End Riff

Nathan Connolly: So, folks, we’ve talked about a lot of different thorny and troubling topics on BackStory, and some fun stuff. And this is something that could potentially be fun, and yet we’ve been pretty tied up in knots about how to handle something like cursing. And I’m curious, given what we’re used to dealing with, why this presented such a challenge for us.

Brian Balogh: Not since our producers told us we were doing a show on the history of fashion have I been so nervous. And I still am tied up in knots. I just interviewed people who used language that I would never use in public, I would never use in private, and I kind of felt like if I’m embarrassed by this, I don’t want to impose that on our listeners, even though we warned them up front.

Joanne Freeman: What’s so striking about that is, think about the power of those words. The amount of energy that we are no expending, trying to decide if we should say them or not, think about what that says about how powerful those words are.

Brian Balogh: Some of those words have deep historical meanings, and some of them are … What should we say? Kind of disembodied or disconnected from particular historical moments.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah, I mean, there’s going to be certain histories and images and parts of the past that get conjured by certain curse words. And so, certain words are innocuous. I mean, you think about a word like piss or shit that doesn’t really carry the same kind of gravity as the dreaded “N word,” right? Or any number of words associated with gay people or women. There’s a violence that’s behind the language, and there’s a violence that often accompanied the use of particular kinds of terms, that I think at a visceral level, we’re all aware of.

Nathan Connolly: And so, rather than take that lightly, I think we enter the conversation about cursing with a certain amount of caution. Yeah, I think that that’s important. I gotta share with you guys something around this, as well. I had a chance to teach an FBI file of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

Brian Balogh: Wow.

Nathan Connolly: And reading the FBI file is a remarkable window into the politics of cursing, it turns out. So, this is from the 1921 episode, the riot in Tulsa. And the agent is giving what seems like a pretty clinical account, and he’s talking about the local sheriff and the local county marshal and other law enforcement, and he’s using air quotes or quotes around the word, the N word, and as they’re talking about a lynching that they’re trying to execute against an African American who was accused of assaulting a White woman. And eventually, the quotation marks just disappear and the agent himself simply uses the N word as a pronoun for the African Americans he’s describing in Tulsa.

Nathan Connolly: There’s a second aspect to this, which is in order to justify the actions that are taken by the White mob, the field agent describes how many African Americans in response to the threatened lynching were basically muttering and cursing. And that’s a quote, “Then armed Negroes standing off to one side, muttering and cursing.” And this was in the presence of White women. And it was a way of capturing this as a particularly un-respectable group of Black people, who might have in fact been deserving of what happened in the subsequent aftermath of the riot.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, I have to ask, when do the air quotes disappear?

Nathan Connolly: Well, if you can imagine a 14 page document, it’s about on page two.

Brian Balogh: But what is your hypothesis as to why he just drops the pretense?

Nathan Connolly: I actually think it’s because the government and the agents of the government in 1921, law enforcement, by and large are adopting racist ideas. And they can pretend to have a certain objective distance, but this is a word that they’re quite comfortable using.

Joanne Freeman: Right.

Brian Balogh: It wears off by page two.

Nathan Connolly: Exactly.

Joanne Freeman: Right.

Nathan Connolly: Exactly. And it becomes a simple synonym for people of color, Black people. But this is one of those things that, again, I think it speaks to our own struggles with this, is that sometimes when you get a little bit familiar, when you get deeper into the conversation, you let certain kinds of decorum slip, right? And I wonder if there’s a certain feeling that we have about being on the airwaves, right? About being recorded. It might be different if we were in informal conversation and letting the words kind of fly, fast and loose.

Joanne Freeman: You would think that being on the airwaves, whether that means radio to TV, would mean that you would be hyper conscious. However, I can say that I have the honor for having been bleeped for profanity on PBS.

Nathan Connolly: Joanne.

Joanne Freeman: I know, it’s shocking. It’s shocking. Well, and after I did it, I worried about it for like three months until the show aired because I thought, “Oh, my gosh. What does it mean? Are people going to look down on me for having said the word?” It was a documentary about Alexander Hamilton, and I was asked what people of the time thought about him. And it’s not even that horrible a word. And I said, “Oh, people at the time considered him an arrogant, irritating asshole.” And when I watched the documentary, asshole was bleeped.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Joanne Freeman: And it was fascinating to me that I uttered it. I was trying to capture the strong emotion of people at the time. Then suddenly it caught me up in it and I began to be really worried about what people would think that I used it. And then I became sort of bizarrely proud of myself for having gotten the bucket list accomplishment of being bleeped on PBS. But it was a lot more gauged with saying that word than I would have assumed there would be.

Nathan Connolly: So, is there something about cursing that we can put into perspective? In other words, to say that there are certain words that in some ways, in the case of someone like Hamilton, for the sake of history, we just have to say and be willing to say? That’s something unique about Hamilton’s character that’s captured by the term asshole. And it’s at historians’ discretion basically to say, “Well, I’m being the most accurate when I roll out these particular kinds of words.”

Joanne Freeman: Well, I mean, here’s the thing that strikes me about all of these kinds of words. I kind of hinted at it earlier. I said how powerful they are and how striking that is, but part of the reason they’re powerful is what you suggested before, Nathan, has to do with the historical baggage. Part of it has to do that these are words that inherently have so much emotion attached to them. And whether that’s anger or hatred or passion or fear, they kind of zoom in on something that’s really powerful and direct, which I did without even meaning to and I was trying to capture people’s feelings about Hamilton during that early time period. But that’s part of what gives them their power, is that in and of themselves as words, they’re such powerful emotional statements.

Nathan Connolly: So, I think we’re in a moment now where we’re coming to a crossroads as a society, about what words we’ll consider to be profane. Because infamously I suppose now, the president was heard in what was presumed to be a private conversation, in a very public setting, but not recorded, calling people or calling countries from the Southern part of the world, shit hole countries. And news organizations had to figure out if they were going to bleep or to say the word and what the politics around that were. As a candidate, Trump used foul language and was caught on tape using that, and again news organizations were forced to think about that. And now again with a more recent speech at the Convention for Conservatives in Baltimore, Maryland, he was caught saying bullshit and the news organizations, yet again, had to figure how to carry the words of the leader of the country.

Nathan Connolly: And I guess my question is, in light of all these now serial crises of censorship and language, are those terms going to be considered more acceptable? If you run that on mainstream media, does it lose the taboo of saying a word like shit or bitch or bullshit?

Joanne Freeman: It’s interesting. I totally agree with that, that we’ve become familiarized with them and the more we become familiarized, the less bad or banned they seem and the easier it is for us to say them. But at the same time that that is the case, and that might become the case with the word bullshit, the fact that the president said that word suggests something about his character. Which is why I think that it’s important for us to know that he said that word, right? So that at the same time that we’re stating here that him saying that might make it not mean something, the fact that he said it does mean something at this current moment, and that both of those things are true at the same time.

Brian Balogh: So you guys are not gonna like this question, but I’ll ask both of you.

Joanne Freeman: Uh-oh.

Brian Balogh: Doesn’t the fact that he said that make him even more authentic to at least 45% of the American public?

Joanne Freeman: Yeah.

Nathan Connolly: The data on this is clear, right? You’re more trustworthy if you’re caught cursing. And so, yeah, it means somehow that you’re telling the truth, because you’re not using elliptical language or spinning tales.

Joanne Freeman: You’re not censoring yourself.

Brian Balogh: A point to a historical moment that strengthens what you just said, and that’s Richard Nixon cursing like a sailor in the Watergate Tapes, not in public, right?

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Brian Balogh: And so, what Donald Trump is doing in some ways is being authentic by using the same language, ostensibly, although it may be far worse in private, using some of the same language that he uses in private, in front of millions of people. And that adds to this patina for some of “authenticity”.

Joanne Freeman: Because he said it, because it number one will, as you’re suggesting, Brian, will make him seem authentic, but also, because it is still a dirty word, that part of what he accomplished by saying it, and I believe he said it more than once, is that it will stand out to people, because it’s not normally what you expect someone to say.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Joanne Freeman: And when we think about the things he was saying it about, the Mueller Investigation, that’s the word that’s gonna pop into our heads.

Brian Balogh: Yes, it’s a bullshit witch hunt.

Joanne Freeman: Right, exactly. That’s 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.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Provost Office at The University of Virginia, The Johns Hopkins University, 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.

Speaker 9: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at 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.