#1691 Was it Shakespearean Tragedy or Greek Tragedy?

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

Clay interviews the award-winning historian Joe Ellis about America's tragic legacy of slavery, and about the dispossession of American Indians from their sovereign homelands. Professor Ellis has often argued that what happened with respect to African Americans was Shakespearean tragedy — in other words, if the better angels of American life had prevailed, things might have turned out differently; but that the dispossession and cultural genocide America wrought with Native Americans was probably inevitable. Clay has repeatedly challenged that view, and Joe Ellis suggested that Listening to America feature a serious discussion of how things might have turned out differently in both cultural intersections. The problem of what Clay calls "the Myth of Inevitability" is that it lets white America off the hook. If it could not have turned out any other way, perhaps we don't need to wring our hands too much. It's a critical discussion of agency and complicity in America's problematic history. This episode was recorded on December 15, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. I'm Clay Jenkinson. This is my introduction to this week's podcast. This is a very,
0:06.0	very, very important one. Joe Ellis is one of America's great historians. He's won all the awards.
0:12.4	He's written great books on Jefferson. He's an extraordinary man, a great historian, an old and
0:18.0	very dear friend of mine, now living at an undisclosed location in the green mountains
0:22.9	of Vermont. And for a number of years, he's been saying that what happened with slavery and
0:28.5	racism in America was Shakespearean tragedy. In other words, that this didn't have to come out
0:33.7	this way, that decisions were made. Things might have been different. We could have addressed the problem of slavery much sooner, but he has always said that what happened with
0:41.5	Native Americans was what he calls Greek tragedy. There's no way to wriggle away from that,
0:46.6	that the larger, more dominant culture with its exceptional industrial tools, gunpowder,
0:52.8	railroads, etc., was inevitably going to roll over
0:55.8	Native peoples. I have always kind of choked at that and challenged it. I don't think that's okay.
1:05.8	I think to say that what happened with Native Americans was Greek tragedy in a sense lets us off
1:10.8	the hook. Well, if it was inevitable,, in a sense, lets us off the hook.
1:11.2	Well, if it was inevitable, what could we have done? But I don't think it was inevitable, and I've
1:16.5	made lists over the years of ways in which things could have gone differently if we had only
1:20.4	really had the national will to do it. And, of course, a nation that prides itself on being the
1:25.2	most enlightened nation in human history with a
1:27.5	declaration of independence, a written constitution, and a bill of rights, that nation surely
1:32.3	should pitch itself higher for its behavior with everyone than just another nation.
1:38.1	And so we have special responsibilities because when we got here in 1492, the continent was all indigenous, and by
1:46.1	1942, about 3% of it was still held in indigenous hands. Was that inevitable? Well, I don't know,
1:54.0	but I think we must challenge that view because it allows us to slip away and not take full
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