community members. >> and at 9:00 p.m. eastern on afterwards, brent bozell on big media's war against trump. >> all modicum of decency has been cast aside, now from donald trump to his opponents but from his opponents to him, they call him far worse things. they are attempting to do far worse to him than what they accuse him of doing to them. it is telling. they have no right. none. >> watch book tv, every weekend

on cspan2. >> sunday night on q and a, theoretical physicist, mich michio kaku, talks about destiny beyond earth, achieving digital immortality. >> digital immortality takes everything known about you on the internet, your digital footprint, your credit card records, what movies you see, what wines you like to buy, what countries you visit. your videos, pictures, audiotapes, creates a profile that's digitized that will last forever. so when you go to the library of the future, you will not take out a book about winston churchill, you'll talk to winston churchill. >> sunday at 8:00 p.m. eastern on cspan's q and a. next on american history tv, historians discuss effect of media and technology on 20th

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