Listen to my conversation with Dan Skinner, a former Director of Kansas Public Radio and the Audio-Reader Network. He is the host of KPR’s Conversations program. The interview is a little over 25 minutes long and presents an overview of
The World in Books: 52 Works of Great Short Nonfiction (Scribner, October 2024)
“On this edition of Conversations, Kenneth C. Davis talks with host Dan Skinner about “The World in Books: 52 Works of Great Short Non-Fiction.” Davis is the New York Times bestselling author of “America’s Hidden History” and “Don’t Know Much About History,” which gave rise to his series of books on a range of subjects, including mythology, the Bible, geography, and the Civil War. This book is designed as an introduction to short books that will make you think about who you are and what you believe.”
–Kansas Public Radio
[Repost; originally posted 7/26/2013; revised 7/26/2024]
When Lloyd Austin III, a retired general, was confirmed by the Senate as defense secretary in January 2021, he became the the first Black Pentagon chief.
This historic landmark was a reminder that on July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued two Executive Orders that ended official discrimination in the United States military and the federal workforce.
After Truman’s order. the U.S. military was desegregated and integrated units fought in Korea. (Photo: U.S. Army-November 1950)
It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.
Coming in an election year, it was a daring move by Truman, who still needed the support of southern segregationists. It was also a controversial decision that led to the forced retirement of the Secretary of the Army when he refused to desegregate the Army.
President Truman, the first President to speak to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had based part of his platform on civil rights. Successfully elected but stymied by the 80th Congress, President Truman—armed with documentation from his Committee on Civil Rights—called for a special session for Congress. They were to convene on July 26, 1948.
On that hot, summer day in July, Truman signed his name to two documents: Executive Orders 9980 and 9981, integrating the Armed Forces and the Federal workforce.
Truman’s decision reflected the deep racist discrimination that plagued the country, including the celebrated G.I. Bill, passed to help veterans of World War II with education, housing, and job training. The program, while profoundly significant in American history, was largely closed to Black veterans.
Civil rights groups, frustrated by the lack of progress, continued to press Truman on legislation for racial equality. Knowing that civil rights legislation would stall in Congress, and with the reputation of the United States as a great democratic nation being questioned as racism continued to flourish during a nascent Cold War, on July 26, 1948, Truman signed two Executive Orders, 9980 and 9981, desegregating the federal work force and armed services — practices that would take years to be fully carried out.
Source: “Returning From War, Returning to Racism,” New York Times (July 30, 2020)
As historical documents go, ““Executive Order 9980” and “Executive Order 9981” don’t have quite the same ring as “Emancipation Proclamation” or “New Deal.” But when President Harry S. Truman issued these Executive Orders, he helped transform the country. The first desegregated the federal workforce, segregated by President Woodrow Wilson.
The second order began the gradual official process of desegregating America’s armed forces, which was a groundbreaking step for the American civil rights movement.
It is worth noting that many of the arguments made at the time against integration of the armed services — unit cohesion, morale of the troops, discipline in the ranks– were also made about the question of women and gays serving in the military, a policy effectively ended when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was overturned in 2011.
In a Defense Department history of the integration of the Armed Forces, Brigadier General James Collins Jr. wrote in 1980:
The integration of the armed forces was a momentous event in our military and national history…. The experiences in World War II and the postwar pressures generated by the civil rights movement compelled all the services –Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps — to reexamine their traditional practices of segregation. While there were differences in the ways that the services moved toward integration, all were subject to the same demands, fears, and prejudices and had the same need to use their resources in a more rational and economical way. All of them reached the same conclusion: traditional attitudes toward minorities must give way to democratic concepts of civil rights.
Integration of the Armed Forces: 1940-1965 (U.S. Army Center of Military History)
Here is the text of the Executive Order 9981 (Source: Harry S. Truman Library and Museum; dated July 26, 1948)
Four years ago, in the the thick of the pandemic and other crises, the two major party nominating conventions went mostly virtual.
As I wrote at the time:
“Will there be a virtual balloon-drop? That is about the only intrigue left when it comes to what will happen at this year’s national political conventions. Even more so than usual, the chance for high drama at the twin events is largely zero. Not just because both the Democrats and the Republicans have chosen their candidates, but because both will mostly be held remotely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.” (Smithsonian, August 12, 2020)
Yes, it seems like one hundred years ago, not four.
Once upon a time, nominating conventions captured national attention. Over time, changes in the primary election process largely negated the drama as candidates had secured the delegate count they needed long before the first nominating speech.
While we might have thought that the intrigue of the 2024 conventions was gone, the future of the Biden candidacy is now less certain.
Intrigue is back. And this year’s Democratic convention may go down in presidential history. This convention may matter a great deal.
Let’s take a look back at the political conventions that mattered most. Read “The Top Ten Political Conventions That Mattered Most” published in Smithsonian magazine (Originally published August 2012).
John F. Kennedy addresses the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles after being nominated for President. PhotoQuest / Getty Images via Smithsonian Magazine
We’ll start with 1831.
1831 Anti-Masonic Convention—Why start with one of the most obscure third parties in American history? Because they invented nominating conventions. The Anti-Masons, who feared the growing political and financial power of the secret society of Freemasons, formed in upstate New York; among their members was future president Millard Fillmore.
Read the full piece in Smithsonian magazine
(Post updated May 20, 2024)
Some governors would have us teach “the basics.” So here goes:
LET’S SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT— Memorial Day is about Slavery
It is not about swimsuit sales, the start of summer, or the hot dogs on the barbie.
Memorial Day, the most solemn occasion on the national calendar now honors the nation’s war dead. But it was born out of the the Civil War, which was fought because of slavery, America’s original sin. Memorial Day is about a nation “conceived in liberty” but born in shackles.
In these fraught times, when teaching history has become so contentious, we must tell it straight when we observe the history behind the holiday. Here are some basic facts:
1) Memorial Day was conceived as Decoration Day, first marked in May 30, 1868 by a proclamation of General John Logan, leader of a powerful Civil War veterans group. His original proclamation –“General Orders, No. 11”– read, in part: “Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms.”
The day was an occasion for visiting the cemetery and decorating the graves of fallen Union soldiers who died in the Civil War.
2) The Civil War was fought over slavery. The “states rights” argument was put forward by “Lost Cause” apologists and eventually accepted by educators who wanted to diminish the significant role of slavery both in American history and in bringing about the war.
The Hidden History of America At War (paperback)
Read more about the divisive history of Memorial Day in an earlier post.
Don’t Know Much About the Civil War (Harper paperback, Random House Audio)
The truth matters. Now more than ever. So, once and for all, we must set the record straight.
As we observe Memorial Day, a day for honoring our nation’s war dead, let us emphasis these truths about America’s deep history of slavery.
Here are five important points that illustrate the through-line of slavery in American history, from the founding through the Civil War:
READ MORE in my article “Conceived in Liberty, Born in Shackles” (Social Education, March-April 2020)
(Previous post updated 8 May, 2024)
Happy 140th Birthday!
Harry Truman, 33rd President of the United States, was born on May 8, 1884.
President Harry S. Truman
(Photo: Truman Library)
It was on his birthday in 1945 that Truman was able to tell Americans that the war in Europe was over with the surrender of Germany.
THIS IS a solemn but a glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day. General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. The flags of freedom fly over all Europe. For this victory, we join in offering our thanks to the Providence which has guided and sustained us through the dark days of adversity.
Described as “a minor national figure with a pedestrian background,” Truman was a World War I veteran and a Senator from Missouri when Franklin D. Roosevelt chose him to become his running mate in the 1944 election. Truman became vice president when FDR won his fourth term and then took office on April 12, 1945 when FDR died.
When he took office, Truman had been largely left “out of the loop” by Roosevelt as World War II entered its final months. Truman did not know of the existence of the “Manhattan Project” and the development of the atomic bomb until he became president. Then he had to make the decision to use it against the Japanese.
Fast Facts
•Truman was a member of the Sons of the Revolution and the Sons of Confederate Veterans
•He wanted to attend West Point but poor eyesight kept him out. He enlisted in the Missouri National Guard and served as the commander of an artillery battery in World War I.
•Before entering politics, he was a farmer, bank clerk, insurance salesman and owner of a failed haberdashery store.
•As president he once threatened to punch the nose of a newspaper critic who had given his daughter a poor review after her debut singing recital. Margaret Truman went on to greater fame as a mystery novelist, beginning with Murder in the White House published in 1980.
Harry S. Truman died on December 26, 1972.
The Truman Library and Museum is located in Independence, Missouri
Read more about Truman, his life and administration in Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents. Truman is also featured in the Berlin Battle chapter of The Hidden History of America at War.
Don’t Know Much About History (Revised, Expanded and Updated Edition)
THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR: Untold Tales from Yorktown to Fallujah
Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents (Hyperion paperback-April 15, 2014)
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911 from front page of The New York World (Source: [Post revised from original on 3/25/2011]Cornell University ILR School Kheel Center © 2011)
Can anything positive or hopeful emerge from a terrible tragedy? That is a question we are all pondering as we still contend with a pandemic that swept across the United States and the world.
We are also asking about the human costs of “business as usual.”
So it is a moment to consider of one of the greatest tragedies of modern American history.
On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York caught fire and 146 people died, most of them women between the ages of 14 and 23, many were Jewish and Italian immigrants. They had been trapped inside the building, its doors chained shut.
Cornell University’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation offers a web exhibit on the Triangle Factory Fire.
These are the names of the 146 people who died that day.
A new memorial commemorates the event, the memory of the lost, and the meaning of the tragedy.
It was a disaster that shook the American conscience and sparked the nation’s Labor movement.
“Look for the union label.”
If you are of a certain generation, you may recognize those words instantly. They are the first line of a song that became a 1970s advertising icon.
Sung by a swelling chorus of lovely ladies (and a few men) of all colors, shapes and sizes, it was the anthem of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
Airing as American unions began to confront the long, steady drain of jobs to cheaper foreign labor markets, the song implored us to look for the union label when shopping for clothes (“When you are buying a coat, dress or blouse”).
Seeing these earnest women, thinking of them at their sewing machines, made us race to the closet and check our clothes for that ILGWU tag. (“It says we’re able to make it in the USA.”)
The International Ladies Garment Worker Union was born in 1900, in the midst of the often-violent period of early 20th century labor organizing when brutal working conditions and child labor were the norm in America’s mines and factories.
One of the companies the union attempted to organize was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory at what is now Greene Street and Washington Place in New York’s Greenwich Village.
A walkout against the firm in 1909 helped strengthen the union’s rolls and led to a union victory in 1910. But the Triangle Shirtwaist Company –which would chain its doors shut to control its workers— earned infamy when a fire broke out on March 25, 1911 and 146 workers were trapped in the flaming building and died. Some jumped to their deaths.
A police officer and others with the broken bodies of Triangle fire victims at their feet, look up in shock at workers poised to jump from the upper floors of the burning Asch Building. (Credit: Cornell University ILR School Kheel Center ©2011)
The two owners of the factory were indicted but found not guilty. The tragedy helped galvanize the trade union movement and especially the ILGWU.
On this anniversary of that dreadful event, it is worth remembering that American prosperity was built on the sweat, tears and blood of working men and women. Immigration and jobs are the issue again today, just as they were more than a century ago.
The Library of Congress also offers numerous resources on the tragedy.
On February 28, 2011, American Experience on PBS aired a documentary film about the tragedy and the period.
The site is part of New York University and a National Historic Landmark.
March 16 marks the anniversary of the birth in 1751 of America’s fourth President, James Madison, also known as “The Father of the Constitution.”
Like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, his Virginia predecessors in the presidency, Madison embodied the “Great Contradiction”– that a nation “conceived in liberty” was also born in shackles.
READ MY ARTICLE “THE AMERICAN CONTRADICTION,” on teaching the history of American slavery in Social Education.
Small in stature and overshadowed by the more famous Washington and Jefferson, Madison is counted among of the greatest of the Founding Fathers for the breadth and influence of his contributions. Like many of the Founders, Madison had reservations about slavery as a contradiction to this ideals, but did little to end the institution. He hoped that slavery would end after the foreign trade was abolished and thought that enslaved African-Americans should be emancipated and returned to Africa.
The story of Paul Jennings, who was enslaved by Madison and wrote a memoir of working as a servant in the White House, is told in my book IN THE SHADOW OF LIBERTY.
Montpelier, home of James Madison (Photo: Kenneth C. Davis, 2010)
James Madison was born on March 16, 1751 in Port Conway, Virginia. The son of a tobacco planter and somewhat sickly as a child, he went north to study at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton). There he came under the influence of the college President, John Witherspoon, a future signer of the Declaration of Independence, and made a friend of fellow student, Aaron Burr, son of the College’s founder.
Returning to Virginia, Madison became involved in patriot politics and became a close colleague of his neighbor Thomas Jefferson, serving as Jefferson’s adviser and confidant during the war years while Jefferson was Governor of Virginia.
In 1794, he married the widow Dolley Payne Todd, having been formally introduced by his college friend Aaron Burr.
A few Madison Highlights:
•Secured passage of the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), an act that is a cornerstone of religious freedom in America. As part of that effort, he wrote the influential Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. (I discuss the “Remonstrance” in my article “America’s True History of Religious Tolerance” in the October 2010 Smithsonian.)
•Was the moving force behind the Constitutional Convention and was one of the principal authors of the Constitution. Madison’s support of the electoral system is laid out in this essay by Yale professor Akhil Reed Amar “The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists.”
•With Alexander Hamilton and John Jay was one of the authors of The Federalist Papers (Resources from the Library of Congress), arguments in favor of the ratification of the Constitution
•Was principal author of the Bill of Rights, which he originally thought unnecessary
Following ratification of the Constitution, Madison was a member of the House of Representatives from Virginia and a powerful Congressional ally of George Washington.
•Drafted the first version of Washington’s Farewell Address
•Supervised the Louisiana Purchase as Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of State
•Presided over the ill-prepared nation during the War of 1812, the “second war of independence”
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. –June 16, 1788
Madison’s grave at Montpelier (Author photo 2010)
Madison died on June 28, 1836 at Montpelier, at age 85. Enslaved servant Paul Jennings was at his bedside and later recalled in a memoir that Madison died, “as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out.”
James Madison is buried at Montpelier.
LINKS:
The Library of Congress Resource Collection on James Madison.
Madison’s Major Papers and Inaugural Addresses can be found at the Avalon Project of the Yale Law School.
Imacon Color Scanner
(March 15, 2024: Revision of original post of March 15, 2014. Video created and directed by Colin Davis.)
Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, was born on March 15, 1767.
His birthplace was a cabin on the border of both South and North Carolina (the precise location is uncertain).
When this was last posted, he had fallen from favor and was going to be moved to the back side of the $20 in favor of Harriet Tubman. That decision was shelved by the previous administration and in 2021 was put back on track under the Biden administration.
In his day and ever since, Andrew Jackson provoked high emotions and sharp opinions. Thomas Jefferson once called him, “A dangerous man.”
His predecessor as president, John Quincy Adams, a bitter political rival, said Jackson was,
“A barbarian who could not even write a sentence of grammar and could hardly spell his own name.”
His place and reputation as an Indian fighter began with a somewhat overlooked fight against the Creek nation led by a half-Creek, half-Scot warrior named William Weatherford, or Red Eagle following an attack on an outpost known as Fort Mims north of Mobile, Alabama.
The video above (created in 2014) offers a quick overview of Weatherford’s war with Jackson that ultimately led the demise of the Creek nation.Like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, it was an event that shocked the nation. Soon, Red Eagle and his Creek warriors were at war with Andrew Jackson, the Nashville lawyer turned politician, who had no love for the British or Native Americans.
On March 27, 1814, Jackson’s troops defeated Red Eagle and his Creek warriors, killing more than 800 Natives–women, children, and the elderly as well as warriors. Jackson’s soldiers cut off the noses of the dead to tally their numbers. Other soldiers cut off strips of skin to make reins for their horses. (A Nation Rising, page 66-68)
On August 9, 1814, Major General Andrew Jackson signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson ending the Creek War. The agreement provided for the surrender of twenty-three million acres of Creek land to the United States. This vast territory encompassed more than half of present-day Alabama and part of southern Georgia.
Resources from Library of Congress.
The complete story of the Red Creek War is told in my book A Nation Rising.
Andrew Jackson died on June 8, 1845. He was surrounded by many of the household servants he had enslaved. He told them:
Tombstone of Alfred Jackson, enslaved servant of Andrew Jackson. (Author photo © 2010)
“I want all to prepare to meet me in heaven….Christ has no respect to color.”
The story of one of those people, Alfred Jackson, is told in my recent book, In the Shadow of Liberty. Alfred Jackson is buried in the garden at the Hermitage, near Andrew Jackson’s gravesite.
Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart (Source: Clark Institute Williamstown, Mass.)
[Originally posted July 2, 2020; revised February 22, 2024]
Today is actually George Washington’s Birthday. Maybe you thought you celebrated last Monday (not President’s Day). Seeing as the holiday falls in February –Black History Month– it is a good time to bring these two crucial pieces of history together.
There is no question that Washington’s accomplishments were central to the foundation of the Republic. His command during the Revolution. His role at the Constitutional Convention, where he presided. His two terms as president, in which he established many presidential precedents and then stepped aside. For these achievements, I described him as one of America’s greatest presidents. He was, as one biographer described him, the “Indispensable Man.”
But like many of the Founders, the “Father of Our Country” enslaved people. Inheriting ten people from his father at age eleven, Washington held more than three hundred men, women, and children in bondage at the time of his death in 1799. While one man was freed in Washington’s will, the others had to wait for Martha Washington to die. And roughly half of those people remained enslaved, parceled out among the Custis family, as part of the estate of Martha’s first husband.
In other words, George Washington was an enslaver from childhood to grave. And we have the receipts.
He once raffled off whole families in lots, including small children separated from parents. He later purchased four children at an estate sale, sending two dark-skinned boys to do fieldwork while two “mulatto” boys became house servants. Frank Lee became Mount Vernon’s butler and his brother Billy Lee served as Washington’s valet, his “loyal manservant,” for some thirty years.
The last remaining set of Washington’s dentures (Courtesy: Mount Vernon Ladies Association)
Washington’s own journal records that he purchased teeth pulled from the mouths of enslaved people, presumably to be fitted into his dentures. In exchange for a grocery list of rum, molasses, fruits, and sweetmeats, he once shipped off a man named Tom, a repeat runaway, and at least two other men to the cane fields of the West Indies.
And then there is the heroic Washington’s actions at Yorktown. After his signal victory over the British in 1781, General Washington wasted no time in recovering Esther, Lucy, Sambo Andersen, and fourteen others who had escaped Mount Vernon when offered the chance. They were among thousands of enslaved people who had fled to the British in hopes of emancipation. While Washington won America’s liberty, they lost theirs.
Did this inconsistency trouble Washington? The contradiction between his devotion to freedom while enslaving people did seem to prick his conscience. In 1786, he confided to fellow Founder Robert Morris, “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery].”
But he did precious little to make it happen, either while presiding over the convention that cemented slavery in the Constitution, or as first president. After Philadelphia became the nation’s capital in 1790, President Washington shuttled enslaved servants in and out of the city to evade a Pennsylvania law that called for the emancipation of enslaved males residing in the state for more than six months. In 1793, he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, making assistance to runaways a federal offense.
When Ona Judge, Martha Washington’s enslaved maid, learned she would be given away as a wedding gift, she escaped from the home of the president in 1796. He advertised a ten-dollar reward for her return and spent the next three years trying to track down and recover a woman who had risked all for freedom.
For more than two centuries, these contradictions were given little weight by Washington’s admirers. The little boy who couldn’t tell a lie was immortalized as “First in the hearts of his countrymen.” The enslavement of human beings, especially by one of America’s most admired presidents, remained the dirty secret long concealed by textbooks and popular culture.
But a stunning moment of correction has arrived. It begs the questions:
Will George Washington’s picture be removed from the currency?
Will protestors project the images of African-American heroes onto Washington’s stern visage carved on Mt. Rushmore, as Harriet Tubman’s face now adorns Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond?
Washington Monument (Courtesy National Parks Service https://www.nps.gov/wamo/learn/historyculture/index.htm)
What about the Washington Monument?
We are now in a teachable moment. What we do is limited only by our creativity and the courage to be honest. We won’t take a chisel to the Washington Monument or spray paint it with graffiti. But we should teach students and all Americans that Washington was a flawed man who committed a crime against humanity while also building the nation. This was the “gross injustice and cruelty” that Frederick Douglass famously called out in his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Remaining silent on that injustice and cruelty is no longer an option. Because this is one of those “self-evident” truths. The United States was “conceived in liberty,” but born in shackles. We can no longer honor Washington’s indispensable achievements without recognizing his original sin.
What better occasion than Washington’s Birthday to do that.
“I must go into the Presidential chair the inflexible and uncompromising opponent of every attempt on the part of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia against the wishes of the slaveholding states, and also with a determination equally decided to resist the slightest interference with it in the states where it exists.”
–Inaugural Address, March 4, 1837
(Post of 12/5/2016; reposted 12/5/2023)
Martin Van Buren Eighth U.S. President Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
OK –Literally.
Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the United States, was born on December 5, 1782 in Kinderhook, New York, making him the first American president born a U.S. citizen. Van Buren was also known as “Old Kinderhook, or “OK,” the origin of that American expression.
Van Buren was also the first New Yorker elected President. He was a crafty political power broker who mastered the art of “machine politics” and helped bring New York into Andrew Jackson’s column in 1828. He became Jackson’s Secretary of State and later his vice president. He won the presidential election of 1836. But his presidency was tainted by the Panic of 1837, a deep economic depression that lasted seven years. He was defeated in 1840 by William Henry Harrison of the Whig Party.
Fast Facts:
•Van Buren was the first president not of English descent. Growing up in a Dutch-speaking household, he was also the only president who spoke English as a second language.
•As a young attorney, he became the protege of Aaron Burr. Due to a passing resemblance and their political and professional connections, it was rumored that he was Burr’s son, gossip thoroughly dismissed by historians.
•Elected Governor of New York in November 1828, Van Buren took the office on January 1, 1829 but resigned on March 12, 1829 to become secretary of state, making him the shortest tenured governor in New York history.
•During Van Buren’s administration, the removal of native Americans from the Southeast accelerated including the removal of the Cherokee on the “Trail of Tears.”
•The Congressional “gag rule” was passed during his presidency; the rule forbid any discussion of petitions relating to slavery, including banning slavery in Washington, D.C, as mentioned in Van Buren’s inaugural address above.
•Failing to win the Democratic nomination in 1844, Van Buren became the first president to run on a third party ticket when he joined the Free Soil Party as its candidate in 1848.
You can read more about his life at the Martin Van Buren Historical Site (National Parks Service) and at the Library of Congress.
And read more about Van Buren and his administration in Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents
