The Forum

Annette Gordon-Reed’s trail-blazing work on the history of race and democracy in America is an invaluable touchstone for the convulsive political moment we are living through. Her prize-winning 2009 study, The Hemingses of Monticello, cast the familiar myth-making of the American founding in a dramatically different light, by focusing on the story of a family struggling against the systemic brutalities of slavery, and joined to Thomas Jefferson’s bloodline by his rape of his slave mistress, Sally Hemings. Her 2021 memoir, On Juneteenth, interspersed her personal trials as the first African-American child to desegregate her elementary school in Conroe, Texas alongside the complicated and overlapping sagas of colonial and racial subjugation in the Lone Star state. Gordon-Reed is now working on a follow-up volume on the Hemings family’s history, taking their experience up through the early twentieth century, tracing the diverging fortunes of family members who chose to identify as white and those who identified as Black. In a wide-ranging conversation with Forum Editor-in-Chief Chris Lehmann, Gordon-Reed discussed the imperiled state of our democracy, the role of white supremacy in shaping the American past, and the prospects for genuine and substantive reform. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

Chris Lehmann:

In your recent book, On Juneteenth, you wrote very powerfully about the kind of stories that need to be told with regard to your experience growing up in Texas and desegregating your community school. And you discussed how the story of Juneteenth resonated, but also reflected this very set of racial tensions and political conflicts that you had to re-interrogate from the ground up. And I feel like our country is in that position now—so I’m wondering, based on your personal experience and your journey to becoming a distinguished historian, what kind of stories do you feel need to be told right now as part of this same urgent project of reclaiming racial justice, reclaiming bodily autonomy, and gender equality?

Annette Gordon-Reed:

Well, I guess the stories that need to be told are the ones that remind people of why these things are important—looking at instances where these things have been lost. And it’s like we’ve forgotten what all of this was about and what we’ve been trying to strive for. It seems a sort of a turn away from a democracy. We’ve never been a direct democracy, but a democratic republic. And we seem to have lost even that—republican ideals: the notion that the people rule, and they rule through representatives, but that the people’s vote counts.

It’s puzzling to find apparently so many Americans who don’t want it to work that way. And it’s a symptom of the extreme polarization of the society. Partisanship doesn’t really describe what’s going on here. One side has been taught—well, both sides, but one side really has been taught—to hate the other one. When an American says, “I have more in common with Vladimir Putin than I have with Joe Biden,” it’s inconceivable that such a person could really understand what the most aspirational aspects of the American experiment were really supposed to be about.

It’s bizarre. I mean, I know these kinds of people have always existed in American history at different moments. But they seemed like fringe groups of people. But now because of our electoral system, the weaknesses in our electoral system, and the weaknesses of the Democratic party in terms of working at all levels of government, not just the national glitzy things, the local government, the state government, we seem in danger of losing a lot. So this is a long answer to your question, but it is to say that the only stories we can tell now are to try to remind people of what was intended by the American experiment. And how people over the years have tried, and I talk about this in the book, to try to perfect that experiment. And some people seem bent on just tossing it out the window.

Lehmann:

Right—there are all these perverse incentives in the structure of the government, which actually goes back to the slaveholder’s republic, the electoral college, the Senate, the Senate filibuster, all of which are striking obstacles to any kind of positive forward momentum. And if you go back to the Cold War background to modern liberalism, there was at least a rival ideological system that, in some ways, compelled us—this all goes to sort of Derrick Bell’s convergence-of-interests argument—to hold the country to some of its professed ideals. Without the pressure of the Cold War, the civil rights revolution probably would have taken much longer and would have had less support from centers of federal power.

Gordon-Reed:

That’s right. I want to give a plug for my colleague Mary Dudziak, who’s written a book about that very subject—about the Cold War and the rival ideology that made the United States say, “Hey, we can’t have people living behind an iron curtain.”

There was at least concern about the society and talking about it. It’s huge. And they exploited that, the Russians and the Chinese exploited that, very, very well.

But you’re right—once Cold War hostilities lapsed, the U.S. was now the sole superpower. And we thought, yay, that’s great. But what it means is that when you don’t have the check of that outside enemy, America gets to do what it wants to do in lots of ways. And that’s good and bad.

I can’t imagine a Trump administration during the Cold War. Now, you might say we can’t imagine an Obama one, either. That was a way out of it. But clearly the lack of an existential threat means that we could give vent to our own demons. And yeah, living under a nuclear terror is not great. But now it’s like we’re afraid that we’re going to be hurtling towards some kind of civil war.

Lehmann:

That’s actually another thing I wanted to ask you. This is a different historical analogy, but you had mentioned the failures of the Democratic leadership to meet this present moment. And again, the recovering historian in me is starting to fear that the Democratic party is akin to the Whig party in the 1850s. Like today’s Democrats, the Whigs were focused on this idea of national improvement, and they could sort of mobilize resources toward this higher vision of who we were, while they completely ignored the talk about an existential crisis, the crisis of slavery, and the sectional crisis, and the coming Civil War. And  then I just can’t bring myself to think about the next step, since the next step in our history was a civil war.

Gordon-Reed:

Well, I don’t see it happening like that, like it happened before. But certainly violence. There’s a suggestion that some of the outbursts of violence that we’re seeing at Highland Park and things like that are part of a political movement. It’s not just in all instances  a lone-wolf kind of thing. And the country, we’re not divided up . . .  we don’t have political polarization in one region. Well, it is one region in a way, but it’s not that kind of thing where you could have demarcations with states and so forth. We’re mixed together. And Black people are everywhere. Free Black people are everywhere.

So it’s not going to be the same, but it could be really ugly. And it’s gotten ugly in political terms certainly, with our system, as I was saying, giving up on the idea of majority rule, and people’s votes counting. That the only vote that counts are the votes of our group.

Lehmann:

Right—the “real America,” as it’s been mythologized on the right.

Gordon-Reed:

Yeah, it’s mythologized. But I mean, what the right is veering away from now is the idea that you can lose. And by losing, the strange thing about it is that it goes against every single thing that’s supposed to be American, even in terms of competitiveness economically. The idea is that if you get better through competition, and if you lose, then you come back, and you come back with better ideas. You make a better case. Instead the antidemocratic right is saying, “Let’s rig it so that we win all the time.” And when that happens, that’s a monopoly. And we know where that leads.

Lehmann:

That is the end of democracy. I mean, I live in Washington, and I know a lot of people in the professional political establishment. It’s commonly acknowledged that the Republican party understands that its policy agenda is not popular. I mean, you look at polls, and people do not want spiraling inequality, and tax cuts for the wealthy, and the climate crisis being denied. And it’s true, even for the CRT backlash—that has been at the local school board level kind of a disaster for the right. And the Republican politicians who are trying to elevate it into national politics so far, knock wood, are flailing. Glenn Youngkin I guess, is the big exception.

Gordon-Reed:

Yeah. I wasn’t following that as closely because I’m not in Virginia. I got the impression that he tried to make himself in other ways cuddly and acceptable.

Lehmann:

Right—he was wearing a down jacket, looked like a suburban dad. He didn’t look like Steve Bannon or someone. And yeah, he also did finesse around the CRT stuff, using bland formulations like parental choice as a dog whistle. But the larger point is Republicans—Mitch McConnell is a perfect example—Republicans understand that their agenda is not going to win in fair elections. So the solution is to get rid of what there is of a democratic infrastructure in the country.

And it started well before Trump. I mean, obviously it goes all the way back to the rise of the Cold War right and the John Birch Society. All of this stuff, as you were saying, that was fringe then is now very much mainstream, like conspiracy mongering. You would never have imagined Nelson Rockefeller’s GOP having a QAnon movement. So the trade off for them is that they get the power to enact their agenda, and they decide that it doesn’t matter that it’s not a democratic society. One of the key mantras that the Birchers intoned throughout the 50s and 60s was exactly what you hear from the Trump alt-right: “This is a republic, not a democracy.”

Gordon-Reed:

That’s like saying, I have a dog, not a German shepherd. It’s a form of democracy, a republic. But I know the code word here just means we get to deny people the right to vote. That’s what it means. They don’t want to say that, but that’s what that phrase really means.

Everybody doesn’t get to vote, but that still doesn’t qualify calling it a republic. They’re giving their true intentions away.

Lehmann:

That’s true—you, of all people know that the model of a republic is that you have rough socioeconomic equality, everyone participates. And Thomas Jefferson’s first party was the Democratic-Republican party—a notion that would make the Birchers’ and Trumpers’ heads explode.

Gordon-Reed:

Yeah. That was the idea. My colleague Michael Klarman has been talking about all the various anti-democratic things that people had been doing over the years. This is about eight or nine years ago, and it was the first time I had sort of keyed in on this issue, to sit to think about how pervasive this is, and what’s going on at these different levels of government, while we were focusing mainly on the presidency and the Senate and those kinds of things. And they’re in the state legislatures gerrymandering, doing all kinds of stuff to make sure they have a permanent minority installed in power.

Lehmann:

Right—so it’s gotten to the point that voting doesn’t really matter in many districts. There’s this famous anecdote, again going back to the 80s: the Heritage Foundation, which launched to advance the Reagan agenda, there were these two lead funders at a Heritage Foundation gathering. And one reportedly said to the other, “Okay, here’s how we’re going to split it up. You get the Soviet Union and I get the state houses.” That was the explicit strategy. Obviously, it took all of this time. And the Democrats had this corresponding move away from the state-level playing field. They had the Democratic Leadership Council, which was all about capturing the presidency after losing it repeatedly. And they just let the congressional majority, which had been in place for the most part over 70 years, just vanish.

Gordon-Reed:

Yes. Go away—​​just vanish.

Lehmann:

Pretty much overnight. And I guess I still have a simplistic and schematic view of how the way you fight oligarchy in a formal democracy is you counter money with votes. So if you are a small-D democratic party, you can’t just casually give up Congress as a center of power. It is actually the most robust safeguard of popular government.

Gordon-Reed:

Well, two of my other colleagues, Niko Bowie and Daphna Renan, have written an article that is just coming out, I think it’s in the Harvard Law Review. It explains how Democrats have come to see the Supreme Court over the years as a friend because of the sort of iconic cases that have helped shaped postwar liberal policy. And they point out, rightly so, the Supreme Court has been never a friend to really advancing rights, and so forth. I mean, people look at the Warren Court, and they look at a couple of decisions—they look at Brown v. Board of Education, and it was a big encroachment for Southern whites. But even so, they got around that. Or you look at decisions like Gideon v. Wainwright, bolstering procedure for accused criminals. But Terry v. Ohio, which upheld stop-and-frisk searches as constitutional, is also a Warren Court opinion. The same is true for Terry v. Ohio, which allows you to search for mere evidence in a blanket fashion, as opposed to just contraband.

I mean, these were two hugely expansive vindications of the power of the police in the Warren Court. And so focusing in on the presidency, and by extension the Supreme Court—the presidency being important because of the Supreme Court—became a Democratic mantra. But the rest of it is just not important. And we see what that has brought.

Lehmann:

We’re now living through that. And again, there’s another great book called The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, which supplies a sweeping history of the entire track record of the high court. And it makes a point that the [anti-union] Lochner decision was actually the kind of high water mark of the reactionary high court as it was envisioned. As you’re saying, these handful of Warren decisions became very mistakenly, and I think disastrously, bound up with this image of the court as somehow liberal.

Gordon-Reed:

Or as something that’s going to save us.

Lehmann:

Right—it’s going to be our last resort, the last bulwark. And again, I’m a simple person, I just think popular government needs to be close to the people, it needs to be accountable on a more frequent basis. That’s why Congress is just not negotiable if you’re thinking of long-term, small-D democratic strategy. So now it feels like the Democrats’ best hope in this midterm cycle is narrowly expanding their Senate majority because in Georgia and Pennsylvania, the Republicans have nominated lunatics. I mean, you can count on that to a certain degree, but it doesn’t help if that’s your strategy.

So speaking of such things, I think your book is a really lovely and eloquent acceptance of your own identity as a Texan, and how complicated that identity is, and how it’s full of these historical tensions having to do with racial subjugation and colonial settlement. So I’m just wondering in the wake of the Texas GOP’s new platform, which I’m sure you’ve read about, what your thoughts on the Texan experiment are these days.

Gordon-Reed:

Well, I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that Texas is not a red state, it’s a voter-suppressed state. And so it really does depend on if the structure can be overcome by people coming out and doing whatever they can: following whatever procedures are in place, and making sure that there are people on the ground to make sure that they can get to the polls, that they can vote, and that they’re registered. They need to focus on all the kinds of hoops that they’re going to make people jump through.

Lehmann:

Exactly—like what they managed to do in Georgia in 2020.

Gordon-Reed:

Yeah. They should talk to Stacey Abrams, I guess.

In Texas, though, it’s not clear what their ground game is going to be. So yeah, it’s going to take a huge effort. Because it’s everything. And just I don’t know that I have the sense—well, maybe it will get started, but how can I put it? I don’t know that party leaders or people have the sense of urgency that this is an existential moment.

And as a historian, I think about this. As a person who writes about the early American republic, I mean, I dipped my toe into the nineteenth century to write the Juneteenth book. I wrote a book about Andrew Johnson, too. So I mean, I’ve done it before. But to think about what’s at stake here, I don’t know. I’m trying to think of a path forward. Not that I want to be like the other side, because I can frankly say I’m a Democrat, and these are the policies that I would follow.

But I have a sense that the other side might do better with some of the things that have been handed to them. I mean, they’ve been sounding the alarm about stuff that shouldn’t be a problem—replacement theory, caravans. I mean, all this kind of stuff that’s not really an existential matter—well I guess for them, it is, if white supremacy is your thing, they come across as an existential thing. But this stuff we’ve been talking about, permanent majorities whether you win or not, rigging the rules, all that kind of stuff, we should be fighting it. And I don’t hear people talking about that. Am I missing this?

Lehmann:

No, I wish you were. Like I said, I live in Washington, and I think people are just kind of hypnotized by the idea that—it’s a version of the Supreme Court cult you were describing earlier—that the institutions will somehow save us. If you know anything about the actual history of this country, there’s no consolation to be had in that reflection.

Gordon-Reed:

None at all. I don’t know, if I were the president, I would, with some of the things that are taking place, I would just give a speech to talk about what is going on here. And maybe what is needed is something like the mission of Lincoln’s party, to revive the idea of the national union. But, see, the difficulty is again the polarization trap: a number of people on our side will not tolerate anybody on the other side, unless they’re actually not on the other side. I mean, they have to believe all the same things.

And at some point it would be good if there could be some sort of union, some sort of understanding. All right. Dan Quayle, for example—I was not a fan of Dan Quayle, but I never thought that Dan Quayle didn’t believe in the United States of America. I just thought he had opposing views about how to form a more perfect union.

Some of these people on the extreme right, I don’t think they believe in the country. They don’t seem to believe in the ideals of the country as they have been expressed imperfectly, but expressed for almost 250 years now. And so the people who believe in America, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, need to say, “Okay, folks, let’s get through this one. And then we can go back fighting about the way we used to fight before things went crazy.”

I mean this ought not to be in the parameters of what we’re doing here.

Lehmann:

Actually, I was also thinking we need a pro-democracy party that says, okay, well, let’s put a pause on some at least some of these recursive debates, on the repeal of the estate tax or whatever. Just look at the moment of institutional crisis we are living through.

Gordon-Reed:

Because you’re not going to have any of those things—I mean, all the stuff you’re fighting about, you’re not going to get any of that stuff if they get into office.

Lehmann:

We saw in the Trump administration what the future could hold, and it’s just endless culture wars being prosecuted from Washington. That’s the model.

Gordon-Reed:

Greater inequality, economic inequality, with people dangling these cultural war things out there while people are losing income and jobs and so forth, and getting further and further behind. It’s a disaster. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Lehmann:

I did want to go back to your book, especially since you published it before Juneteenth became a federal holiday.

Gordon-Reed:

Yes, a month before.

Lehmann:

That’s right—I’m sure your publisher was happy.

Gordon-Reed:

Yeah, though it was not anything that we anticipated. I mean, I hadn’t focused on it that much. That was not why I wrote the book.

Lehmann:

Right. I do think there is something odd at this moment to have the holiday officially recognized amid generalized conditions of racial backlash. And I’m sure you’ve seen the sort of queasy efforts to commercialize it—when you have a Walmart ice cream devoted to the emancipation of slaves.

Gordon-Reed:

There were a couple of things like that, which were completely, as I recall, kind of stereotypical. It was not just the commercialization of it. It was the substance of it. And I’ve said this—there’s going to be commercialism. Because this is America. This is what we do.

And I wouldn’t mind having a Juneteenth refrigerator magnet. Something like that, a flag or whatever. But I think corporations, if they’re going to do that, they need to talk to people before they do it—like they do any other time they launch a product.

Before you do anything you go through and focus-group it. Exxon, before they chose the name Exxon, they went through everything to make sure Exxon was not some weird insulting thing. That’s what they do when they’re serious about stuff. And this was not one where it seems to have been much thought went into it. So we have to balance it.

The only thing I could say is that Black Texans have been celebrating Juneteenth for 157 years now. And there’s a template for the kinds of things you do. It’s a holiday about history. And most of the celebrations have someone giving a speech or discussion of the history. You’ll have art that depicts the moment. Those kinds of things that keep the purpose of the holiday upfront. And we just have to keep doing that, and protest when people do things that don’t align with the history.

Lehmann:

Right. Though for me, it was also kind of an odd feeling seeing that this was I think the one thing the Senate unanimously approved.

Gordon-Reed:

Yeah—unlike, say, voting rights.

Lehmann:

Exactly. So part of me was—again, this is the side effect of living in DC—I  was thinking, oh, the Senate is just going to tell the country basically, “Look over there. We made a holiday dedicated to racial justice. Forget everything else we’re doing.”

Gordon-Reed:

I’ve said this before because people ask me about this. The Juneteenth vote was a relatively easy thing to do. There was one senator who gave up his opposition, and this was something that everybody agreed on. I went to the White House for the signing. [GOP Texas Sen.] John Cornyn was there and [Democratic Texas Rep.] Sheila Jackson Lee was there. They probably don’t agree on a lot, but they could agree on that. So it was a good moment. And we need feel-good moments from time to time. But we also need these serious things that we want them to move on, and we have to press them to move on.

Lehmann:

Yes, like voting rights. Obviously the Democratic Party is the only party that will take it up. But this session, they addressed it only after it was clear that Build Back Better wasn’t going anywhere. I don’t think they even bothered really to see if they had the votes in the Senate for it. So it felt as though this issue is not where it should be as a priority.

Gordon-Reed:

Yes. Well it just shows you how much the country has changed. This was something that used to be easy for Republicans and Democrats.

Lehmann:

That’s right. When the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 2006, it was almost unanimous in the Senate.

Gordon-Reed:

And now people feel that they can’t vote for something that they may actually think that’s right. Because they think that . . .  I wouldn’t even say it’s pressure from their constituents, I would say whoever they feel that they’re answering to—party leaders, donors, and organizations and people are watching. And it’s not about the substance. It’s just: “are you opposed to the Democrats?”

Lehmann:

This goes back to what you were saying earlier, the perception of political opponents as existential threats—things that should not exist.

Gordon-Reed:

Evil.

Lehmann:

That is a very hard thing for our system to respond to. And speaking of my profession, the mainstream press fails over and over and over again to just see that the Republican party is in a state of capture by white nationalists—that it is, in fact, an anti-democratic force. So all of the templates of reporting just fail the moment: Democratic politician X says this, Republican politician says Y. We aren’t in a position to adjudicate. We’re just reporting the facts.

And when the Republican politician is saying democracy should not exist, people should not vote. I go back to one of the first things that Trump did in office was to create this bullshit agency to collect reports on crimes by undocumented immigrants. And I said, and people in polite Washington parties dismissed me and laughed at me, but I said, “This is fascist. This is actually what fascism is. You’re creating an outgroup for the state to persecute.” By the way, undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower levels than the native population because they want to be sure that they’re not rounded up by authorities. And so you’re creating a federal agency devoted to something that is not a problem that exists only in order to stigmatize an outgroup. I don’t feel like we should hedge in describing what that is.

Gordon-Reed:

No, you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t.

Again, thinking about how you go back and look at newspapers from the past, and what people are writing and what it says about the culture. And we know that there was definitely partisan then. There was none of this pretense of impartiality and stuff. None of that.

Lehmann:

There were party-affiliated papers.

Gordon-Reed:

But just think about 100 years from now, people looking back at this moment. And someone saying, as you said, “I don’t think people should vote. This should not be a democracy.” Another person says yes it should be. And the press says, “Well, it’s not for us to say.”

I think it will be clear—I mean, it’s clear to us now, but I wonder what people are going to make of that, because it’s such a failure of citizenship. And journalists are a part of the citizenry. To think of yourself not as a citizen, and somehow that makes you objective, that doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t cut it.

I don’t know. Because, on the other hand, you had, in 2016, the refrain in the New York Times and everywhere, “But her emails.” When it’s Democrats who do something, they can and often do make a judgment. Or Whitewater. Oh my God–cattle futures. Travelgate.

With Democrats, it’s really much more that the media go after them for smaller, less important things than on the other side. Then they pull back and say, “Well, we don’t want to make a judgment about that.” And now what they’re withholding judgment on is whether or not there should be a democracy—whether people should be allowed to vote.