Sharon McMahon on The Unsung Americans Who Altered the Course of History

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0:55I'm recording this on a Monday and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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1:46Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

2:31Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think people think that social media only surfaces the worst stuff, that it's bad for you, that these tools have ruined the world, ruined society, broken our brains. And I would agree to a certain extent. The algorithms prize engagement, high valence emotions, conflict, extremes, also just the platforms themselves, like what fits in a tweet, how a thumbnail has to jump out at you. It doesn't incentivize necessarily the best stuff. I've had to figure out with Daily Stoic, you know, how do we use these platforms, which have enormous audiences for good?

3:11How do we harness that algorithm to spread stuff we want people to hear? But it's a tough sell, right? made an obscure school of ancient philosophy going up against, you know, internet memes and fails and thirst traps, all the stuff that social media prioritizes. There's an even bigger uphill battle, which my guest today has conquered at a level I can't even comprehend. Sharon McMahon is known as America's government teacher. She spent years as a high school government teacher, and she now runs this nonpartisan fact-based Instagram account, Sharon Says So, that has millions of followers and has reached millions of people and about government, right?

3:51The thing that we love politics as a society, but we hate government, how it actually works. And she's reached this huge, like super diverse audience. This is how unique her audience is. I've had the honor of having like so many cool people on the show, huge movie directors and athletes and billionaires and celebrities and actors and like doers. It's been awesome. My in-laws who live down the street from the studio have only asked to come meet one guest. Rod and Karen, they're amazing. I don't know if I could do all the stuff that we do without their wonderful support and help, but they are big fans of Sharon McMahon.

4:30In fact, they were going to see her live at the Paramount Theater. Sharon was doing a talk in Austin that night and they came to meet her while she did the show so they wouldn't have to wait in line as she signed books for thousands of people. She's awesome. I've been following her, I think, since the pandemic. My wife turned me on to her and maybe she discovered her through her parents. I don't know. But Sharon's awesome. There's all this misinformation and polarization out there. People just don't understand how the government works. There's a quote I love from Kennedy. Kennedy was saying, you know, parents want their kids to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to be politicians.

5:06People don't understand how the system works, that being a politician is how you move the levers of government. And so many of the Stoics were politicians, but in the sense that they understood how the levers of power work. They were functionaries in the government. They weren't all emperors. Cato has these boring jobs in the sort of machine of the Roman Empire. Seneca does too. A bunch of the middle Stoics, we talk about lives of the Stoics, all did. And that's what Sharon is a world-class expert in. And going into an election, that's what we need more of. And she has this amazing new book. Like I loved this book.

5:46It's called The Small and the Mighty. She looks at the lives of 12 ordinary Americans who actually weren't ordinary at all. They did extraordinary things. And they changed not just their own lives, but the lives of people around them. And we live in a world that they helped create. I really love this book. It touches on a lot of the same themes. And in fact, even some of the same people that I talk about in Right Thing right now. I so enjoyed this conversation. I was so excited to see her. And we need more people like her, people who are charismatic, people who are smart, people who are caring and compassionate, but also understand how these social media tools work.

6:21And they can surface the ideas that the basic civic knowledge that we have to have to be able to operate the machinery that is government. I think it was Barney Frank, a Democratic politician, who once said that government is the name we use for the things we choose to do together. That's how you have to see government, not as this negative, nasty thing that Ronald Reagan said, you know, government is the problem, not the solution to the problem. No, government is the things we do together. Sometimes we do them well. Sometimes we don't do them well. Sometimes we don't do them together when we should.

6:52And Sharon talks about that amazingly in her new book. In this conversation, we talk about this idea of contributing to society, how history favors the doers, as the Stoics would say, act a nonverba, and how we can actually make a difference. I think you're really going to like this. She was awesome. And you can grab signed copies of The Small and the Mighty at The Painted Porch. I'll link to that in today's show notes. You can follow her on Instagram, at Sharon Says So, and you can check out her podcast, Here's Where It Gets Interesting, which I will link to in today's show notes. This episode was so good.

7:22We split it up into two parts. So I'll bring you part two in a couple of days. Look out for that. By the way, if you don't have a plan for voting, get it together. Find out where you can vote early. Absentee ballot deadline's probably already passed. Check your voter registration. This is a consequential election, to say the least. And as we've talked about, a stoic participates. And let's get after it.

7:49Well, I loved your book. I thought it was a great idea. I think that's the heavy lifting too is like, okay, so you have a huge social media following. How do you translate that into a book? You have to – like I think books are one of the hardest mediums to compete in because you're competing against the greatest books of all time that have such dang power. And so how do you come up with a unique angle to talk about? Yeah, you're absolutely right that books have a legacy that other types of media do not, that I can post all day on social media and that's going to be gone from the algorithm in 24 hours or maybe one week if you're really lucky.

8:26So yes, this idea that books are somebody's legacy is something that it's not a fact that's not lost on me at all. And yes, how do you compete in this vast sphere of books, Ryan? All of these books, this wall is a graveyard of exactly what you're up against. So Portfolio did send me about five. I was like, give me one of every one of your titles. And so I used that. But mostly I use this company called Book by the Foot. Have you heard of this company? Yeah, yeah. So these are all books that were really popular and then nobody wanted anymore. Yeah, like L. Ron Hubbard. Yeah, yeah. Right, because they give a lot of those away.

9:03But like there's Shadow Divers by Robert Kirsten, incredible book, but was a huge book. 15 years ago. So he probably sold a million hardcovers. And then those people died and their kids were like, or they moved to a smaller house and they're like, well, I don't want this anymore. And they all end up at Goodwill and this company goes and gets all these books. So these are what I sometimes kind of an ego is the enemy. I kind of look through and I go, yeah, this book was like a cultural sensation for a brief moment. And then I bought it by weight. Is that different though than any other kind of media?

9:42No, like I think about this, like if you listen to like a Spotify playlist, best of the 90s, you've heard of 80 % of the songs. Then you go 80s, you're like 60%. And till you get to a decade where you're like, I don't know any of these songs. And those are the big, that's a collection of the biggest songs of an entire era. They've sold millions of copies. They've been in movies. And you're like, nope, none of this is registered. And so how far do you have to go back to get to that oblivion? You think it's going to be, like the exercise they do in politics is like, they'll go, who is the vice president three presidents ago?

10:23And you're like, And that was the second most famous person in the world or whatever. Yeah. So, but I mean, like, is this idea that you're supposed to be competing against all titles of all time, is that an idea that's worth, like, holding on to, exploring, like, feeling bad about if you don't compete against all titles of all time? Well, there's a passage in Marx's Meditations where he goes, Vespasian, he goes, how many people know who that is? And Vespasian was the emperor, like, five emperors before Marcus. Actually, the only reason if I think there's in some language, Vespasian is the root word for toilet because he created public bathrooms in Rome.

11:02That was his thing. But so this is the most powerful, important person in the world ruled as an emperor god in the biggest empire of the most famous empire in history. And nobody knows who he is. And Marcus Aurelius was saying that like just a couple generations. And so his point was not, okay, so you have to really conquer a lot of territory to be more famous than Vespas. And he was saying, this is a race you can't win. So opt out. So yeah, I think when I look at this, I just go every – it's like Shakespeare, out, out, brief candle. All of these people had their little moment and probably most of their moments were bigger than my biggest moment.

11:44And so if you're going to take your identity and worth from surpassing them, even if you do it, you're going to lose. I like thinking about it more in the sense of what somebody said about a character in this book, Nesma Holland, after she dies, they say something to the effect of, no work for liberty is ever lost, for it becomes part of the fabric of the nation. Yeah. And I love thinking about contribution in that way instead of how long can my name be in headlights or in spotlights? How long can my name be in the spotlight? I think it's like perhaps a healthier way to think about things in the sense of my contribution becomes part of the fabric of this society.

12:36Yeah, there's a famous World War I poem, and he has this line. I used it in the Justice book. He says, to you from failing hands, we throw the torch. If you see the figures as a person who moved the ball forward or carried the torch a little bit, but that it was part of this continuous battle or this perennial march, then it's beautiful. And each one of them was significant. If you try to attribute it to any one of them, or you go, this was the person, each individual accomplishment is not that great and ultimately can be cut short, whether it's by assassination or they have some personal scandal.

13:11So yeah, I think it's about making your brief contribution with the resources you have, the moment of time that you're in, and then seeing it as part of this larger procession. That's the only way to do things and to do it not motivated by it. Yeah, I totally agree with you. And I think the people in this book, they're great examples of that. Yes. Yeah, where their contributions are by and large lost to history, either by virtue of the fact that they died young. They didn't have descendants to keep their memory alive. They were intentionally excluded from history because they were the wrong color or they were the wrong gender.

13:51And yet it does not negate what they did. No. And I have really been enjoying sort of excavating their contributions. Well, and what they did is actually, in many cases, more significant than a lot of people you've heard of. Exactly. Exactly. And I think it's actually tremendously encouraging to people who feel, I'm sure you've heard this many times, people feel like nothing I do matters. Nothing I do makes a difference. I did the things. I made the calls. I wrote the letters. I did the voting. I did, you know, whatever it is. nothing is changing. And it can feel very discouraging and it can make you feel hopeless as though it makes you retreat into cynicism, as though nothing you do will ever move the needle.

14:37I think that's one of the problems. It's not totally incorrect. Some of the structural theories, critical race theory, these sort of explanations for the interlocking systems of oppression and discrimination, how they have shaped and informed history, how we're still living in them. There is, it's not a nihilism that comes from it, but like the great man of history theory at least gives people something to believe in and aim for. So if you believe that everything is interlocking and structural and it doesn't matter what individuals do, that's also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't believe you can make a difference, you will definitely not.

15:21That's absolutely right. Just because you believe you can make a difference doesn't mean you will. But certainly believing that change is not possible makes sure that it is not possible. That's absolutely right. Yes. If you believe you can't, then you're right. Yes. And I just, yeah, it's been tremendously helpful, at least for me and from other people that I've heard of, to sort of reframe this idea of what it means to make a contribution. And it does not necessarily mean that your name is on the side of a weirdly shaped rocket ship, right? Or that you have an airplane emblazoned with your local.

15:54Yeah. Or that it was even appreciated or understood in the moment that it was happening. That's right. Sometimes if you're ahead of the curve, you're probably not going to be appreciated in your moment or you're not going to be fully appreciated for the magnitude of what you're doing. You might be appreciated by your small group of people or your supporters or believers, but most people, It's almost a sign that you're not that groundbreaking if everyone likes what you're doing. Yeah, I think that's totally true. If you look back at some of the biggest change makers in history, they were widely opposed, right?

16:24Like the Martin Luther Kings of the world had a lot of hate in his life. And not just from white people, by the way. A huge percentage of Black America thought either Martin Luther King was too radical or not radical enough. And so in his own community, he was considered too in the middle. And so, yeah, there's something about being able to stand alone and do the thing because you think it's the right thing. It's such a big ask for some people. Sure. Right? Like it's such a – I would love to hear what advice you have for somebody who feels like they just – like they just don't know if they can do that.

17:02We think of change as this enormous thing as opposed to – like I was fascinated. I didn't end up doing a chapter about it in the Justice book, but like I was fascinated with footnotes. Like how many future Supreme Court decisions the stage was set for them in like by a footnote in a dissent from a much earlier Supreme Court decision. And so, yeah, like that it feels paltry and not nearly enough to be dissenting in, say, Plessy v. Ferguson. But the argument that he lays out in that decision is drawn upon a generation later. and so yeah sure it would it would it have been better if he could have convinced all of his colleagues to not do this morally important thing but he couldn't and so he did the piece of it that he could do and it stood there for a very more than 50 years yeah yeah but the stoics like cato resists julius caesar uh his attempts to overthrow the roman republic he is defeated And he, instead of, Caesar almost certainly would have pardoned Cato.

18:12And Cato found that subservience to be morally unconscionable. And so he kills himself in this incredibly dramatic, resistant way. It's the ancient world's version of the monk who lets himself on fire. And it has exactly zero effect. Caesar takes over. He's later assassinated, but has nothing to do with Cato, really. So philosophers would debate, like, should he have stuck around? But like 2000 years later, it's Cato that George Washington is modeling himself on and the founders are modeling themselves on. And so, yes, sometimes you do this thing that you're trying to inspire others or send this message.

18:57And you're thinking, like, I hope everyone around me sees this. But it may stay dormant for 100 years. It could stay dormant for 1000 years. So I think the idea of like, hey, I'm going to do what I think is right here and I'm going to send this message. To me, the stoic part of it is I don't control whether the message is heard. I only control whether I say it. And let's see where it goes. Yeah, I love that. That's really interesting.

19:33Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

20:18We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

20:57Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

21:40My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

22:18Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

22:37My wife read your book and loved it. And then my in-laws both read it and loved it. And I was like, I was waiting to read it till closer to when you came. And I was trying to like guess who was going to be the figures. Were there a bunch that you didn't include that you wanted to? Yeah. Yeah. And there's also stories of the figures that I wanted to include and couldn't. I think that's always true of any sort of nonfiction writer is that you end up with stuff that you wish you could have included and you just couldn't make it work or whatever. There was one aspect of a story in this book that I am still convinced is true.

23:11I just couldn't find the documents to prove it after years of looking, which is that one of the characters in this book, my hypothesis, is that her family was involved in the Underground Railroad. Oh. Which one is this? Anna Jeans. Okay. So Anna Jeans lives in Philadelphia. She's in the right place. She's in the right time. She's a Quaker. She has the right belief system. I can put her brothers, you know, she's the youngest of six surviving adult siblings. I can put her brothers in the same room with very prominent workers on the Underground Railroad. You know, like William Still. They're in the same room together.

23:51They belong to the same sort of abolitionist societies. And the Jeans family was very wealthy. And there's almost no chance that the people who were, you know, raising money for the Underground Railroad were not hitting up the Jeans family, right? There's almost no chance. But the other sort of piece of the puzzle that I became really intrigued by is the fact that the Jeans family has a country home that is where they just kind of go in the summer that they abandon. And at one point, their country home is robbed. And somebody steals a painting off the wall that Anna had painted. And Anna had an attachment to that painting, and she wanted it back.

24:27And so there's this big, you know, sort of investigation into who broke into the household, et cetera. And there were reports in the newspaper that talk about how there was food left on the table as though people had left in a hurry. And that's not something that the jeanses would have done. Right. So to me, it makes sense that they had sort of said, OK, you can go ahead and use our house. You know, go ahead and like if you need to use it, it's yours for the using. that somebody had been there who needed to leave in a hurry for whatever reason, because why would the Jeans have needed to leave in a hurry?

25:08Why would they have left food on the table? And there were not reports that the house was trashed or that vandals were living there or anything of that nature. So that's a whole storyline that I ended up writing up everything that I knew about the Jeans family and about the evidence that I was able to compile about their involvement in the Underground Railroad. But ultimately, because the Underground Railroad was intentionally secretive, and because the Jeans family was intentionally secretive, they believed in this sort of biblical edict that you should not let your right hand know what the left is doing, and that you should give in secret and your reward will come in heaven later.

25:46And so they purposely did not attach their names to things. They purposely were not like, courtesy of the Jeans family. You know, like that was not their vibe. They didn't even allow their picture to be taken. They were very hardcore about it. Yes. So there's that aspect. And then there's also the aspect that the Underground Railroad was also intentionally secretive. They're not going to be like, and we stayed at this house. So there's just no documentation that I can come up with that is the smoking gun that says, and we stayed at Stapley Manor, outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as much as I looked.

26:26And the other thing that's quite possibly true is that the people who were on the Underground Railroad would not have known what that house was called. And they would have been very reticent to give up a description of the house. They would not have known who owned it. They would have just been word of mouth told, you can stay, there's that house over there, you can stay at if you need to. So there are definitely stories like that, that I wished that I could have included. And there are aspects of other people's stories too that ultimately did not make it into the book. Well, as I was thinking about this, I was like, I don't want to talk about the people in the book that much because the book's so good.

27:01I wanted people to, like, I think it's a spoiler thing. I feel like you want to... So I was going to tell you some of my favorite small but mighty figures. I'd love to hear them. Yes, tell me. out about them. But the concept of like, who are these kind of hidden figures of history who punched above their weight? I love characters like that. Yes. Same. So when you're talking about the Underground Railroad, do you know who Thomas Wentworth Higginson is? Okay. So he's a translator of Epictetus. He's the first one who translates Epictetus in American English. So he's a professor at Harvard. He's a contemporary of Emerson and all the transcendentalists, but he's much more radical than they are.

27:38So he's like one of the six who funds John Brown. A couple of those riots where the fugitive slave catchers would steal people out of Boston. He was like there when they would riot. So he's this kind of radical abolitionist. And he ends up leading the first black regiment of troops in the US Civil War. So there's Colonel Shaw, who people know, that's what the movie Glory is about. He's a little bit before him. They were less distinguished about us. But so you have this philosopher who is not passive, like you would think of the stories, but like engaged in the great struggle of his time. But then he's also this lover of poetry and art.

28:16And he meets this, this woman sends him her poetry and he likes it and he ends up publishing it, which brings her great fame. He's the person who discovers Emily Dickinson. And so I just love, so it's like, you know, if you did any one of those things, that's an incredible life. But just the guy that is funding John Brown is leading Black troops for the Union in the Civil War. and just on the side discovers one of the great American female poets. I just love. I love those kind of, yes, I call them brain tingle moments where you're just like, I love knowing that. That is just like does a little something in my brain where I'm like, that just feels real scratch, a little itch I didn't even know I had.

28:55Yes. Speaking of Emerson, Emerson was potentially in love with Emma Lazarus. Okay. And Emma Lazarus is the woman who writes the poem that is currently affixed to the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poor huddled masses. Yes, yes. The New Colossus, the poem is called. Give me your tired, your poor. I'm not thinking of those two things as overlapping. But yeah, of course, this is like 1870s, 1880s. Yes, yes, your huddled masses, you know, weary to whatever. So she writes that. She's asked to contribute to this sort of fundraising effort because, of course, the United States needed to pay for the base of the Statue of Liberty, which was gifted to the United States by France.

29:41And she actually, Emma Lazarus, was friends with one of the descendants of Alexander Hamilton. And they were very good friends with each other. After Emma Lazarus dies very tragically and young, Louisa Hamilton discovers this, one of her poems in a bookstore, rediscovers the New Colossus in a bookstore. And it's like, this deserves to be on the Statue of Liberty. And it wasn't attached to the Statue of Liberty at the Statue of Liberty sort of dedication. It was years later, and the Hamilton descendant had to raise her own funds to get the brass plaques made and to petition to get it added. But anyway, Emma Lazarus was a relatively well-known poet in her own day.

30:28But she was a young Jewish woman who, you know, her family's wealthy. Her dad was a sugar merchant. She never had to work. She was, you know, home educated. And what she wanted to do with her life was just write poetry. And she begins getting published and she begins corresponding with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who's significantly older than she is. And the letters that exist between them are very like, hmm. And eventually she kind of sours on his advances, which did seem a little creepy. Maybe not quite creepy, but like, what are you doing? You know what I mean? Like you're a 60 year old man. This woman is 23.

31:08Also married. She's a young woman, but she's flattered by his attention because he's a giant of literature at the time. But he becomes sort of a champion of Emma Lazarus' work. And she was, again, she was relatively well-known in her lifetime, but most Americans would not recognize her name. Yes. Right? But we would recognize her contribution despite not being able to pick her face out of a lineup. I have an amazing kid's book for you in the bookstore. Have you read Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers? I think I have, yeah. He had a kid's book about the Statue of Liberty. It's all based on this little observation he makes, which is that her foot is raised.

31:46And his point is that she's not stationary. We think of the Statue of Liberty as this monument to liberty, as opposed to liberty being on the march, which is what she would have represented to France shortly after the abolition of slavery. So we're seeing it as a celebration of what we have done, as opposed to a a monument to the doing, which is supposed to be, as we're saying, this perpetual ongoing thing. I love that. And the Statue of Liberty also has a broken chain around her foot, as though she has freed herself from the shackles. And the chain is just kind of like hanging there as though it just recently happened.

32:37There's a lot of symbolism, actually, in the Statue of Liberty that I think kind of goes unnoticed because we see it from afar and it's so large that it's difficult to observe all of these individual elements. But yeah. Or that kids paid for it. Yeah. It was the first crowdfunding campaign. Yes, that's right. Because America was like, what do we do with this? Kids made it happen. Yeah, totally. I wrote a piece for The Economist about this because there was a throwaway line I read as a kid in Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, where he talks about how he loves the Statue of Liberty, but he felt like there needed to be a corresponding statue of responsibility on the West Coast.

33:15And so I did this big piece on the idea of a statue of responsibility. Because again, yeah, we think of the Statue of Liberty as being this thing that it was like a celebration of how great we are, as opposed to a call to arms. But that also liberty, which America is founded on confers, by definition, a certain amount of responsibility. And that is what America's like. I don't like that part. No, of course not. No. I want to be free to dump my trash wherever I want. Exactly. Yes. That's what freedom is, apparently. I think about this on my neighborhood all the time. So yes, I don't like that people do it.

33:52But if I don't clean it up, it's just going to stay there. Right. So the responsibility of, hey, I live on my own road and the government can't tell me what to do with it. Also means I can't call the government to clean up someone else's mess. I have to do it. And it's disgusting and I hate it, but I try to teach it to my kids. But the idea is like everything that's not enumerated in the constitution, just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. Right. And that is, again, a big part of, I think, the fundamental premise of America that your average citizen wants to not. Oh, I didn't agree to that.

34:32Like the social contract isn't just your contract with what the government is not allowed to do to you. It's also the contract of the responsibilities that are thus inherent on you to take care of. I think you're absolutely right. I don't disagree with you at all, but it is, it's very, when you start getting into things about social contract, man, there's going to always be people who push back on you who are like, oh, that's communist. You know what I mean? That's communist. Freedom means freedom to do what I want. If I don't want to participate in that, then I shouldn't have to. But you're, I mean, you're not wrong at all.

35:07Of course. Yes. But, you know, the idea that Statue of Liberty, liberty enlightening the world, it's, there's a verb in there, right? Like it's continuing to enlighten the world. Not liberty enlightened the world, that it is an ongoing effort to enlighten the world. And yeah, I think that's worth remembering. One of the other ones I'm fascinated with, I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong, but do you know his name was Senator Proxmire? He was the senator. He might've been from Minnesota, so I'm probably butchering the pronunciation if you're not hearing what I'm saying. But he's the one who, he wakes up one day in the 70s and learns that immediately after the foundation of the UN, almost all the countries pass a treaty basically banning genocide.

36:00And the US just didn't sign it. We were like the only major country that didn't sign it. And he's like, this is absurd. We invented the UN. It's on our soil. We're the main driver of this. And we're just like, I don't know if we're opposed to genocide, that might be inconvenient. And so he gets up and gives 3000 consecutive speeches in the Senate, pushing for the ratification of this. I think it takes like 25 years or it takes this absurd amount of time. And again, we just take for granted that these things happened because everyone was in agreement about them. And what I love about the characters in your book, all my favorite historical characters are like, if they hadn't done it, it wouldn't have happened.

36:48That's right. They forced or forged a consensus that would not have existed otherwise. And his intellectual predecessor was this guy named Lemkin, a displaced European Jew who lived in America, who during the the Nuremberg trials and then the founding of the UN invents the word genocide, which did not exist. He gives the crime a name. And you would think coming out of this horrendous genocide, everyone's like, yeah, we definitely need a word for that. We should all be opposed to that thing. But there was not a consensus. It was inconvenient. And it was only the force of will of this singular human being that wills a concept into existence.

37:33And again, you might go, what is the concept? The concept doesn't matter, but having a word for something like having a footnote in a Supreme Court decision, it's the most necessary first step in hopefully eradicating or preventing that.

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39:00Yeah. You know, I keep coming back to this idea that history favors the doers and not the critics, right? This is true of the entire sweep of history. Who are the critics that we look kindly upon, right? Who are the critics that have the biographies written about them unless they have done something truly terrible with their lives and they're worth remembering as a villain, And the people that history smiles most kindly upon in many ways are the people who just kept doing the next needed thing. I love that phrase in your book. Yes. Just the next needed thing. These are people without some grand five-year plan.

39:41These are people without access to the levers of power, by and large. People without fame and fortune, by and large. people who are often very marginalized by society, who just continue to do the next needed thing. And the effects of their actions are still being felt in the United States today in some cases. And in some cases, the effects of their next needed thing, it's almost incalculable, the effect that they managed to have outside of the traditional levers of power. Yeah. And that to me is a really interesting, an interesting proposal to think of. We think about how do we make change in society?

40:20We always think about using the levers of government. As a longtime government teacher, I can tell you that's an important component of it, right? But yet so many of the big and important and lasting changes, especially in American society, have been enacted by people who just decided, I'm just going to try. Or they were almost in opposition to government. I don't mean that in the libertarian sense. Like I love Florence Nightingale. She wouldn't be a small but mighty figure is not really American. But like you think of her and every one of her reforms was done in the teeth of enormous army bureaucracy and government inaction and inertia.

41:02And so like because it was inconvenient, because it was expensive, because she was a woman. And so often what these people do, like there's a famous poem about Florence Nightingale where she's the lady with the lamp. And this is all the art. And one of her aunts who volunteered with her was like she hated that. She was like that's not what she did. She's like the image of her is at two in the morning with a lamp doing fucking paperwork. You know, like her her force. She was a bureaucratic warrior and a reformer. And that like oftentimes, yeah, that next needed right thing is like, let's let's help this person and let's help that person and let's set up this hospital or let's do this campaign.

41:49Let's and yes, so much of that is not only not with the government levers of governmental power, but it's usually done in resistance to the powers that be, even if they're in agreement. Like that's like, again, with the civil rights movement, the civil rights leaders had a lot of Democratic, Northern Democratic support, Johnson and Kennedy, both Kennedys, but they were like, you're moving too fast or like, hey, I have these other concerns. And so there was this push and And poll, they were very astute political fighters who understood, hey, Johnson might be sympathetic to me as far as the cause, but he's only going to do he's only going to support me here if there's political pressure upon him or if events dictate that he has.

42:39And so they were just really savvy at using the media, using public support and all that. Like that's an underrated part of it, I feel like. They're just doing the thing. Yeah. Well, and again, they're doers, right? They're not the critics. They're not the people who are just like, oh my gosh, Johnson is so lazy. Johnson just, he's all talk and no action. Like nothing will ever happen. That would not have yielded the same fruit as people who just did stuff. Yeah. Right. And I think so often we wait for somebody to come by and we're waiting for somebody to come by and give us permission to start doing things.

43:19We're waiting for some group, who knows, to give us their stamp of approval. And, you know, the civil rights movement is full of people who did not wait for permission, who, in fact, would have never been chosen. I think about people like Claudette Colvin, who refuses to give up her seat on the bus well before Rosa Parks does. And she's a 15-year-old girl. Yeah. And she says in that moment when the white bus driver tells her that she needs to get out of her seat, she had been sitting in a seat reserved for black patrons and the white section filled up. And so he was trying to force all of the Black patrons to move back.

43:56Everybody else in Claudette's row gets up and moves back. But she refuses. And she says in that moment, I felt the hand of Sojourner Truth on one shoulder. Who actually was the first person to fight for fair seating on a public accommodation. A public transportation in Washington, D.C., like 100 years earlier. And the hand of Harriet Tubman on the other. And, you know, she, of course, Claudette Colvin is still alive. But at that time, she— Crazy, by the way. People think this was a long time ago. No, not a long time ago. She would not have known the phrase, history has its eyes on you. You know, because she would not have had seen she would not have seen Hamilton in the 1950s.

44:36But nevertheless, that's exactly what she felt in that moment, that history had its eyes on her and that she has the courage as a 15 year old girl to do what she viewed as the next needed thing, which was to resist an unjust system of oppression. When to go to the point about the levers of power, also, you know, who was opposed to the Montgomery bus boycott, if I remember correctly, the NAACP also like not not once it got momentum, but they had a plan for how they were going to do things. And so oftentimes there's even disagreements within factions or within causes that are largely in agreement with each other on the timeline, on the right people.

45:19And there is an element of it's ultimately moved forward by the kids who are like, hey, let's go do it today. Let's go integrate the counter at Woolworths today. Today. And that forces the hand that starts the movement that, you know, the people at their desks in a big, expensive nonprofit in Manhattan are just going to have a different timeline and a different view of prioritization. Totally. And Claudette feels cast aside by the machinery of the movement, you know, because she becomes pregnant. And so she's a pregnant 16-year-old. And that is not the face that they want to put on the front of the newspapers.

45:59In the 1950s. Not in the 1950s. That was not acceptable to be pregnant outside of wedlock. And it certainly was not acceptable to be a pregnant black teenager. And so she was not the person that they could have elevated to that status. Right. And so in many ways, she feels really salty about it. She feels like, listen, I was I was out here doing the thing before y 'all were and I get no credit for it. And then I get I get convicted of crimes. Yeah. And she finally, within the last couple of years, gets her criminal record expunged. And it took literally until I want to say it's been within the last three to four years that her criminal record was finally expunged and only because she fought for it, not because Alabama was like, you know what, that was our bad.

46:42You know, like she had to say, I actually did nothing wrong here. Yeah. You accused me of things I didn't do. It's weird how we tell ourselves, it's not just that it's historically untrue, but we tell ourselves a story that's actually like disempowering. So like we tell ourselves even about Rosa Parks that like, okay, this is this little old lady and she was tired and she's just, I had enough. And then that's how it happened. And it's like, actually, no, this lady went to a school where they trained her to be like an agent of chaos and a disruptor. Like, I think that's been one of the most eye-opening things I've understood in my study of the civil rights movement is they weren't just like brave and they weren't these like saintly, naturally endowed heroic figures.

47:33But like nonviolence wasn't just, oh, they went to church and that's where they learned nonviolence. No, they would practice getting the shit beat out of themselves. And they would practice having white people say horrendous things to them at these schools. And they'd practice not getting provoked. Like they had all the regular impulses that any human being would have, including hatred and resentment and anger, all very deserved. but they conquered that in like the stoic sense of the command of oneself is the greatest empire sense. Like a soldier, that's how they did it. Yeah. You know, I was talking to somebody about this book earlier this week, and it's always interesting to hear what other people take away from your own work, right?

48:19And the takeaway that this person had was that every single person in this book had learned how to suffer. And then they used that suffering for something else. And it was an interesting thought to me that everyone who has made significant change learned how to use their suffering for something. Yes. And again, it feels like it's so long ago, But I interviewed Ernest Green a couple years ago, and it was like it was someone my age's grandfather. Totally. My grandmother went to Little Rock High School. Did she? Yeah, before it was integrated. Yeah. So again, that's not a story. When my parents talked to me about these things when I was a kid, it was distant past then, not like, oh, grandma could tell you about this.

49:13Right, right. She went to an all-white high school. Right. it's like, no, this is a long time ago. And it's like, no, these people are still around. Yes, they're still alive. I think about like the Little Rock Nine that was happening in September of 1957, which is when my mother was born. My mother was born in September of 1957. That's what was happening in the world when the person who gave birth to me was born. The idea that this is just some, and I know you deal with a lot more ancient history than the average Joe Ryan, but these events in this, you know, America's a young country, right? And most of these events happened within just a few generations of us.

49:50And I think it's also worth reminding ourselves about how far we've come, right? Like there's a lot of work left to do, but sort of the trajectory, that moral arc of the universe, you can see how it in fact does bend toward justice when people work to bend it. I hate that quote. Yeah, because bends is passive. It's saying that it's like it's bending under its own weight like a heavy. Like a rainbow is already bent. No, it's pulled down. Yes. Like a bunch of people, people in your book, people I've talked about, like people. Bend it. They reached up and they grabbed it and they pulled it down with their body weight, you know, and a little bit at a fucking time, you know, like it's bent that way.

50:37By the way, other people not only resisted them doing it, but were trying to bend it in the other direction. That's right. I'm writing about Lincoln a lot right now. And I think we think of Lincoln as the guy who abolished slavery. But the primary fight of his time, it was first and foremost to stop the active expansion of slavery. So not just like people go, oh, he didn't actually want to stop slavery. Actually, what Lincoln was trying to do was not like – it's not like Lincoln was okay with the status quo. And by the way, neither were the slave owners. The slave owners imagined in America where slavery was legal across the entire country.

51:18And they had their eyes on Cuba. And they had their eyes on huge swaths of Mexico, the parts that we hadn't already taken. And like they saw an enormous slave empire occupying the northern and southern hemisphere. And so it's not just that the arc of history bends towards justice because it doesn't. It's bent that way. But if it is not bent that way, do you know what direction it can go? Like there are awful people who want not just to keep like it's not just their conservative forces who want to preserve the status quo. But there are often very radical forces that want a new reality you can't even fucking imagine.

51:58That's so true. A horrendous one. Yeah. Yes. And you can look no farther than Aaron Burr. Yeah. Who decided after he killed Alexander Hamilton that he was going to try to seize portions of North America for himself. And contacts people in England and is like, you want to help me out? I'll be a friend to you if you let me be the ruler of this section over here, this little section of Texas and Louisiana. I would like it for myself, please. And then, of course, he's put on trial for treason for attempting to do that. He's acquitted. But nevertheless, the history is full of people who they're not just low-level resistors, you know, of like, no, I don't want you to change that.

52:39Keep that the same. I think that's how we tend to view people who work in opposition to changemakers. Yeah, no, I just want to keep things the same. No, there is a faction of people who would like to radically remake the country in their own image. They have a profound vision for a different world. Yes. And it's vicious. Yes, yes. And you see that at work today, that demon of unrest is afoot in the country today.

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