Steven Hahn
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Steven Hahn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But I think a modern reader, by and large, who knew anything about the history of the United States and of Native people would recognize what he was really after.
Right. I think he saw himself as representing the interests of white Americans in the trans Appalachian West, who themselves were in the process of trying to expand their population and settlements, which would be at the expense of Native people. And so, in a sense, what Jackson really represented was, you know, he was the first president from the Trans-Appalachian West.
He had strong support among white adults, white adult men from that area and also from the southern states because he was a slave owner and he was committed to the maintenance of slavery. So, you know, at the same time, access to politics in the in terms of voting and office holding, property holding requirements were being dropped. And so adult white men had more access than ever.
And so even though in most places people of African descent didn't, women didn't, in some ways the workforce in many, many places didn't because they were made up of women and children. But nonetheless, there was kind of this sense that the groundwork for what would be an expanse of democracy was being laid then.
Well, I think there are a number of things that they could connect to. Not least was his defiance of Supreme Court rulings on the potential expulsion of Native people. You know, he said, OK, that's fine. Let them enforce it. I think they see him as a quote-unquote strong leader who was willing and able and interested in moving directions of his own choosing.
Obviously, he had a very complicated relationship with the federal government, but he stood up very strongly because the nullification crisis in the 1830s when South Carolina said, unlike Jackson's view of the Supreme Court, no, we're not going to enforce the tariff. Jackson threatened to really crush them militarily as well as politically.
So I think they see him as, you know, an example of an early executive who was interested in expanding the powers of the presidency at a time when the president of the United States really had relatively few powers. And, you know, the important power remained in the states and nationally in the Congress.
And I think they saw him as a harbinger of what would happen later and what Trump clearly admires.
Well, the Pomerades are called the Pomerades because the Attorney General of the United States was A. Mitchell Palmer. I think it was an example of how people who were regarded by those in power as politically objectionable
could suffer all sorts of forms of repression, including expulsions of various sorts that included people who were isolationists, but it's also included people who were on the left, first socialists who had a complicated history with that, and then after the Russian Revolution, people who were associated with the spread of communism.
were those who quite simply did not fit into their view of what the United States should be, which is a republic of white Christians. And in that particular time, the federal government became involved in in the repression of these movements and whether it involved prosecuting them. I mean, Eugene Debs ran for president from jail.
Or whether it had to do with expelling them, not only communists and socialists, but people who were accused of Anarchism, Asako and Vanzetti, you know, became a very notorious example of how that could happen. It's important to recognize that the Ku Klux Klan was in the process of reorganizing in this period. It was reestablished during the teens, but it really exploded later.
in the 1920s, and it fed off a lot of these currents. It admired fascist regimes elsewhere. It admired the sort of political violence and paramilitarism that went into it. You know, one of the things that they did was enforce prohibition, which they regarded as an attack on the life ways of European immigrants and others who were not white Christians.
Well, one of the things I try to do in the book, which is recognizing that illiberalism is not one thing. It's not an unchanging, static thing. It's a collection of ideas and notions of relationships or political power. is to think about how illiberalism was modernized during what we call the progressive period.
And there, the idea of social engineering, the use of eugenics, which is oftentimes not adequately accounted for by historians of the period, disfranchisement, segregation, warfare overseas that was justified in racialized terms, the use of troops who basically got their experience in Indian wars in the Trans-Mississippi West, and the idea that was advocated by people.
Herbert Crowley is a good example because he was one of the founders of the New Republic. He was one of the advocates of Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism. And yet he was very suspicious of what he called Jeffersonian democracy.
He thought that many people in the United States didn't understand the national purpose and that therefore politics really should be conducted by those who were trained, by those who were experts.
So I do think that without saying that the United States was moving in a Nazi direction, I mean, there were people, obviously, who in the 1930s very much embraced what was going on in Germany on many accounts. There were many people in the 20s and into the early 30s who thought that Mussolini was really pointing out the future that the Euro-Atlantic world was headed towards.
Because he seemed to be somebody who was active, engaged, strong, and recognized the limitations of a kind of the liberal state that had really fallen into real question. You know, the Klan was the largest social movement in the 1920s, and their ideas about what the United States would be, it was an early America Firstism. I mean, that's really where it emerges.
And so, again, I think that without necessarily saying that this was Italian fascism or this was Nazi, which it wasn't. But to say that some of the ideas, some of the connections, and the overall project, the sense of who really should be participating in this, who shouldn't be participating.
Showing 21–40 of 121 · page 2 of 7
← Previous
Next →