Jill Lepore on Democracy in Peril, Then and Now

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2020

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the nineteen-thirties, authoritarian regimes were on the rise around the world—as they are again today—and democratic governments that came into existence after the First World War were toppling. “American democracy, too, staggered,” Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker, “weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation.” Lepore talks with David Remnick about how Americans rallied to save democracy, and how we might apply those lessons in a new era with similar problems. This segment originally aired on January 31, 2020.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.4	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:20.9	To put the political upheaval that we're living through into a wider context, I often find
0:26.5	myself turning to Jill Lepore.
0:28.8	Jill is a staff writer and a professor of history at Harvard, and she's also the author of
0:33.2	these truths, a great one-volume history of the United States.
0:37.9	Earlier this year, she published an essay called In Every Dark Hour,
0:41.9	and she considered how our nation responded the last time that it seemed
0:45.6	that democracy was in trouble all around the world.
0:51.4	In the 1930s, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio,
1:01.7	Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks, for scraps of food,
1:08.1	and democracies dying from the Andes to the Ural's to the Alps.
1:14.0	American democracy too staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy,
1:19.4	inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation.
1:26.4	We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,
1:29.9	FDR said in his first inaugural address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear
1:35.4	was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans' own declining
1:41.2	faith in self-government. What does democracy mean? NBC radio asked listeners.
1:47.8	Do we Negroes believe in democracy?
1:50.2	W.B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column.
1:54.3	Could it happen here?
1:56.0	Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935.
	...

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