Tape: From VFH Radio in Charlottesville, Virginia, this is “BackStory.”

Peter Onuf: From weapons of mass destruction to the U.S.S. Maine, each of America’s wars has been accompanied by its own debate at home, but no war has produced as much debate about its root causes as the American Civil War.  Was it slavery or states’ rights?  Might it have been avoided or was it baked into our history from the outset?  One hundred and fifty years after the shooting began, the national conversation about what the Civil War really meant is still going strong.

Ed Ayers: We’re the American History Guys and today on our show, we’re diving head first into that conversation with an hour devoted to your questions about the Civil War.  What interests you about the war and how much does that have to do with your own family story?  How have our collective stories about the Civil War evolved and what in the world is left to discuss?

PO: The questions that remain one hundred and fifty years later.  That’s coming up on “BackStory” after this news.

Tony Field: Hi, I’m Tony Field, the producer of “BackStory.”  Today’s Podcast is the third and final installment in our special Civil War Anniversary Series.  You can find the first two parts on our website and on iTunes.  If you enjoy the Podcast, please consider making a contribution to VFH Radio to help cover some of our production costs.  There’s a link to give in the bottom right hand corner of our website, backstoryradio.org.  Fifteen dollars would amount to a dime for each year since the Civil War began and we’ll consider any donation of that amount as an endorsement of our work on this series.  As always, you can also help out by sharing links to our shows with your friends and by leaving a review on our page in the iTunes store.  Thanks so much for listening.  Now, back to the show.

PO: Major production support for “BackStory” is provided the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.  Support also comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  [music]  This is “BackStory,” with us, the American History Guys.  I’m Peter Onuf, the 18th century guy.

EA: I’m Ed Ayers, the 19th century guy.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh, 20^th century history guy.  [music]   A few weeks ago, a historian friend of ours here at the University of Virginia, a guy by the name of Gary Gallagher, received an invitation to deliver a talk about the Civil War.  Now, there’s nothing new about that.  Gary is one of the most prominent scholars on the Civil War.  He could probably talk about the Civil War in his sleep, but he had the feeling that this lecture was going to be just a little bit different.

Gary Gallagher: I was asked to talk to basically the Democratic Caucus of the United States Senate.

PO: The invitation came from the office of Senator Harry Reid.  They wanted Gary to provide the after-dinner entertainment for a group of 49 senators attending a retreat in Central Virginia.

Gallagher: I’d been told to give 20 minutes worth of comments and to be ready for 20 minutes worth of questions and answers, and the third and most important thing according to the person who invited me and who was speaking for the Majority Leader Senator Reid, “don’t be boring.”

PO: That last admonition weighed on Gary throughout the evening’s dinner, especially as the dinner went on, and on, and on, much later into the evening than had been originally planned.

Gallagher: Just before I got up, Senator Kerry who was sitting right across from me leaned over and said, “I wouldn’t give prepared remarks if I were you,” and I said, “I’m way ahead of you Senator, I’m not giving prepared remarks,” and so I didn’t.  I asked for a hand-held mic and I just walked up and down and talked to them.

BB: Gary ended up talking to the senators about everything from the balance of power between federal, state, and local governments to what happens to individual liberties in war-time—all from the perspective of the mid-19th century.  The Q & A continued late into the evening, leading Gary to believe that a lot of these senators found the Civil War more than a little relevant to the issues they’re dealing with today.

EA: In the spirit of that evening, we’re devoting today’s show to your questions about the Civil War.  We’re interested in hearing your thoughts about how the war connects with today.  The last two episodes of our program looked specifically at the run-up to the war and at the question of what actually motivated Northerners and Southerners to take up arms against each other.  In this third episode of our Civil War 150th Anniversary Series, we’re opening things up.  All questions are fair game. And, yes, we promise to do our utmost not to be boring.

BB: Okay, guys, I understand that we all get excited about anniversaries and it’s been a hundred and fifty years since the Civil War, but I got to tell you, I don’t understand all of the effort and the subtlety and the nuance that has gone into recreating this event.  It actually seems pretty clear-cut to me, right?  I mean, there’re two really fundamental things at stake:  one is the preservation of the Union—

PO: Yeah.

BB: And two is liberty.

PO: Liberty for all.

BB: Check.  Check.  Check.  End of story.  I mean, what actually is there to talk about.

PO: Well, Brian, I would say the question then and now is this:  who is an American?  Now, if you think we have a clear answer to that question right now, then I think you’re crazy and you know that it’s not true. We’re constantly debating the margins of nationhood.  Well, that’s what was happening in the period of the Civil War, that is, were African Americans really part of America?  Were they Americans?  Now, that’s the question I think that’s so troubling to us now looking back is even in the North, the civil rights, the liberties of blacks were radically circumscribed.  You would have very few people accept fully the notion that these are us, that is, white people saying black people are part of the great American people and obviously, slavery was the great bulwark of this exclusion of a whole people, but that’s the reality of the times, so let’s look it straight in the face and say, okay, yeah, we have come a long way but it wasn’t because we got rid of Confederates.  I mean, that wasn’t it.  There was a lot of other things that had to happen.

BB: So you’re pointing to a danger also, Peter, which is the notion that, okay, this is an important question, but we settled it in the Civil War.

PO: Yeah, exactly right.

EA: And not really settled it but atoned for it.

BB: And atoned for it.  Yeah, that’s terrific.

EA: What’s what gets me is a sense of, yes, I know we were all complicit in this for 200 years, longer than we’ve been since the Civil War that the nation as a whole tolerated and fostered slavery and somehow that the white North sacrifice, intentional or otherwise, in the Civil War somehow wipes the books clean—

PP: Yeah, yeah.

EA: And buys innocence for the nation.  I think the other danger of it is that it creates the impression that a war can fix a deep-seated social problem and, well, look, in just four years, the North wiped out slavery.  Imagine what we could do elsewhere with missiles and tanks, so I think that’s it full of danger to too easily settle up on a triumphal story of the Civil War.  I think it’s better for us to feel so profoundly fortunate that it turned out as it did and for us to redeem that good fortune by trying to live up to the best of its promise.

BB: Guys, we have some good fortune of our own.  We call that good fortune our listeners and our callers.  For the past few weeks, our producers have been soliciting your questions on our website, backstoryradio.org. Today, they’ve invited a few of the people who left comments there to join us on the phone.

[phone music]

PO: Our first call today is from Atlanta Georgia.  It’s Dan.  Dan, welcome to “BackStory.”

Caller (Dan): Hey, thanks for having me.

PO: So, Civil War, a hot topic.  Dan, what’s on your mind?

Caller (Dan): Well, I was thinking a lot about the secession crisis of 1860 and 1861 because it seems to me in many of the popular retellings of the history of the war that it kind of goes that Lincoln was elected in November of 1860 and from then on down, the Civil War was happening and there was no stopping it—

PO: Right.

Caller (Dan): But over time, you know, I’ve kind of looked a little bit closer at some of the events that happened and there was a really long time in between when Lincoln was elected and when the fighting really started.  The states, they didn’t all leave at once.  They kind of slowly filed out one at the time and there was a lot of negotiations back and forth and a lot of debate in the state legislatures and so with all of this going on, all of these different small events, how much could those affect the course of history as opposed to the longer term events that we talk about a lot in [9:03/ __________] slavery sectionalism.

PO: That’s a great question.  Well, you know, Dan, you’re really putting your finger on a hot button for historians.  It’s the contingency button.  That is, things are not inevitable.  Stuff happens but it doesn’t have to happen and we have one of the world’s leading authorities on contingency hailing from the 19^th century.  Come to us, Ed.  [laughter]  Communications are very irregular across the centuries.

EA: One way to think about this is there’s two groups of historians:  one, to the fundamentalists who point to the real fact that slavery is a driving source of conflict from the moment that the American nation is created and that the fact that we see every decade some different kind of struggle over it, shows that it was going to come to some kind of head and if you just want to get all hung up on the details of what actually happened, you’re overlooking this fundamental struggle.  Other people say, no, no, no, this is really about the political machinations at the time and this is what most American historians thought in the 1920s and ’30s, that if you’d had somebody other than James Buchanan and other inept blundering generation at the famous phrase went, you would’ve had the war.  I think what historians today are trying to figure out is exactly how do you connect those underlying structural tensions and the more dynamic personal—

BB: Contingencies.

EA: Contingencies.

PO: Yeah, yeah, right, but Ed, wouldn’t say that something had to happen.  I’m prepared to say that as an expert on the founding, so you might cast me as a fundamentalist but what’s going to happen is by no means clear.  Does it have to be that kind of war?  Do we know who the antagonists are going to be?  We don’t know these outcomes and it seems to me everything is wound up in the thing that does happen and that, of course, is deeply contingent.

EA: Well, you know, I think the critical thing to understand is that it’s not just that the war has started like a wind-up toy—

PO: Yeah, yeah.

EA: Even in April of 1861.  Now, once it begins, it can follow lots of different courses.  As a matter of fact, the one that it followed seemed very unlikely to most people at the time, that it could be fought to just ultimate exhaustion on both sides.  You know, even after Virginia and Tennessee and North Carolina and Arkansas leave, Maryland and Kentucky do not.  Even though you could imagine that Kentucky had at least as much reason to secede as Tennessee, it didn’t because of geopolitical positioning and so forth, so I think that Dan, you’re on to something really important, that we’ve got to relax our certainty of how the story is unfolding enough to actually see what happened.

BB: I have a question for you, Dan.  As 20^th century guy, I want to know what interests you about all this stuff.  You know, frankly, to me it seems a really long time ago.

PO: He’s from Atlanta, Brian.  [laughter]

Caller (Dan): Yeah, we’ve got a big reminder carved onto Stone Mountain.

PO: That’s right.

Caller (Dan): Of the conflict.  You know, in Atlanta, there’s historical markers on every corner in downtown Atlanta.

BB: Yeah, but you know you guys are too busy to hate there in Atlanta and you’ve kind of, you know, you’re the new South, but, you know, to get back to contingency, what about you?  What about your circumstances really drives you to learn so much about the Civil War?  You seem to know more about it than I do, for instance.  [laughter]

PO: That is saying next to nothing.

BB: I know.  I know.  Dan doesn’t know that, though.  You didn’t have to tell him that.

PO: Go ahead, Dan.

Caller (Dan): Well, I think that part of what drives my interest in it today is there so much contemporary debate on it, so even if the Civil War in and of itself was not that interesting, the fact that so many people keep debating about what caused it, how did this happen, what does it mean, you know, it just kind of naturally draws my interest looking to some of the history around it and saying, well, you know, what did happen.

PO: In other words, Dan, you’re saying it’s out of self-defense that you engage with it?

Caller (Dan): I want to feel like I’m well equipped [13:06 / with facts].

PO: You know, I think that’s a serious response.  I’m not making fun of that.

EA: I would have a word in particular for Dan.  We look back on it now and that is that Georgia came in pretty soon after South Carolina which was one of the original Confederates states, but historians have looked at the returns pretty carefully and think that maybe a majority of white Georgia men would have voted against secession if it had been presented as such.  And it’s certainly the case that Georgia under Governor Brown began to be a real thorn in the side of the Confederacy almost from the beginning, withholding men, resisting Confederate policy, so here’s the contingent thing I’d leave you with, Dan.  Virginia comes in kicking and screaming, deeply reluctant.

PO: Yep.

EA: And then is remarkably loyal to the Confederacy from start to finish whereas Georgia is torn apart.  Northern Georgia resists the Confederacy so we tend to think about the Deep South being the real Confederacy and the upper South being kind of an ersatz Confederacy—

PO: Yeah, yeah.

EA: But in the course of the war it becomes the opposite.

PO: So, Dan, do you feel well armed for your next engagement on the Civil War?

Caller (Dan): I hope so.

PO: Good.  Yeah, well, keep your powder dry.

Caller (Dan): It can be difficult to make some progress among people sometimes.

PO: All right.  Well, Dan, keep on fighting.

BB: Thank you, Dan.

PO: Thanks for calling.

Caller (Dan): Thank you very much.

PO: Bye.

EA: Bye, Dan.  [music]

PO: It’s time for a short break, but before we go, let me just tell you that we’ve posted tons of great multimedia resources on the Civil War at backstoryradio.org.  After the break, we’ll return to the phones, so please, don’t go away.  This is “BackStory,” the show that looks at a topic from the perspective of three different centuries.  I’m the 18^th century guy, Peter Onuf.

EA: I’m the 19th century guy, Ed Ayers.

BB: And I’m the 20th century guy, Brian Balogh. Today, we’re marking the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginnings by opening up the phone lines to your questions about the conflict.  For a few weeks now, our producers have been surveying all the comments that you left at backstoryradio.org.  Today, they’ve invited a few of the people who left questions there to join us on the phone.

PO: Hey, guys, we’ve got a call from New York City.  Elaine’s on the line.  Elaine, welcome to “BackStory.”

Caller (Elaine): Hi, thank you so much and thank you for having me on the show.  So, I was wondering, what did racial identity, ethnicity make up, was in the military in both the North and South since at that time there were a lot of different races and plus a lot of different ethnicities living in America already.

PO: Right.

Caller (Elaine): So, I would imagine the military probably had a good mixture of different races, probably in the North but I’m not so sure about the South.

PO: Ed, maybe you could speak in a general way to the ethnic and racial make-up of the armies.  In a way, the question is do they reflect the country or the parts of the country that are now at war with each other.

EA: They actually do reflect their populations very effectively.  No, the white Southern concern was that the Union armies were reflecting too much ethnic diversity, [laughter] that they were not really the Northern people mobilizing but rather sending what they saw as the riff-raff, people who didn’t have a job otherwise, sort of mercenaries, but we’ve looked at this pretty carefully and it turns out that white Southerners were right in that Northern immigrants did fight but they fought really as a part of solidarity often with other people from their own ethnicities and they fought with remarkable bravery and consistency.  The harder thing for us to understand perhaps is that also in the South, which was more ethnically diverse before the Civil War than it was afterwards.

PO: Yeah, interesting.

EA: That there sometimes people were more conflicted but you would’ve had very prominent Irish people, Germans, and Jews who would fight for the Confederacy, so I think the general story is that the entire populations of the North and South, the entire white populations, were quite mobilized by the Civil War.

PO: And that’s the important qualification, Elaine.  It’s white we’re talking about.  The idea of African Americans fighting on, well, on either side, though, ultimately, of course, even the Confederates consider mobilizing slaves and freeing them in order to win, but this is in the desperate final phases of the war, but the idea that this was a democratic movement in the broadest sense, North and South, even in the North there’s tremendous resistance to mobilizing black troops.

EA: Yeah, Elaine, I’m curious as to where your question comes from.

Caller (Elaine): Well, I’m Chinese and we all know that America at that time that there were a lot of people from all over the world already, so I was just wondering, what was their motivation to join the military at that time?

PO: It’s a great question.  Yep.  And I think Ed mentioned the Irish and maybe, Ed, you could talk a little bit more about the Irish because in some ways that is the great immigrant group of this period and how the Irish would fit into American society, that’s a live issue.  There’s some discussion among historians that in many ways Irish were treated as if they were black, that is, a despised other, so the moment of wartime mobilization and Irish enthusiasm for the war North and South, because Ed’s right, I mean, there’re Irish units on both sides, indicates a kind of self-conscious Americanization.  It’s a moment in which you can prove yourself that you’re a part of this great country.

BB: Yeah.

EA: This is all the more remarkable that the Irish would fight because they were often pitted against African Americans at the bottom of the social order—

PO: Yes, yes, exactly.

EA: Competing for jobs and so the fact that Irish people often who’d lived in the United States less than 10 years are willing to imagine themselves as a part of the American people and willing to fight for the freedom of other people is really another amazing story in U.S. history.

PO: Uh huh.

EA: Something we need to remember, however, is that the Irish also rioted in the streets against what they saw as, and what was, in fact, an unfair use of the draft that seemed to them days after many of their compatriots had died in Gettysburg and the story was in the Irish neighborhoods, that they had been sacrificed by Union generals who did not value Irish lives the way they did a people who had been born in the United States, so you have both the greatest gallantry and sacrifice for the Union but also the nagging story of when push came to shove, the Irish and other working people did actually riot against the United States.

BB: And just for our 20^th century fans, it’s also true for the 20^th century where we have zoot suit riots among Mexican Americans during World War II that on a large part ethnic groups and racial groups see this as an opportunity but they also are not unaware of the intense discrimination and it’s very understandable that some would ask, what?

PO: But isn’t it interesting, though, that the U.S. colored troops are not rioting?

BB: Far from it.

PO: They’re rioting for the opportunity to fight and so the comparisons are interesting because, of course, there’re mixed feelings about the war but the one group that is absolutely clear about the war would be freed people or slaves, that the war means for them the end of slavery and the possibility of dignity and inclusion in the nation.

Caller (Elaine): Right.

PO: Thanks for your call.  It’s been a lot of fun talking to you.

Caller (Elaine): Thank you.  Have a good day.

EA: Bye bye. 

Caller (Elaine): Bye bye.  [music]

PO: We’ve got another call and it’s a local call from right here in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Blake— welcome to the show.

Caller (Blake): Hello.

PO: So, what’s on your mind?

Caller (Blake): Well, you know, I was brought up in Virginia and have lived I guess with the Civil War for my whole life and remember very vividly the Centennial in Richmond, but recently I have been trying to learn a little bit about the, for lack of a better word, the causes and have been reading particularly about the influence of the church, in this case, mostly Methodist and Presbyterian churches in the South and was wondering how you guys viewed that.  Do you feel the preachers from their pulpits and their writings led the South to the Civil War and to secession?

PO: Well, Blake, that’s a great question.  Blake wants to know whether the preachers are responsible for the Civil War.  That’s the short version of it.  Obviously, they didn’t do it all by themselves.  I’d say this is a point of departure.  Many Southerners believe there was a piety deficit between North and South, that the South was a more Christian place and the North was riven by heresy and socialism and secularism and so Southern preachers did a couple of important things, I think, and that is, on one hand, to tell Southerners that they had God on their side, that they were good Christians, and second, preachers played an absolutely crucial role in the emerging pro-slavery argument.

EA: That’s really well put, Peter.  I think the preachers make a real point of saying, hey, hey, hey, the pulpit is no place to talk about politics.

PO: Right.

EA: All that we say is that slavery has God’s divine sanction.  Other than that, we have no political position at all to make.

PO: That’s all.

EA: That’s right.  So, Southern preachers do not lead the South into secession but as Peter says, as soon as providence seems to dictate that that’s the way to go, the ministers are some of the most vocal advocates of the Confederacy.

PO: But, Ed, it’s my impression from historians who’ve written on this subject that in fact Southerners had ample ground in scriptural reference for the support of slavery and they might even have had the edge over their Northerner counterparts, at least if you’re looking for literal readings of the Bible and what it tells us.

EA: Well, that’s the crucial point, Peter.  The literal historic injunctions, especially in the Old Testament do accept slavery as a reality.  Increasingly, what happens in the North is that people look at the spirit of the New Testament instead.  It said how can you possibly love someone as your brother and hold them in perpetual bondage so there’s plenty of energy in the Bible—

PO: Yeah, yeah.

EA: For both pro- and anti-slavery.

PO: No question, but what is also going on and what’s important for white Southerners is that they believe that they have been successful in a great missionary campaign to Christianize the quarters and it’s one of the reasons why they’re comfortable with slavery is that they have taken an instrumental role in spreading Christianity in the slave population so the idea that the slaves were an internal enemy or dangerous subversives who would rise up and revolt, that had been mitigated if not altogether eliminated for many Southerners because they thought of Christianity as a profound bond of union between black and white, even if they worshipped separately.

Caller (Blake): But would that be a true belief, do you think, or more or less just an apology for the burdens that they’d put on African American through slavery.

PO: Hey, Blake, what is a true belief?

Caller (Blake): [laughter]

PO: It’s a known unknown or unknown known.  Do they believe it?  I think absolutely.  One of the things that we learn as historians is to take our subject seriously.  They may be by our standards deluded and self-serving, but that Southerners believe they were good Christians, I believe that’s absolutely true.

EA: As a matter of fact, the South says we are in the process of creating the most Christian nation on the face of the earth, but your question, I think, Blake is right.  It doesn’t take long for the end of the war for white Southerners to begin to worry, hmmm, were we fooling ourselves?

PO: Yeah.

EA: Yeah, do they really love us?  [laughter]  The fact that they’re moving away at the very first moment of freedom really is a confrontation with a kind of truth that the white South is really not ready to embrace.

BB: Hey, Blake, may I add an addendum to your good question?

Caller (Blake): Yes, please.

BB: Guys, I’d like to know—  I do know, actually, that the church played such a crucial role in the lives of African Americans after the Civil War.  Can you tell me something about religion and slaves during the Civil War?

EA: Well, one of the first thing that happens is the churches which had been the really only inter-racial space in the slave South begins separating.  At the very first moment, African Americans seize the opportunity to have their own churches.  You know, they’ve always gone off on their private worship ceremonies out in the woods or whatever, but in the Civil War itself, as things begin to fall apart, you find that black ministers step forward and begin leading the African American church, so you find that there’s a kind of freedom that comes maybe first in the religious realm and African Americans are quick to seize it.

PO: Well, Blake, thank you for calling “BackStory.”

Caller (Blake): Thank you very much

EA: Thank you, Blake.

Caller (Blake): Right.

PO: Bye.  [music]

BB: If you’re just tuning in, this is “BackStory,” and today we’re talking about everything you ever wanted to know about the American Civil War.  Or at least everything the people on the other end of our phone line want to know.

PO: Next up on that line we have Carl, calling in from Murray, Kentucky.  Carl, welcome to “BackStory.”

Caller (Carl): Oh, thanks, glad to be on.

PO: Yeah, so, we’re talking about the Civil War and you have something for us.

Caller (Carl): My question involves education.  As a future educator myself, I’m just wondering what do you all see the significance of the Civil War for kids of the next generation?

PO: Yeah.  Super question. That’s really the big question of this series we’re doing on the Civil War.  What can we take away from the Civil War?  What are the lessons we want to learn and can we get beyond simply reveling in the details and reenactments and all that stuff.  How about the 20^th century, because, you know, as an educator—

BB: I was being quiet because I know so little about the Civil War, Carl, but I’ll say my piece and then shut up.  I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from the guys about the Civil War which is basically you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.  You know, there were some very smart people back then and we might not have agreed with them and their views, but they thought about this really carefully and they followed the news and they talked to each other and they debated each other and just about everything that they thought was going to happen either didn’t happen or happened in another way or happened in ways that absolutely would’ve confounded them two or three years later.

PO: So, Brian is so absolutely right and it’s the historians’ takeaway, but just imagine with Carl that we’ve got school kids and we want this to be a real teaching opportunity.  Are there any—  Well, the old-fashioned word “civics.”  Any civics lessons, Ed and Brian.

BB: Well, I’ll continue and then, again, try to shut up.

PO: You will succeed.

BB: I think one of the lessons I would take away, Carl, and your future students, is that language and the way we talk to each other matters.

Caller (Carl): Right.

BB: That’s a very timely issue today as you know, and we as historians tend to pooh-pooh some of this very heated rhetoric that’s being tossed around today and say, oh, you know, they were a lot worse to each other back in the 19^th century but, you know what, every now and then things kind of come unraveled and that heated rhetoric which they surely used contributed, I think, to tearing at the fabric of the nation, along with, of course, key issues like slavery and expansion of slavery into the territories and now I really am going to be quiet.

EA: May I ask what age students that you’ll be teaching, Carl?

Caller (Carl): It’ll be secondary ed, 8^th to 12^th grade.

EA: Oh, man, 8^th.  If I were you, I would choose the 12^th.  [laughter]

Caller (Carl): Hey, I’m at the point now I’ll take anything they give me, really.

EA: I know how that goes.  That’s right.  Even 8^th graders.  But, you know, it’s a fine line.  I always tell the story, I’ve actually written some things about kind of the open-ended nature of some of these things and my daughter who was 11 at the time which I guess is pretty close—  That’s not quite 8^th grade.

PO: Right.

BB: She’s very precocious, though, Carl

EA: Exactly.  She walked in, literally with her American history textbook with her finger in part of the pages and she said, “Daddy, what caused the Civil War?”  And I was thinking, okay, do I go into all this thing about a the complexity and the indeterminacy and the choices to be made.  I said, “slavery, honey.”  [laughter]  And because, you know, that’s what she could have right then.  That’s what she could understand.  If you have to chose one word, that’s what it is.

Caller (Carl): Right.

EA: But the trick is, you know, as the kids get older, to suggest, yes, it was slavery but how was it slavery?

PO: Yeah, that’s the question.

EA: It suggests that the North was all different from the South.  No, they weren’t.  They sort of discovered over the course of the war that slavery was going to have to be destroyed and they didn’t want to do it necessarily and they weren’t just the good guys who were coming in.

PO: Right.

EA: But the people that look back on it now and, you know, you have the same accent I do, so I know you’re a fellow Southerner—

PO: It’s really grating, isn’t it, Brian?

BB: Yeah.  I would say one’s enough.

PO: [laughter]

EA: Hey, it’s never enough, is it, Carl?

Caller (Carl): That’s right.  We got to band together, I guess.

EA: Well, we tried that once.  It didn’t really work out all that well.  Even the last time I checked you guys in Kentucky chose not to stick together with the South.

PO: [laughter]

Caller (Carl): Well—

PO: Come on.  East Tennessee, a hot bed of Unionism.

Caller (Carl): I would say I’m from far western Kentucky and we were called the South Carolina Kentucky, so I guess I’m from the pro-Southern part.

EA: And I’m from east Tennessee.  We’re called the Massachusetts of Tennessee, so I guess it all evens out.  Which is an important lesson in and of itself, you know, that this was not just a thing.  If I were to come up with a sort of short version of all this is that kids, this is a story that we have to follow to see how it unfolds.  You can’t just sort of get to the summary and say that’s what it was all about.

PO: You know what?  We have to be aware of unintended consequences and we like in our mythic understandings of American history to ascribe the right intentions to our forefathers and foremothers.  We like to think that the right people at the right time stood up like Abraham Lincoln represents the North and he had a vision that slavery was evil.

Caller (Carl): Right.

PO: It’s not that there isn’t a conscience and a moral sense.  There is all over the place.  It’s just that what happened was not scripted, that it became a war that ended slavery was on nobody’s mind or very few, except for radical abolitionists’ minds at the start of the war and I think this is humbling—

Caller (Carl): Right.

PO: So, Carl, after listening to all this, you still want to go into the history teaching biz?

Caller (Carl): Well, yeah, sure.  [32:49 / __________]

EA: Okay. So what can we do to get you’re a job now, Carl?  Let’s get down to brass tacks.

PO: How about we write a letter for him?

EA: We’re ready.

PO: All right.  “BackStory” endorses Carl.  Great talking with you, Carl.  Thanks for calling.

Caller (Carl): Oh, yeah, I really enjoyed it.

EA: Thank you very much.

BB: Thanks a lot, Carl.

Caller (Carl): Thank you.  [music]

BB: It’s time for another break.  Don’t go away, though.  When we get back, we’ll hear if these two very wordy colleagues of mine are capable of summarizing the Civil War in a hundred and forty character characters.  That’s right.  You’re going to hear Peter and Ed tweet the Civil War.

PO: You’re listening to a Civil War special from “BackStory,” and we’ll be back in a minute.   We’re back with “BackStory,” the show that turns to history to understand the world around us today.  I’m Peter Onuf, and I represent the 18th century.

EA: I’m Ed Ayers, representing the 19th century.

BB: And I’m Brian Balogh, spokesman for the 20th century.  Normally on our program we take a topic from the news and explore its historical context.  Today we’re changing things up a little, and devoting the entire show instead to listener calls about the Civil War.  But before we go back to the phones, I’m just determined to get a little bit of the 21^st century into this show.  Okay, guys, I’ve warned you and you have had sixty seconds, a millennium in 21^st century terms, to think about this.  One hundred and forty characters or less, I want each of you to distill the essence of the Civil War.  I want you to tweet the Civil War.

PO: Okay.  I start.  I get a hundred and forty characters?

EA: That’s right.

PO: Right.  All right.  Here’s the simple version.

EA: That includes your name.

PO: Americans love their country.  They’re nationalists.  We had two different nations on one territory and it was love of nation and, of course, one of those nations was predicated on the existence of racial bondage; the other on the integrity of a Union that included both parts, both nations.  It’s nationalism.  That’s my one word answer.  Patriotism.  That’s another word.  But it’s the same word.  It’s this devotion to some higher cause and I think that’s why we admire these heroes North and South.  We know they are devoted to a higher cause.  We may have different judgments about the worthiness of that cause in retrospect, but put ourselves back in a moment.  They died for a reason.

EA: Okay.  In fairness to Peter, they didn’t have Twitter in the 18^th century.

PO: How many [centuries] was that?  [laughter]

BB: We’ll call that a fascinating and engaging blog.  Ed, you’re closer to the 21^st century.  See if you can tweet the Civil War.

EA: North versus South.  Black versus white.  Events creating their own momentum.  North brings victory out of near defeat, brings emancipation out of slavery.  The story continues.

BB: Wow.

PO: That’s good.

EA: That was very close.  [laughter]

BB: Well, now that we’ve experimented with the 21^st century, why don’t we go back to an old-fashioned technology like the good old telephone, something I feel so comfortable with as 20^th century guy.  [music]

PO: We have another call.  It’s from our nation’s capital and it’s Alan.  Alan, welcome to “BackStory.”

Caller (Alan): How are you guys doing?

PO: Oh, we’re doing pretty good.

Caller (Alan): Okay.  Well, you know, gentlemen, it seems to me that one of the criticisms of the Emancipation Proclamation is that it didn’t cover the border states or some Union-controlled areas.

PO: Yep.

Caller (Alan): And a lot of people look at that and they say, well, you know, there’s some illegitimacy concerning the Union’s desire to eliminate slavery.  Could you talk about that?

BB: Well, you have to trace this really to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1^st, 1863.

EA: And what the Emancipation Proclamation says is that in those places in rebellion against the United States, slavery is hereby abolished, but that leaves enormous gray areas.  You have some areas where the Union Army has penetrated and occupied all along the Mississippi River, New Orleans, Nashville, Tennessee.  Then you also have states that have never left the Union that are slave states, especially Kentucky is the largest one, and in all those places, you have a fundamental uncertainty about the future of slavery that the Emancipation Proclamation does not resolve.

BB: Does that not get cleared up until the 13^th Amendment?

EA: That’s right, Brian, until the 13^th Amendment in 1865 officially abolishes in the grain of the Constitution not as a war aim—

PO: Right.

EA: Right?

PO: So, Ed, the bottom line for Kentucky is there were slaves until the 13^th Amendment was ratified.

EA: That’s right.  So, ever since then, people have pointed to the hypocrisy the Emancipation Proclamation, that it emancipates people who are weak and actually reach them and the ones that are completely within our control are not emancipated.

PO: Right.

EA: So, let’s think about Abraham Lincoln’s point of view.  He needs more than anything the loyalty of the slaveholding border states—

BB: Right.

EA: Or the war is lost, especially Kentucky and Maryland.  If Maryland goes, then the capital of the United States is surrounded by enemy territory.  If Kentucky goes, they lose the Tennessee River and the incredible strategic advantage that gives.  You might also say that even if those things weren’t compelling, he does not want to have to be fighting a war in the rear, so to speak, of slaveholders resisting the Union cause in those very tenuous Union states, so the reasons to not abolish slavery are much more powerful than the moral consistency of abolishing slavery in the border states would’ve suggested.

PO: Yeah, and Ed, it’s fair to add that preponderant opinion throughout the Union North was not anti-slavery.  It wasn’t as if there was a clear public will and so even in prudential political terms, Lincoln couldn’t get out, way out in front of the American people, that is, the people of the North without subverting his own cause.  You can talk about a war in the rear.  What would people have said about a war against slavery?  Not only was it unconstitutional but nobody was ready or had thought through the implications of the end of slavery, not just for the South but for the North as well.

BB: Well, I’m going to just jump in kind of on Alan’s end of things and just comment on the remarkable paradox.  If I’m right, Ed, that you had slaves being freed in the Confederacy before there were freed in the Union.

EA: That’s right.  So, the hypocrisy is apparent and people who want to be skeptical of Abraham Lincoln and, ironically, this is often African Americans who were looking at this and saying don’t be talking about giving us anything, because we seized our freedom ourselves.  When you did have power, you didn’t use it.

Caller (Alan): I just want to just add a couple other things.  You know, I don’t really want to, you know, glorify Lincoln too much, I guess, but I do understand that before the war, he tried to, I guess, in modern language, tried to maybe pay off the border states.  I know that he specifically approached Delaware and basically said, you know, can we have compensated emancipation and I think his term was, you know, this war will probably end slavery anyway.  Why don’t you let us pay you to free your slaves and then at least that will be one less contentious issue to think about, so, again, I’m not really saying that he deserves credit but I think that’s maybe a bit of history about him trying to cause emancipation in the border states that people don’t understand, so that’s just one thing I was going to add.

PO: Yeah, well, you know, Lincoln was in favor of colonization, that is, to free people and send them someplace else and the idea of compensated emancipation is another version of colonization.  It was going to be a big thing for white Americans to get their minds around the idea of an integrated nation based on the premise of equality.    If you look at state legislation in the North up to the Civil War with few exceptions, the legal political environment was increasingly hostile to freed blacks—

EA: That’s right.

PO: If you just tracked legislation as an expression of the popular will, you’d say, you know, things don’t look that good, so what’s remarkable is that opinion could be so radically reshaped and what really was in historians’ terms, a very short of time and I think that makes the achievement of emancipation all the more remarkable.

EA: Peter’s exactly right, of course, about the atmosphere for African Americans in the North before the war.  The sad thing is that it was the same thing for African Americans after the war as well.

PO: Uh huh, yep.

EA: A terrible backlash in some ways against African Americans during the war.  The New York City draft riots and all that, blaming African Americans for being held in slavery but after the war at the same time that Reconstruction’s going on, Northern states are removing the vote from African American men, so I guess what strikes me is that it is amazing that the North could mobilize itself enough during the war to get behind ending slavery.  I think that is the main story frankly that Lincoln through enough manipulation of political chits and public opinion and timing and good luck militarily and so forth was able to pull this off.  He was barely able to do that.  And after he did it, there was sort of a backlash in the white North, so I think people are right to be skeptical, but I think that what’s remarkable, too, is the extent to which for a moment in the crucible of war, Lincoln was able to lead a majority of white northerners to accept that destroying slavery was a wise and just and feasible thing.

PO: Hey, Alan, thanks a lot for calling.

Caller (Alan): All right.  Thank you guys.

PO: Bye bye.

EA: Thanks, Alan. Bye bye.

Caller (Alan): Have a good one.  [music]

BB: If you’re just tuning in, this is “BackStory,” and we’re talking about some of the questions that remain one hundred and fifty years after the shooting started for the Civil War.

PO: Guys, we’ve got another call.  It’s from Fultonville, New York. Wanda, welcome to the show.

Caller (Wanda): Thank you.

PO: Well, we’re talking about the Civil War and it’s on everybody’s mind for some reason just about now.  What have you been thinking about?

Caller (Wanda): Well, I’m writing a book called Soldier’s Dream and in researching the dreams in the letters of Civil War soldiers, soldiers from both the North and the South dream of home as a lifeline to normalcy and humanity, but I’ve found there seems to be a difference between the dreams of Southern soldiers which are often lengthy, evocative, describing the dreams as so real you can taste the peach or hold the beloved, and Northern soldiers who still do not deny their dreams are real, but they’ll say something like, well, I dreamed of you last night and it was really real.

PO: Hey, hey, Wanda, this is very upsetting.  I’m from the North.  You’re saying—

EA: Well, Peter, it’s obviously, Wanda, they read Hemingway in the North and in the South, they read Faulkner, Wanda.

PO: Whoa.

EA: Call over.

Caller (Wanda): I’m thinking that there might be a cultural difference in the mindset we have of the Northerner’s pragmatic and practical and getting things done and this is [45:05 / __________] Ed, and I dreamed about you, and the sort of overly romantic Southern solider who goes on at some length about trees and glades and flowers—

PO: Wow.

Caller (Wanda): And holding his beloved.

PO: Wanda, Wanda, we need to devote a whole season of this show to that question and let me toss it over to Ed framed in this way:  A lot of the discussion of the origins of the Civil War pivots around the idea that there were, as Southerners said, separate civilizations North and South, that is, your cultural question, Wanda.

Caller (Wanda): Right.

PO: That is, that they just think differently down there.  Now, as close as we get to an authentic Southerner in our midst and I don’t know about Ed Ayres since he’s from east Tennessee which is a dodgy part of the South—

BB: Yeah.

PO: But, Ed, what do you think?

Caller (Wanda): I’m from Tennessee.

PO: [laughter]  I didn’t say it was a bad part, just dodgy.

EA: We’re probably related, honey.  [laughter]

PO: So, Ed, this does verge on what we call in the business, essentialism and it does run counter to I think the prevailing wisdom among many of us now that in cultural terms there’s not all that much difference between North and South.

EA: Ahhh—  Boy, you set me up on this one, Peter.  As it turns out, you know, I think that does describe my own thinking about this, except that this question poses in such an interesting way, so here’s the paradox, Wanda.  I think that what you’re saying is true in the sense that Southerners are known and I have lots of tape on the editing floor here to prove, known for being long-winded and somewhat in love with the sound of their own voice

PO: Ed, will you just get to the point?

EA: This is the point, Peter, is that I like to talk, but the thing is is that there’s a famous line from Bell Wiley, the historian who pretty much invented the social history of soldiers way back in the 1940s and ’50s.  He’d read thousands and thousands of letters and he said, if you took the letters from Northerners and Southerners and threw them up in the air and they landed on the floor, you would not be able to put them back into the right pile again, that the differences between the way Northerners and Southerners talk and even the ideological content of what they said was far more alike in their letters than you might think.  Now, I don’t think that Bell Wiley was looking at the sort of subtle cultural manifestations that you’re talking about.

Caller (Wanda): Right.

PO: Hey, Ed, I got another idea here and that is we have troops from the North marching on the South and threatening the homes of these soldiers—

Caller (Wanda): Exactly.

PO: These evocative images really suggest that sense of profound threat.  It may seem more prosaic and routine for Northerners to talk about home, but that’s because it’s a fixed place and it’s not necessarily under risk.  Now, we know that the home front does suffer in the North but nothing like that nightmare vision of what happens when a countryside is destroyed by a marching army and it seems to me that those evocative images of this sensual, romantic, sentimental, wonderful place have something to do with—

Caller (Wanda): With what’s being threatened.

PO: Yes.

Caller (Wanda): And the universality that I found interesting speaks to—  [Carl Hume] made a statement which I don’t think was every thoroughly proved that when soldiers ceased to dream of home on the battlefield, they should be removed for a time until they began to dream again because they became animals on the battlefield and fought with less humanity.

BB: You know, it’s interesting because there’s a pretty well known article about World War II that talks about what soldiers were really fighting for had to do with home and had to do with consumer goods and it’s, you know, kind of tossed off as being superficial, especially when the army was spending so much effort and money to train soldiers in terms of the ideological reasons they were fighting.

PO: Yeah.

BB: But, in fact, you’re saying that this is really essential to retaining one’s humanity.

Caller (Wanda): And survival, because I’ve also found dreams of soldiers in Andersonville and the ones who survived best are the ones picturing in their mind and dreaming recurring dreams of a place in their childhood or a place in their home where they were thriving with food on the table and in one particular case, a person dreams of an inn where his father took him as a child in St. Louis where there were tables and tables of food and this got him through Andersonville.  He would wake up to a crust of bread, starving, but that memory of food gave him the will to survive and not go crazy.

PO: Wanda, this is, of course, another story about human nature and how we can transcend horror and survive it and it’s an inspirational one.  I’d just like to add this darker dimension to it, however.

BB: He’s from the North, Wanda.

PO: Yeah, well, when we sentimentalize home and these dreams are a way of making home seem very real, present to you in your dream and you re-dedicate to the cause and to surviving the great war, but at the same time, as you sentimentalize your home, you’re demonizing your enemy because those are the people that want to destroy your homes, so I’d say that both it’s a triumph for humanity and it’s also a triumph for inhumanity.

Caller (Wanda): Well, that’s interesting.  That’s interesting.  So then you wonder which takes over if the dream of home—

PO: Oh, yeah.

Caller (Wanda): Yeah.

PO: No, and on an individual level, what can you say?  This is wonderful.  This is a resource to work with.  This is the way people have survived, but on a cultural level, when a whole society is at war with another society, I think it takes on a rather uglier profile.

Caller (Wanda): Unless it’s what gets you back to where you were before.

PO: Yeah.

Caller (Wanda): However you define home, back to that memory of someone that you’ve loved, back to a place where you can separate yourself from the battlefield and be where you were when things were normal again.

PO: It is a dream of peace.

Caller (Wanda): Yeah.

PO: Yep.

Caller (Wanda): Yeah.

PO: Well, Wanda, this has just been fabulous and thanks so much.

Caller (Wanda): Well, thank you.

BB: Thank you so much, Wanda.

Caller (Wanda): Oh, thank you.  This is great.  [music]

BB: That’s where we’re going to have to leave things today.  But as always, we’d love to keep this conversation going online.  Drop in at backstoryradio.org and let us know what still interests you about the Civil War.

PO: Again, that’s backstoryradio.org.  You can listen to the first two episodes of our Civil War series there, as well as any of our other past shows. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter.  Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

EA: Today’s episode of “BackStory” was produced by Tony Field and Catherine Moore. We had help from Miriam Kaplan and Jose Argueta.  Jamal Milner mastered the show and Gabby Alter wrote our theme.

BB: “BackStory’s” executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.

PO: Production support for “BackStory” is provided by Cary Brown Epstein and the W.L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation.  James Madison’s Montpelier, Weinstein Properties, Trish and David Crowe, Austin Ligon and an anonymous donor.

Tape: Brian Balogh and Peter Onuf are professors in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History.  Ed Ayres is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond.  “BackStory” was created by Andrew Wyndham for VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Gary Gallagher: Why Northerners Fought — University of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher argues that while Northern leaders’ opposition to slavery brought on the Civil War, it wasn’t what motivated the majority of men in the Union army to enlist.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Why Confederates Fought — University of North Florida historian Aaron Sheehan-Dean explains why so many non-slaveholding Southerners were willing to lay down their lives in a Confederate war to protect slavery.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Why Confederates Fought (Extended Interview) — Hear the full account of Southern soldiers’ motivations in this extended interview.

23rd New York Infantry, ca. 1861-1865 (Library of Congress)

150 years ago this April, the Union went to war with the Confederacy. Ever since, Americans have been debating the causes of that war. Most historians today agree that it was fundamentally about slavery. And so what are we to make of the fact that most Southerners didn’t own any slaves, and most Northerners were not abolitionists?

In this hour of BackStory, the History Guys turn the question of the war’s causes on its side, asking instead why Northerners and Southerners took up arms to fight one another. What causes, in other words, were they willing to die for? Were families on the home-front united in their commitment to war, or were there differences of opinion? Who didn’t want to fight? What did slavery mean to white people on both sides, and what role did enslaved and free African-Americans play in the liberation of slaves? How much did Americans’ reasons for fighting change between 1861 and 1864? And finally – how have intervening wars altered the ways we interpret the motivations of Civil War soldiers?

“Why They Fought” is Part II of a three-part BackStory series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

Read Show Transcript

Guests Include:

 
• Adam Goodheart (lead author, New York Times “Disunion” series)
• Christy Coleman (president, American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar)
• Gary Gallagher (historian, University of Virginia)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean (historian, University of North Florida)
• Catherine Clinton (historian, Queens University Belfast)

 

Features and Highlights

Listen to historians Gary Gallagher and Aaron Sheehan-Dean explain what men on both sides of the conflict were really willing to die for.

Further Reading

Want to peer further down the road to Civil War? The BackStory research team has compiled a comprehensive list of print and online resources for further exploration. Read On.

Listing of the music heard in “Civil War 150th: Why They Fought”

_____________________________________________________________

Peter:  This is Backstory, with us, the American History guys.  I’m Peter Onuf, 18th Century guy; I’m Ed Ayers, 19th Century guy; and I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century history guy.

[music]

Ed:  A little over five decades ago, the Russians sent a dog into outer space, a mutt named Laika,  that some government functionary had found on the streets of Moscow.  The suited her up in a dog spacesuit, put her on a rocket ship, and off she went.

[music and woman speaking Russian]

Ed:  We later learned that that little dog only lasted a few hours, and she probably died from stress.  But back in November, 1957, it seemed like most of the stress was on this side of the Bering Strait.  The U.S. Had been caught napping a month earlier when the Russians announced that they had launched Sputnik 1 . . .

[music and man speaking Russian].  “Today, a new moon is in the sky” . . .

Ed:  . . . now they had repeated the stunt, this time with a living, breathing passenger on board, at least for a little while.  What would Sputnik 3 carry – a nuclear missile?

Male Announcer:  “You are hearing the actual signals, transmitted by the Earth circling satellite, one of the great scientific feats of the age.”   [beeping]

Brian:  It didn’t take long for the pundits to figure out who was to blame for this colossal national embarrassment – the military?  No.  Congress?   No.  The White House?  No (uh uh).  It was America’s schools who had gotten us into this mess.  Russian schools were churning out scientists who could put a dog into space; and American schools were churning out, well, rock-and-roll.

[background music - “Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll.”]

Brian:  As the cover of “Life” magazine announced the following spring, there was a “Crisis in Education”.

[background music]

Dwight Eisenhower:    The Soviet Union now has, in the combined category of scientists and engineers, a greater number than the United States . . .

Brian:  Dwight Eisenhower, November, 1957.

Dwight Eisenhower:  . . .  and it is producing graduates in these fields at a much faster rate.  This trend is disturbing.

Brian:  It may have been disturbing, but the Sputnik episode was not the first, or the last time, schools were blamed for our national crises.  Just think about all the politicians you’ve seen railing about low standards in our schools.  To take a classic example, “A Nation at Risk”, the report commissioned by Ronald Reagan in the early 80s, to quote one of its best lines, “If  an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have feuded as an act of war” . . .

Ronald Reagan:  “Despite record levels of educational spending, America’s students came in last in 7 of 19 academics tests, compared to students of other industrialized nations.”

Peter:  On each episode of BackStory, we rip a topic from the headlines and spend an hour exploring its historical context.  Today, our topic is “Public Education”, because once again it’s taking its lumps in our nation’s capitol.  Here’s President Obama back in February.

President Obama:   “We have one of the highest high school drop-out rates of any industrialized nation, and half of the students who begin college, never finish.  This is a prescription for economic decline, because we know the countries that out-teach us today, will out-compete us tomorrow.”

Ed:  So have we always been worried about being “out-taught”?  Later in the show, we’re going to be speaking with a historian of education about what many think of as “The Golden Age of Education”, the era of the one-room schoolhouse, back in the 19th century.  We’ll also look at one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century history of education, but first, we’re going to turn to our 18th century guy for some deep background on all of this.  So, Peter, do people back in your period worry that we were going to fall behind our competitors, the British or the French, because our schools weren’t doing their jobs back then?

Peter:  This is really deep background, Ed, and the answer is “no”.  In fact, the idea that the common people should be educated was a heresy in the old days; that is, why would you want them to be able to read and write, because as many early modern thinkers thought, if people were too literate, they’d be uppity, maybe they’d claim rights or something like this.  And that’s really the story of American education, it doesn’t begin in an international competition, it didn’t have anything to do with that.

Ed:  How many people did go to school, Peter, was it just for elites. . .

Peter:  In theory, in Colonial Massachusetts, every community with a certain population was supposed to have a school, but this was a statute that was observed more in the breach.  Most education, as we know it today, took place within homes, particularly Bible-centered homes, where literacy was important in the religious life of communities, there weren’t schools to do this.  You could say that churches were a kind of educational institution, but basically these were places of oral performances, that is, where sermons would be delivered, and text would be read out to the congregation.  So mass education as we know it is really a phenomenon of, well, Ed’s century.

Brian:  Well, now I can see Ed waiting for the school bus, but before we let him get on it, I’ve just got one more question.  And yes, Peter, it has to do with your guy, Jefferson.  He had a few ideas on education, didn’t he?

Peter:  Absolutely, Brian, he is the author of a still-born notion of universal public education; we don’t like to emphasis the “still-born” part, we like to say that Jefferson was a great visionary in his 1779 Bill for the Diffusion of Knowledge.

Ed:  It only took another 130 years to come to pass in his native Virginia.

Peter [laughing]:  That’s right, Ed.  Virginians are slow, but . . .

Brian:   He was nearsighted, you’re saying.

Peter:   . . . But his scheme of public education was that every community would support a school, for girls as well as boys, at the primary level, and then there would be this kind of peri-middle selection moved up where a few select boys would be sent on from primary schools to grammar school, or secondary schools, and then on the peak of his system, the University of Virginia or William and Mary, at that time on a scholarship.  But this proposal really reflected the paranoia that Jefferson and other Revolutionary leaders had about the ignorance of the people; that if they weren’t adequately educated, they could be subject to demagoguery and they could be mislead, and so they had to be trained to be able to detect conspiracies against liberty within the ruling class.  One of the paradoxical things about the democratization of American education is that the people resisted this because they suspected the motives of educational reformers; they thought education reformers were really trying to put one over on the people by taxing them to support a system of education that would primarily benefit elites.

Ed: So, let me tell you about where public education came from in the form that we know it.  By which I mean, taxpayer supported universal education.  Like so much, frankly I’ll have to admit, that starts in New England and Massachusetts, and Peter has described what it was like in the Colonial era with this kind of patchwork of home schooling and so forth, but with the expectation that the Commonwealth owed an education to people and that the whole population was uplifted by a more broadly distributed education.  And so, in the 1830s, Horace Mann who is as close to anyone as the parent of American education, looked around and said, “You know, what we really need to do is to make this a far more coherent, forceful state-supported system.”  And what Horace Mann says is, “Folks” . . , by which folks I mean wealthy people, “. . . it’s going to pay off, if you’ll pay taxes to create public schools for everybody.”

Brian:  So in Peter’s period, Jefferson and others arguing we needed education to create citizens, but are you suggesting that Horace Mann was also saying to Americans, ‘Hey, you know, education produces productive citizens who can actually help this economy?’

Ed:  No, he didn’t say any of that.

[laughter]

Ed:  Yes, that is exactly, my 20th century friend, what he said, and he actually would make pretty specific argument to big manufacturers, ‘Look, guys, if you want workers to be disciplined, to answer bells, to be self motivating to the extent you want them to be, to be able to read simple instructions, education is not merely useful to the Commonwealth in creating better citizens,  yadda,  yadda, yadda, it is literally going into your pocketbook’.  You look back at it and you could see that that’s really the only way that man was going to be able to persuade the people who paid the most taxes to pay more to educate, frankly, other people’s children.  And I don’t want to be cynical.  People would like to have jobs that were regular and well paying and industrial jobs brought something that we never had before, which was year-round sustained, guaranteed employment that was not tied to the agricultural cycle.

Peter:  There might be another dimension to this.  I wonder if immigration had something to do with the importance of education.  The literacy rate in Massachusetts before Horace Mann was virtually universal for men, and pretty high for women was well.  So it wasn’t that you needed those basic skills, and of course, if you had a religious population that spent all that time at church, they had their own bells, so to speak, they had that kind of discipline.  But when you had large numbers of Irish, Catholic immigrants, you faced a kind of new demographic challenge.  Is that an element in man’s notion of public education is to Americanize?

Ed:  You know, I don’t think so.  As logical as that seems, part of it would be our friend chronology.
And the fact that this . . .

[laughter]

Ed:  . . . The fact that this begins in 1837 suggests that it predated the big tide of Irish immigration that would not come for another decade, and that would not peak for 20 more years, I think, in fact, that if man had waited until the challenge was to spend tax money to educate a bunch of new immigrants, it would not have happened.  So, ironically, the fulfillment of a sense that a homogeneous America can become more homogeneous by using education.

Peter:  So, Ed, what are the social changes that lead to an emphasis on education?  If it’s not yet widespread immigration, is it the fact that Massachusetts farm children are moving away from home, because only a limited number of people could sustain a farm operations through the generations, so that there’s an anxiety about the future and about what provisions are going to be made for children, and a growing recognition that new sets of skills are going to be necessary to cope with an unpredictable future.

Ed:  Beautifully put, Peter, and exactly right.  And this takes us back to Sputnik, because the same way that the Soviets led to a great period of instability and anxiety in the country, if you’re sitting there in Massachusetts and you’re watching a lot of your population leave, and you’re wondering how it is that you’re going to be able to keep people in New England when you’ve got the Northwest open.  When there’s land out there to be taken, what’s going to keep people on the rocky soil of the Berkshires.  It’s also the case of manufacturing is growing, and if you want to compete with the great industrial power at the time, England, you’re going to have to have a population that knows how to invent and create.  I think it’s a recurring theme for as long as we’ve been a nation.  Maybe not back in the Colonial period, but it didn’t take long in the 19th century for that kind of rhetoric of  ‘We’re under peril, and only education can really save us.’

Brian:  Well, in a minute, we’ll delve a little deeper into that 19th century, and look into why one-room schoolhouses weren’t all they were cracked up to be.  We’re also going to take a few of your calls, but first it’s time for a quick break.

Ed: Remember, if you’d like to call on a future show, have a look at our website to see what topics we’re working on, you can find us at BackStoryRadio.org.

Peter: We’ll be back in a minute.

[music]

Peter:  This is BackStory, the show that looks to the past to explain the America of today.  I’m Peter Onuf, 18th century guy’ I’m Ed Ayers, 19th century history guy, and I’m Brian Balogh, history guy of the 20th century.

[music]

Brian:  Today on the show, we’re exploring the history of public education.  Like so many other topics we’ve explored on BackStory, we tend to remember that history as being much rosier that it actually was.  Take, for example, the song we’re listening to right now, “School Days”.  [music]

Jon Zimmerman:  “School days, school days, good old golden rule days, reading, writing, ‘arithmetic, taught to the tune of hickory stick, etc.”

Brian: That’s John Zimmerman, a historian of education at New York University.  In 1949, the “New York Times” declared this one of the 10 most popular songs in the history of the United States.  “School Days” is all about a one-room schoolhouse in Ed’s period, the 19th century, but it was written in the first decade of my century, by a guy named Gus Edwards.

Jon: Now what’s interesting about “School Days” is as follows:  Gus Edwards was a German immigrant who moved to Brooklyn when he was 7; he never, as best we know, stepped into a one-room schoolhouse, and he might not really have left New York; actually, he did, eventually he lived in L.A., but Gus Edwards was a vaudevillian, and later became a booking agent.  This is the guy who wrote our most popular and our most influential ode to the one-room schoolhouse, and he’s an urban immigrant from Germany.

[music]

Brian:  Part of the reason Jon Zimmerman is so fired up about this subject, is that he’s just written a book about it.  It’s called, “Small Wonder:  The Little Red Schoolhouse and History and Memory.”  In it, he looks at the way school reformers with a wide range of agendas, invoke the one-room schoolhouse as a kind of model of educational setting.  In fact, until recently, there was an actual model of the little red schoolhouse outside the entrance of the Department of Education in Washington.  Zimmerman basically argues that this nostalgia, a word he likes to point out, comes from the Greek for homesickness, that this nostalgia skews all kinds of facts about little red schoolhouses, beginning with their color.

Jon: Most one-room schoolhouses were either white, or more commonly, just unpainted because school districts didn’t want to pay to paint them.  [laughter]

Brian: Help me understand this, John, Americans seem to put public education on a pedestal, but we don’t want to pay to paint the little schoolhouse.

Jon: I think that’s true and I think that that contradiction goes back all the way to the founding and the common schools.  The common school movement, the idea that there should be universal, state-supported education, was, although not unique to the United States, in many ways, distinct to it.  By 1850, there are greater fraction of elementary school aged kids going to school in our country than in any other country on earth.  But what we did in 19th century was we sent an extraordinarily large fraction, relatively speaking, of our kids to school and we sent them to school in essentially shacks; that’s what one-room schoolhouses were, they were 15 x 40 feet in dimension, and they were in every sense bare bones.  Most of them did not even have a belfry or bell, even though we remember that part too; very primitive heating systems, if any at all.  You read accounts of people trying to drink water in a one-room schoolhouse, but finding out that the water they had brought in earlier in the day was frozen, was ice.  The teaching force which was overwhelmingly single, female and young; and young means sometimes as young as 15 or 16, often has very little more education than the kids they’re teaching.  If you think about “Little House on the Prairie”,

Brian: …my touchstone for all things historical, by the way… [laughter]

Jon: …this was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical story and it was about her life on the prairie in the 1880s.  It didn’t become popular until the 1930s, which was precisely the time when, thanks to the WPA and the PWA, the ripping down these one-room schools, and that’s important, too.  Because again, this comes a venue for nostalgia for remembering institutions going away.  But was does she remember in those stories; she remembers being a kid teaching other kids.  And she remembers all kinds of problems with the so-called “big boys”, because you might guess that the big boys are the ones who are going to test your authority.

Brian:  And, Jon, what is roughly age range?

Jon:  Age 3 to 20.  And often all in the same place, and sometimes there would be as many as 100 kids in a 15 x 40 square box, and sometimes there would be as few as 4.  The major deficiency is that the pedagogy is what we would call “rote”.  And rote means repeat.  And it has to be not just because of the lack of training of the teacher, but also because of the enormous age range of kids.  So they all have their own primers, and people would bring in whatever text book they had, and they would memorize it and then recite it in a rotating way to the teacher.  And so it was not uncommon to find 11 or 12 year old kids that could just say a whole text book.

Brian: Wow. But was there some basis for the later nostalgia of this home sickness, as you put it?

Jon:  If the question is was there reason for people look back longingly at these, there absolutely is, and here’s the reason:  Whatever their deficiencies, they were communal institutions.  In most cases, they were the only public building, so they were not just a place where the kids went to school, they were a place where the community met.  If it’s the only public building, it’s not just a schoolhouse, it’s the place where voting happens, where debates happen; not just that, weddings, funerals, all of the holidays, Christmas, Easter and so they were not perfect, they had a multitude of deficiencies, but when people look back at them and say, “But they were ours”, this is absolutely true.

Brian:  Am I being really naïve, and nostalgic to use your word, to think there was something good about getting literally everybody in the community, kids, adults, etc. all in one room and just letting them hash it out.  Contrast that image, at any rate, to what we have today, this long chain of bureaucratic command stretching all the way from the Secretary of Education down to the Assistant Principal for physical education and discipline.

Jon:  I think you have to go back to answer the question, to distinguish between what adults were doing in these schools and what kids were doing.  The one-room schools of the 19th century were profoundly small “d” democratic and debate-filled institutions in the evening, when the entire community showed up to debate, among other things, who was going to pay for the school.  You don’t have to be a nostalgist to celebrate the idea that there were these public institutions that brought everybody together to debate the content and the contours of their shared lives.  However, let’s not impute that dynamic to the classroom itself when the kids and teachers were in there; because that was not a land of democratic debate.

Peter:  That was the three Rs:  rote, rote and rote.

Jon:  Completely.  My way or the highway. [laughter]  And that’s why teachers devised all of these, to us, draconian punishments.  By the way, the dunce cap was rarely used, but every other kind of humiliation was, often recapitulating the alleged errors since, so a kid that talked too much would have a twig affixed to their tongue; a kid who chewed gum would have the gum put on their forehead or their nose, and to me the most fascinating one, which tells you a lot about the 19th century is that a kid who was a poor speller would have to cut letters out of a newspaper and eat them. [laughter] This sounds quite barbaric, and in many ways it is . . .

Peter:  Is that where “eat your words” comes from?

Jon:  . . . It may be.  We don’t know.  But something that I find fascinating about this is, on one level it’s awful, horrible, humiliating, gross, right? But I think it’s also an example of the time when any academic failure was considered to be a function of a lack of effort, not differential ability.  Right? That punishment is pre-IQ test, and it’s pre-the entire concept of disability; if you’re not spelling, it’s not because you have a different learning style that prevents you from spelling, it’s because you weren’t listening, so eat some words, here’s your punishment.  So as awful as it is, I think there’s also something and in some ways I find rather salutary about it, there is something quite small “d” democratic about the idea that everyone has the same ability, ergo, if they’re doing worse, it’s because they didn’t apply themselves.

Brian:  Right.  There’s a presumption that there’s an equal starting ground, there.  Well, Jon, I want to thank you so much for joining us.

Jon:  Thanks for having me.

[music]

Peter:  Jon Zimmerman directs the History of Education Program at New York University’s Steinhart School of Education.  His new book is “Small Wonder:  The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”  You can listen to an extended version of our conversation at BackStoryRadio.org.

[music]

Brian:  Well, guys, you noticed that I took advantage of being alone with our guest to deflate all kinds of things, and I was just, to anticipating you now pulling them apart and maybe we’ll start with you, Ed.  What do you think about what Jon said and does it have any application to all of those schools that you’ve studied in the South?

Ed:  No, it takes the fun out of it, Brian, to roll over on your back like that, but, actually, it was a great interview.  I think in many ways it captures what the experience of the 20th century south was like.  The south, as we know, is a little bit behind the times when it comes to education, and it simply wasn’t the same kind of value placed on it.  All the way from the 18th century on, the elite was actually pretty well educated, and they went to a lot of trouble to create academies and colleges, and boarding schools, and tutors, and all those kinds of things, but if you go back to the 19th century south, there were no mechanisms for middle- and lower-class people to gain an education.  If you were African American, of course, it was illegal to learn how to read.  So not only were there not schools, but there were laws that prohibited you from gaining literacy.  So the idea coming along of a school for everybody was a late innovation and progress.

Brian:  So this may be naïve, but at least one good thing of this notion of a common schoolhouse, is that it does strike me as a place where at least everybody could come together.

Peter:  Well, they come together, Brian, but not necessarily on everybody’s terms.  If you think about early public education in New England and Massachusetts, particularly, where the “King James Bible” is the text, in effect.  It’s a Protestant education and that was one of the reasons why many Catholics, wanted their own schools.

Ed:  And no sooner do you have public schools in New England, then Catholic schools start growing up, then you have the biggest debates and riots around parochial schools in the north in the 1840s and 1850s, because people say, “I don’t want the state educating my children into Protestantism, and I don’t want them to be using books and Bibles that are prejudice against my religion.”  And the people on the other side “Well, we don’t want Catholics gathering together outside of the common vocabulary, and teaching about Popery, or whatever.”

Brian: Hey guys– I never said they sang “Kumbaya”  together; I just said they came together to hash out some of these fundamental issues that are at the heart of our democratic republic.

Peter:  But, Brian, these are not level playing fields.  We have a notion of state neutrality, which I think we, to an extraordinary extent, live by in modern day America, but it’s been a tough slog, and you can’t take it for granted.  Even today, you have to wonder what are the implicit messages, this is what’s being asked when people challenge the nature of education and the role of religion in education; what’s being taught in schools?

Brian:  Well I think it’s time for some explicit messages, which is why we’re going to turn to our listeners.  As we do every episode of BackStory, we’ve been fielding your comments on today’s topic on our website, BackStoryRadio.org.  We’ve gotten a lot of great comments there, and our producers have invited a few of you to join us on the phone today.

[music]

Brian:  We’ve got Kathleen on the line from New York City.  Kathleen, welcome to BackStory.

Kathleen:  Hi.  I have a question for you guys.  These days I hear a lot of complaints from my daughter about school – it’s too long, there’s too much homework, and I was wondering, what did the children in the 19th century think about school?  The reason I ask this is because both my grandmothers, who were born in the 1880s, they loved school, they thought it was like so great, I can get away from doing chores, and so what evidence– what kinds of sources do you guys have, what did the kids of  the 19th century say?

Ed:  What’s interesting is how much this changed over the 19th century.  At the beginning of the 19th century, they didn’t think about school all that much because they didn’t really go all that much.  I think you would have seen that kids would not have complained about how long school went, but rather, would have been struck by how sporadic it was, and how short the day was, how little attention each individual student received because they were all together in one big classroom.

Brian:  And I just want to say to 18th and 19th century guys, that kids didn’t really start going to school until the 20th century.  Even as late at 1900, half of the kids in the United States didn’t go to school, and the average number of years that people went to school was about five years.

Peter:  So, Brian, when would you say school began to present something like a total environment for children and they’d expect to go through it and they would see it as a fact of life, one that they didn’t necessarily like very much.

Brian:  I would say, Peter, if you’re talking about northern urban schools, I would say by the 1920s school is kind of a regular experience for most kids.   Now we’re not talking about high school, but we are talking about regular schooling, at least through what we would call middle school age years.  One of the reasons for that was compulsory education laws and more and more states started imposing them beginning in the progressive era, but you know when they really took effect was during the Great Depression, and why do you think that was, Kathleen?

Kathleen:  Keeping teachers employed.

Brian:  Keeping teachers employed, but also keeping kids out of the work force.  There were so few jobs to go around, all kinds of measures were taken in order to preserve those jobs for adults, but that’s really somewhere between the 20s and 30s; that’s when kids started complaining about school the most because they were in school the most.

Ed:  I would say, having read quite a few letters and diaries and stuff in the 19th century, you don’t have to go very far to find people complaining about “Oh my God, I’m going to shoot myself if I have to sit here and read this Latin one more night.”  [laughter]  So I think that the point that I would make is it depends on everything else in which the education is embedded.  If the contrast is shoveling out barns, school looks pretty good.  So as we’ve ratcheted up the expectations of schooling, we’ve ratcheted down the expectations of everything else.  Kids entire experience of being young is now channeled and focused on school.  We invest it with a lot more significance than it used to have, including a lot more complaint about boredom and so forth.

Brian:  Do you agree, Kathleen, are you actually interested in this?

Kathleen:  I am very interested in it.  I went to a New England school that had six grades in four rooms.

All participants:  WOW!

Brian:  How did that work . . . could you tell us more specifically how that worked?

Kathleen:  Well, the teacher didn’t pay attention to all the time because sometimes she was working with the other kids, so you could spend your whole life daydreaming or reading, as in my case, and they wouldn’t necessarily know what was going on.

Brian:  So, Kathleen, you’re saying you learned more because the teacher didn’t pay attention to you and you actually could read.

Kathleen:  Yes, yes.

[laughter]

Peter [sarcastically]:  Here’s a radical reform proposal. . . I like that very much.  Hey, Kathleen, thanks for that great call.

Kathleen:  Thank you, it’s been really fascinating.

Brian:  Well, it’s time for another short break.  Remember, we want to hear your stories about your own education.  Did school facilitate your education or did it just get in the way?  What do you think our schools today can learn from the lessons of the past?  Leave your comments and questions at BackStoryRadio.org. or just give us a call.  Our phone number is 888-257-8851.

Peter: After the break, we’ll take more of your calls and we’ll speak with a Virginia woman who experienced school segregation up close and personal.  We’ll be back in a minute.

Brian: Production support for BackStory comes from James Madison’s Montpelier, Marcus and Carol Weinstein, Trish and David Crowe, and J.M. Weinberg.

[music]

Peter:  This is Backstory, the show that turns to history to understand the world around us today.  I’m your 18th century, Peter Onuf,;

Ed:I’m your 19th century host, Ed Ayers;

Brian: and I’m your 20th century host, Brian Balogh.

Brian:  Today on the show, we’re looking at the story of public education in America, and asking whether people have always worried about school as much as people seem to worry today.

Peter:  We’re going to take another call now.  This one is from John in Moneno[?], Virginia.  John, welcome to BackStory.

John .:  My question is when I think about the old one-room schoolhouse with the schoolmarm that was paid by the parents of the students, when and why and how did we move from that consumer based model to our current more socialized model?  Now we’re funding this big giant school system as opposed to saying that we’re watching the children from the schoolhouse making sure they’re coming out smarter and then paying for that.

Peter:  I think what you’re getting at. John, is the levels between us and the education of our kids, or other people’s kids, it’s so distant we don’t really feel we don’t have much control over it, although you have to say the survival of PTAs and school boards that are responsive to local citizens, they keep alive that historic memory of having control over children’s education and over the way we govern ourselves.

Brian:  As has home-schooling, which has become quite popular recently, but, I want to address the elephant in the room, the B word, because I think it goes to the heart of John’s question, and that bureaucracy.  I think what John—you tell me John—is really talking about is getting away from a kind of direct-parent control and handing over control of education to all of these middle men–and the funny thing is that all these superintendents, etc. were men, and all the lower paid teachers were women, as this transition took place during the late 19th century and early 20th century.  Am I on the right track there, John?  Is this what’s really got you troubled?

John:  Right, when did the states decide the localities weren’t very good at it and needed to get involved and then when did the Federal government decide that the states weren’t very good at it and they needed to get involved and it’s done exactly as you’ve said:  It created this huge bureaucracy; the amount of money we spend educating our children in the public sector is much  more than private schools spend to educate a child and it’s not because the teachers are so overpaid, or because they have really fantastic books, it’s because we have these bureaucracies, we have all these upper level administrative people that we’re paying, and it’s consuming a lot of the funds that should be either going to education or not be collected in the first place.

Brian:  Thank goodness you didn’t ask that question, John, because it would have required actual historic knowledge to answer it.  I’ll take a crack at it anyway.  Basically, the states got involved in the late 19th century and early 20th century and by the 1920s and 1930s, it was the states that started saying it’s not cost efficient to have all of these little one-room schools all over the place.  We’re going to build consolidated schools.  And, of course, at the same times, states were building roads, so it was easier to get to these schools, it was easier to run school buses by the 30s and the 40s.  When did the Federal government get involved?  Well, you’d have to point to the very important Education Act in 1965, passed by Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, and that was aimed at poor kids.  And were most of the poor kids?  They were in the South.  And a very funny thing happened on the way to the school house – states that were determined not to integrate; southern states started accepting this Federal money and along with money comes control.  And the Federal government said we’re not going to fund segregated schools, and if you don’t integrate, this is separate from Brown vs. Board of Education– separate from the courts.  The Federal government said if you don’t integrate, we’re going to cut off all that money.  And you know what? Those states said we’re getting so much Federal money, we can’t even think of not accepting it, we’d better move towards integration.  The last thing I’ll say, John, in answer to your question, is none of us like bureaucrats—“bureaucrat” itself is kind of a pejorative term, of course you can find examples of excess, but I think that overall these bureaucrats have really been pretty impressive at raising the standards of American education; at the same time that they have helped bring in virtually all kids to the education system.  It is not easy to educate everybody and educate them well.  Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Peter:  It’s never too late in America and that distinguishes the American educational system from every other educational system in the world.  And it’s never too late to learn something about history if you keep tuning in to BackStory . . . That’s what we’re here for, sort of a remedial education for grown-ups.

John:  I truly appreciate the education that you have just given me, which is that you . . .

Peter:  . . . Are you calling me a bureaucrat?

[laughter]

John:  . . . No, a teacher.

Peter: Well, thanks so much for calling, John.

John: Well I feel a lot smarter.

Ed:  So, Brian,  you mentioned the school funding in Federal government help lead to desegregation in the late 1960s.  I think it’s important to remember that big case that lead to desegregation, Brown vs. Board of Education, occurred back in 1954, so there’s a whole missing decade in between.  Now what happened was this:  Southern politicians led by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, basically said “We don’t care what you say, we’re not going to integrate.” It was a movement that came to be known as “massive resistance.”  In 1958, the Governor actually closed down the white schools in three Virginia cities so they wouldn’t have to integrate them.

Brian:  And one of those cities was our own Charlottesville.

Ed:  Yah. And one of the students who graduated from Charlottesville’s black high school that year was Alicia Lugo, and we’re going to hear her story in just a minute.  But first let me give you a little background on her:  Alicia Lugo went off to college, got her teaching degree, and came back to Charlottesville; she was assigned to teach in the same school where she had been a student.  Now this is 1965, and even though segregation had officially been outlawed, the student body there was still all black.  Two years later, the city closed that school and moved her over to Walker School, integrated finally after all those years.  Years later, she went on to chair the city’s school board for more than a decade.  Now I’m going to shut up and play for you my recent conversation with Ms. Alicia Lugo.

Alicia Lugo:  I was born in Charlottesville.  All my public school education was here in Charlottesville.  First at all black Jefferson Elementary School, and then all-black Burley High School, which was an excellent school.  I think that people have some erroneous feeling that because we had fewer supplies and less resources and our teachers were fighting over one film projector, and that sort of thing, that we were somehow receiving an inferior education.  I find that laughable from the standpoint of 50-60 years later.

Ed:  Did people not resent the fact that they might have multiple film projectors and better supplies and things at Lane?

Alicia:  No.  Projectors and supplies don’t make the excellent education experience.  You have to make a child want to learn, and that’s what we came up under.  To my way of thinking having been a student at all-black Burley, feeling safe knowing that there was a definite connection between my home and my teachers, my parents were intricately involved.  In fact, many more black parents than now were supportive of both our teachers and our schools and Burleigh students excelled everywhere.

Ed:  Why do you think that so many people then would work through the courts and sacrifice so much in order to bring about integration of the schools?

Alicia:  Because they recognized that there is no such thing as “separate but equal“.  That for many minority children, the segregated school system was a farce.  When children had to walk two miles past an available school to go to school.  Those things were jokes.  But even though the “separate but equal” schools were crushed by the courts.  If you walked down the halls of the average school today, you’ll see situations where classes are either all black, Hispanic, and poor white, and other classes that are all white with a token black person or Asian person in there.

Ed:  So why do you think that integration did not turn out the way that people dreamed of?

Alicia:  Because I think that there were those people who had no intention of letting it turn out that way.  The only way systems change is that you treat them like a rubber band.  As long as you keep the tension on the rubber band, you can change its shape.  But one you let go of that tension, once you let go of that scrutiny, it drops right back into its original ball.

Ed:  That’s a great metaphor.  May I steal that?

[laughter]

Alicia:  Sure you can.

Ed:  So it’s your sense that tension left the school when there was not really a direct connection between the teacher and their community and the students and their community.  Is that what happened?

Alicia:  Exactly.  When the scrutiny was gone because who can complain?  Now we have the desecrated schools, so you got what you asked for.  But we’ve got in Charlottesville, a majority African American school board, we have an African American female superintendent, an African American assistant superintendent, female, and we have a 13% drop-out rate.  What’s wrong with that picture?

Ed:  And what do you think is wrong with that?  What’s driving that?

Alicia:  Well, I guess to my way of thinking, when school is not interesting, when you don’t see any relationship between school and your future, when you feel you’re in a hostile environment, when you feel that you’re not safe in that environment, when you feel that people don’t have the level of expectations for your performance, that they do for other students’ performances, school doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?

Ed:  I see what you’re saying.  If we can go back to your story for a minute, I wonder and I think about, what great changes that you saw and experienced and helped lead, did we lose a generation or did we lose some continuity or some tradition of our teachers that the people said that it is so ridiculous if the states can be playing games, like with “massive resistance” and if they’re not going to be really giving every kid a chance, instead doing this “tracking” and so forth.  Did people just become disgusted and said that they would just put their energies into something else?

Alicia:  Uhuh. Which is exactly what I did.  I stayed at Walker one year, and I realized that the numbers of minority children dropping out of school, getting pushed out of school, somebody needed to be out there to help reclaim.  And so for the next 35 years I worked in non-profits that worked with kids trying to help them get themselves on track.

Ed:  I’m really grateful for your time today and your insight and a couple of metaphors I’m going to steal, but also very grateful for keeping the faith over all these years, and doing the very best you can with whatever history’s handed you.  Thank you very much for joining us today; I really appreciate it.

Alicia:  I enjoyed it a lot; thank you.

Ed:  That’s Alicia Lugo, former teacher and school board chair right here in Charlottesville, Virginia.

[music]

Brian:  There’s a deep irony in that interview that Ed teased out and it’s that at the very moment when real opportunities were opening up for African Americans in society, Ms. Lugo seems to suggest that teachers were giving up on students and students were giving up on school.  How can that be?
I know this is my century, but I don’t have the answers to that.

Peter:  Well, Brian, I think that was what was so upsetting to me about this interview, that sense that you won the big struggle, you thought, over integration, but there’s a bigger struggle over what we now call “racism.”

Ed:  That’s the fundamental tension or tragedy in the heart of all this.  On one hand, you can’t just say we’re going to have “separate but equal,”  because obviously “separate but equal” doesn’t work.  On the other hand, when you do that, you insert several layers of necessary bureaucracy between parents and students and the schools.  I’m not exactly sure, we do know what happens is that some people spend the money to create those schools over which they have control, which are the little private schools, and Charlottesville has a number of those itself right now, which are dedicated to young women, or dedicated to people of different religious backgrounds.  I don’t know that segregation, as a matter of fact it is a trivialization of that word to talk about people looking for various kinds of affinities, but I think that what Ms. Lugo would say is that real integration was never given a chance, and that economic inequalities were inserted in place of racial inequalities, and as a result, we have a sham.

Peter:  I think the point is that community, which we get nostalgic about, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, and in many ways that’s what we strive for, a sense of identification with each other, of nurture and care, yet communities are also inevitably through history exclusive, and they want to define themselves according to their own image, that is, according to the group that dominates within that community.  It’s a highly volatile situation, and I think the only upbeat message of all this is there’s been such massive dislocations that a new sense of community will emerge out of all this, which will at least move forward in terms of our expectations of our students.  Who is going to succeed?  And there’s some reason to hope that self-perpetuating notion of discrimination and superiority and racism.

Brian:  Well I don’t think we should underestimate the importance of daily contact and interaction within the schools.  There may be tracking within certain classes, but I don’t think we should underestimate the interaction between racial groups, starting in kindergarten, even if those relations are not smooth or out of Disneyland at all times.

Peter:  Well, Brian, I think what we’ve got here is an example of schools which we expect to take the lead in social change, but in many ways, social change is going to register last in schools.  It’s a real paradox.

Ed:  Those are all really good points.  I guess looking at it from the point of history, that’d be a great idea for a radio show.  I’m struck that we’ve had 300 years, almost 400 years, of slavery and injustice, and I wouldn’t want us to despair too soon when we’re only 5 years into a new more expansive, inclusive order.  There’s no doubt that what Ms. Lugo said is true, but if we lose faith that we can make that change, we’ve lost faith in America.

Brian:  Ed, I think that’s a good way to sum up, and it’s a good thing, too, because that’s all the time we have today.  But remember, we want to keep the conversation going.   Visit us online and tell us what you think about the past, present and future of public education in America.  You can find us at BackStoryRadio.org.   Don’t be a stranger.  Thanks for listening.

Brian: BackStory is produced by Tony Field, Rachel Quimby, and Catherine Moore, with help from Bart Elmore and Lydia Wilson.

Ed: Special thanks today to David Bearinger.  Jamal Millner mastered the show and Gaby Alter wrote our theme.

Peter: BackStory’s Executive Producer is Andrew Wyndham.

Ed: Major production support for BackStory with American History Guys is provided by the David A. Harrison Fund for the President’s Initiatives at the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Richmond, Cara Brown Epstein and the W.L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Foundation, UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, and an anonymous donor.

Female Announcer: Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor of history at the University of Virginia. Brian Balogh is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is President and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Full Transcript

Guests Include:

* Jon Zimmerman, Professor of History and Education at New York University and author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory

*Alicia Lugo, who graduated from an all-black Virginia high school in 1959; taught in Charlottesville’s segregated school system; and went on to run that city’s school board

Show Highlights

• Little Red Schoolhouse
  Education historian John Zimmerman tells 20th Century Guy Brian Balogh why Americans romanticize the one-room schoolhouse, and what they were really like.

Web Exclusives

Zimmerman Extended Interview
Brian talks to education historian Jon Zimmerman about why the Little Red Schoolhouse represents America’s educational ambitions.

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Teacher Resources Page
Teachers, if you’ve used BackStory in the classroom, visit our Teacher Resources page and tell us about the experience. Or let us know how we can make the show even more useful to you.

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Call of the Week
BackStory caller Jennifer wants to know whether school was more rigorous for students “back in the day.”

Further Reading

Want to dig deeper into this history of public education? Check out this list of resources compiled by the History Guys to learn more.