Dividing the National Map, 1860. Source: Library of Congress

Divided States of America?

The History of an Often Disjointed Union

11.16.18

Google the phrase “divided America” and you’ll find numerous, stories, opinion pieces and even psychological theories on why we’re so disconnected. From race and class to gender and politics, it seems that Americans can’t see eye-to-eye – to the point that a recent NBC News headline stated, “Americans are divided over everything except division.” On this episode, Ed, Nathan and Joanne look at other times in history when Americans were split.

This episode and related resources are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this show, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

polarization; political divisions

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Divided America Lesson Set

Download the Divided America Lesson Set

According to a 2016 study by the Pew Research Center^[1] the idea that America is more polarized than it has been in recent years is supported by the data that Democrats and Republicans view each other with anger and see each other more negatively than they have in the past. Polarization and division, however, has been a theme of American history since its conception. As the episode discusses, Loyalists and Patriots represented this division over the colonies’ relationship with Great Britain. The election of Andrew Jackson pitted the “common man” of the south and west against the urban, cosmopolitan elite of the Northeast. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the caning of Senator Charles Sumner provides an example of unprecedented partisan violence and vitriol.

This lesson set considers aspects of the divisions in the 1920s and helps students grapple with the following questions: Should America pursue a policy of prohibition? Is America a Christian nation? What is the role of women in modern America? What is the role of America in the world? What role do African Americans have in shaping American culture?

Segments

Franklin Falling Out

Benjamin Franklin’s first son, William, was born around 1730. The identity of his mother is still unknown. But despite being an illegitimate child, Benjamin adopted William and the two became inseparable – that is, until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Joanne and Historian Sheila Skemp tell how the fight for America’s independence tore the Franklin family apart.

Music:

Starling by Podington Bear

Benjamin Franklin; Revolutionary War; family; political divisions

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Joanne: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Nathan: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly. Joanne: I’m Joanne Freeman. Ed: And I’m Ed Ayers. Joanne: If you’re new to the podcast, all of us and our colleague, Brian Balogh, are all historians and each week we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news. Today we’re gonna start off in Philadelphia around 1730, when Benjamin Franklin welcomed his first child, a son named William. It was a day of happiness for the Franklin family, but a complicated one. William was illegitimate. In fact, the circumstances of his birth are unknown to this day. Whatever his reasons, Benjamin ended up adopting William, and the two developed an intimate bond. Sheila: Benjamin called himself an indulgent father, and from all we can tell I think he was. Joanne: That’s historian Sheila Skemp. Sheila: He was the kind of father that I think all fathers probably are, “I’m gonna give my kid what I never got when I was growing up.”, and one of the people who observed Benjamin and William in England when they were there together said, “These two are more like companions than father and son.”, and I think other people observed the same thing. Joanne: By the time William reached adulthood, father and son had become close political allies. While Benjamin was away in England as Postmaster General, William was appointed Royal Governor of New Jersey in 1763, and despite the distance they looked out for each other’s interests on both sides of the Atlantic. Moderate in their politics, Ben and William shared a love for the king, as did many a loyal subject, and did everything in their power to support the British empire. But as things started to unravel between Britain and America, so too did the relationship between Benjamin and William. Joanne: In 1774, Benjamin was fired from his position in the British government as Postmaster General, and William, ever loyal to the crown, saw this as a blessing in disguise. He hoped that this would pave the way for his father’s triumphant return to America to restore harmony on the heels of what would come to be known as The Boston Tea Party. Little did he know that his father’s support for British rule was waning. Sheila: I mean, he would write to him, and he would say, “If only you were over here, why don’t you come home? They don’t like you over there anyway. Come on home, and you can deal with these people who are being absolutely irresponsible, and radical, and you’re the kind of person … they’ll listen to you. So, come back home, and you can pull us back together again. It’s not too late.” I sincerely think that he expected that that’s what his father would do. He saw his father as a moderate, as somebody who always tried to mollify people, and to bring people together, and when Benjamin came home, and was clearly going to be, not only for independence, but leading the fight for independence, I think William was shocked. I just don’t think he was prepared for that. Joanne: After the Revolutionary War broke out, William, New Jersey’s Royal Governor, was arrested in 1776, and charged with being an enemy to his country. So, while Benjamin worked to spearhead the revolution, William was held captive in Connecticut where he was brutally treated, and locked in solitary confinement. Sheila: Because he was a [gentleman 00:03:52], they gave him quite a bit of leeway and so he got to ride around the country, and he gave his parole that he wouldn’t do anything that he shouldn’t do, and of course violated his parole, and started trying to stir up the countryside to support the king. When the continental Congress found out what he was doing they were furious, and they removed him to another jail, and put him into solitary confinement, and he remained there for almost two years. His wife was kicked out of their home in New Jersey, taken to New York, she got sick, she died. William heard that she was near death and asked for permission to go visit her one more time, and he was denied that. Joanne: As the Revolutionary War raged, the two Franklin’s completely fell out of touch. Although Benjamin almost certainly knew of his sons plight, he didn’t lift a finger to help him. It was not until after independence that William, now exiled in England reached out to his father in an effort to repair their relationship. Sheila: After the war, William wrote to his father, and his father had not yet left for home, and William was in England, Benjamin was in France, and William said, basically, “The war is over, you won, I did what I thought was right, you did what you thought was right. I would do the same thing all over again because this is … you taught me to follow my conscience and I did, but now that the war is over, maybe we can meet again and let bygones be bygones, and reconcile.” Benjamin wrote back and said, “I’ve never been so hurt by anything that anybody has done, and in such a public and humiliating way. I will never forgive you.” Male reader: Ben Franklin letter to William Franklin, August 16, 1784. “Nothing has ever hurt me so much, and affected me with such keen sensations as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son, and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me in a cause where in my good fame, fortune and life were all at stake. You conceived, you say, that your duty to your king and regard for your country required this. We are men, all subject to errors. This is a disagreeable subject. I drop it.” Joanne: Benjamin felt deeply betrayed. His son’s loyalty to the crown was a mark of shame, and as a national leader, Benjamin had a reputation to uphold. They saw each other only one more time after the Revolutionary War. Eventually, Benjamin wrote his son out of his Will. It was a decisive and permanent break. Sheila: What William did, he did so publicly. He didn’t just support the king, but he headed an organization called the Board of Associated Loyalists, and I think today we would probably call it a terrorist group. He sent men throughout the countryside on missions to try to punish people who had done bad things to Loyalists, and people noticed, obviously. I mean, these are two rather famous people, and there were people who spread rumors that Benjamin and William were in cahoots with one another, that this was all a big show, that they were just trying to make sure that no matter which side won, Franklin would be in a good position. Sheila: So, it was an embarrassment to Benjamin at a time when he was trying to negotiate very, very fragile and delicate moves to get the French to support the war, and then to make the war a success, and William threatened all of that. When he wrote back to him, and he said, “If you’d done this quietly, if you had just been a quiet supporter of the king I might have been able to forgive you, but what you did in such a public way I can never forgive.” Joanne: Sheila Skemp is professor emeritus in history at the University of Mississippi. She’s the author of Benjamin and William Franklin: Father and Son, Patriot and Loyalist.

Forgive and Forget

The Revolutionary War was a civil war that pitted Patriots against Loyalists. Oftentimes American colonists took up arms against their own neighbors. After independence many former Loyalists fled the country. But most stayed put in America. Ed sits down with historian Rebecca Brannon to learn how the new nation healed its divisions and reintegrated former Loyalists into society.

Music:

Dreamliner by Podington Bear

Civil War; Revolutionary War; forgiveness; political divisions

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Nathan: On today’s show, we’re exploring moments in history when America was most divided. Ed: We’ll discuss the Revolutionary War, and the plight of Loyalists after independence. Joanne: We’ll also talk about how Benjamin Brown French, the protagonist in my new book, experienced America being ripped apart in the years leading up to the Civil War. Nathan: And later, we’ll learn how the Anti-Saloon League tapped into anti-immigrant sentiment to become the most powerful lobbying group of the prohibition movement. Ed: While the revolution tore Ben and William Franklin apart, the ripples of division extended much farther than the Franklin family. In fact, the Revolutionary War split society into three distinct categories. Historians now estimate that around 20% of colonists were Loyalists with allegiance to the crown, 20% to 25% were Patriots who supported the rebellion, and the rest were neutral, not interested in joining either side. Based on these figures, the Revolutionary War was more than just a fight between Patriots and the British, oftentimes American colonists took up arms against their own neighbors, a conflict was as much a Civil War, as it was a revolution. Nathan: Some people at the time actually called it the Civil War. Ed: And for good reason, Nathan. Though many Loyalists fled to Canada or England, most stayed put in America, and that presented a problem. The new nations faced with a big question, how should former Loyalists be punished for their treason? Rebecca: And the Civil War of the American Revolution got especially out of hand in South Carolina- Ed: That’s historian Rebecca Brannon. Rebecca: … because there are locals fighting locals, and it’s not a Civil War in a sense of the American Civil War where a lot of it is regional. If you live in South Carolina, pretty much everybody you know supports the confederacy in 1861, and fights for the confederacy, but what you actually have in the American Revolution in South Carolina is small pockets where one village might support the Loyalists, and the next village over supports the Patriots. Both sides, they joined local militias, and they know the terrain and they know the people intimately, and they use that to harass and terrify civilians in an effort to tamp down support for the other side. The end result is ever escalating warfare and atrocities. Ed: So, that sounds like a hard situation to overcome, to put the pieces back together after the war is over. How does that happen? Rebecca: Great question, and that’s part of why I chose South Carolina, I thought, “If the war was so terrible, how did they manage to live together afterwards?” Ed: Right. Rebecca: Part of the answer is they engage in practices after the war where they allow themselves space and time to get over their anger. They initially have … single out some Loyalists for very harsh punishments. They confiscate, or take away all of their property. They tell them they have to leave and never come back, and they make an example of a few prominent people. They contemplate more ordinary people having to face criminal justice trials in the courts, and then they quickly decide, it’s a really bad idea to use our new court system and fill it with all these angry cases. Rebecca: So, they start with much more symbolic punishments, and then they start to back away from even that, and one prominent public intellectual and judge in South Carolina frames the whole idea as, of course it’s offensive to justice, but he says you do it like you throw a tub to a whale. You just have to throw a little blood sacrifice to the angry people and then you can move on, and when they start to move on, they’re looking for things like, were these Loyalists willing to apologize to their neighbors? Are their neighbors willing to support them and say, “Yeah, they made a bad choice in the war, but they’re good dependable people, and this is this bold experiment, and democracy, and a new nation, and we need dependable people in our communities to help us make this work.” Ed: Was this a good idea? I mean, they go through show trials for a few people, but then let most people off, would that be a fair way of putting it? Rebecca: Show trials, or the legislature wants to be seen to be punishing people, so they take away their property, but two years later, these Loyalists petition an appeal and say, “My neighbor supports me now, and I’m not so bad, really.”, and they’re given their property back. The vast majority of Loyalists end up suffering no permanent disability as citizens. They get their property back, they’ll get the vote … in some cases they’re not allowed to vote. They’ll get the vote back within a decade, and become full fledged citizens. Ed: Well, that’s amazing. Did the Loyalists have to abase themselves to achieve this leniency? Rebecca: That is one of the best questions because it’s really hard for me to capture on the political record, and so I found it in some places. They do have to abase themselves, in part because the Patriots are really angry, and apologizing is hard, and I have one example. There’s this young man, Elias Ball, and he’s trying to get the support of his very prominent uncle, Henry Laurens, who is also a negotiator of the Peace Treaty that ended the war with Britain, and he’s trying to get Henry Laurens to support him in this effort to get off this confiscation legislation and get his property back, and he apologizes three times. Rebecca: We know this, ’cause Henry Laurens writes in a letter after he finally accepts the third apology, then he thinks that Elias Ball has finally been abject enough and truly apologized for his political conduct enough, and we don’t have Elias Ball’s letter, we only have Henry Laurens letter afterwards saying, “You knew what you did was wrong. You knew the cause was unjust, but basically you finally put together the right combination of words that made me feel better. You were abject enough.”, and then he’s actually willing to support Elias Ball, and support him in front of the South Carolina legislature, and the legislature gives Elias Ball his property back. So, a little abject apologizing can get you a lot. Ed: So, is this kind of about the culture of honor? That people are looking for ritual agreement that they had been wrong, and once you’ve apologized then it’s sort of like, well, we can move on? Rebecca: I think so. I even went into the psychological research, albeit timidly ’cause I’m a historian, and I found this research now that shows that we humans are deeply programmed to seek what we see as justice. It’s deeply scarring to us to see what we see as injustice in the sense that when we think we’re gonna watch somebody who really deserves it get punished, it lights up all the pleasure centers in our brain- Ed: Yikes. Rebecca: … the same ones that like alcohol and cocaine and good coffee, however … right, right, it’s not the feedback loop we were looking for. Ed: Yeah, right. Rebecca: However, the research also shows that actually seeing the punishment, even if we think it’s just, is an incredible letdown. The pleasure is in the anticipation. It’s not in the reality. I kept thinking about that, and how often these Patriots would talk about how angry they were, would entertain apologies, and I think that they’re basically almost onto something, that it’s pleasurable to imagine the punishment, but it’s not so fun to really do, and that is part of why they allow themselves to begin to empathize with the plight of the Loyalists, and move to being more generous with them. Ed: How long does this process take, for them to come to that realization? Rebecca: The amazing thing is it doesn’t take that long. So, it takes two or three years for them to start really backing away from the punishments that had sounded so good in the immediate aftermath of the war. They start to give property back. The Loyalists had been really savvy and tried desperately not to leave, and a lot of times they’re living in the family house even though the state is threatening to auction it off and sell it, and it’s hard to argue with some pitiful widow who’s standing there in the door. “Yes, I know the law says this, but how am I supposed to support my family? P.S. I’ll show up on your doorstep, if I’ve got nowhere else to go.” Rebecca: All of this starts to work, and there are some … I call them public intellectuals, but they’re the jurists and politicians of their day who say, “Let’s think about this a little more. This doesn’t make sense from the point of view of the laws we want to create. This doesn’t make sense from the point of view of the political entity we wish to be. Let’s learn to live together.” They also make the savvy point that it was one thing to expel people, to drive them out, it’s a whole nother thing to keep them within your nation constantly oppressed and discriminated against, and second class citizens. That is a far more dangerous thing to do. Ed: What’s interesting about all of this, actually it’s all interesting and surprising, is that it may actually have been a good thing and a bad thing, that all this forgiveness kind of swept across South Carolina. Can you help us untangle that? Rebecca: I’ve come to think of this as, on the one hand the American genius at work. Our propensity for forgiving and then forgetting, on the one hand it has helped us historically heal from these times when America’s been very divided. It makes our society more inclusive in the sense that we’re willing to forgive people who fought on the wrong side of a war, had the wrong political opinions, wrong being not a moral judgment but just who won. That we practice compassion and empathy, albeit for people we think are like us. Rebecca: On the other hand, I’ve often thought that because South Carolinians did an amazing job forgiving and forgetting, and moving on from their Civil War and the American Revolution. They didn’t learn the lesson that civil wars are awful. That civil wars are lasting, that they rip society apart, that there’s no way you can guarantee that you can put society back together again, and that they will go on longer and be more bloody than you can imagine, and there’s a sense in which they’re not tempered by their own history as they embrace conflict and divide leading up to the American Civil War. Ed: Rebecca Brannon is a history professor at James Madison University. She’s the author of From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists.

Field of Blood

As clerk for the House of Representatives, Benjamin Brown French had a front-row seat to all that went on behind the scenes in Congress. Through his experience, Joanne shows the growing polarization in the decades leading up to the Civil War and charts French’s transformation from “doughface” democrat to gun-toting Republican. Music: Over and Out by Ketsa

Civil War; abolitionism; political divisions; slavery

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Joanne: There are many ways to explore the polarized politics of a nation. You can stand back and look for broad patterns like electoral results, or policy debates. You can study the extreme rhetoric and accusations in the press, in newspapers, or on t.v., or you can get up close and personal with people in the midst of the fray and try to understand how they experience the divisions that tore at their world. My recently published book, The Field of Blood: Violence and Congress and the Road to Civil War, takes the latter approach exploring how Congressmen and their constituents, North, South and West, gradually grew to distrust each other to the point of violence in the decades before the Civil War. Joanne: One rather obscure historical character left behind a remarkable record of this growing polarization. The correspondence and diary of Benjamin Brown French, a clerk for the House of Representatives, offer a remarkable personal account of a nation being torn in two. A small town boy from New Hampshire, the 33 year old French arrived in Washington in 1833 to begin his career as a clerk, and at first he was awestruck by the grand architecture and sweeping symbolism of the Capitol building where he spent his workdays keeping records of Congressional proceedings. Joanne: He arrived in these grand surroundings as an extremely loyal Democrat. Someone who, at the time, would’ve been called a “doughface” Democrat, willing to appease the South on slavery to promote his party, and preserve the Union. Although he disapproved of slavery, he didn’t want it discussed. Better to leave the South to its own devices. If his views seem confusing, it’s because they were. Even French himself had trouble making sense of them. Male reader: “I am so much a free soiler as to be opposed to the addition of any more slave territory to this union, but utterly opposed to the agitation of the question of slavery if it can be avoided, and although abhorring, slavery in the abstract, defending it to the utmost of my power so far as it is tolerated, or justified, by the Constitution.” Joanne: For a time French toed this party line defending and abhorring slavery, and agonizing when Congress dissolved into outrage over the issue. For that reason, the dramatic rise in anti-slavery petitions in the 1830s profoundly alarmed him. Through the efforts of abolitionists, male and female, white and black, and the American Anti-Slavery Society, Congress was bombarded by hundreds of thousands of petitions, many of them undoubtedly processed by French. Joanne: Representatives of slave states responded by demanding gag rules intended to keep anti-slavery petitions off the floor and out of discussion. Many a Northerner supported this strategy. French did. To him, abolitionists were fanatics who threatened the Union’s survival. The final gag rule was overturned in 1844, but America’s war with Mexico in 1848 inflamed the nation once again. Joanne: The large swath of Western territory that the United States gained in the conflict meant that a series of new states would be requesting entry into the Union, and each request compelled Congress to confront the issue of slavery head on. Would the new state be a slave state, or a free state? This debate wasn’t a matter of calm policy disagreements, it was heated, and sometimes violent, with Southern congressmen using bullying, threats and violence against their Northern colleagues, to protect the institution of slavery, and promote the South’s hold on the Union. For French, this debate increasingly became alarmingly personal. Joanne: When he tried to gain the clerkship of the House in 1849, with his own party, Democrats, in power, Southerners in that party, his own party, gave the position to a Southern Whig, rather than trusting it to a Northerner. After years of loyal service to the Democratic party, and years of appeasing and pleasing Southerners, the betrayal stunned French. The South had served itself, and no one else. Southerners couldn’t be trusted. The shock of the moment spilled over into a letter to his brother. Male reader: “One thing I have learned, and I intend to make a note of it, if a Northern man will not bow, and knuckle, and prostrate himself in the dust before their high mightiness of the South, he must hope for nothing. I will see the South all damned to ever lasting perdition before I will ever crook my thumb and forefinger, or open my lips in their defense.” Joanne: Yet even now, however, even after losing all faith in the South, French remained a Democrat, though a wary one. It took one more major piece of legislation over slavery to finally push him over the edge. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the territories of, you guessed it, Kansas and Nebraska. But the act also did something else that caused a frenzy. It let voters in the territories decide for themselves their states slave status when they applied for statehood. Eager, even desperate to sway the outcome their way, anti-slavery and pro-slavery settlers poured into the territories. It wasn’t long before Kansas became a hotbed of violence and corruption. Joanne: The Kansas-Nebraska debate stunned French for many reasons. The violence in Kansas was bad enough, but events in Washington were equally alarming. President Franklin Pierce, a longtime friend of French’s, seemed to be siding with Southerners on the question of slavery, and Southern bullies were even more aggressively trying to silence Northerners in Congress. For French, there could be only one conclusion. The Kansas-Nebraska Act confirmed a vast conspiracy, the Southern slave power seemed willing to use any means necessary to ensure the spread of slavery. Male reader: “It is now perfectly evident that the Kansas-Nebraska act was for the purpose of establishing more slave territory in this Union, which I am decidedly opposed to. As regards Kansas, there is a determination amongst the slavocracy that the people of that territory shall not make it free if they are ever so much disposed to do so.” Joanne: Not only was the slave power asserting its dominance over the rest of the Union, but his own party, the Democratic party was facilitating this plot. Unwillingly to put the North enthralled to the South, and distrustful of the South’s and his party’s intentions, French did something that he never thought possible. He cut all ties with the Democratic party. As he put it in a letter to his former friend, Franklin Pierce. Male reader: “I am now a free man. Untrammeled by party or personal obligations. Ready to do what may seem best for my country.” Joanne: French wasn’t alone in his feelings. Many northerners cut ties with the Democratic party. These powerful emotions fed into the rise of the Republican party. A party that declared itself dedicated to fighting slavery and the slave power. French put his powerful feelings on paper in a poem. If the South continued to push its slavery promoting agenda, then disunion might be necessary. Male reader: “Then let the Union slide, if o’er that freedom glorious for which our fathers died, slavery must be victorious, then let the Union slide. For ’tis not worth the keeping, if o’er our fathers graves. Man, shackled man, is weeping. That half his race are slaves. Let it slide, then, this great Union. Pronounce the compact dead, with the South no more communion if slavery still must spread. There’s land thank God, for freedom North of Potomac’s tide. Let the South keep slaves and breed ’em, but let the Union slide.” Joanne: The rise of the Republican party brought to Congress a new type of Northerner. Increasingly, Northerners elected congressmen who were ready and willing to stand up to the bullies of the South. These Northerners wanted their representatives to fight for their rights. Sometimes, to literally fight. And as Republicans got tougher, the South got angrier. After 1855 violence and Congress surged to new heights. Southern congressmen responded to the attacks on their standing and way of life with a vengeance, insulting and assaulting Republican congressmen with gusto, hoping to frighten or intimidate them into compliance or silence. Emotions reached a peak in 1856 in response to the notorious caning of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Incensed over Sumner’s aggressive anti-slavery speech on the floor, later titled The Crime Against Kansas, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks confronted Sumner at his senate seat and brutally caned him. Joanne: Northerners responded with outrage and shock. A good many Southerners praised Brooks for defending the honor and standing of the South. The caning stoked the flames of polarization even higher, and the attack on Sumner didn’t occur in a vacuum. There were a number of violent encounters in Washington at that time that all boiled down to Congress’s inability to deal with the problem of slavery. Increasingly, congressmen themselves grew to distrust each other. There was simply no telling what the other side would do to promote its cause and defeat its foes. Joanne: By the late 1850s the vast majority of congressmen were armed, not because they wanted to gun down their opponents, but because there was simply no telling what their opponents would do. Fear, distrust, anger, betrayal, inside and outside of Congress, emotions rose to new peaks. French shared these feelings to the point that in 1860 he decided to buy a gun. Not because he wanted to shoot down Southerners, but because he was afraid that he might have to. To French, Southerners simply couldn’t be trusted. Male reader: June 10th, 1860. “I went down in the city and bought one of those little pistols that I can carry in my watch pocket, for if we are to be bullied for our principles, I think we ought to be prepared to defend ourselves. I also bought two pairs of underwear, a dollar a pair. I have one pair of them on now. They are very comfortable.” Joanne: French had come a long way in his decades in Washington, eager and willing to do all that he could to appease the South, and working to do just that for many years. Well liked by Southerners as well as by people on the other side of the political aisle, he was now prepared to shoot Southerners if he had to. And he wasn’t alone. Many a Northerner came to that same stopping point. Had you asked French, back in 1833 when he arrived in Washington, if he might ever want to shoot a Southerner over the issue of slavery, he would’ve been horrified, yet by 1860 he was prepared to kill fellow Americans if he had to. Policies, politics, political parties and their personal implications drove people of all kinds to extremes, inside and outside of Congress.

The American Issue

When the Anti-Saloon League moved its headquarters to Westerville, Ohio in 1909, the national nonpartisan organization quickly became the most powerful lobbying force of the prohibition movement. Beth Weinhardt, Local History Manager at the Anti-Saloon League Museum, talks with Nathan about how the League launched a propaganda campaign that appealed to emotion and seized on anti-immigrant sentiment to promote the temperance cause and outlaw alcohol. Music: Way to Success by Michael Manvelyan

Prohibition; political divisions

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Nathan: The prohibition movement emerged after the Civil War when activist groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, began pinning family disfunction, poverty and disease, on the evils of alcohol. Today, the echoes of prohibition still ring out in Westerville, Ohio where the city recently erected a sculpture that recognized the divisions caused by the prohibition movement. Beth: The sculpture is called The American Issue. It was done by Matthew Gray Palmer, and it’s very interesting because at the bottom there’s a huge limestone boulder which represents the people of the United States, and that boulder is actually split. There’s a large granite wedge that rises out of that. So, it kind of is about wedge issues that split the United States. So it’s representative of that, and on either side of that granite wedge are quotes. On one side are quotes that are for prohibition, and on the other side are quotes that are against prohibition. At the very top is a barrel that is broken apart, and it actually has … it’s a water feature. Water comes out of that and runs on either side of the wedge. The two sides represent … the idea of legislating morality on one side, and that’s for prohibition. On the other side, it’s more about liberty and letting people choose for themselves. It’s a very interesting piece, and it is now there in front of our City building. Nathan: After the Anti-Saloon League moved to Westerville in 1909 it quickly rose to the forefront of the temperance cause. As a national nonpartisan organization the Anti-Saloon League pumped out propaganda, lobby politicians, and partnered with churches to pass legislation that outlawed alcohol, eventually resulting in the 18th Amendment in 1919. Beth: The other thing about the Anti-Saloon League is, they viewed big cities as places of vice- Nathan: That’s historian Beth Weinhardt. She says the Anti-Saloon League appealed to a motion and seized on anti-German sentiment during World War I to promote prohibition. Beth: … and they were nativists to a certain extent. They look at the immigrants that were coming into this country who were going to the cities, and many of them came from drinking cultures, your Germans, your Irish, your Eastern Europeans, your Italians, and this movement was made up of rural White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. What’s interesting is, they were not even for a constitutional amendment in the beginning. They felt that they could dry up the country precinct by precinct through the printed word and this nonpartisan approach. So, they looked at the census in 1910, and they’d taken local option as far as they could. If you look at a map of the United States or most states in the Union, which they looked at and they printed, the states in the rural areas were dry. In your big cities, that were the bastions of immigrants, they were wet, and they knew that they were never gonna get the city dwellers to use local option and dry themselves up. Beth: So, they chose, in December of 1913, to throw their lot in with the WCTU and the prohibition party who had been calling for a constitutional amendment all along. It’s at that point that there’s a big march on Washington. They march down Pennsylvania avenue, they march to the Capitol, they sing Onward Christian Soldiers, on the steps of the Capitol. They go into the gallery of the Capitol and they unfurl petitions with tens of thousands of names calling for a constitutional amendment. Nathan: So Beth, give us some sense of the kinds of print material that the Anti-Saloon League was distributing. Beth: They began to print 40 tons of anti-alcohol information and ship it from here every month. So, when you get to 1913 they are really at the peak of this printing. They have their own national and state editions of newspapers called The American Issue, they had their own magazine called The Patriot, and they have posters and fliers that are going all over the country, and actually eventually around the world. They printed in six foreign languages, and once this country was dried up, they formed something called The World League Against Alcoholism, to try to dry up the rest of the world. Nathan: Wow, nice small goals. Beth: Yeah, and they were very savvy because they looked at the census of 1910, and the country was about 46% urban, and the rest was rural, and they knew with the influx of immigrants into the country that by 1920 that was gonna flip. Now, they were already in control of congress, and a lot of the state legislatures, so this flip meant that when there was reapportionment that they might be on the losing end of this as congressional districts changed, and Purley Baker who was the superintendent of the League when they came to Westerville was very emphatic about cities, and I just want to read one quote, he says, “The vices of the cities have been the undoing of past empires and civilizations. It has been at the point where the urban population outnumbers the rural people that wrecked republics have gone down.” Nathan: Give me some sense of the general themes that can be teased out of the Anti-Saloon League’s propaganda, like the kinds of emotional appeals, or patriotic sentiment they try to tap into. Beth: There’s some amazing things they’ve done. There’s one that says … the full father. It shows the father out drinking in the saloon with his cronies, and then below him in another image is a young girl at home. She has tattered clothing, waif thin legs, the plaster’s off the wall in the room, a pane in the window is patched, and there on the mantle is a very empty stocking. So, the whole saying on the cartoon is, “The full father and the empty stocking.” It’s very heart wrenching. There’s another one that says, “Daddy’s in there, and our shoes, and stockings, and clothes and food are in there too, and they’ll never come out.”, and it’s showing a young girl and boy standing outside the saloon doors. So, they are excellent at framing that kind of appeal to our emotion, and one of the sayings they had leading into World War I is, “Kaiserism abroad and booze at home must go.” Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Why were German-Americans specifically targeted as one of the main culprits behind this supposed scourge of alcohol. Can you give some specific examples? Beth: There’s a lead up to the war, and of course we enter World War I in April of 1917. You start to see a lot of cartoons in their American issue newspaper that address their feelings about Germans, and they tie the Germans to the brewing industry. So, for example, there is one cartoon that has … the title on it is, Killing Two Birds With One Stone. It has two buzzards sitting in a tree on a branch. One is labeled “brewer”, and right next to him is another labeled “kaiser”, and then it has a man who has a slingshot, and he is labeled “all of us”, and he is picking up a rock that is labeled “war-time prohibition.” So, they make the link between the German brewers, and of course if you look at the names of the brewers in the United States, Miller, Schlitz, Anheuser, they’re all German. So, it’s easy to make this link. Nathan: So, this approach of bundling concerns for the business sector, anti-immigration sentiment, by thinking about rural America versus urban America, all of this together proved successful, right? The 18th Amendment was passed in 1919, and alcohol was outlawed for over a decade. You have to tell me, how did things start to unravel for prohibition? Beth: The Anti-Saloon League was very persuasive in their printed word and their nonpartisan approach, however I don’t think we really know that the majority of people were on board with what ended up as the total prohibition of both distilled products and brewed products. I mean, even the brewers were thinking they would be exempt from the 18th Amendment, they thought they’d be able to produce three-two beer. So, they did not join together with the distillers to fight this in the way they should. So, I think right from the beginning it may have been doomed because you needed buy-in from a lot of people in order to have this kind of legislation. Beth: Initially, I think people thought, “Well, this may be good for our children. It may make for less drunks on the street.”, all of these things, but very quickly what they began to see is that organized crime entered the vacuum that was left by the removal of the saloon. So, saloons were simply replaced by speakeasies, and a lot of the people who were for this in principle, because it sounded good, could see when it began to criminalize activities that a lot of people were engaging in that really were not harming anyone, they began to have second thoughts. So, when you get to the mid-1920s you have a movement against this. Nathan: When prohibition was finally repealed in 1933 I have to imagine that a place like Westerville might have opened up a bar or a saloon right away. Beth: In November 1933 before repeal had actually taken effect we voted ourselves dry again here. The final vote- Nathan: Wow. Beth: Yeah, we wasted no time. The final vote was 1,063 against alcohol to 400 citizens who wanted it. That continued until January 2006. Nathan: Oh my goodness. How did the locals react to this? Beth: Well, someone was Johnny on the spot to buy that first beer so … some people were happy about it, some … longtime residents saw this as a point of pride. We had kept this dry tradition going for so long, so it was heritage as much as anything. They would go outside the city and buy alcohol to bring in to serve in their homes, so it wasn’t like no one here drank, because they did, but they liked the idea that there weren’t businesses in our uptown business area selling it. I’m not quite sure how many establishments we have in our business district now that sell alcohol, but we have two wine shops, we have our own brewpub where they brew alcohol, and actually that establishment is called Temperance Row in honor of the homes that were built by the Anti-Saloon Leaguers when they moved to our community. Nathan: Beth Weinhardt is the local history coordinator at the Anti-Saloon League Museum in Westerville, Ohio. Ed: You know, Joanne, Nathan, you can’t pick up the newspaper or look at your phone without seeing evidence and worry about divisions in the country. This recent election seemed to really dramatize one more time just how divided we are. It’s hard to get some kind of historical perspective on that, but I guess that’s what our podcast is about, so we’ll go ahead and try to do it. Joanne, I’m curious, would this be a surprise to the founders that the country seem to be coming apart at the seems like this? Joanne: Well, I mean, I suppose I’d say yes and no. On the one hand, they expected faction, they expected conflict. They did not assume that the nation would waft its way cloud like with no division at all. They assumed that, and they experienced that as we’ve talked about in the show, but what would have surprised them, and what actually began to surprise them even within the first 10 or 15 years of the government was the likelihood of there being national political parties. That just wasn’t on their radar screen. Ed: So, what did they think faction would look like? Joanne: There’d be lots of them. There’s be lots of factions. There’d be lots of ideas, and people, and groups bouncing against each other, and that out of all of that bouncing around, and debating, and compromising, would come policy, but the idea of a national party … first of all parties at all, organized parties made them nervous, because in their mind a party was out for itself and not out for the good of the nation, which we could debate if that’s true or not, but the idea of having a national party with the power, and discipline, and control that we’re seeing today, and then as a result of that the impact that that has on the nation as a whole, that definitely would have given them pause. Ed: So, the idea seemed to be though that it was a temporary division, a temporary fight, and that you’d be able to kinda shake hands, come back out the other side and move on. Was the example of the Loyalists that we saw in South Carolina a precursor of things to come, or a history left behind do you think? Nathan: Well I mean, I think the one big piece about the Loyalist story obviously, which is that in many cases when you have a place like South Carolina with a black slave majority, some of the concerns about who gets to vote, and who gets to belong to the citizenry becomes pretty clear, you want to make sure that you have your property owning class of white males all working it out ultimately, ’cause there’s a lot more at stake if they don’t. I wonder about the extent to which even a division like that between Loyalists and Patriots is easier to paper over if you have other kinds of division around disenfranchisement, who gets to be a freeholder, those kind of things. It’s almost as if there’s an inverse relationship where the more political participation is possible, the more these divides become almost irreparable. I’m not sure. Ed: Yeah, if you look at the maps in how people voted in [inaudible] America you don’t see the Civil War coming into pretty soon before it does. I mean, in the 1830s and ’40s the patterns are party and they’re national, and it looks like the parties are actually helping hold the country together along one axis as much as they are dividing it across another. Joanne: Right. Exactly. Nathan: So obviously, the Civil War is the big granddaddy of all divisions- Ed: Right. Nathan: … [crosstalk] sitting right here in the middle of all this. I wonder about the extent to which we can look at the Civil War and the fault lines that to sharpens as a way to explain what happens in the later part of the 19th and early 20th century. In other words, is there something about the restarting of who has power, who gets to count as a citizen, the way in which the country was redefining any number of variables about who got to, again, belong. How do we understand that to have set the terms for what becomes the political divisions of the late 19th and 20th century? Ed: Yeah, that’s a great point, Nathan. I think what happens is that, for maybe 10 years after the war, everything seems up for grabs. Formerly enslaved men become citizens, new constitutions written across the United States, the 14th Amendment redefines what it means to be an American. All those things happen in just a few years with the war and its immediate aftermath, but then it’s almost as if a gravitational pull of white privilege and of the two party system reasserts itself, and despite the war you have those same two parties that have been there at the beginning of the war back in control of everything, and African American people marginalized more with each passing decade to the beginning of the 20th century. Ed: So, it’s almost as if, to go back to your original point Joanne, about the parties emerging to the surprise of the founders, the parties survive everything else, even when the constitution seems to be failing, and then when the constitutions remade the two parties are still there, containing, and channeling, and amplifying the division. So, on one hand as the saying goes that, American voted the way they shot, after the Civil War. The Democrats stay the part of the South by and large, the Republicans stay the part of the North by and large, and so the war maintains its imprint, but the two parties are constantly changing, adapting to immigration to Western migration, to all these different kinds of things. Depending upon your point of view they’re the great flywheels that kind of give stability to American history, or they’re the great engines of division that keep dividing us. Joanne: What’s fascinating about that is early on when parties were first coming into being, people realized, and they had felt the absence of an organization that allowed you to corral all kinds of people, and spread a unified message, and do all these concrete things that now we associate with party politics. So, it’s those very things that I think initially people were excited at because it allowed them to pull people together just as we’re saying here, those are the precise things that the founding folk were afraid of being able to pull people together, and at the same time push people apart. So, if you’re talking about belongingness, which is where you started us off Nathan, talking about belongingness, and talking about who has power and who doesn’t, I suppose it helps to be part of an organization that has long roots and a lot of pull. Nathan: Yeah, I mean, on the face of it at least, it seems very challenging because, again, as with the party structure, there’s also structures of propaganda in communications and media. So I mean, you can tune into FOX news or MSNBC, and the information is gonna be curated based on the political party that’s behind that operation, and it does leave a lot of people unrepresented and unspoken for. Ed: Overall as we look at the grand arc of American history, are you folks optimistic or chastened, or worried, or something else? I mean, should we take comfort from the fact that we’ve always been at each others throats, or do we feel that we’re in some new era when the divisions are just too deep, too entrenched, too inflamed to overcome? Joanne: Given the book that I just wrote- Ed: Yeah, right. Joanne: … I’ve been thinking a lot about divisions, and I’ve been thinking a lot about other times in American history when we’ve been driven to really polarized extremes, and there have been a number of them, and we’ve pulled out. Now, on the one hand that’s encouraging, we’ve pulled out of those moments, often the political process, and whether that’s an election or a supreme court decision, or a piece of legislation has helped pull us out because people have agreed that the process, if they don’t like the answer they can at least agree that the process has validity, so that in and of itself is encouraging, but I mean, it’s a cliché but I’ll say it anyway, history doesn’t repeat. It teaches, but it doesn’t repeat. So, we’re in an interesting moment. I’m personally as a historian, I’m watching very closely to see how the political process is playing out after this election. I think that will matter a lot. Ed: So to what you just said, as long as we maintain faith in the structure and the process that we can withstand it. It’s when we lose faith in the very integrity of the courts, or of the parties, or of our leaders that things get really dangerous. Nathan: Yeah, I mean, I would say, two things that might be kind of surprising coming from me as a 20th century person which is that, we have to actually put down our 20th century thinking on this, and again, not think in terms of election cycles, but think in the way that the founders did in terms of the long view or even the way our forebearers under reconstruction, and the end of reconstruction had to think, which was in terms of generations, not simply election cycles, and again, not to say to be patient by way of being inactive, but to really understand that, like you said, the deep structures require a tremendous amount of work conducted over decades, and decades, and decades. I think one of the things that we have as a nation to really work on is our patience in terms of building a cohesive country and what that really does require. Ed: That’s gonna do it for us today. Do get in touch. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send us an email at backstoryofvirginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger. Nathan: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and The National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. Male 4: Brian Balogh is professor of history of the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the Humanities, and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.