Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. & Jesse Wegman

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. We're on vacation, but we still have an amazing show for you today. Jesse Wegman stops by to talk about his new book, The Lost Founder, James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution. But first, we have Dr. Eddie Glaude on his new book, America, USA., How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. Welcome, welcome, Eddie.

**Eddie Glaude Jr.** (0:34)
Well, it's a pleasure. It's always a pleasure to have a conversation with you, Molly.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:38)
I'm really thrilled to get to talk to you. So this book, and you have written many books, you've written a lot of brilliant stuff. And you're an academic, but you're also an academic who is able to talk to the rest of us who are not. And so this is a really interesting idea here. How America, USA., How Race Shadows Our Nation's Anniversaries. So it's such a perfect moment for this book. And I'd love you to talk about how you got here.

**Eddie Glaude Jr.** (1:07)
Well, first of all, thank you. You know, I was trying to write a book about the contemporary moment, but it was so fluid. Everything was changing with every blink of the eye. It looked as if the country was going to hell fast, you know, on speed in some ways, on speed dial in some ways to mix my metaphors. And so I was trying to write and nothing was happening. Also, I was trying to manage my own emotions. I'm not okay. You know, the country is barreling toward whatever it's barreling towards. I was being asked daily to interpret it, to say something about it, to comment on the state of affairs. And so I'm not Jill Lepore, so I can't write a 250 year history of the country, 700 plus page tone. So I was trying to figure out, well, every moment, every present requires a past to account for itself. What does it mean for us to be in this moment in the 250th year of the country? And so I decided to look at the other anniversaries. And lo and behold, with each milestone anniversary, the nation was facing its contradiction. It's as if the ghost had it by the nape of the neck, and they were screaming in its ear. So I decided to use the anniversaries as the kind of through line to talk about how we've arrived at this moment now.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (2:21)
It's such a good frame for this moment, and it speaks to sort of the underlying tension that got us here, right? No. Donald Trump doesn't happen without a lot of underlying dysfunction. We're at 250 here. This is the big anniversary, but there are certainly other anniversaries, I'm sure, that are the focus here. So could you talk us through kind of what that looks like?

**Eddie Glaude Jr.** (2:48)
Sure. So I looked at the centennial, the 100th anniversary of the country, the sesquicentennial, the 150th, and the bicentennial, the 200th. And in each of these moments, we see the country's contradictions in full view, as if we're convulsing at the moment in which we have to tell the story about our founding. So in 1876, of course, this is the collapse of Reconstruction. Collapse is a bit generous. It's the murder, the assassination of Reconstruction. And President Grant is going to speak at and the dais in Philadelphia, this amazing Philadelphia exposition. This was supposed to be this announcement to the world of the nation's maturity in the aftermath of the carnage of the Civil War. But it turned out to be this grand ritual of disremembering, to use Tony Morrison's language. The fact that 600,000 plus were left dead on sea and land was ignored. Custer's defeat basically ignored. The reason for all of this carnage placed to the side as the country celebrated its wealth, its ingenuity, its creativity and innovation. And there's this wonderful example, Molly, of Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most famous American at the time, certainly the most famous orator in the country. He's trying to enter the exposition because he has actually a ticket to be on the dais with the president. A Philadelphia police officer says there's no way an n-word could be on the dais with President Graham and refused to let him in. And if it wasn't for a senator who saw his big white mane, he would have never made it to the dais. But then when he got to the dais, they refused to let him speak. So Black Folkwood basically disappeared in the 1876 celebration. Fast forward 50 years later, 1926