Revolutionary Ideas with Jon Meacham, pt. II

This podcast is made possible through listener contributions to the ETV Endowment of South Carolina. Hey folks, thanks for calling back into the SC lead hotline. Again, this is 8D Shire producer extraordinaire. If you're calling in because there's no way breaking news happened when Gavin and I took our first vacation since Christmas, right? There's no way that that happened. So with that in mind, if there was anything that happened, we'll be sure to cover it next week. But otherwise, Gavin, if this is you calling in from mainland Europe to record your voiceover for this week's lead, you go ahead and record that after the beep. Okay, let's go.

Ugh, what's the country code for America? Oh, yeah, it's one, of course. What's that damn voicemail number? Oh, oh, am I? Oh, I'm already connected. Okay. I forgot to hang up from the last call. Weird. European time, right? From South Carolina Public Radio, this is the South Carolina lead. I'm your host, Gavin Jackson, and this episode was recorded on July 1st, 2026, here at South Carolina Public Radio Studios in Columbia. I mean, Europe. I love working on my vacation, just kidding, to be a professional New York before you go on vacation, so you feel guilt-free until you come back, then you have to work more. But as you can tell, I'm once again phoning this in because I'm on a much-needed vacation, okay? It's been a crazy couple weeks, guys. And it's also my 40th birthday. Now it was my 40th birthday. Now you're just 40. 40 with a podcast. And a bunch of plants. Oh, my mother was right. Anyway, this is again the only episode this week, and we continue our look at America's 250th birthday. It's a never-ending look, honestly. Every day's a new day here in America. And on this episode of the lead, we bring you part two of Pulitzer Prize winning author John Meacham's recent speech and conversation at the two-day Revolutionary Ideas Symposium at Dock Street Theater in Charleston on June 25, 2026. Now, in our last episode, you heard his speech to the crowd there. In this episode, I bring you his conversation with his fellow Swanee classmate. And I may say, my friend, Ben Ziegler, who is a Florence lawyer, in fact, if I ever win the lottery, I'm calling Ben first because he's a bond attorney, history buff, archaeological nerd, and SC250 board member, and just all-around great South Carolinian. They're discussing Meacham's new book, American Struggle, Democracy, Descent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union. They also took some audience questions, so take a listen to the conversation. Jon Ossoff always, it's great having you. Thank you. South Carolina, particularly great having you in Charleston to talk about this remarkable book. I want to start, since we're putatively talking about the American Revolution, I want to start with great quotation you've got at the beginning of your Revolution and Republic section. For a K.A. to know the word putatively? Go ahead, John. You have this great quote from John Adams about what he sees as the legacy in the history of the revolution. And he said in... the 1780s, the history of our revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be the Dr. Franklin's electrical rod, smoke the earth, and out sprang general Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod, oh dear, and thenceforward, these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures, and war.

That is so John Adams. So John Adams. Cynical, prickly, suspicious. He's my favorite founding father for that reason. Yeah. And I think he's the one that if he came back now, if we had the opportunity to show John Adams, the current state of affairs, he would say, I told you so. He was deeply suspicious of populism, of charisma, Washington's charisma, Franklin's fame. He saw that things could easily go off the rails if a demagogue got the people behind him. What would the founders say if they looked at our current situation? I think the founders would be surprised it took this law for there to be this level of a crisis. I really do. I believe the Constitution is as much a theological document as it is a legal one. It's predicated on the Calvinist insight. It comes from John Witherspoon, who was the president of the College of New Jersey, became Princeton. We call it the Solani of New Jersey. And he taught some crazy number of the signers. I've forgotten, but like 12 of them, including James Madison. And Witherspoon signed both the declaration and the constitution. And his insight was that our appetites and our ambitions were so controlling that we needed to check and balance them. And that no one could be trusted with the governance of themselves. So why should they be trusted with the governance of others? And that's a line that Madison rendered into that. slightly impenetrable Madisonian prose, what Adams and Hamilton in particular, and I'm a Jefferson biographer, so for me to be nice about Hamilton is an act of great grace, what they worried about was less populism, I would suggest, and democracy itself. They were building a republic. democracy was a bad word to them. And then as the French Revolution unfolded, they began to say, look, see that. I will say about Hamilton, it was about 15 years ago, I guess. I published a book on Jefferson. And I got a call from Chris Christie, Governor in New Jersey. And he said, I want to talk to you about Jefferson. Would you come up and have lunch? So I went to Trenton and sat down. And the first thing he said was, you know, I'm really more of a Hamilton guy. And I really wasn't trying to be clever. I just said, you know, that's great, governor, but at least my guy didn't get shot in Jersey. The damnedest thing happened. I couldn't get back into the city. So the founders, to some extent. I love these folks. Anticipated these sort of vicissitudes that we would not, there wouldn't be a sort of iterative. progress that we would have. I'm sorry, I've been boning up. This is really impressive. Wait a minute. I got about three more. Right, you got three more. This is desperate. No wonder you all charged by the hour. So, yes, they would have, they saw this. I think they would be stunned. Do you agree with this as a lawyer that we only have 28 or 29 amendments? Yep. I think that would surprise them. Now, the countries, remember, it was 13 states. It wasn't. 48 and then 50. I think they saw the amendment power. I think they saw the Constitution, and this is what makes the original intent, arguments, federalist society kind of stuff. One of the things that makes it tricky. I think they did see the Declaration as scriptural. I'm not sure they saw the Constitution as scriptural. I think the Declaration is our mission statement, and the Constitution is the user's guide.

And you change a user's guide as you have to adapt to circumstances. And so I think they believed in amendment. They believed in reform. You know, one of the first kind of moments we were talking about commemoration and celebration, one of the first seasons of this was in the late 1830s when John Carroll was the last signer of the declaration. And he died. And it was a big moment, actually. Jackson was president. He commented on it. Out in Illinois, a railroad lawyer was giving his first public speech. His name was Abraham Lincoln. And he talked about the founders. He called the men of iron. There was a reverence for what they had accomplished. And a warning. And what Lincoln saw was we will never be defeated by a foreign foe. I mean, there's no air power if you think about it as a continental matter. But there could be, as he put it, a towering genius of tyranny could arise from among our number and could destabilize and throw out of balance. that constitutional order. And so I think they, I think they were ready at all times. And the founders I find the most illuminating, obviously Jefferson, I do think Madison, because he wrote, I made a joke a moment ago, but it's harder to follow a Madison sentence. But the great theorist, the great conceptual thinker. But he, and here's something that he spent the winter before, you know, he and Hamilton kind of. pulled a fast one to get a constitutional convention, right? It was supposed, it was called to do a commercial treaty. And then they just, they did what Ben does in his nonprofit board meetings. He just took over. and fixed it all. He spent, Madison spent that winter at Montpelier studying republics, and there hadn't been that many of them. There are all these Swiss cantons, there are all these sort of odd. Polish Lithuanian. Yeah, yeah, it was, but they were like counties. And his insight, and this is not hugely reassuring, so this is a trigger warning, his insight rendered both in Federalist 10 and Federalist 14, was that a republic had to be. either really small, and you knew, everybody knew each other and could negotiate, like a New England town meeting, or it had to be vast. And why did it have to be vast? It had to be vast, this is me, not Madison, so crazy people couldn't find each other and bind together, right? They can find each other now. And I really do believe my friend Danielle Allen at Harvard was the first person who made this point to me about perhaps the central inside of Madisonian.

constitutionalism may have been outstri—may have been rendered moot now by technology. Yeah, yeah, I was going to ask that. Is technology taken— The extremists can find each other. And that's why—I don't want to wander too much into long-term political reform. But it's why people who might be against proportional representation and two senators in electoral college, you know, be careful. Be careful. One season's stumbling block— is another season's redemption. One of the things we're going to be dealing with in the next 10 years is the incumbent president will have left some very sharp knives on the desk and what do his successors do with them. And it's very hard to not want to use executive power when you have it. Everybody's against it when they don't have it. But I remember when President Obama took over, there was a... Some of us made a prediction that he would actually find that maybe Dick Cheney knew more than he thought. And it turned out to be the Bill Gates, right? So these are issues we're going to have to be dealing with. Let's switch gears and talk about another aspect of our national story and the struggle that we have to engage in. We're, of course, in Charleston, where we're sitting this afternoon. probably 150 yards from where the secession convention met. John C. Calhoun is buried about 100 yards from here in St. Phillips' graveyard. Obviously, Fort Sumter is in the harbor, and of course, Charleston was the place where a great number of African slaves were imported into the States. And obviously, the great irony at the founding, theoretical irony and founding was that... a lot of the founders didn't really believe that all men were created equal. And the struggle for equality has been really, if there's a single tone throughout this book, is the struggle for equality. Give us some thoughts on where we are now with regard to that history and the painful story that we as sovereigners and South Carolinians have to deal with and how that fits in with this, I think, very nuanced. idea of history not being a chance to despair and self-pity. It's also not a warm blanket, something that you have to actively engage in and appreciate for its. Well, I think there are, as ever in the public conversation, there tend to be, you know, you need clarity, so there tend to be nuances of usually the first casualty. And there are people who want the American story to be uncomplicatedly wonderful. And there are people who want and who see it as unrelievably bleak. And maybe it's my Anglicanism. Maybe I'm a wimp. I don't know. But I think that intellectual honesty requires us to say, we've gotten some things right. We've gotten some things wrong. I find the moral utility of history actually to be, one way to think about it is let's not look at the past, look up at it adoringly, but let's not look down on it condescendingly, as if Arthur Slazinger had a great line about self-righteousness in retrospect is easy, also cheap.

But let's look it in the eye so that when we look around in our own time, we can see what we're screwing up and perhaps we can fix it in time. If even the best people of a given generation could get something so wrong as enslavement and its implications, until 20 minutes ago, right, parenthetically, is this really the 250th anniversary of the country or were we really founded in 1965? Take that one. We weren't a multiracial democracy until 1965. It's also the year that President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which removed the restrictive quotas that had been in place since 1924 in an era of ferocious anti-Catholicism, ferocious anti-Semitism, as well as traditional racism, color-based racism. So if the UN were ranking us, we'd still be kind of a developing democracy. And boy, are we proven that. So I think it's really important to understand the way the late 18th century thought of slavery as it moves into the 19th century. And to do it as quickly as possible. It is very revealing, I think, that this idea somehow or another we only realized slavery was bad in the 19th century is wrong. The first anti-slavery document in American history was in 1888 in Pennsylvania. There was a petition against slavery by some German town Quakers. There was always this tension. There are some marvelous pieces, incredibly moving pieces from very early in the Revolution, anti-slavery pieces in this collection. The way the founders, the American founders, thought of slavery, the way they sort of worked around it, is they decided that it was a necessary evil that the British had engrafted, that was the word they like to use, had engrafted on us. And they wanted time to work it out. So you had the 20-year Atlantic slave trade, you had the compromises of the Constitution. Inherent in necessary evil? What's the interesting word there? Evil. And then, with all respect to the late departed John Calhoun, he decided to argue it was a positive good. And... That came in the 1830s. Why did it come in the 1830s? Because the movement for emancipation was gathering steam. And I used that word, that image advisedly. It was gathering steam because printing presses were becoming more sophisticated. Railroads were beginning. The world is becoming smaller. An argument made in Boston didn't have much of... If you read the Liberator... William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper in Boston, and you were a subscriber to the Charleston Mercury, you probably didn't care very much what they said in Boston. But as the 1830s went on heading into the 1840s, suddenly you kind of did because it would get down here. And our predecessors in the South, as we know, were so unhappy with even the arguments against slavery that they did a, remember the gag rule? They banned the transmission.

of anti-slavery literature. That shows a certain level, dare we say, of unease with the solidity of your own argument. They founded a university in Tennessee, so the young men wouldn't have to listen to such things. Yeah. And there was a huge clerical movement, religious movement, to see slavery, to portray slavery as divinely ordained. It's particularly unconvincing. But that was what the White South broadly put was doing in those middle decades. And I think it's important, I want to be careful here, I think it's important to read with care the arguments that were being advanced by white Southerners heading into the 1860 election and the secession convention that happened here. And one way of noting it is through Lincoln speech at Cooper Union, which I commend. It's a lawyer. It's eloquent. It's been here. Yeah. What Lincoln saw was that people, white southerners, didn't just want to be let alone. They wanted to be told they were right. It's, it's subtle, but it's important. And I would argue that this dynamic is a piece of supporting evidence of this being a human enterprise. So what Lincoln says is it's not that they, Cooper Union, it's not that they want, you know, we believe, as he put it, we believe slavery is wrong. They believe it is right. And they want us to tell them it's right. And that's why I did a book on Lincoln that was basically not how he did what he did, but why. And the why is that. his central anti-slavery conviction. His central moral conviction was anti-slavery. Now, there are gradations here, right? You can be anti-slavery and not be an abolitionist. You can be anti-slavery and be an abolitionist and not be a racial egalitarian. And that's kind of where Abraham Lincoln was. I mean, you could be some of the worst anti-egalitarian folks. in the era were what we would call the white liberals. They were, you know, there were people who wanted to abolish slavery. And as you know, the mainstream position, the respectable anti-slavery solution in the middle of the 19th century was colonization. All respectable people. I suspect if you were anti-slavery in South Carolina, you were probably part of this. Henry Clay was the head of it. James Madison was part of it. The idea was not that we were going to end human enslavement and have a multi-ethnic, multiracial republic. That was not the central position. The central position was, let's get rid of slavery and send black folks to Haiti or to Sierra Leone or Liberia. And it's deeply troubling. Lincoln was on this bandwagon certainly into 1863. Now, he gave a couple of speeches at the end that suggested he was moving. And so we have to give him credit for that. But to be anti-slavery was not to be egalitarian. I go through all that to say, again, the moral utility of a story like this, I believe, is not for us to feel superior to them.

Because we don't know what we would have done. Ben and I come from generation just after the civil rights movement. I suspect both of us would like to think that we would have been on the Pettus Bridge standing with John Lewis, staring down the troopers. Well, guess what? If everybody who thinks they would have been there had been there, they wouldn't have had to be there. Right. So I've not, this is not. making some kind of moral case against them. What it is to say is that what history can do is say to us, these are the best people. Harry Truman, who integrates the military, you know, drove your former governor and longtime senator out of the Democratic Party. Remember, in 1948, when Thurman was, Strom Thurman was leaving, a reporter said to him, but you know, Truman's civil rights plan is the same as FDRs. And Thurman said, yeah, but Truman means it. Well, John, let's take a few minutes for some questions from the audience. Yes, sir. My question is this. You just put an advertisement in for a book called The Coming Storm. which has been published this year, and I've read it. And in it, it raises the issue that the world is heading into this sort of struggle, not just the United States, and that it is beginning to look an awful lot like pre-World War I. when the various smaller but powerful nation states couldn't agree and we got into World War I. And it seems to be suggesting that if we don't figure this one out here, where we are still the most powerful country in the world, we may find ourselves again. in a World War III in the foreseeable future, I think that's what that book is saying. And I wonder whether you could give us a little bit of your thoughts as to whether there's any possibility of anything like that. Thank you. Well, that's a cheerful question. That makes the fun summer afternoon here, World War III. It's a vitally important question. The factor that we have to confront, which makes every historical analogy about warfare and state craft prior to 1945, complicated, is what happened in 1945. So there has been this sense now for almost, God, almost 25 years, I guess, right? That what Vladimir Putin wanted to do. is he doesn't want to restore the Soviet Union. He wants to restore Tsarist Russia. He was in St. Petersburg during the fall of the wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And you do have potentially expansionist China. You've got self-evidently expansionist Russia. You have nationalistic feeling growing largely as a reaction to some extent to immigration and to the unevenness of globalization of the global economy. There are clearly winners and losers. And by the way, we're getting ready to enter a whole new phase of this. I mean, I don't really, I don't understand AI, but I will say this politically. 30 years ago, people who look like us told working class folks, you just have to retrain. We're going to send the manufacturing jobs are going away, but it's going to be more efficient and you're going to become more white collar and more information driven. And now we're going to tell them that there's now a computer program that's going to do everything that we told them that they could do to make a living. I have manufacturer friends who three years ago, it terrified me. This is a global, you would know his name. This is a global figure. I said, how many people in a back office are you going to have to let go if AI does what you think is going to do? And he said 80%. So what that does, now I was, and then I was with someone the other night in Nashville who said that he goes every second hour, he changes his mind. That it's, he thinks that's going to happen and then he thinks this is going to be this great job creator. So we don't know. The point is the uncertainty is not going to help. And so does China try to take Taiwan? There are obvious historical reasons. There are obvious economic reasons because of the chip industry. You know, Russia is kind of a gas station. I mean, that's sort of what they are now. And they want more, right? Because that's, you know, it's not going to always come out of the ground. It's hard, it is tempting to say that we are in a 1913, 1914 moment. where there are competing nationalisms, strange alliances. But the nuclear reality is such that it's hard to see how, I'm not an expert on this, but my gut is combat at any scale larger than where we kind of are now in Ukraine, somewhat in the Middle East. It's hard to see how it gets much bigger. Because then you enter the nuclear question. And so I think we're going to have what Eisenhower used to call a lot of brushfire wars. A World War III, a lot keeps me up at night. That one doesn't. But now that you've asked the question, you're not going to sleep tonight. Another question. This question has to do with what you see. Or how you see our way back from AI and social media and the amalgamation of the crazies, how do we come back to a place where we're able to compete with each other without hating each other? So it's entirely a human choice. It would be great if there were a polarization Ozimic. But I don't think there is.

So that means we're back, and this is not good news, we're back to diet and exercise. I mean that. I'm not being clever. We have to put down the phones. You have to know that the algorithm is sending you what it thinks you want. You have to resist playing into the people who have monetized conflict. And it's hard. I'm not very good at it. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I got off Twitter. And then when Mark Zuckerberg started doing what he did, I got off all his stuff too. I am much healthier mentally, which is a low bar. But I don't pay attention to minute to minute. And I promise you, I'm fine. And it's hard. And it's, you know, there's a machinery of perpetual conflict that thrives on producing momentary bursts. of attention getting anger. And the first great moment of this was the tan suit. Right? That was, oh my God, we have reached a real low. My favorite second one was I watched someone on television say that they thought one of the Biden's dogs did not look like a presidential dog. And I said, okay, this is, you know, maybe it's time to think about Canada, you know. But it never is. I don't mean that. It's a joke. I really do think you just have to decide. And we have not been invaded by aliens. What we've been is we've been systematically divided by people who are really good at it. And so the only answer to that is to say, no, I'm not going to play. Oh, the question. Yes. They're in the middle. Yep. Gentleman with his hand up in the middle. Along similar lines to this last question, as you look back on history and how people like us in previous generations have pursued that more perfect union, what advice would you give to the younger generations? I have my grandson here with me, senior in high school. What can they do? from their generation to pursue that more perfect union. Well, let me talk to him. I mean, I love you. What's your name? And you could, this is all your grandfather's fault. Uh, Peyton, sir. Peyton, sir. I love that. All right. I love South Carolina. That's so sweet. That's so great. We know how to do right. What's your first political memory? Like, just of politics and the national. Like, who's your, who's the first president you remember? When I started paying attention, that would be Trump. Yeah. Okay, sit down. Good. Just kidding. So you're 18? 17. 17. So where do you get your, last question? Where do you, like, in the course of a day, is it? Twitter, where do you find out what's going on in the world? Or how does that come to you? Everywhere. Everyone likes to tell their opinion. I get it from my parents. I get it from my friends and just when I'm not even trying to, like on Instagram and stuff. Yeah. But you don't like go to the New York Times directly to say, yeah. Yeah. So this is, thank you. Thank you. Peyton, everyone. So my.

I have a 24-year-old, this will be 22, and then 1718. They know what's going on in the world, but they can't tell me how, which is kind of what you were saying, right? They remember, they have a collective memory of Obama, but as with you, President Trump is there, is the one that they've lived with the most. So I think, Grandpa, I think the answer is what you're doing right now by forcing this poor boy to come here. But I mean that. I think that the story of when we have become a more perfect union has to be told because we're not doing it right now. So the story matters. And the kids born in the 21st century, let's think about it. It begins with September 11th, the failure of weapons of mass destruction intelligence, the Great Recession, a biographically interesting but historically indispositive Obama presidency, COVID, the rise of President Trump, the popular impression that the Supreme Court has never been more politicized. I would argue, too, that one of the reasons there is so little trust in institutions among folks born in the 21st century is that we have told them, when we run through school shooting drills, we have told them, we can't keep you safe. We have admitted that. There are three places you're supposed to feel safe, right? Home, church, classroom. And we've said, You know, we're not really sure we can do this, so this is what you do if someone walks in here with a gun. I don't think we've thought about how the impact that's had, but why would you trust the grown-ups who have to have you train for that? It makes the story so important, right? It makes the fact that folks, kids, your age, went to Omaha Beach. It's your age. went to Gettysburg. And the story matters. John, thank you. Thank you. You can watch that speech and more at YouTube.com slash SCETV News. And that's the pod for this week. Don't worry. We will be back with two full episodes with wind down sections and stories of Europe. And bring AT back spices and silk.

We'll be talking all about it. And you can talk with us about it to 8.03-563-7169. That's how you get in the wind down. You can also stay up today with the latest news on sceetv.org and south Carolina Public Radio.org and don't forget to support your local newspapers. I'm still laughing about the spices. It's so good. Oh, the Silk Road. The South Carolina lead is a production of South Carolina Public Radio. Our producer is A.T. Shire. Amy Crouch is our supervising producer. Sean Birch is our executive producer. Sydney Wilcox is our intern, along with Jake. This podcast is produced with support from PRX. It's made possible in part by a grant from the John Ness and James L. Knife Foundation, as well as listener contributions to the ETV Endowment of South Carolina. For the South Carolina lead, I'm Gavin Jackson. Be well, South Carolina. That's not a word. I was like, it's called a Bindlestiff. Yeah, you can call it whatever you want to call it, but like this is the formal name for it. It's what it is. That is a Bindlestiff.