The purpose of political violence

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2019

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Between 1830 and 1860, there were more than seventy violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or on nearby streets and dueling grounds.” Here’s the wild thing about that statistic, which comes from Yale historian Joanne Freeman’s remarkable book The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War: It’s an undercount. There was much more violence between members of Congress even than that. Congress used to be thick with duels, brawls, threats, and violent intimidation. That history is often forgotten today, and that forgetting has come at a cost: It lets us pretend that this moment, with all its tumult and terror, is somehow divorced from our traditions, an aberration from our past, when it’s in fact rooted in them. That’s why I wanted to talk to Freeman right now: to remind us that American politics has long been shaped by people who used the threat or practice of national violence as a way to force the political system to accept ongoing injustice. This conversation isn’t as easy as just saying political violence is bad. It’s also about recognizing that political violence has a purpose, and weighing the conditions under which it’s right and even necessary to provoke it. Book recommendations: Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee’s Journal, 1828-1870 by Benjamin Brown French First Blows of the Civil Warby James S. Pike The Impending Crisisby David M. Potter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:51.0	It's almost dangerous to look at the present moment and see it as coming out of nowhere and so un-American.
1:01.0	When it's rooted in a lot of things that are American and the only way out of it, I think, is to grapple with those things, not to deny them.
1:21.0	Hello, welcome to the Glancho on the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:24.0	My guest today is Joanne Freeman, a historian, a Yale who is the author of a remarkable new book called Field of Blood.
1:30.0	What do you think field of blood is about? Just like if you had to guess.
1:34.0	Probably wouldn't expect it to be about the floor of the US Congress.
1:37.0	But she's written this amazing book built on primary documentation of that period, which is a pretty civil war period, about the astonishing amount of violence that characterized the early US Congress.
1:48.0	How often members of Congress were beating the hell out of each other, getting into duels, occasionally killing each other.
1:55.0	How much violent intimidation was part of the way the organization worked.
1:59.0	And I think it's a really important book. One reason it's an important book is to contextualize the moment we're in.
2:05.0	All the points we have about today's Congress, about the ways in which it is betraying the great traditions of the institution.
2:11.0	And we tend to take more seriously the glittering words that survive in history about American politics.
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