Original subtitles

♪

History tells us

that this particular era is difficult but not unique.

♪

The forces that are shaping

the worst parts of us right now...

are forces that are part of the American character.

I just think we're the most polarized

we've possibly ever been.

No society has ever changed this much.

Thousands more families

were separated at the border.

It is time for the return of men.

An attack on women's basic human rights and civil rights.

Worst of the worst examples from the mainstream media.

The number of hate groups has doubled...

I think that history gives us the ability to see

what is the scope and nature of our crisis,

how have people in previous generations

addressed those crises,

and are there lessons to apply?

Joining me now, NBC news contributor

and historian Jon Meacham, giving a history lesson.

It is a complicated and... and fraught history.

We have been in terrible spots before.

What we have to figure out is how do we get out of them,

and what lessons can we take to get through this?

I'm not saying it's all gonna be fine,

but I think it's on all of us.

If we don't arm ourselves

with a historical understanding of how complex our history was,

we're not gonna be able to think clearly enough

to react in real time to save the country.

♪

♪

It is not unexpected

that in these politically tumultuous times,

we scrutinize our past

in order to understand the present.

- Hey. How are you? - What's up?

- Good to see you. Jon Meacham. - Hi.

Tonight's speaker has established himself

as one of the most reasoned and enlightened voices

wielding the literary scalpel examining history.

Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome

to Jon Meacham.

Thank you. Um...

So, we're living in an era of politics as entertainment.

Politics as an unfolding and insistent drama.

And so, the question I get asked the most is:

"Has it ever been like this?"

Second question is: "How do we get out of this?"

And so what I'd like to take are... are a few minutes

this afternoon is to talk about some moments

that I think should give us a sense of proportion

about the questions of the present time.

Because we have been here before.

If we had been here 101 years ago today,

what would have been going on?

♪

Woodrow Wilson would be president of the United States.

We would be fighting the First World War

with a huge part of the country wondering

why our boys were going to fight

for nations about whom we knew so little.

In 1919, 1920, you had a prevalent fear

that radicals, socialists, communists

were taking the country away.

Woodrow Wilson cracked down on civil dissent

and civil liberties.

A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General,

launches a number of raids on suspected dissidents.

President Wilson closes down 400 newspapers.

Immigration was at an extraordinary high.

It didn't really stop until

the 1924 immigration legislation,

which put quotas on immigration from different countries.

There was white anxiety about cultural identity,

about economic opportunity, that inspired the rebirth

of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

1925 and '26,

50,000 Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue

in what was a remarkable

but not stunning public display.

It was a big, broad-based racist army,

and what they wanted to do was make America great again.

The governor of Georgia announced that he wanted

to build a wall of steel as high as heaven

to keep immigrants out.

Huh.

As Mark Twain once said, "History may not repeat itself,

but it does rhyme."

Nativism, xenophobia, racism,

sexism, isolationism are perennial American forces.

They ebb and they flow.

♪

The story of race and fear and anxiety and violence

is inextricably intertwined with the story of the country.

It's not that the soul of the country

has been captured

by a particular group at a particular time.

The soul of the country is, in fact, this essence,

which is not all good or all bad.

You have your better angels

fighting against your worst impulses.

And that has a religious component, certainly.

It's also, though, a matter of historical observation.

Our history is shaped by the extent to which

those better angels or those worst instincts win out

in a given period of time.

♪

It was true in the 1760s.

It was true in the 1860s.

It was true in the 1960s.

And it's true today.

You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!

A white nationalist blogger

had called upon his followers to meet here in Charlottesville

to protest the city's efforts to try to take down

a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park.

When the Charlottesville riots happened,

the neo-Nazi rally, and then the death of Heather Heyer...

The editor of TIME magazine at the time called and said,

"Do you have anything to say historically

about the history of hate in American politics?"

So I started with Reconstruction

and moved forward.

And it became a book about the soul of the country.

The fact that, in the 21st century,

people calling themselves Klansmen

are in Charlottesville, Virginia,

the home of Robert E. Lee,

basically fighting for

an antebellum vision of the world

is a remarkable thing.

But it's not all that remarkable if you know American history

and if you know that five minutes after Lee's surrender,

the reaction sets in.

White supremacy replaced slavery

as the consuming concern of white southerners.

Segregation replaced human enslavement.

And so, when people say

the Civil War never really ended,

that's pretty much what they mean.

♪

If the 2016 election had gone the other way,

I wouldn't have written about the soul of America.

Now I could just write books about that,

or I could, as I do, try to talk about it in real time

and hope that it has some impact.

So, we have about 15 minutes until your talk.

- Oh, okay. - Yeah.

Uh, is there some place I can just...

- Be? - Sit? Yeah.

The American story is a story

of more generously applying the Jeffersonian idea

that everybody gets a chance.

Thomas Jefferson wrote,

"We hold these truths to be self-evident,

that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator

with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness."

Jefferson didn't mean everybody

when he sat down to write that in June of 1776.

He didn't mean women.

He didn't mean people of color.

He meant white men.

But the story of the country

is one in which we have more generously understood

what that sentence meant.

Where we were opening our arms and not clenching our fists.

♪

On Saturday, one day after the presidential inauguration,

thousands of women are expected to march in Washington, DC.

- A - wave of protesters,

many in pink knitted "pussyhats,"

gathered in the National Mall.

An estimated half a million people turned out.

I really believed that we were

moving toward a world where there was equality,

and I guess I was really disappointed that, um...

the election showed that maybe,

I don't know, maybe there was a backlash.

For those who think that the country can't change,

I sometimes submit that a hundred years ago,

more than half the population couldn't vote.

To exclude women from voting was to move them

to second- or even third-class citizenship.

Our better angels tell us that if all men are created equal,

then all men and women are created equal.

To make that real is a victory for those better angels.

♪

The women's movement

out of which the suffrage movement arises

really starts in the antebellum period

in the United States, so in the 1830s, 1840s.

By 1913 or so, there's this phenomenon

called the "New Woman."

And the New Woman is this young, independent woman

who works for a while, forestalls marriage,

sometimes has a fair degree of education.

And people hold up the New Woman all the time

to say, you know,

"Woman has all the rights she could need.

Why would she need the vote?"

In the suffrage movement,

the person who most emblemized this New Woman

was Alice Paul.

She had gone to college.

She was a social worker.

She went to England. And while she was there,

she became associated with the suffrage movement

in Britain, which was quite militant.

And then she would come back to the US,

and launch a new chapter of the suffrage movement

that was in your face and unrelenting.

Alice Paul launched a very direct campaign,

focused on the White House, trying to get Woodrow Wilson

to endorse the suffrage movement.

When he arrived in Washington in 1913 for his inauguration,

he actually asked, "Where are all the people?"

And all the people were at the suffrage march.

There were floats and delegations

from suffragists all around the nation.

It's the largest parade to take to the streets

in American history at that point.

But the crowd becomes incensed

because, of course,

good, respectable women don't do this,

and the crowd starts attacking the marchers.

If you're a white man

susceptible to the appeal of the Klan

in the second decade of the 20th century,

"My God, immigrants are taking my job.

Catholics are trying to change my culture.

And now women want to vote. What's next?"

You know, that was the view.

People are sent to the hospital,

people have broken bones.

And the police turn a blind eye.

But Alice Paul keeps up this tactic of direct action.

One of the things she does is start stationing picketers

outside the White House.

♪

They had these banners

and they would just stand

silently outside the White House gates.

We now think of this as a familiar tactic.

That was brand new.

Alice Paul made a point of having people

at every gate of the White House,

so that the president would have to see them

when he came and he went.

She was determined to take the fight directly to him.

At first, Woodrow Wilson is

cheerfully tolerant of them.

"Oh, these cute little women, they'll go away after a while."

And then winter comes, and they're still there.

And then summer comes, and they're still there.

And then World War I breaks out.

And you do not picket a wartime president.

That is unpatriotic.

The problem is that they are not breaking any laws,

so they trump up a reason to arrest them,

and they say that they have obstructed traffic.

And they start to round up these women,

throw them into paddy wagons, and assume they'll go away.

They go to court, they refuse to pay their court fines,

they go to the workhouse.

More women show up.

They throw them in paddy wagons.

They go to the workhouse.

So you start to have a huge crop

of political prisoners in Occoquan Workhouse.

There were hunger strikes in prison.

They were willing to risk everything.

The prison staff thought they could

stop this hunger strike

by force-feeding these women.

They would put them in chairs and literally strap them in.

And then you would have a tube

forced down your throat.

And then they would put a funnel

at the top of the tube,

and they would whip up eggs or whatever it might be,

and then they would just pour it into the funnel

and it would come down.

The women would vomit.

They had bloody noses routinely.

Alice Paul had stomach problems

for the rest of her life.

But the National Woman's Party

knows what's going on inside the prison, right,

and they start publicizing what's happening.

And this creates a great deal of sympathy

in the American public because it was so brutal.

But really it's a million things over time

that eventually tip the scales.

A bunch of suffragists go state by state

and get "male" taken out of the constitution.

That is a dual strategy

working at the state level and working at the federal level.

You've got two branches of the movement.

The state movement

starts to win a lot of victories.

States out west and states in other places

start enfranchising women

and allowing them access to the ballot.

It started to have a kind of insurmountable momentum to it

that I think Wilson eventually joined.

In 1918, Congress takes up a vote,

and it narrowly fails.

And what the National Woman's Party decide

is they're gonna go to those states,

to those legislators who voted against,

and they're gonna try to get them out of office.

And by 1919,

they've gotten a lot of those men out of office.

They take a second vote in the House and the Senate,

and it passes both.

Change in America comes

when the powerful take notice

of what the people have been saying.

And when those two things intersect,

that's how history is made.

♪

But the thing that we can't forget

is that while this suffrage story is unfolding,

there is simultaneously a suppression of democracy

going on in the United States.

During that massive 1913 suffrage parade,

the great Ida B. Wells, journalist,

anti-lynching crusader, feminist activist,

comes in with her Illinois delegation from Chicago.

But they're in D.C., which is a southern city,

and there are gonna be southern congresspeople watching this.

And so Alice Paul says,

"No, we can't have you march with white women."

And that's one example of the ways

in which Alice Paul was willing to embrace

and perpetuate racism in the service of the movement.

And I think the suffrage movement reminds us

that we really have to be thinking constantly

about the ways in which justice movements can do damage

while they're also doing good.

And I think that's a caution to us today

because we're no different.

I grew up on Missionary Ridge,

a battlefield in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

When I was little, you could still find Civil War bullets

on Missionary Ridge and around.

So, to me, the history was just right there.

I met Jon when he was 19,

and he seemed to me like he was 30 when I met him.

He was just very much an old soul,

and he was very wise.

He was sort of someone who got on really well

with older people.

You could tell that this was someone

who, at a very young age, was really engaged

in the life of the mind.

At age ten, he campaigned for Reagan.

And he was fascinated by Reagan as a man.

We, as Americans,

have the capacity now, as we've had in the past,

to do whatever needs to be done

to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

I could have fairly easily ended up

in some sort of young conservative ethos.

But because I started in journalism when I was 18

at the Chattanooga Times, I almost immediately saw

that the world was a hell of a lot more complicated

than either a conservative ideology

or a liberal ideology would have it.

By the time we really got together,

he was at the Washington Monthly,

which was like boot camp for journalism.

We would have Friday night dates that got cancelled

because we had to drive up to the printer

because somebody was late filing their stories.

And then Jon ended up getting an offer from Newsweek.

I was an editor at Newsweek,

and the young Jon Meacham walked in,

25 years old, maybe.

We talked for a little bit, and I realized right away

that I'd be working for him soon.

You are how old?

- I'm 29. - Twenty-nine?

What's it like to be a 29-year-old managing editor...

- Closing in on 30. - Okay.

What's it like to be a, uh, closing-in-on-30,

uh, managing editor of, uh, one of the big news magazines?

My guest tonight, the editor of Newsweek magazine.

Please welcome back to the show, Jon Meacham. Jon?

I remember thinking

he was a slightly ridiculous figure

at Newsweek because people usually dress sloppily,

and Meacham always wore kind of a neat suit.

His hair was carefully combed.

He had this slight waddle as he went down the hallway.

He was kind of prematurely old and... an old-fashioned figure

surrounded by a lot of people trying to be hip.

And I think he took some grief for it.

I think people kind of laughed at it a little bit.

But they weren't laughing when he was working on...

When he was working on their copy.

You know, I've written about people

about whom much has been written.

Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson.

And I've written about people

where it's kind of the beginning

of the conversation, George H. W. Bush.

On the primary campaign trail in New Hampshire once,

he grabbed the hand of a department store mannequin,

asking for votes.

When he realized his mistake, he said,

"Never know, gotta ask."

I've spent most of my life...

thinking about the past,

and thinking about how the past became something

either worth emulating or worth avoiding.

♪

In the course of a year, I can do

between sixty and a hundred speaking engagements...

with people who care about the country,

who care about history,

and are trying to connect these dots.

So, one sign of consistency in challenging times

is I appear to be wearing the same necktie.

So...

My hair is grayer, however,

so that may be because of the 2016 election.

Uh, so 2016, uh, how did it happen?

Two numbers, I think.

One is 17 percent.

That's the percentage of Americans who say

they have trust in the federal government

to do the right thing some or most of the time.

That's down from 77 percent in the mid-1960s.

So that's a huge trust gap.

The other is $130,000.

That's the number that some economists believe

a family of four needs in annual household income

to lead what they would think of

as a classic post-World War II middle-class life.

Annual income for a family of four

is about 56,000 dollars right now.

So in that missing income gap and in that trust gap,

you have the ingredients

for a kind of populist moment like this...

where someone says, "Those people are to blame

for the fact that you don't have this money."

We are sick and tired of people disrespecting,

coming over by the thousands.

We wanna make sure that our borders are secure.

The US government is releasing

new video of the child detention centers.

This shows children walled in

by a chain-link fence.

Mommy.

And so often, people in American history

have felt that they were on a precipice,

- and so they lash out. - Build the wall!

You saw it with white southerners

after Reconstruction.

You saw it with the second Klan and immigration,

the shifting economy.

You saw it in the 1930s.

It's an incredibly powerful political emotion.

And the great political leaders...

are the ones who don't cater to it,

who tamp it down instead of flame it.

♪

The 1930s have a lot to say to us.

It was a period of enormous ferment

of anxiety about a changing world.

Technology was changing the country,

the rise of radio,

people were moving away from farms,

they were gathering in cities, they felt alienated,

they felt lonely.

If we look at the 1930s, we can see

how economic anxiety, isolationist tendencies,

nativist tendencies can lead to a genuine crisis,

both at home and abroad.

The country is in the throes of what becomes

a global depression.

We're paying the price for isolationism,

paying the price for instituting immigration quotas,

putting up high tariffs.

By the spring of 1933, one out of every four

adult American men was out of work.

There were riots in the Midwest.

There was a live question about whether

democratic capitalism would survive the decade.

We face that crisis.

We face it with singleness of purpose.

So shall we win through to a better day.

Onto that stage comes Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

One of the brightest young politicians

in the Democratic Party, 1920,

goes to Campobello off the coast of Maine,

wakes up and can't walk.

Wills himself back into the arena

and becomes, in a way,

the embodiment of the American notion

that we can recover.

He believed we could all walk again,

not least because he had taught himself to walk again.

♪

Let me assert my firm belief

that the only thing we have to fear is...

fear itself.

So, when we think of FDR,

we think of the great line,

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

The line that got the biggest cheer that day, though, was

the current crisis is of such scope

that he might require powers

"as if we had been invaded by a foreign foe."

Invaded by a foreign foe.

And the crowd roared.

And it suggested to Eleanor Roosevelt

that they were ready for a dictator.

Dictatorship was on the march.

Look at Germany, look at Italy,

look at the increasing totalitarianization

of the Soviet Union.

What did Franklin Roosevelt do?

I have shown our determination

in the past by action.

Franklin Roosevelt stayed in the arena.

Action that is saving and will continue to save

the constitutional representative

form of government

in which all Americans rejoice.

He insisted that we had something worth preserving

despite its faults.

He fought against fascists, the German Bund.

Madison Square Garden was filled, 30,000 people,

a Nazi rally.

♪

The isolationist movement

was centrally based on the idea

that we should not be drawn into foreign quarrels

because someone was always taking advantage of us.

If you believe that this country

should not enter the war in Europe,

we ask you to join the America First Committee

in its stand.

Dealt with isolationism

incredibly carefully.

We are keeping out of the wars that are going on

in Europe and in Asia,

but I do not subscribe to the preachment

that the United States should do nothing.

World War II was opposed

by 40 percent of the country.

Again, this is why I think history matters.

The more we understand

that it wasn't so clear cut even then,

I would hope that would give us some hope that you can...

We can find a way to manufacture consensus

to solve the problems of our own time.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Hey. How are you?

Hello. Thank you for coming to Westmont.

Thank you.

Yeah, I was just interested in your comments

about the legacy of...

forgive me, but, like, your generation and...

older generations.

Like, what kind of legacy do you think, like,

your generation is leaving behind for my generation?

Well, the jury... Well, the jury is still out.

Um...

I think we've created an overly partisan...

and overly reactive world right now.

I don't think it's a great legacy at this point,

but we have a little more time.

- That is true. - It's close.

♪

We tried to line up a speaker for this fall,

and nobody else would come, so I said, "We got Jon Meacham."

"He's an old friend of mine."

I'm supposed to introduce him, so I'm gonna be polite.

Um, please welcome my friend, Jon Meacham.

Thank you.

That was much nicer than usual. Thank you.

So, let's talk about that book, The Soul of America.

In it, you write about the darkest chapters

in American history.

So when was the last time the partisanship was this bad,

we were so divided?

I would say the isolationism versus the interventionism

- of the late 1930s, early 1940s. - The war?

There was more ferocity, more vitriol over what to do

about Hitler than even about Vietnam.

And it was solved for us by external forces,

by Japan and by Germany's unilateral declaration.

So it's not as though we woke up one morning

and said, "Yeah, I think we are gonna

defeat tyranny and project liberty."

♪

We Interrupt this broadcast to bring you

this important bulletin from the United Press.

Flash, Washington. The White House announces

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The attack on the Hawaiian Islands

has caused severe damage

to American naval and military forces.

What changed everything was Pearl Harbor.

Bombs had been dropped, Americans had died,

war had been brought to us by the Japanese.

The number of our officers and men killed

in the attack on Pearl Harbor was 2,340.

Since the unprovoked and dastardly attack,

a state of war has existed

between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor,

there were anxieties,

particularly along the West Coast,

that Japanese Americans might serve as agents

of the Japanese imperial government,

an enemy force.

Word has just come that some 91 Japanese

have been taken into custody in Northern California

by the FBI.

In Fresno, California, two Japanese were arrested,

their automobile seized by police.

Within a day, the Secret Service, the FBI

sweeps into cities and urban areas

from Seattle to Arizona,

arresting community leaders, martial arts instructors,

Japanese school language teachers, Buddhist priests.

Our West Coast became

a potential combat zone.

Living in that zone were more than 100,000 persons

of Japanese ancestry,

two thirds of them American citizens,

one third aliens.

My parents met in Los Angeles

and they married there.

I turned five years old on April 20th, 1942.

I'm the oldest, and my brother was next, a year younger,

and my baby sister, Nancy.

Here we were in the United States,

and the country was at war with our ancestral land,

and so there was great concern about what might happen to us.

♪

The Attorney General of California, Earl Warren,

and others argued that people of foreign descent

were dangerous, were potentially enemies of the country.

No one knew what would happen

among this concentrated population

if Japanese forces should invade our shores.

By February 1942,

President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066,

and this empowered the military to take control

of the eight most western states.

General DeWitt is placed in command

of that whole western region.

General DeWitt, uh, said that Japanese Americans

are an enemy race.

He said very emphatically, "A Jap's a Jap.

And a scrap of paper attesting to his citizenship

doesn't alter that fact."

He began issuing public proclamations

singling out Japanese Americans.

A curfew came down.

Japanese Americans had to be home by eight o'clock

and stay home until 6 a.m. in the morning.

The government froze our bank account.

Rents couldn't be paid.

My father's dry cleaning business fell apart.

Everything was lost. Everything.

And then the soldiers came.

One morning, my parents got me up very early,

together with my brother and my baby sister,

and dressed us, uh, hurriedly.

And suddenly, we saw two soldiers

marching up our driveway,

carrying rifles with shiny bayonets.

And they stomped onto the front porch

and with their fists,

began pounding on the door.

Uh, that sound still resonates in my mind.

My father came out, answered the door,

and we were ordered out of our home.

We stood on the driveway

waiting for our mother to come out.

And when she came out,

she had our baby sister in one arm,

a huge, heavy-looking duffel bag in the other,

and tears were streaming down her cheeks.

♪

We were taken by truck

to, uh, the, uh, Buddhist temple

in downtown Los Angeles in Little Tokyo.

And that's where we were all assembled.

The heads of the families

were ordered to report,

and we were given our family number and tag.

And a row of buses took us to Santa Anita,

where we were unloaded

and herded over to the stable areas,

and each family was assigned a horse stall to sleep in...

still pungent with the stink of horse manure.

We were there about three or four months...

And then we were loaded onto trains

with armed soldiers at both ends of each car.

We were transported two thirds of the way across the country

to the swamps of Arkansas.

There were ten camps altogether.

Rohwer, Arkansas, was the farthest east.

The camps were not camps, they were prisons.

They lived in dusty barracks.

There were cracks in the walls,

so they had to stuff newspaper in

to stop the wind from blowing in.

They had common latrines without doors.

The food was terrible, inadequate medical care.

I did go to school,

and I remember we began every school day

with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.

I could see the barbed wire fence and the sentry tower

right outside my schoolhouse window

as I recited the words,

"With liberty and justice for all."

By the end of 1942,

you had almost 120,000 Americans,

people like my mother and my father

who were born in California, who are citizens by birth,

who had lost their property, they lost their freedom,

some had even lost their lives

without any trial, without any charges,

and for no offense.

We were incarcerated for the duration of the war,

four years.

When we were freed, we had nothing.

For my parents,

everything that they had worked for was taken away.

We know now that if we lose this war,

it will be generations or even centuries

before our conception of democracy can live again.

It's one of our most shameful episodes.

And a reminder that even in the midst

of a global campaign to defend liberty,

someone as otherwise remarkable as Franklin Roosevelt

was able to make a decision that violated

fundamental principles of both human and American rights.

The internment's a cautionary tale.

When we give in to the worst in us,

we exclude, we oppress, we marginalize.

Are we gonna look back at the child separation

on the southern border in the same way we look back

on slavery and segregation and Japanese American internment?

I'd bet yes.

♪

♪

♪

Hey, how are you?

I didn't wanna disturb you.

- You're just like... - Good to see you.

All the youngsters you see in the street.

I know, I know, I know.

I'm trying to earn my living while on the road.

- Everything's well here? - Oh, it's great.

It just gets better and better here.

Excellent.

The other day when you were on MSNBC,

you were talking about Trump being so emotional

and the Democrats sort of trying to talk reason.

- Right. - It was such a simple...

- Reason versus passion. - Yeah,

such a simple statement that you don't hear that.

- I specialize in those. - You don't hear those.

I try to be as simpleminded as possible.

- It was so wonderful. - Well, thank you.

As Madison said,

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

And reason was our best bet.

That insight forms the core of what made this country

and what makes this country, when we get it right,

truly great.

Shh. I like this, shh.

Hey, how are y'all?

- Hey, how are you? - Jon Meacham, how are you?

- Hey, I'm Keith. - Keith, glad to see you.

Do we need a mic, or are we okay?

We're gonna mic you up.

So, just be careful when you get up.

I have this microphone up top.

Okay.

We're at a moment in our history

where we react to things because of where we stand,

not because of what they are.

And the issue becomes that the partisan reactions,

the passionate reactions to incoming data

are so strong, they're tsunami-like,

that it's almost impossible for people to sort out

in a reasonable way, in a data-driven way,

what to make of a given report.

One of the most significant shifts we've lived through

is the move from a literate, reading print culture,

which was the world of Jefferson and Lincoln,

to radio, which was FDR and Churchill,

to television, which was Kennedy and Reagan,

and now digital and cable, which is Trump.

It is increasing the likelihood

that people will not engage with texts,

they will simply engage emotionally.

And that creates a political marketplace

that is ever farther from reason and ever closer to passion,

which is exactly what the Founders were worried about.

We can learn a lot by studying the McCarthy era.

I think the fall of McCarthy

is an incredibly important case study

in how reason can ultimately triumph over passion.

Socialism has spread the shadow of human regimentation

over most of the nations of the earth,

and the shadow is encroaching upon our own liberty.

In many ways, the conservative movement

that has a connection with conspiracy theories

begins in the aftermath of the second World War.

The Communist fifth columnists among us

are working for world dictatorship.

There was anxiety about the way,

uh, FDR had handled Yalta.

Eisenhower was seen as a dedicated agent

of the Communist conspiracy.

George Marshall, the army chief of staff

during World War II, was seen as a Communist agent.

Thousands of good, loyal Americans have been duped

into actually aiding the Communists.

There was this ferment which plays in, yet again,

to this recurring theme that there is some force,

foreigners, powerful people, rich people,

who are trying to undo the America

that is most familiar and most beloved

to those who are listening to the conspiracy theories.

Joseph R. McCarthy,

the junior senator from Wisconsin.

He was obscure in the halls

where senators advise and consent

until February the 9th, 1950.

Even if there were only one Communist

in the State Department, that would still be

one Communist too many.

Joe McCarthy gives a speech

saying he has the names

of 205 Communists in the Department of State.

That discovery propelled him into the headlines.

There is no remote possibility of this war

which we're in today ending except by victory

or by death for this civilization.

He then starts this campaign executed

in the Senate through different committees,

but mainly in the newspapers.

McCarthy understood that headlines

spoke louder than details.

He would have loved Twitter.

He is the master of making the sensational charge,

often with very little basis to it,

and the press amplifies it.

And here is our guest, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

If you had to do this all over again,

would you have changed any of your tactics?

I'm not, uh, equipped to use

lace-handkerchief type of tactics.

Uh, we may have to use lumberjack tactics,

bare-knuckle tactics. If those are the only kind

of tactics the Communists understand,

then those are the tactics we'll use.

There's an enormous number of lives

that were wrecked because of these charges.

Senator McCarthy's charges and insinuations

are not only false, but utterly irresponsible

and, under the circumstances, reveal a shocking disregard

for the interests of our country.

McCarthy, his own lawyer Roy Cohn said,

was an opportunist.

He wasn't really interested in the end

of fighting Communism.

He was interested in the means of fighting Communism,

because the means made him more popular,

made him more powerful.

McCarthy's political base

was a source of fear,

particularly for other Republican senators.

McCarthy gave the impression

that he was leading this vast army.

His other fellow senators weren't sure

how big that army was, but if it was big,

they sure as hell didn't wanna run afoul of it.

Acclaimed as an anti-Communist hero

and denounced as a threat to civil liberties

for his conduct of Senate investigations,

Joseph R. McCarthy became the most controversial

political figure of the period.

There was a huge amount of debate

during the McCarthy era

about whether a journalistic institution

should simply report what was said

without assessing its validity.

It's the same kind of debate that goes on today.

Just because someone in power says something crazy,

do you have to report what that is?

If you report it, do you say it's crazy?

Or does that somehow violate the neutrality of the news?

So, in the midst of the McCarthy scare,

Palmer Hoyt, who was the editor and publisher

of the Denver Post, issued a statement saying,

"We are no longer simply going to report

what Joe McCarthy says, unless we can confirm it."

Hoyt's view was widely discussed,

huge debates in newsrooms about what to do.

Tonight's See It Now devotes its entire half hour

to a report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,

told mainly in his own words and pictures.

Did the Civil Liberties Union supply you with an attorney?

They did supply an attorney.

Edward R. Murrow's program would say,

"The senator has said this, but he has no evidence."

Do you know the Civil Liberties Union has been listed

as a front for and doing the work of the Communist Party?

The Attorney General's list does not and has never listed

the ACLU as subversive,

nor does the FBI or any other federal government agency.

I think when Palmer Hoyt,

when Edward R. Murrow said,

"This is what we think the truth is,"

they were living up to the best tradition

of those better angels.

The line between investigating and persecuting

is a very fine one.

And the junior senator from Wisconsin

has stepped over it repeatedly.

This is no time for men who oppose

Senator McCarthy's message to keep silent,

or for those who approve.

We can deny our heritage and our history,

but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.

If you're a journalist today

trying to figure out what to do about a demagogic figure

who makes outlandish statements...

studying the McCarthy era is instructive.

In Washington, a Senate committee recommends

censure for Joseph McCarthy.

It took a long time, four years.

But ultimately, McCarthy is censured.

McCarthy becomes the fourth senator in history

to be disciplined.

McCarthy rose on screaming headlines:

"Reds under the bed."

He fell when some reporters, including Edward R. Murrow,

began assessing the validity of those claims.

Purists versus pragmatists.

In politics, we tend to want

candidates to be principled,

coherent, uh, absolutely devoted to a certain platform,

and they're gonna do everything they can

to enact that platform, right?

The issue is, if you're in a position of power,

if you are totally devoted to that purist principle,

you have less of a chance of getting through the day

and getting something done.

I would argue some of the greatest moments

in American political life have resulted

when people in power have changed their minds.

Hmm.

Abraham Lincoln on emancipation.

Ronald Reagan on the Soviet Union.

Richard Nixon on China.

The country was built by people

who were willing to learn from their mistakes.

We looked the facts in the face,

and we thought, "You know what?

What we thought was true and good yesterday

is not true and good today."

Thank you, all.

That's not a partisan point.

It's about the capacity to say,

"I want to live in a country that looks and feels like this."

♪

Get outta here.

Ooh, wait, look.

Hmm, Fanta Zero, that sounds glamorous.

Unavailable?

Ooh, cherry.

It's Friday, we're going for cherry.

We are praying, praying ♪

- ♪ We are praying, praying ♪ - ♪ Ooh ooh ♪

♪ We are praying In the light of ♪

♪ The light of God ♪

♪ We are praying, praying ♪

- ♪ We are praying, praying ♪ - ♪ Ooh ooh ♪

♪ We are praying In the light of God ♪

So we have a formidable group of people here.

You got a lot of members of Congress here,

you've got a lot of engaged souls

in the fight of this moment going forward.

What's your best advice, given what you've seen

and what you've done and what you've fought for

and what you've hoped for?

What's your best advice for folks in the arena today?

I think a part of the direction is to go the way

of the Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King movement.

Because love is powerful.

Love is not an empty, uh, quiet force.

It's a force that we have not yet begun to really explore.

And so,

that nonviolent movement was rooted in that.

So I think that that's one of the things that I would push,

so that we can be pushed hard to recognize

that we are people on a journey,

and that that journey does demand

a certain kind of behavior.

Anything doesn't go.

The hundred years from the end of the Civil War

through the civil rights movement

is a vivid case study in the struggle

between our worst instincts and our better angels.

In the civil rights legislation of '64 and '65,

our better angels won...

in a ferocious struggle with our worst instincts.

And if we want a model for how to move ahead,

looking at those years is instructive.

♪

During the '60s, we felt the stain of segregation

and racial discrimination.

And when you see something that is not right,

not fair, not just, you have to do something.

We cannot continue to accept

these conditions of oppression,

for this is not a struggle for ourselves alone,

it is a struggle to save the soul of America.

When I participated in the movement,

I was 15.

It would not have been successful

had it not been for ordinary little nobodies

doing their part to make it happen.

By 1963, the full panoply of segregation

was under attack.

It begins to culminate on the streets of Alabama.

The campaign was directed

against racial discrimination in Birmingham,

the most totally segregated big city in the south.

I had a made-up mind that I could handle

whatever was coming, and be nonviolent.

In May, thousands of children marched

against segregation in Birmingham.

The city is determined to maintain order.

They're attacked by fire hoses,

by police dogs.

To see children treated like this,

the whole nation rose up in arms.

The events in Birmingham

have sent a chill through most Americans.

What the movement did is dramatize

the stakes between good and evil.

I will be present to bar

the entrance of any Negro

who attempts to enroll at the University of Alabama.

All of these incidents have a slow, cascading effect

on the opinion of the country.

I have a dream today.

And honestly, the opinion of President Kennedy.

I remember President Kennedy saying to us

on one occasion, "We now understand."

This nation was founded on the principle

that all men are created equal,

and that the rights of every man are diminished

when the rights of one man are threatened.

Now the time has come for this nation

to fulfill its promise.

Kennedy and Johnson propose

a far-reaching Civil Rights Act.

It was not going particularly well.

It appears as though

something has happened in the motorcade route.

Kennedy is shot to death in Dealey Plaza.

It's official now, the president is dead.

♪

I do solemnly swear...

I do solemnly swear...

Johnson takes the oath of office on Air Force One,

becomes president.

We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed.

I ask for your help...

and God's.

♪

That night, Johnson is lying in bed,

and he's listing off things he wants to do:

foreign leaders that need to be called,

funeral arrangements.

But in the midst of this, he says he wants to pass

the administration's civil rights bill

without changing a comma.

And it was kind of a remarkable moment

because Johnson had a presidential race coming up.

No more political man ever drew breath

than Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Johnson had been a senator from Texas, a segregated state.

A lot of debate about to what extent he watered down

civil rights legislation in the '50s, but he did.

He was in no way a leading progressive.

And so, you wouldn't have bet that Lyndon Johnson

was gonna try to finish the work of Lincoln.

Everything about that moment would have led him politically

to have made all kinds of promises,

all kinds of rhetorical nods

to the civil rights legislation,

but not to pursue it.

There was something in Johnson's soul

that led him to believe

that this was the moment to strike.

Lyndon Johnson was a strong, strong leader.

He made a commitment to those of us

in the civil rights movement,

that he would pick up where President Kennedy left off.

And he did.

Lyndon Johnson risked just about everything

for civil rights.

As he later put it,

"What the hell is the presidency for

if not to do the big things that other men might not?"

Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to pass

the civil rights bill because it's morally right.

What Johnson then did from '63 to '64

is he created a remarkable coalition

of Republicans and Democrats

to pass a law that would finally undo

what had been the racist reaction

to the verdict of the Civil War.

I promise you here and now

that we are going to pass a civil rights bill.

Lyndon Johnson was one of the great persuaders

in American politics.

The "Johnson treatment," it was called.

We will pass the strongest civil rights bill

in American history.

The trade-offs, the deals cut

to get to a legislative solution

is the work of politics.

July 2nd, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson

signed the civil rights bill into law.

I urge every American

to join in this effort

to bring justice and hope to all our people

and to bring peace to our land.

The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act,

taken together in '64 and '65,

represent what concentrated acts of citizenship can do

when they intersect with the attention

and the skill of those in power.

Lyndon Johnson heeded the work of Martin Luther King,

the work of Rosa Parks, the work of John Lewis,

the work of innumerable people whose names we will never know,

who stood up in the streets and courthouses and schools

of the American South

and undid, as best he could, American apartheid.

And if America wants to do some big things

about education, about climate, about economic inequality,

you can do a lot worse than to look at 1964 and '65

and see how even in a complicated,

ultimately fallen universe, you can make progress.

♪

8:05, so what time is it?

♪

Oh, we got seven minutes, this is perfect.

It's actually really useful in speeches.

It's my godfather's. Herbert Stephenson Wentz. HSW.

All right.

All right, let's go dazzle 'em. Let's go save America.

It may take a little more than this.

♪

There is seemingly no US institution,

big or small, that is off-limits for Trump.

The president of the United States is lying to us.

They referred to journalists as the enemy of the people.

I do think there are certain norms,

there are certain conventions,

and those are under fundamental assault at the moment.

The president's attacks on the FBI...

The president charging the department

as part of a so-called "deep state."

So we can't count on the American president

to play the role that many of us had become accustomed

to that president playing.

So I wanna talk about three characteristics

that in my mind are great leadership characteristics

but are as important for citizens.

One is curiosity.

We have to listen to each other more.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred,

if you're on that side of the aisle

and I'm on this side of the aisle,

I'm gonna disagree with you.

But here's the difference.

If you get up and I listen and I think,

"Huh, maybe you have a point,"

I would submit that America at her best

happens when you say, "Huh, maybe you have a point."

The second is humility.

Humility in the sense of being able to acknowledge

a mistake and learn from it.

Most of us wouldn't be here if John Kennedy

had not been able to admit that he'd screwed up

the Bay of Pigs in April of 1961.

There are from this sobering episode

useful lessons for us all to learn.

After the disaster in Cuba,

Kennedy reaches out to the one person on Earth

before whom he least wished to appear

to be in need of tutelage, and that was Eisenhower.

Eisenhower walked him through what had happened,

he realized that Kennedy had never held a meeting

with all the stakeholders,

so he couldn't weigh their arguments.

He said, "You have to do that."

Cut to October 1962.

A series of offensive missile sites

is now in preparation on the island of Cuba.

The purpose of these bases can be none other

than to provide a nuclear strike capability

against the western hemisphere.

Kennedy remembered what Eisenhower had told him,

and he held what became

the world's longest committee meeting.

It lasted 13 days.

We came through that crisis,

not least because Jack Kennedy had the power to admit

he had screwed up and needed to learn.

And if we can't find a way

to admit that we changed our mind,

we're not gonna make progress.

The third characteristic is empathy.

We have to be able to see the world

through other people's eyes.

Cut to November 1989.

Good evening. Live from the Berlin Wall

on the most historic night in this wall's history.

The most vivid symbol of the deadliest standoff

in human history, the Berlin Wall, falls.

To Acknowledge the tremendous significance

of the symbolic destruction of the Berlin Wall,

I urge President Bush to travel to West Berlin.

Democrats, everybody's pounding on Bush

to go to Berlin and declare a great victory.

It clearly is a good development

in terms of human rights.

Bush won't go.

Lesley Stahl is pounding on him.

You don't seem elated,

and I'm wondering if you're thinking...

I'm elated. I'm just not an emotional kinda guy.

He was thinking about Mikhail Gorbachev,

who had a hardcore right wing

that did not wanna see Soviet greatness go away,

and if you doubt me, I refer you

to a young KGB officer named Vladimir Putin,

who was part of that right wing.

Bush knew that if he showed up,

it was gonna make Gorbachev's life harder.

And so, he took the hit.

His low-key reaction of yesterday was another case

of what critics have called timid leadership.

Christmas Day, 1991, the Soviet Union disappears

without a shot being fired.

He was empathetic enough to know

that our national interest was being served

by his seeing the world through Gorbachev's eyes.

We have to create a climate that gives enough permission

for people who are in office

to actually make that compromise or two.

I mean, that's on us.

Thank you.

♪

Jon has a desire to see what is good in America

and to let people know it,

while being realistic about what's not so good in America.

Absolutely spectacular.

- Thank you. - It was special.

- I expected nothing less from you. - Oh, thank you.

But it was a special evening.

- Thank you, sir. - Thank you.

But he has, above all things, a sense of redemption.

That even if we're stuck in a dark place,

there is a way out, and that history shows

we've done this again and again and again.

I think there's a real pride in America

and a belief in America.

Like, I think Jon really, really believes

that the American experiment is flawed but ultimately

better than anything else we've seen anywhere else.

It gives him a sense of duty to go out and...

and preach what it is he believes in.

The work of citizenship

at this particular moment,

if you believe that we need a change

in the presidency of the United States,

the work becomes convincing the right number of people

in the right number of states that you're right,

and they need to agree with you.

And so, the work of citizenship now is, in fact,

the work of democracy in its purest sense.

I think our role as citizens is to become civically engaged.

If the Japanese Americans have anything to say

to the public about this,

is don't take your liberties for granted.

They can be taken away from you.

We are going to build a wall!

What's at stake

in this political and cultural moment

is the nature of the democratic republic.

Nazis out! Immigrants in!

Our reality is farther away

from the American ideal today

than it was three or four years ago.

People think the other side is evil

and must be stopped.

The internment that we went through

is history now, 75 years old,

but I feel like it is current news.

These facilities have now been repurposed

as detention centers for families.

What's happening on our southern borders

is the same kind of irrationality.

Lock her up! Lock her up!

Lock her up! Lock her up!

She was warned.

She was given an explanation.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

One of the things that the women's movement

fought for in that early incarnation

was the idea that women should just be able to

stand up and speak of politics.

We cannot, we will not, be silenced.

And that's something we're still fighting for today.

What I see going on today

is so reminiscent of what I saw in the '60s.

There's so many forces today

that are preaching hate and division.

We need leadership now to lift us, to inspire us...

to be guided by better angels.

We've always grown stronger

the more widely we've opened our arms,

the more generously we've interpreted

what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said

that all men were created equal.

If we don't make that case, if we don't tell that story,

then we're gonna be perpetually in two armed camps

staring at each other,

and neither side wants to blink.

♪

The question at this moment is:

"Will we continue to pursue a more perfect union,

or will we settle into

a constant state of tribal warfare

in a ferocious struggle with our worst instincts?"

How do we get to 51 percent?

How do we do the right thing just enough of the time?

Dark forces are perennial.

The good news

is that the forces of light can also be perennial.

And let's just see how we can get that side to win

a little bit more often.

♪

♪