The Daily Stoic - Edward Ball, Southern Writer, on the Ghosts of Our Collective Past

Episode Date: October 31, 2020

Ryan talks with writer Edward Ball about what has animated the racism of the past and present, the distinction between responsibility and accountability for horrific deeds, and how to reckon with the darkest parts of American history.Edward Ball is an author who writes about history and race. His most recent book, Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy, discusses Ball’s great-grandfather, a white supremacist in New Orleans during Reconstruction. Ball has written for The Village Voice and other publications and has taught at Yale and SUNY.Get Life of a Klansman: https://geni.us/sICwkNThis episode is brought to you by Neuro. Neuro makes mints and gums that help you retain focus and clarity wherever you go. Made with a proprietary blend of caffeine, L-theanine, and other focus-building compounds, Neuro’s products are great for anyone who needs help focusing in these trying times. Try out Neuro’s gums and mints at getneuro.com—and use discount code STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order.This episode is also brought to you by Trends. Trends is the ultimate online community for entrepreneurs and business aficionados who want to know the latest news about business trends and analysis. It features articles from the most knowledgeable people, interviews with movers and shakers, and a private community of like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest insights from Trends. Visit trends.co/stoic to start your two-week trial for just one dollar.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Edward Ball:Homepage: https://www.edwardball.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stove Podcast. I've mentioned it a couple of times. You recently I was talking about a Confederate statue that you pass on the way into my office where I write my books and I record this podcast. And I don't know if I mentioned this, but I saw sort of both sides jostling about it. It's like one side wanted it down because they found it to be deeply offensive that you have to walk past a monument to the people who enslaved their ancestors on your way into court or to see your local representatives to sit in the city

council and all that. And then on the other hand, there was people who'd grown up in this town their whole life and they didn't want to see something that that had always been there just disappear. And so I ended up approaching some of the activists and I said, look, like, how much do you think it's going to cost to move this thing? Not destroy it, but move it. And the number was, you know, they weren't sure, but it was between 10 and 20,000 dollars. And I said, look, how much do you think is going to cost to move this thing? Not destroy it, but move it. And the number was, they weren't sure, but it was between 10 and $20,000. And I said, you know what, I can afford that.

And I offered to put in $10,000 to move this statue. And anyways, there's a couple of city council meetings about it and some protests and there for all of them. And I wasn't sure what was going to happen. It's just an offer. But there's been so much bad stuff happening. It seems like the system is so breaking down or dysfunctional or hopelessly gridlocked. The system worked.

The people protested. They made their thoughts clear to their local representatives. And look, if you want more analysis from me on why I think these statues should come down, we have a great YouTube video about this, about the Stokes and statues. We've done some emails about it. So we won't get into that here. Anyways. statue should come down. We have a great YouTube video about this about the Stokes and statues. We've done some emails about it. So we won't get into that here. Anyways, I thought it was amazing. The County Commissioner based that they're called judges in the counties of Texas. He says, look, the city council voted to give this spot to the daughters of the Confederacy in 1910.

We're going to do the right decision. We're going to take it away. He said, we're going to put it to a vote and then all the commissioners got to it away. He said, we're gonna put it to a vote and then all the commissioners got to vote. And he said, this could be ending my political career. He's a Republican and not everyone's supporting it going. They voted to remove the statue and it's going to go and because of the donation, I mean, it's gonna be done with private funds.

And so I'm just, again, I think there's a lot to be discouraged about, but what's encouraging is when the system works, right? People made their feelings heard, representatives listened, and then private funds did the rest of the work. And so to me, I'm, I love celebrating wins. I think this is a win. I think the reason the statutes have come down as I talk about, you can read some articles about it. But my friend Richard Overton was at one point the oldest man in the world. He was five years old when the statue

went up for four years old when the statue went up. So it's historical, yes. But it's recent shameful history. This was put up as part of a campaign to disenfranchise, to solidify a myth about what the Civil War was, and about what was right and fair here in the modern world. And what they were trying to rationalize and justify was depriving African Americans of their constitutionally

assured rights. That's why the statue's going up 50 years after the Civil War, right? I have a great grandfather who fought on the German side of World War II. If today someone started saying, hey, we should put up a statue to those veterans. Everyone would see what that was about. They think it's a neo-Nazi movement. So anyways, this is all to connect to my guest today, one of the best books I've read in a very long time, Life of a Clansman, a family history of white supremacy by Edward

Ball. Edward Ball is a great writer. Many years ago, he wrote a book called Slaves in the Family. So on his father's side, there was a plantation family that owned many, many slaves in South Carolina. And then on his mother's side, they go way, way back all the way to French immigrants in New Orleans. They were a wealthy family. They sort of fall down the social hierarchy, but always own slaves through that. And he explores not just their role in the Civil War, but he explores the less explored than what comes after, which is reconstruction, the birth of the white supremacy movement in America, the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, which has all sorts of,

of very real implications in American history, as Edward says in the interview, the Justice Department in the United States was formed in a response to the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. You know, today the Ku Klux Klan might just be some old fat guys and robes walking around, but in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s, all the way up through the 1910s, it was a merrous terrorist organization that killed hundreds of people.

Edward tells a story of a of a sickening massacre of 200 African Americans in New Orleans right down the street as it happens from where I lived in New Orleans. In fact, we're talking right after we finished the interview, but where I wrote, trust me, I'm lying, and where I wrote a good chunk of the obstacle is the way, is just a few blocks from New Orleans, a small town, just a few blocks from where Constant, Lichorn, if I'm sure pronouncing it incorrectly, the main character of life of a clansman happened to live. And I would go on walks and think about things as I was writing. These are the same streets that a man who participated in multiple massacres, both in the Civil War

and after the Civil War, of innocent black people, where he lived, and not just lived in some sort of shame or imp for me, but as a well-regarded citizen, as a hero to some people. And Edward talks about how this was a guy that he heard in part of the oral tradition of his family. Like this guy's son was his mother's grandfather

and his mother remembers him growing up. So we talk about how distant history is, but then also how recent it is, how incomprehensible it is, but then how urgent it is that we do comprehend it. And we connect this to some stoic themes. But primarily, look, the reason we're talking about this is because of the four Stoic virtues.

What is the most important? Sure, courage is important. Moderation is important. Wisdom is important. But just as the theme of doing right. And Marcus, really, is 2000 years ago, despite the slavery of his time, was talking about the quality under the law, freedom of speech, rulers that respect the rights of their citizens. So this is a long tradition that the Stokes have been on. We haven't been perfect, but we have been trying to get better, and I alluded to it briefly, but Walker Percy, one of my favorite fiction writers, is part of a famous Southern family in Greenville, Mississippi, and they're sort of known as the Southern Stokes. What do they do in the early 1900s?

They are integral in running the clan out of their town because they saw it for what it is, a travesty of justice. Even despite their sort of acceptance of some racist views and probably took it for granted that certain races were inferior to other races, they still resisted what was a tyrannical terrorist organization. I think it's worth studying. It'll open your mind.

It's a great book, Life of a Clanson, a family history of white supremacy by Edward Ball. And if you're interested about anything about this Confederate monument relocation in Bastrop County, where I write, where I spend a good deal my time, you can check out the Bastrop Confederate Monument Relocation fund.org, or you probably just Google Basterp County Confederate Statue. There's a K-View article and a CBS Austin article.

I posted about it on my Instagram. If you want to check it out, if you want to make a small donation, I'm sure they could use a little bit more. They're almost there. Anyways, I think this is important. I urge you to bear with me and listen to it. It's a fascinating interview you can tell. I really like the book,

strongly recommending it, it will open your mind, and the conversation I was very much looking forward to, and I can't wait for you to listen to it. I thought we'd start with one of my favorite lines in the book, and I think it's something people have trouble maybe wrapping their head around, but as someone who writes about history, I always find it fascinating.

You say, none of this is long ago when you think about it. Talk me through how recent the things you're talking about in this book actually are. Yes. This book tells the story of a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the years after the Civil War reconstruction. And if you think about it, it's your grandparents, grandparents who lived in those days. And 150 years is more than one lifetime, but it's nearly within reach of oral tradition. And a lot of folks have family tradition that reaches back that far. My father's generation, my mother and father's generation,

knew a number of African Americans who were formerly enslaved in their towns in the South, New Orleans and my mother's case, Charles and South Carolina and my father's. So it's not that long ago. Yeah, you you you mentioned that your mother remembered her her grandfather or grandmother who was the son of the Klansman that the book is about. Oh, that's right. Yeah, sure. No, my mother did not know the Klansman who died in the late 1800s,

but she lived with as a child his son and was quite familiar with the family story through him. So, as I said, oral tradition skips down through the generations, and we all have some of it. This just happens to be our family. Yeah, what's interesting is that it is so recent, and then on the other hand, it's so incomprehensibly different. And I don't just mean the racism and the violence, but it strikes me that just the, and you do a good job of this in the book, trying to serve humanized the various characters, but

just how prevalent death was and how incomprehensible that is to us in the modern world. I wondered what effect, like if we think about slavery and racism and not even the racism of today, but the sort of violent murderous racism of the time you talk about, I think you could see that as a, it's not just an empathy problem, but these are people who have sort of walled off a part of themselves, right? And I have hardened to such a degree that they're able to sort of inflict this grievous pain on other people. When I think about history, one of the things that I think isn't fully explained that I'd be curious your perspective on, how much of just the prevalence of death and loss and pain contributed to an environment

where people were able to numb themselves to the injury that they were obviously doing to other people? It's an interesting conjecture psychologically. The Cleansman and his wife, that I write about, has nine children, five of whom died before adulthood, and thousands of people were dying in New Orleans and in Louisiana from yellow fever, every year or from cholera. And it's true that death was woven into life far more than it is in our own lifetime. Possibly today during the pandemic we understand something of the presence of death as a companion in life. And I think that immediate and accidental and un-predictive suffering was part of the life experience

of tens of millions of Americans in the late 1800s. Possibly that helps, if you like, the way, bird helps, clansmen and other violent white supremacists to suppress their own empathy and execute acts of violence. But it's not as though this kind of psychological maneuver is something relegated to the past. I mean, today, when white supremacy has flowed back into the public square, there are increasing numbers of people who are able to carry out acts of violence in ways that are breathtaking.

Where does that come from? Where, where, I mean, I know it, obviously it comes from a place of hate, but there seems to be this line that some people, like, like, there seems to be this line. Like, when you think about constant in the book, not to skip ahead, but like, I mean, there's hate. And then, I mean, it's hard not to describe him

as a mass murderer. I mean, he participated in war crimes as a civil war soldier and then participated in multiple, as you detail in the book, multiple events of, not just like he got in a fight with one person of the other race, but like, but real massacres of, in some cases, unarmed people, where does it become possible to drive your car into a crowd of protesters? How does someone get radicalized to such a degree? 25 word answer to that question. I think that the combustible, the compound of anger and

resentment and loss comes together in such a way to activate violence and rage in some people and not others. The mystery is the enigma is if a million people are experiencing loss and resentments, which one of them or which 500 of them are activated to execute violence against their neighbors. How it happens, I don't know. I can only draw up a list of the precipitating incidents in the life of this one man, Constellton McCorn, that seemed to edge him towards rage and moroting, but I don't know what precisely is the chemical combination. You wrestle with that in the book,

and I found that sort of refreshing and haunting, and obviously your other book slays in the family, does the same thing. I was reading an interview you done a long time ago where you were talking about the distinction between responsibility and accountability. I'd be curious to hear that from you. And also, like, what is our obligation to this somewhat recent but also distant past? Because I think a lot of people say to themselves, it was a long time ago, it wasn't my ancestors

or they said, it wasn't me. Why should I, there's so much going on right now, why should I care about that? Right. Well, quite supremacy is part of founding principle of our country and it prevails for 150 years and then at about the time of reconstruction after the Civil War ends, whites are challenged for the first time in their dominion over society.

And the clan arise in a campaign to reestablish white dominion over all of society. And they succeed. So what I think of is this. It is easy to say that these people have nothing to do with us, but in some distance and mediated way, the fighting that Klansman undertake on behalf of the White Tribe, of which 140 million of us, no, maybe 280 million of us are members. On behalf of that tribe succeeds and clears additional space for their descendants to live in comfort and security and in possession of resources. I believe that to be accountable is to recognize that these ideologies of supremacy and of violence

have something to do with our own, as white people, position in the United States, whether or not our ancestors came from the deep self, whether or not our ancestors came to Ellis Island or in some other way rose through the ranks of the classes. That's an acknowledgement that's not easy to make, but it is part of coming to terms with some of the deep conflicts in our society that are unfolding now in new forms. It's funny. There seems to be a reluctance to wrestle with the uncomfortable ness of it and the violence of it and the pervasiveness of it. And then ironically, as other people have discussions about, hey, you know, like in Texas up until very recently, there's a plaque inside the Capitol that sort of emphatically states that the Civil War is not about slavery. And of course, there's Confederate monuments all over Texas. And I wrote my first book, Living

in New Orleans. I'm very familiar with them. You go behind Canal Place and you can see the Liberty Monument. It was tucked behind a parking garage for many years. So even though those stuff is there, people are reluctant to reckon with it. And then as other people say, hey, let's get rid of this stuff to make a statement about the future, somehow that same group of people says, but you're a racing history.

What is that? Yes. That's hypocrisy, I think. That's the big thing. The truth is that we select and repress our national memories, depending on how well they serve us today. There are acts of intentional forgetting made by the hundreds every decade, in every generation, and the acts of, let's say, extermination, if you like, against native people are selectively censored from

memory and the long lifetime of acts of violence towards African Americans, the old culture of lynching that was part of the, was the key stone of the racial order in the deep south. These things are centered and removed from remembrance. So there are ways that we want the past to serve us. The past is not a foreign country, the past is useful, and we make use of it, depending on how it flatters us and enhances our position in daily life. What struck me about your book, what I think it's important is a lot of people, even people who have begun to do some wrestling with this stuff, they sort of go, okay, slavery ends with the Civil War. And what I think has been, it's been part of my journey as I've studied Reconstruction because I feel like it's not a particularly well-discussed part of American history. It's

sort of this idea of like, okay, we, the North winds, the Civil War, they put in place all these laws. They passed the 13th, 14th Amendment. They try the Friedman's bureaus that reconstruction eventually it ends and then hey, the South passes laws and then segregation becomes the norm of the day. I think what's what gets lost in that story because it one, it's not an overnight thing. It happens over a period of years is is and I'd be curious to take on this, but like, so black people were briefly able to vote and briefly held elected office and those amendments were temporarily the law of the land. I think people have trouble wrapping their head around how did it change from one to the other? What was the means by which black people were re-disenfranchised. And to me, the primary theme of your book, your

primary answer to that question is that was done through violence, like profound breath-taking, horrible violence up and down the United States that one by one broke the spirit of the country that had been trying to go in the right direction. It was a reign of terror, really, is what the clan was and really homegrown terrorism. Right. Well, it's true that the Ku Klux Klan invented the first form of American terrorism, quite terror. And it unfolded over 10 to 15 years in the years after the Civil War. A way that black folks who were becoming entrepreneurs and craftsmen who were becoming politicians, who were becoming educated during reconstruction, the way that's Black folks as a group, and we're talking about 4 million to 5 million people in the late 1800s in the 11 states of the former Confederacy, the way they were returned to destitution was

by the burning of black schools, by the burning of black milleges, by targeted acts of assassination conducted against black politicians by people fire-bombing the businesses of black shopkeepers. And this campaign went on for about a decade, and it took the federal The federal government by surprise made Congress weary of the experiments in black empowerment that reconstruction was trying to attempt to achieve Congress decides in 1875 that we have to call in into this in 1876, the Union Army is withdrawn from the deep south and all of those mixed-race governments, those interracial governments, are folded and quite dominated, white exclusive systems of power come into being. So by the 1880 or so, the South is, once again,

return to a caste society that is severely and rigidly separate. One more word, if you don't mind. These violent campaigns don't end. They return periodically. What they call, what they used to call race riots, which are effectively white terror acted out against entire black towns in Tulsa in 1921 in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 and Rosewood, Florida, I think it's 1919 in riots of breathtaking bloodiness throughout the teens, the 19 teens. So these are things that are selectively

unremembered as we were talking about. Well, that's what I was going to say. We have this idea of the lost cause, sort of being that the civil war was fought over slavery, but it really feels like the lost cause is actually was so successful that we don't even realize how long it goes on. Because not only, yeah actually was so successful that we don't even realize how long it goes on because not only, yeah, even that we're calling these events race riots when in fact they were sort of acts of terror inflicted on communities, but I mean, I've lived in New Orleans and I wonder if you could tell the story really briefly, but

the horrifying race riot that you described were basically, people were run into a building, and the building was lit on fire and shot at, and hundreds of people died. I lived like blocks from there. I never heard a single thing about it, never saw a single plaque about is in no way part of the history of the city really at all.

Yes, it was an important event, something called the Mechanics Institute massacre and takes place in July 1866, which is a year after the Civil War comes to an end. 50,000 Louisianaians come home from the Confederate armies, some 25,000 of them to New Orleans. And these are men who are discouraged and disappointed and often resentful. They notice that many hundreds of thousands of black people are now no longer enslaved. They are in the city. They are starting to work. They are independently. And there develops this immediate kind of hostility, quite working men towards black working women and men.

In July 1866, there was a rally at this place called the Mechanics Institute to agitate for the right for black men to vote, which had not yet been extended. And hundreds of black folks gather and inside and outside of this building, the mayor of the city who's white, sends the police and the fire departments to this rally. The fire departments, interestingly, are the breeding ground for the Q-Cluck's clan. They are full of former Confederate soldiers, including my great-grandfather, Constant Lecorn, who joins a fire brigade called Home, Hook, and Ladder, and these firing

department brigades show up at this rally, and with their clubs and their guns and the police. And two hours later, there are 200 black people dead in the street. Their bodies scattered across bathing stones. And it's a disaster that shocks Congress into action. And it is this event that causes Congress to pass the Reconstruction Acts that eventually give the vote to black men and divide the South into separate military units. In any case, Constell Lecorn appears that circumstantial evidence is that my great-grandfather participated in this massacre, which is a painful and horrifying thing for me to contemplate even today. No one is arrested except for a handful of black folks who are arrested for riots curiously,

but no white people are brought to justice for this event. And it sort of signals it's the opening volley of the decade-long campaign of violence that the QCOTS clan carries out, throughout the South. When you think about the story that we tell ourselves about these things, I mean, obviously, I think it's very important that your work is sort of pointing the focus at it, and there's been a clear denial of it. I mean, the fact I didn't even know that this happened.

I mean, I walked down the street that this happened to record my first audiobook, and so I'm thinking about that. And at the same time, it strikes me that not that the story we tell ourselves as a society about this period is right. But it strikes me, there's also a version of the story that we don't tell, which is that there

was a good chunk of Americans who sort of heroically were like the congressman that passed that act that pushed for the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments, that it strikes me and I just finished and I'm terrible with names, but Al-Bianne, Torje, I think, is that how you pronounce it? His novel about reconstruction, it seems like not only if we obscured all the awful people that did these awful things, but we've also obscured that there was a good part of the country that was trying to do the wrong thing. It's like the good guys won the Civil War, but then they lost the second Civil War after

which was albeit less overtly violent, sort of a cold war that eventually ends in kind of a surrender. But maybe we also don't do enough to celebrate the people who were horrified by this and tried valiantly to enforce the rule of law amongst what was essentially unrepentant enemy combatants. Like you have that old rebel soldier song in the book, where they were like, yeah, slavery was made illegal, but slavery, you can't convince me that slavery's wrong. That's sort of what I took the attitude

of a lot of these characters to be. Yes, it's true. There are, I'd say, 10% of white southerners who in this period are trying to transform the social relationships of their time. At this period, the Democrats are the dominant monopoly party in the deep south and they are the racist party. The Republicans are a very marginal party in the south and they are the so-called progressive party. It's the Republicans who bring Abraham Lincoln to the White House and there were Republicans who win the Civil War against the old South. You know, but one doesn't want to romanticize either side of this conflict. The abolitionists during this late period were

not popular folks in the North among white folks. They were considered eccentric, they were considered fanatics by other white folks. And it was this group of people who laid the foundation for quite liberalism that stretches down to our own time. And there are a number of heroes who are trying to re-engineer the caste society in those days. And we can't forget them. But they do lose, as you say. The North wins the war, but loses the battle in the end. Now, the North wins the battle, but loses the war, I think, in the end. Grant has always been a hero of mine, and I've written a badminton number of my books. I thought, and you present it pretty unflinchingly in the book, the strangest thing is you have

basically the most determined guy of the Civil War, the one general who never gave up, who faced insurmountable odds, basically wins the Civil War through perseverance, which had been the main, you know, trade that the union had lacked. And then he becomes president. And I thought what was so tragic and such a, such a what could have been is that it's grant who eventually is sort of the one

who gives up on reconstruction. It's like he fights it in his first term. And by the end of his second term, he just, is it just that he realizes that it's an impossible fight and he can't possibly change these people? Where is it that he doesn't care? I don't know enough about the interior life of Ulysses Grant to say whether he didn't care, I suspect that he was exhausted by the fighting that's going on. It's reproduced in the Hall of Congress at his doorstep.

And I think that he did care. He did have some affection for African Americans. He did want the South to reconstruct and make a place at the table for African Americans to share and the bounty of the American economy. And he was exhausted by the fight. As I said, as we said, the marauding campaigns of the Q-clucks were spread throughout the south. And so every couple of weeks, there is another episode of horror that is printed up in the newspapers in the north.

It is cramped. You have to remember who sets up the Justice Department. He's the one who originates the Department of Justice as an attempt to suppress the Ku Klux Klan. That was the initial charge of the Department of Justice and the department, its first set of cases is in South Carolina, the so-called Ku Klux Klan cases in which a couple thousand people are arrested and prosecuted for violating the acts of Congress

designed to suppress them, and many of them end up in jail. So, Grandes is a sad turn of events when he finally says, I can't do this anymore. Let the white folks have what they want. To me, and to me, that's kind of the lesson to take from this, as we're seeing some of this, these resurgent, disturbing groups, these hate groups, you know, claw their way back into the public consciousness or splash themselves against the headlines. It's almost like you're fighting a gorilla movement where

their goal is not to beat you. Their goal is not to become the majority. I think what they want is exactly that reaction that Grant had. They're trying to to generate a collapse of will to, to fray the collective so that you go, whatever, just do what you want. Isn't that sort of what the segregation movement was about? I don't think anyone thought, hey, we're going to be able to keep this forever. It was, how can we just stall for more time?

How can we just be so unpleasant, so difficult to tell for the most part, leave us alone? It's sort of like the, you know, what evil needs is good people to do nothing. It needs the good guys to throw in the towel. Yes, that's an interesting speculation. I mean, the white supremacist militias of today, a number in the hundreds, and they're spread and scattered through the northwest and the southwest and the south. And I think that if insofar as there is a network, it is online, a community that is constructed online, it's not so much a militarized unit or organization like the white militias of the reconstruction period. And this is definitely a kind of

a kind of self-regarding separate community. And it may be that there's something of a in your face kind of defiance that is unstrategic, but has the ultimate effect of demoralizing the federal government and the rest of us who will soon grow tired of hearing of the complaints of the white nationalist fragmented minority. where I think your work sort of ends up connecting with mine. There, obviously I write about ancient philosophy, particularly Stoicism, there was this sort of like the Percy family in Mississippi, it was sort of the most well-regarded of the southern Stoics. They were somewhat known as resistors of the clan. They drive a clan out of Greenville,

yet also do some racist things in the great flood. There is this weird, how much of this, I'm curious, how much of the slave owner class, white supremacy mentality, seem to originate almost from this like fantasy that they were living in Greece or Rome. You know, like there like there seem to be,

you know, like even Thomas Jefferson would go, well, Roman slavery was worse than our slavery. It seemed to be this weird, almost fantasy world that the South was living in and they were kind of distorting all these symbols and philosophies to rationalize what they're new. Not just Christianity, but it strikes me that they all sort of saw themselves as the inheritors of these ancient empires.

And that's why it was okay for them to treat people this way. I would think that on the contrary, the fascination with the ancient world emerges somewhat late in this life period in the 18vi hunters and the time that Greek revival architecture enters into the deep south. Prior to that, I think there was much less of a fascination less of a fascination with the ancient world. And so my view is that the remembrance of Athens and Sparta is kind of butter on the toast. It's a way of gracing the economic reality of slave empire and making it into something digestible.

It's part of the ideological justification for enslavements, which takes many forms. So I think it's only skin deep, the fascinate. It does linger, you know, long after the Civil War, when they disf- by their lights, the disfranchised class of white landowners, by their lights, people whose wealth had been taken away by the end of slavery, 50% of the wealth of slaveholders was in human property. The disenfranchised class takes great pains to depict itself as part of a wronged aristocracy. So you get some of that, as you call it, stoical, stoical, right, self-regard. But I think it has economic causes beneath it. No, I agree.

It doesn't seem rooted in reality. It's almost the opposite. There's this letter that Jefferson wrote where he's sort of trying to rationalize slavery and he says, you know, look at Roman, look at Roman slavery and he's like, you know, and at least in Rome, you know, the slaves were smart, you know, he's like, where is the black epictetus who someone I write about, right? Where is, and it's like, well, epictetus wasn't, it wasn't punishable by death to teach a slave to read and write in ancient Rome. In fact,

the slaves were tutors and teachers and often held significant offices or positions of power. The slavery that comes to America is almost unprecedented in how sort of deranged and pseudo-scientific the logic of it is. At least it's almost at least the Roman slavery was just openly about power of one person over another. The South somehow manages convince itself that it's doing people a favor. Yes, it's a very different labor system that the United States makes use of, so-called

chattels' labor, where people are bought and sold, like animals. It's quite different from the slavery of previous empires, and we shouldn't dilute ourselves into thinking that it had anything to do with the enslavements of Greece and Rome. So, much is still to be learned about this time. No, and you're right. And look, I think your book is a really important entry point into that for people. And as you, because you've gone on this journey now with two books looking at, I guess, the ancestors on your father's side and the ancestors on your mother's side, as far as the average American or the average person, you know, like obviously the dutch are implicated in the slave trade, the

English are implicated in the slave trade, the French are implicated in it. If you're someone who wants to wrestle or explore not your guilt, but your accountability for this, where do you suggest they start, other than your book, which I would certainly recommend they start with? Well, family history is a golden highway into history with a capital H. If you look at what's your own family got up to,

it's tremendously rewarding. And you start by asking the oldest people in your family to talk about the folks they knew when they were children. And that allows you to begin to reconstruct a kind of genealogy that leads you further into the past. You know, one thing that I would point out is that about about one half of white Americans have at least one ancestor who participated in the Ku Klux Klan in the past in some generation, about 140 million people, and 50% of the white population can claim to have had a Klanzman in the family. But most of us do not know that.

It can be found out with a little bit of effort, a little bit of digging, and I recommend it. I do as well, and I would say, as hopefully this will, this episode will run before the election, as you somewhat shockingly point out in the intro of the book, the 140 million Americans happens to include the father of the president of the United States.

That's right, yes. The father of the 45th president was a client who was arrested in a hood in a robe in 1927 in Queens, New York, at a rally for rampaging in a mob beating. And so it's quite close. And as we started our conversation, these things are not back for in the past. No. And back sometimes they're next to you. Yes, yes they are. Edward, thank you so much. Thank you very much. If you're liking this podcast we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps and tell a friend.

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