Photocopy created by United States Archives of all three pages of a letter written on November 6, 1940 by Fidel Castro Ruz to President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The letter is the property of the US government held in US Archives. Source: Wikimedia Commons

“Dear Mr President…”

Letters to FDR, #twitterstorians, and one man's experience of slavery's legacy

04.27.18

Joanne talks about the letters that flooded into FDR’s Whitehouse and how historians reach the public using social media. Also, Justin Reid, director of African American programs at Virginia Humanities, reflects on his family’s experience of slavery.

correspondence; historical record; presidency; presidents

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Segments

Finding His Roots

In 2014, Justin Reid, director of African American programs at Virginia Humanities, set out to find the Virginia plantation where his ancestors had been enslaved.

Music:

At the Curb by Podington Bear

No Solace by Podington Bear

Wet Socks by Jahzzar

Gloom by Jahzzar

Changing Seasons by Ketsa

African American genealogy; plantations

View Transcript

JOANNE: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Back Story. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman. If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and each week Brian Balogh, Ed Ayers, Nathan Conley, and I explore the history of topics that have been in the news.

Today on the show, we’ll be listening to what the American public told FDR’s White House. And I’ll be finding out why historians are increasingly getting their message out 140 characters at a time. But first, we’re going to hear from Justin Reed, the Director of African-American Programs here at Virginia Humanities.

Reed grew up in Farmville, Virginia, where his family has roots dating back to slavery. In 2014, he set out on a personal journey to find the plantation where his ancestors had been enslaved. And when he found it, he wrestled with his feelings about the site.

JUSTIN REED: The drive to Ampthill Plantation, it’s a very– it’s a very beautiful drive. You’re passing through Central Virginia, rolling hills. It’s near the James River. There’s still a lot of farms out there to this day and it’s very pristine.

As I was approaching the house, I’m not really sure what I felt then. I just wanted to see something. I guess I wanted to see if there was any evidence of my family in any structures there. I think I wanted to have a physical place that I could feel rooted in.

And when I got there, I was I was struck by– I don’t know, I hate to say it, but I was struck by how beautiful it was. So I guess at that point, I probably was a little nervous. Because here, I’m just showing up. I’m this black guy, like, I’m here.

And this guy starts approaching me. And I introduced myself– hi, I’m Justin, I’m researching my family’s history, and I believe they’re connected to Ampthill. And he was very gracious. And they told me that his brother-in-law owns it. They recently acquired the property, but they’re descendants of the original owners of Ampthill, and that this is when they might be back, but feel free to look around.

And I remember when he walked off, I just started looking around the house and looking at some of the outbuildings. And I do remember, I broke down in tears. And I started imagining where my family worked, where they may have been. It was an emotional time to be there I think.

Then I came out there a second time when no one was there. And left a note for the Harrison family, the owner today. And then I feel like shortly after that, Randy reached out to me. And we set up a time for me to come back and meet Randy and his wife, Paula.

They were very gracious, and we sat down, and I think we had a glass of water, and we talked. And they gave me a tour of the house and told me they wanted to stay connected. And that was pretty much the extent of our first meeting.

When I was meeting Randy for the first time, I do remember searching his face, because there’s so many stories of enslaved black Virginians being related biologically. I mean, you’re related regardless of whether you’re a descendant or whatever. But you’re related to through the of slavery, but there’s stories of being related by blood.

At that time, I recognized that that could be a possibility. And so I remember trying to see in his face any resemblance to relatives of mine. I do remember that. When I first met Randy, I was asking him questions about records and things, papers they may have.

I know he pulled up his family tree, I guess on Ancestry. He was trying to see what he could pull from those online records. But I think he’s also going through a period in his life where he’s wanting to know more about his family history. And they’re also interested in the history of the enslaved community there as well, which was good to hear.

Our initial meeting could have gone so many different ways. I could have met someone who was in complete denial of this history or somebody who was defensive. I could have met someone who was kind of an apologist for his family’s actions, or even tried to present this narrative of benevolence. There could have been many different routes that this conversation could have taken.

But one thing I appreciated was the fact that Randy was very matter of fact. And he understood the fact that this was a very exploitative economic system. And I appreciated that, because that’s the truth.

What do you do next, once you know this history? How do I interact with Randy and Paula’s children, who are my age? Would it be appropriate for us to have a friendship? Would that be disrespectful to the memory or legacy of my enslaved ancestors? How do we navigate and build a relationship that’s rooted in something that’s so painful?

I think there’s just so many unanswered questions. What if it leads to nothing? What is the final goal? And what if it leads to absolutely nothing? Would that just cause there to be this– I don’t know, like this unresolved hole. I don’t know.

What if it leads to nothing, but then also what if what if it leads to something? I don’t know how to make sense of it all. Different scenarios would be we have a connection, we’re able to form a friendship.

But is that possible? Because in the back of your mind, you understand that your position in life is rooted in this very unequal, unjust history, and essentially the privilege and opportunities that the white Harrisons have had for generations have been at the expense of my family. Would there be festering resentment? Would the hurt bubble up at unexpected times?

Because we’ve only had two interactions to date, I haven’t really broached the issue of slavery and it’s legacy, like those deeper level conversations. But I’d be curious to have a better understanding. There’s a lot of weight behind our interactions. And I’d be fine if it’s awkward. I’d rather it be awkward than to be upset that it doesn’t matter. I want it to matter to them just as much as it matters to me.

JOANNE: Justin Reed is the Director of African-American Programs at Virginia Humanities. This segment originally aired on our sister program, With Good Reason.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Dear Mr. President

When President Franklin Roosevelt’s announced that he wanted to add seats to the Supreme Court in 1937, Americans responded passionately. Historian William Blake reads letters sent to the White house by average Americans, and describes how they show a nuanced understanding of the Constitution.

Music:

Memory Wind by Podington Bear

Down and Around by Podington Bear

FDR; court packing; public opinion

View Transcript

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In previous episodes of BackStory, you may have heard a segment called “Footnotes,” where one of us would bring something from the archives that we want to share with you. Well now, historian William Blake tells us about the documents he keeps coming back to, which tell a story about a president’s bold plan to change the Supreme Court and the wave of public reaction it generated.

WILLIAM BLAKE: My name is William Blake. I’m an assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. And the documents I keep coming back to are a number of letters that ordinary Americans sent to FDR expressing their opinions on his proposal to add six new seats to the US Supreme Court.

In FDR’s first term, the Supreme Court struck down most, not all, but most of his New Deal agenda. And he entered his second term after receiving a landslide victory. And he was frustrated because none of the existing nine justices had either died or retired.

But FDR also noticed a loophole in the Constitution. The Constitution doesn’t specify the number of justices that are supposed to be on the Supreme Court. It just says that there shall be a Supreme Court headed by a Chief Justice.

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: Is it a dangerous precedent for the Congress to change the number of the justices? The Congress has always had, and will have, that power. The number of justices has been changed several times before– in the administration of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of them signers of the Declaration of Independence, in the administrations of Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant.

WILLIAM BLAKE: There are accounts that show that members of Congress were saying at the time that they had never received the volume of letters sent to their offices that they were over the six months that Congress was debating the court packing bill. And the White House received a huge number of letters.

Some of my favorite letters were written by people who opposed court packing. And a lot of these letters were written by people who supported the New Deal, but were horrified by the notion that adding six new seats to the Supreme Court was the appropriate solution to the conflict that FDR was having with the Supreme Court.

February 21st, 1937– Dear President, though I know you will never see this letter, there are two ways of expressing your feelings– through bouquets and brickbats. I am throwing brickbats. I’m against your judiciary reform bill.

You may honestly administer said bill, but in the hands of some future president this bill might be dangerous. A constitutional amendment is safer. And then the will of the people is satisfactorily expressed. If your bill is defeated, kindly consider my suggestion. With best regards, a Republican, Williamsburg, Kentucky.

One thing that I really like about this letter is that this person, who’s only willing to identify as a Republican, is thinking both short-term and long-term about the change and precedent that court packing would set. Whereas, a longer-term solution, that would be more viewed as more legitimate, would be a constitutional amendment.

March 12th, 1937– Mr. President, legally you are right, morally you are wrong, and in the long run, you will accomplish nothing. Perhaps I’m not even qualified to give you my opinion. I’m only 17, expecting to graduate from high school this June. Yet I feel that it is my life that is going to be affected by all this Supreme Court rumpus.

After studying the Constitution, I believe that your court plan is entirely constitutional and legal. Morally, I think the plan is unsound, for it will establish a dangerous precedent. As I said before, I am no connoisseur, but only a 17-year-old American boy, interested in this vital American question of the balance of power. Very sincerely yours, Roger Blake, Rochester, New York.

The thing that really jumps out to me about this letter is at a 17-year-old high school student recognizes the difference between what is written down in the text of the Constitution and what sorts of constitutional norms and traditions are just as important for upholding American democracy.

July 16th, 1937– Dear Sir, I am seriously disturbed by your effort to change the Supreme Court. The American government has never been a government of a quick majority, nor should it be. Our government has been designed to be one that makes it necessary for a majority opinion to continue through a period of time before great changes are made.

This is a valuable and important characteristic of our government and you should not urge its removal. You haven’t time for long letters. I felt it was my duty to advise you of my concern. Sincerely, Paul D. Eschelman, proprietor, Eschelman Supply Company, wholesale seller of radios, parts, and refrigerators, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

So this may be my favorite letter that I’ve come across in my sample. And the reason is that Mr. Eschelman might not have ever read any of James Madison’s writings, but he has honed in on a key argument from Madison’s famous Federalist 10, where Madison describes the danger of faction, of public opinion being whipped up into a frenzy. And in the short-term, causing a major change in our political system that’s disruptive in the long-term.

This letter sort of highlights that if you simply just add seats to the Supreme Court, you are shortcutting that vision. And it was something that Madison would be horrified by. You have to sort of move past the mistakes in grammar, or the mistakes in word usage, but if you really take the arguments that these letters contain seriously, they’re the types of arguments that I hope to stimulate from my college students when I’m teaching them in a Constitutional Law class. That’s how many pearls of wisdom you can find in some of these letters.

And there’s something just really patriotic about this, that someone would spend $0.3 on a stamp, which is no small consideration in 1937– that’s about a third of a gallon of milk, or a third of a loaf of bread– to take the time to write the most powerful person in the world and tell them that they are profoundly wrong.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE: William Blake is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

#twitterstorians

How do historians use social media to reach a public audience? Joanne (@jbf1755 ) talks to Professor Erika Lee of the University of Minnesota (@prof_erikalee), and Professor Tyina Steptoe, associate professor of History at the University of Arizona in Tucson (@TyinaSteptoe).

Twitter; public history

View Transcript

We were just hearing about how ordinary voters let President Franklin Delano Roosevelt know their views about his plan to change the composition of the Supreme Court. Today, of course, when voters want to tell their representatives what they think, or when the president wants to tell us his views, they don’t really write letters, they tweet.

Now if you had told me 10 years ago that I would be spending a big chunk of my time communicating about my work in 140 characters or less, I would have told you you were crazy. But in fact, I am now a regular user of Twitter.

Last week, I was in California at the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians. And one of the conversations there was about whether social media has changed the way historians engage with their work, with each other, and with the public.

In the foyer of the conference center, I spoke to professors Erika Lee of the University of Minnesota, and Tyina Steptoe of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

TYINA STEPTOE: I initially just used it for fun. So my first tweets were sort of like these enchiladas are good. I wasn’t saying anything professional at all. And then– that was when I had 10 hours followers or something.

And then, the first people to follow me were friends, so then it was still way more personal. The turning point was my first Twitter beef. And it was with a person who had a huge Twitter following, and has written some books, and had some controversial views. And I didn’t know who this person was. I was fairly new to Twitter.

But she was tweeting about what I was writing about. At the time, I was working on my manuscript. And she was writing about blackness, and saying that a particular person wasn’t black though this person identifies as black.

And so I thought, that’s interesting. Questions of race formation were very central to my work. So I tweeted back and said, what are you defining as black? I’m interested because this something I’m writing about. So if a person says they’re black, you think that there’s something else there besides ancestry. So what is it? And this person got really mad– how dare you, you are so ignorant, and just profane kind of stuff.

JOANNE: Wow.

TYINA STEPTOE: You know, and I thought, well, this is crazy. So I blocked them, like I don’t want to hear this anymore. But that was a turning point. It did make me realize that there are people outside of the Academy who were talking about the issues that we talk about too.

JOANNE: And have strong feelings about it.

TYINA STEPTOE: That was useful. So I think that’s when I switched over to using it a bit more professionally. Because at first, it probably didn’t even occur to me that there would be people out there who weren’t professors or grad students who would be interested.

JOANNE: And now what about you, Erika, as far as having people engage with you on Twitter. Did you pull something from that that was useful?

ERIKA LEE: Not on Twitter, but more on other social media platforms, or on comments sections, op-eds. The advice is always don’t read the comments sections, especially when you’re writing about divisive topics, like immigration. But for me, I found it first scary.

Because sometimes I’ll get– sometimes I’ll literally get hate mail coming through snail mail, and then sometimes email, and then a lot of it are the anonymous comments online in various different stories or postings of interviews that I’ve done.

So it’s scary, but it’s also, I found, very instructive, because it helps me think about– so often these examples are– I am talking about an Asian-American subject, and the comments are not about Asian-Americans but are using Asian-Americans as a cloak to then talk about the problem of so-called illegal immigrants– the Asians are fine, but what about– something like that. So I found that really instructive to think about the place and the role of a group like Asian-Americans in this inflammatory debate.

JOANNE: Interesting– by engaging in it, basically.

ERIKA LEE: By thinking about it, yeah.

JOANNE: Do you find that being on Twitter has changed your work as a historian?

ERIKA LEE: Absolutely, for me, because I’m increasingly– hadn’t planned on it– but increasingly writing about the present day or the recent past. It’s been instrumental in helping me access the latest data, the journalistic reports, the responses. I’m very much writing about responses to xenophobia.

I am not only interested in what’s happened in the past, but I think that this particular moment today has the potential to be certainly very promising and hopefully change making. And so that’s important to keep track of. But also just personally, it’s nurturing to know that there’s stuff going on, that one can be part of that.

TYINA STEPTOE: For me, it’s reminding me that I can be an accessible writer, and to strive for that. And I know that that’s not a necessity. I don’t think that every one, a historian, has to write that way. But it’s something that’s important to me.

And I think Twitter’s helped reinforce that. That if I write in such a way that can be informative, but without so much jargon that someone from outside of my field can still make meaning of it. And Twitter, especially trying out ideas on Twitter, is practice for seeing, OK, can someone who’s not a historian, who doesn’t do 20th century urban history, or cultural history, or race–

JOANNE: In what direction are they going to fly if they’ve grabbed onto that idea.

TYINA STEPTOE: Right.

JOANNE: Do you think– and I guess there’s a lot of qualifiers in this question, because it’s technology, it’s social media. In two years, it’s going to be eight new forms of social media, and they’ll be like us on Twitter, and nobody under the age of 20.

But taking that aside, whatever the form of the social media is, do you think that social media is going to change in any way, the way that we do history, the way that we engage in the public in any kind of a big way?

ERIKA LEE: I think it already has. And I think it will be hard to go back to the Ivory Tower. It certainly has changed the way that I do history, that I think about history, and how I communicate history. So whether it’s Twitter or some other form, I think it’s just going to be part of our practice.

And I know that graduate students are increasingly being trained to be able to speak to diverse public, the term– engage with the public in diverse ways. And social media, whatever form that is, will continue to be part of that training. And I think increasingly part of the expectation, as college and university communications departments are giving their faculty members this directive to do so, which is an interesting development as well.

TYINA STEPTOE: I think things like the “Charleston Syllabus” is a great example.

JOANNE: And maybe explain what that is.

TYINA STEPTOE: Historians, Keisha Blain and some others had a hashtag in the wake of the Charleston shooting. And it was a way for people, especially historians, to use the hashtag to suggest reading to people who were interested in what happened and who wanted context for it. And so a lot of us started using that, started sending out books.

And there have been others since then, like the “Say Her Name Syllabus” following things like what happened with Sandra Bland. I used it to with tweet books in women’s history. So I thought, OK, if you’re interested in what happened with Sandra Bland, what are books that you might want to go to?

So I immediately thought of people like Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom. And so I just started tweeting the name, and adding the historians if they’re on Twitter as well. And so some of those tweets, really those are maybe some of the most retweeted tweets that I’ve had, when I’ve been part of those kinds of hashtags. And so the “Charleston Syllabus” is now going to be a book. So literally a hashtag is going to turn into scholarship. So just that right there.

JOANNE: Right. And you start this group sourced thing in a way that– how would you normally do that?

TYINA STEPTOE: Right, so I think that things like that are just wonderful, that they’re actual projects that can come out of it. And so once you start practicing history in that way, even if Twitter goes away, I think that it’ll have to be replaced by something that still allows us to do that, because so many of us are doing it, that it would sort of be an empty space. Then how do we still do this? We’ll have to find it in some other ways.

JOANNE: I was speaking to Tyina Steptoe and Erika Lee. You can find them both on Twitter. Now, while you’re there, you might want to follow BackStory radio. Modesty forbids me from telling you to follow me @jbf1755, so I’m not going to tell you to follow me @jbf1755.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE: Well, that’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angeli Bishosh, Sequoia Carrillo, Courtney Spania, Aaron Teiling Korean Thomas, and Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Podington Bear and Jahzzar. Special thanks this week to With Good Reason, and as always, to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost’s Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Conley is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.