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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Summer is coming to a close. The school year is kicking off, and that means Get Lit is back. We are kicking things off this month with author Eric Larsen. We are reading his New York Times bestselling book, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. It's a compelling history. We can't wait to discuss it with him. Eric Larsen will be joining us for a live in-person event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, the NYPL, on Monday, September 30 at 06:00 PM. Tickets are free, but you do have to sign up.

For more information on how to get a free e-copy of the book from the library, check out our website at wnyc.org/getlit. Now, while we're on the topic of Get Lit, we have a new series for you just in time for the election. It's time for Get Political. Get it? With a book about historical threats to democracy. We have two months until election day. There's plenty of horse race coverage and rides on the polar coasters, but we here at All Of It want to view the election through the lens of history, using books that offer perspective on the issues and the office. We are calling it Get Political.

Our first book looks at a time when democracy was on the line. It's titled The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. It's by Corey Brettschneider, who's a professor of constitutional law and politics at Brown University. The five leaders were John Adams, who waged war on the national press. James Buchanan, who tried to deny African Americans rights via the Supreme Court. Andrew Johnson, who sought to guarantee white supremacy. Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the government and Richard Nixon, who committed a criminal act.

As Brettschneider writes, "Each of these five presidents stoked the fire of a constitutional crisis. Each wielded the nation's most powerful office to undermine a core aspect of democracy, and each stands as a conspicuous example of the damage a single president can do." As Brettschneider notes, one thing stands in the way of such a president, the people who fought back. Corey Brettschneider joins me now for our very first Get Political. Nice to see you.

Corey Brettschneider: Thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Your last book in 2018 was titled, The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents. What led you to this book?

Corey Brettschneider: That book was about what a president should know about the Constitution. Frankly, what the president at the time, Donald Trump, did not know, and it was looking to the future with hope that the Constitution is a document devoted to we the people and its values. This book really came out of a realization that something more serious was needed, a look at the danger of the office. At the same time, that I'm still an optimist, as you noted, about the people.

I also want to be very real with people about what this office is and how if an occupant that is a problem, that threatens democracy occupies it, why we're all in real trouble. Patrick Henry said at the founding, "Don't ratify the Constitution. If you ratify it, this document assumes a good person in the position of the president." What if you get a bad person, of somebody at odds with democracy who lacks virtue? We're all vulnerable to such a person. He worried in particular about a criminal president. That's what we're facing that possibility right now.

Alison Stewart: A lot has been written about a couple of these presidents, about Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson. There's a new biography of Wilson coming out this fall. Sometimes the writing has taken a mythic tone to it. How did you go about looking at these candidates with clear eyes?

Corey Brettschneider: That is part of what I wanted to correct was a sort of praise of these presidents, of looking to them as heroes. Adams in particular, you hear, just to start with, about him, as how learned he was. He was a smart guy. He wrote books. He was a political theorist, but he also tried to shut down the opposition party by, as you noted, really imprisoning his critics, including a sitting congressperson and the editors who criticized him. There was a danger from the beginning that this supposedly great president would have really destroyed democracy and its possibility by eliminating the existence of an opposition party.

When that is being done, that dangerous assault on democracy from the nation's highest office, there was a chance that we might not have recovered. I really wanted to correct the record by thinking through the lens, partly recognizing the danger that we're facing now in the person of Donald Trump, but also to look back and rethink a lot of these presidents. Adams stuck out as the first.

Alison Stewart: We'll get to him in a second. You know that the presidents used the Constitution of the United States to bolster their arguments, but it was actually politics many times. Just give us one example of the five. Where it really was the politics of the situation.

Corey Brettschneider: The Constitution can be interpreted in a couple of ways. One is the democratic way that many of these citizens tried to reclaim the constitution of we the people, but it's also a dangerous document with a long history of presidents emphasizing their authoritarian powers and using it to really undermine democracy. When that combines with an egotistical view of oneself, as you sometimes get with these presidents, there's a real danger, and sometimes they're secret about it. I'll mention Adams. I'll mention Buchanan. Secretly lobbies the Supreme Court to decide the Dred Scott case in the way it was decided to essentially deny Black Americans all rights.

Even the idea of legal personhood is denied in the Dred Scott case. He's doing that secretly while pretending to be neutral about a Constitution. There's a real danger in the office being used that way. It's a combination of both a dangerous interpretation reading of the document as authoritarian with politics that in his mind was devoted to security. That's a lethal combination, quite literally. In the case of Buchanan.

Alison Stewart: You note that our constitution is the third shortest in the world. Is that good or bad?

Corey Brettschneider: It's both. That's part of the idea of the book, that the malleability of the Constitution both makes it dangerous because it's open to a president who says, as Donald Trump did, "I have an article too. I can do anything I want with it," and really misreads it in this authoritarian way. Past presidents have done that. Adams read the document to essentially give him the powers of a quasi-monarch.

At the same time, the danger of the vagueness of the constitution also is its hope, because its allowed citizens to fight back by saying against Adams, "Look, we have a newly passed First Amendment right to free speech," and that means a right to dissent, a right to criticize even a president, or in the case of Buchanan, Frederick Douglass, a view that was not well received at the time. Although now I regard Frederick Douglass and this idea as the foundation of American democracy, the true founder of American democracy, even though he wasn't writing in the 18th century, it says, "We the people," in the preamble, not we the white people.

Alison Stewart: The president who seemed to understand this perhaps the most was George Washington, prior to John Adams. What did he understand about the Constitution?

Corey Brettschneider: We really start off strong because in his second inaugural in particular, which happens to be the shortest ever given, he says, "Look, I just took the oath of office. It binds me to the rule of law, to the Constitution. If I violate it, I want you to criticize me, upbraid me. If I really violate it, subject me to constitutional punishment." What a great idea. What great explanation of the idea that the office of the president has something above it. That's the law and the constitution itself. That's the thing to which we could all appeal to. We could appeal to its values when a president threatens democracy.

Alison Stewart: Is there a more modern president who seemed to get the idea of what the Constitution was about?

Corey Brettschneider: I think throughout American history, thankfully, we've had these major moments of recovery. I mentioned the horrible, evil Dred Scott case denying all rights and even legal personhood to Black Americans throughout the country. When Frederick Douglass resists Buchanan, he has to flee the country to the UK, where he's giving speeches about this broader democratic idea of we the people.

He is eventually vindicated in his alliance with Ulysses Grant, who not only supports passage of the 15th Amendment, refusing to allow discrimination based on race and voting but more importantly, passes and supports the enforcement acts leading to the prosecution of more than 1,000 white terrorists throughout the United States. Douglass, really, these recoveries happen we the people, these citizens sticking up for democracy, find recovery presidents to take on their cause. After Adams, there's Jefferson who says we're all federalists, we're all Republicans.

Meaning, I'm not going to allow the restoration of a sedition act. I'm not going to prosecute my political opponent. I mentioned Grant. The hero of the third cluster of the threat to democracy that you mentioned from Woodrow Wilson is Harry Truman, who is prevailed upon by members of the civil rights movement, some known, like Thurgood Marshall, some unknown, like Sadie Alexander, to really get rid of the idea of second class citizenship for Black Americans. He begins as a racist, and he's won over by these constitutional constituencies, these citizen readers. I think of him as another hero of the book.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. My guest is Brown Professor Corey Brettscheider. All right, let's dive into John Adams, second president, and founding father. What kind of presidency did he face? Let's not even talk about what he did wrong. What was he facing?

Corey Brettschneider: Of course, it's so early on in the republic. As he saw it, he's facing a threat of disloyalty, of opposition parties, a member of the Federalists, and he thinks the Democratic, and Republicans have their allegiance to France and that there really is a civil war going on in the United States. From his perspective, the job of the president is security. If you have the gall to insult the president of the United States, "He thinks I can shut down the opposition party." The issue is how he did it. The Sedition Act allows for criticism of the vice president, a member at the time of a different party, Thomas Jefferson, but makes it a crime to criticize the president, John Adams.

Yes, he claims he's facing instability and demanding security, but really he uses it as an opportunity to really shut down the essence of free speech. Brown Professor Alexander Meiklejohn said, "Look, free speech isn't just any right. It's the right of democracy to hear arguments and to make all arguments without the right to dissent, to criticize our leaders, we're not a democracy." That's why Adams was such a threat. He really did shut that right down.

Alison Stewart: He considered the threat to the country the separation between France and England, yes?

Corey Brettschneider: Yes. He thought the French, in particular, loyalty to France was a civil war threatening American stability on the part of the opposition party.

Alison Stewart: What was the threat to him?

Corey Brettschneider: Well, I guess he identified himself as president with the task of stability. The way he would have seen it is that this opposition party, in criticizing him, was threatening his leadership, threatening his ability to control the country. He needed to shut down the opposition party. The truth is it was also personal. He was a deeply egotistical person.

Alison Stewart: Thin-skinned.

Corey Brettschneider: He was thin-skinned, I say. He mocked Washington because he thought he wasn't as learned and as great as Washington was, as you noted. When he saw these criticisms of his family in particular, and Abigail Adams worried about criticism of their son, he equated that to a threat to the country. It's sort of the personal and the political merge, I think in the case of Adams.

Alison Stewart: There was a man who entered, Benjamin Bosch, who was Ben Franklin's grandson, who ran a paper called The Aurora. What did he criticize?

Corey Brettschneider: There's a myriad of criticisms of Adams. One of the ideas is that he's really pretending on the one hand to care about democracy and at the same time not respecting it. He's critical, too, of his shutdown of the opposition party. At one point, the editors, and this is the most controversial, they use various language to criticize his wishy washiness and his, on the one hand, pretending to be even-handed, but being deeply partisan.

Alison Stewart: How many people did he put in jail?

Corey Brettschneider: It's one of the most interesting things about the Adams story is that it was underreported for generations, and it's how we sort of said, "Oh, yes, there was the sedition act, but it wasn't a big deal. The most recent research puts it at about 126 prosecutions. I mean, it wasn't a small number, including the sitting congressman I mentioned, Matthew Leon, including three newspaper editors who really fought back and were effective in fighting back. Yes, 126 is not a small number.

Alison Stewart: Let's move on to James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. They kind of were a one-two punch. James Buchanan, what was his view of the presidency?

Corey Brettschneider: He pretends in his inaugural address that the most important constitutional questions have to be answered by the Supreme Court. He pretends to model himself on Washington and that he has this modest idea of the office, but secretly, what he's doing is lobbying the Supreme Court for this awful, evil decision. It's a kind of fake modesty that he's presenting, while at the same time, he's using the power of the office to try to really decide the question of the enslavement of other human beings by spreading it nationally.

Alison Stewart: You're right that Buchanan considers slavery a great political and a great moral evil. What does that mean?

Corey Brettschneider: Buchanan, on the one hand, is at least proclaiming that there's a moral evil of slavery. He knows it's not good for the country, but in the end, what he decides, I think, is that the real evil is the division over slavery and that's the worst thing about it. The way he tries to end it essentially is by becoming one of the most, if not the most, pro-slavery president in the United States history.

Alison Stewart: How did he impact the Supreme Court's decision about Dred Scott?

Corey Brettschneider: He's sending, I would say, more than signals, letters to one of the justices who he knew before and really saying, "I favor the most extreme decision in the Dred Scott case." The decision could have been decided in a very narrow way that didnt have an impact on the nation, but he's really urging an extreme decision, which is to say that Congress should not have the right to abolish slavery in new territories, in new states, and that instead, we should say that because Black Americans are not citizens under the federal constitution, there is essentially a national property right to own other people.

That's his solution. Usually, he does and did succeed in blaming the court for the Dred Scott decision. We still blame the court. I'm trying to say no, behind the scenes, something very different was going on. We know that from contemporary politics that the court really isn't operating on its own. Here we have the evidence that he was secretly conspiring for this evil decision, pushing it.

Alison Stewart: Andrew Johnson. I think a lot of people know about Andrew Johnson, but basically, he wanted to keep the South happy after the Civil War, we'll put it that way. What in the Constitution said, "Keep the South happy." What was it about the Constitution that he could interpret that?

Corey Brettschneider: I think in Johnson's case, it's partly this theme of security, and that's the running theme that I care about security, and that's the job of the president. That, of course, leads to authoritarianism around the world, and it's led to it in the United States. I do think he was a true racist, a true white supremacist in the case of Johnson, unlike Buchanan, and saw himself as not going to bring us back to a point where enslavement was a legal institution, but he wanted a country that was 1st and 2nd class citizens.

Frederick Douglass at first, who in each of these clusters, it's the citizens who fight back. In that first cluster, as we talked about, it's the newspaper editors who use their own trials to put President Adams on trial. In this case, really the hero of that second cluster is Frederick Douglass, who pushes back against Buchanan, has some progress with Lincoln, who he meets with and persuades to move closer to his view, a view of equal citizenship for all people, regardless of race. When it comes to Johnson, he trusts that maybe Johnson will be on board, that he can persuade him, too.

What he learns from a meeting, and he leaks the details, Douglass brilliantly said, "We all know what happened," is that this president is both egotistical. He talks about himself as a Moses, Andrew Johnson. Really, when Douglass pushes the idea that Black people to defend themselves need a right to vote, he sees the white supremacy in clear form and lets the rest of us know about it. It's not just that he's devoted to stability, it's that he is truly devoted to the warp morality of white supremacy.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. It's our very first Get Political. Corey Brettschneider is our guest. We'll continue after a quick break. This is All Of It. You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The book is called The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. Its author is Corey Brettschneider.

I'm going to read you a piece from an op-ed that was in the Times called What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather. It was written by Gordon Davis. He wrote, "By 1908, he was earning a considerable salary, my grandfather, for an African American of $14,000 a year, but only months after Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in 1913, my grandfather was demoted. He was shuttled from department to department and various menial jobs, and eventually became a messenger in the War Department, where he made only $720 a year.

By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made Black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson's term, a broken man. He died in 1928." What did Woodrow Wilson do that would affect so many Black Americans? Beyond that, black generational wealth?

Corey Brettschneider: Great. It's well known, and this op-ed does a beautiful job of bringing this out, that he resegregated the federal government while pretending not to do it, but he secretly did that. It's also well known, of course, that he showed Birth of a Nation film, a horrendous film celebrating the Ku Klux Klan in the White House. What the book shows is that he was so much worse than even we've known because it was really a philosophy of white supremacy combined with an idea of an increasing power in the national government. Really, he was the original white nationalist in this country.

The white supremacy of Johnson, for instance, had largely been about the right of states. Now, what you get with Wilson is this nationalization. I went into the archives in Princeton and found his lecture notes from his students, and you see how deep this philosophy is. They hadn't been looked at, but they wrote down what he said, and some of them are in these leather-bound books. What he says is that the most important thing in our Constitution is about the president as a leader in charge of a nationally efficient government.

The most inefficient thing there is is what he called friction. Now, what was going to cause friction? Integration. Segregation nationally turns out to be the key to the growth of an efficient national government. In terms of Birth of a Nation, what I show is I go back to his textbook. He was a writer, of course, and a professor and a president of Princeton and wrote a pretty popular textbook. When you read it, you see the scenes in Birth of a Nation. That's not a coincidence. He knew the author of The Clansman that Birth of a Nation is based on from Hopkins, where Wilson did his PhD. Really, there are scenes taken in The Clansman and in Birth of a Nation almost directly out of the textbook.

What Wilson says about the Clan, like the film, is that the Clan was a kind of necessary evil. Like, "Yes, they were bad, but they were necessary for efficiency, for stability." He really spreads that idea in his speeches. For instance, in the midst of what becomes some of the worst racial violence. Red Summer, he's stoking that violence by talking about the danger of disloyalty or hyphenated Americans, and the same way these other presidents are called out. We're not just realizing this now. I talk about how Ida B. Wells and William Monroe Trotter called him out at that moment.

Alison Stewart: Nixon thought the rules of private citizens did not pertain to him. When you thought about this, the case of Nixon, it was obvious what was done, what was less obvious about his opinion of the Constitution?

Corey Brettschneider: Both how vast the crimes were. I talk about his plot, for instance, to blow up a safe at the Brookings institution. When he said, "Oh, if they have documents." He thought they had documents showing his secret dealings with the Vietcong to try to prolong the war before he was president. He thought they might have those documents. Henry Kissinger says to him, "Well, why don't we get them through legal means?" He says, "No, I want it done on a thievery basis." I interviewed Daniel Ellsberg shortly before his death for the book, and Ellsberg talks about the plot to murder him on the Capitol steps, which was being investigated by prosecutors before the pardon.

Part of it is how vast it was but it was also the ideas of Nixon that when Nixon said famously in an interview, that when the president does it, it's not illegal, that was not a mistake. He had a thought-out idea that America was in a civil war with protesters, Vietnam protesters, in particular, Daniel Ellsberg, who he considered enemy number one. That war, like Adams, gave him the ability to really use what would otherwise be criminal methods, and that for the president, it was legal to do it.

Alison Stewart: Why would Nixon have been so bold?

Corey Brettschneider: He thought he could get away with it. He really did think that he was empowered by the Constitution, and he saw Ellsberg as such a threat, and he really was focused on this one person that he said, "We need our own Ellsberg, that this is the only way that we could save the country." Again, we come back to the beginning. This idea of stability. "The nation requires me, obligates me." He thought it was a matter of duty to shut down the opposition with these vast crimes. Of course, unlike the other instances Ellsberg and the members I talk about of grand jury one, including a postal clerk, a legal secretary, who tried to indict that president.

Unlike in the other clusters, we really never recovered from the Nixon presidency. We're still in the midst of his crimes and his lack of accountability. I warn about the immunity of a sitting president. Of course, that's only gotten worse with the recent decision saying that even former presidents are immune. Part of the book is a call to action, that these past aren't just heroes. They should be examples to us now in trying to recover our democracy and our constitution.

Alison Stewart: It seems like in the book there's the overreaching by a leader and then people who say, "Hey, not so fast."

Corey Brettschneider: Right.

Alison Stewart: That may not be an accident. That may actually be written into the Constitution, into the design of the Constitution. How so? Does it mean it's going to happen again and again?

Corey Brettschneider: It's a great question. I think the framers really thought there were formal checks that would work. You'd have a court that would enforce the Constitution against a president who went wrong, and you'd had impeachment against a really bad president. That's part of what Washington is referring to in that second inaugural. The thing that worked, I think, is something very different. It's we the people, through elections, through popular organizing, reclaiming our democratic constitution.

We can, on the one hand, have hope and take solace in the newspaper editors who fought back against Adams, and Douglass, who I've mentioned repeatedly, who fought back against Buchanan and Johnson, and in William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells and Sadie Alexander, who fought against 20th century white supremacy. It's not inevitable. I think that's what I'd want to emphasize. That's the point of the book that we have not recovered from Nixon.

Ellsberg, the members of this grand jury didn't succeed in indicting that president. He stepped down, but he was never prosecuted. It's not inevitable. It's really up to us, as we the people, to take inspiration, to see the possibilities and the hope but we also might fail and that's also the lesson of the book. That warning that I began with of Patrick Henry, the revolutionary hero, who thought about the danger of the presidency, we might fail and democracy might collapse if we don't take seriously the example of these previous heroes.

Alison Stewart: Your book ends on January 6, 2021. What do you want people to think about as they decide who they're going to cast their ballot for?

Corey Brettschneider: There really is a threat to democracy right now, and I don't hide the ball when it comes to that. January 6 was a paradigm of an attempt to destroy our democracy. It wasn't just the insurrection at the Capitol and the violence there as serious as that was, it was that that was combined with a threat to the vice president, a demand that he not certify electoral votes and that they keep Trump in power. That was an attempted self-coup.

Adams, it turns out, tried it too, that he had a plot to deny the certification of electoral votes, to use the fragility of the electoral college to stay in power. It was discovered and exposed then, and of course, January 6 didn't work, but it could have. All of these threats to democracy could have worked out. Now, we've had elections, like the election of 1800, the defeat of Adams by Jefferson, which I mentioned. We also had the election of 1868, the election of Grant over a white supremacist, at the time, the Democratic party.

Those were elections in which democracy was really recovered. That's what this election is. The current election is about the threat to democracy. A person who in January 6 threatened to self-coup and a candidate who certainly is promising and has the hope of restoring it. That's what I want Americans and listeners to realize. That we live in a country which really could be vulnerable to the destruction of democracy and our past shows that, but it also shows the hope for the future.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. Our very first Get Political. Cory Brettschneider, Brown professor of politics and constitutional law scholar, thank you for coming in studio.

Corey Brettschneider: Thanks so much for having me, for reading the book, and for this great conversation.

 

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