Q. Describe the state of the nation in the winter of 1932-33? 

A. Well, they called it “the interregnum of despair.” In those days the president wasn’t sworn in until March 4, and it was a very long period of time as the country slipped lower and lower. The crash had taken place of course in 1929, but it had taken a while before we were mired in the Depression. And at its bottom, which it was in this period, unemployment was 25 percent, but that actually underestimated it. You had the stock market down about 90 percent at the bottom. You had farm foreclosures and home foreclosures all over the country. Most of all you had a banking crisis, which had built slowly and then erupted after the first of the year, 1933. Pretty much every day when you picked up the newspaper banks were folding and closing their doors. About 10,000 banks went out of business. Many of these were small banks, but people depended on them, and there was no deposit insurance, so you were wiped out if you happened to put your money in the wrong bank.

There was a mental depression that was every bit as bad as the economic one. I think we’re starting to understand now what that feels like—this sense of tremendous fear and uncertainty about the future. Without food stamps, there was also rampant fear about putting food on the table. So in some ways, when Roosevelt said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” it wasn’t quite right. It was a wonderful line, but it wasn’t right because if you were worried about putting food on the table, that was a real fear, not an imaginary one. Read More

Q: Let’s start with a definition. What exactly do you mean when you talk about “liberalism”?

A: I see the liberal idea as one of autonomy. We should be in charge of our lives. Crucial decisions about how we should live properly belong to us, and are not determined by God or written in our genes. What’s good for one person has to be good for every person. If we’re talking about a society in which only a few lead an autonomous life, that’s not a liberal society.

In some ways, liberalism is the sort of automatic by-product of all the forces we call modernity—industrialization, urbanization, cosmopolitanism. These produce a world in which self-directedness or autonomy become the only way to live.

Q: That sounds like something a lot of people could get behind. But you write that the book grew out of a sense that liberalism needed defending. From what or whom?

A: One of the places where I see the liberal idea really threatened is in sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, whatever you want to call it. The bestseller lists are dominated by books that tell us how we always make the wrong choices. That’s on the left end of the spectrum. Then you have this revival of conservative religion in the United States, which says that God chooses these things. I’ve found the need to defend the liberal idea against both science and religion. Read More

Interview by Paul Gleason for Progressive Book Club

Q: When did you start to write The Unforgiving Minute?

A: When I returned from Afghanistan I was assigned to the Old Guard, a unit right outside Arlington National Cemetery. It kept triggering a lot of memories—some of them painful—from Afghanistan and of the folks we had left behind. I wanted to write those things down as a way of taking command of the painful experience, rather than letting it intrude on me when I didn’t want it to.

Q: Has it helped you deal with the things you saw?

A: It helped me come to a degree of closure, and helped me to communicate with the other guys from my platoon. In many ways our memories and recollections conflicted. I was the one person who could sit down with all the maps and radio logs and lay out a chronology. And it gave me a vehicle for opening up correspondence with Evan O’Neill’s parents. He was a private in our platoon who was killed in that firefight just three days after arriving. I had a hard time mustering the courage to speak with his parents, until I finally had a manuscript I could share with them. I went up to visit them in Andover and had no idea how they were going to react. They told me a couple of things. First, they said, It’s not your fault. I can understand that intellectually and rationally, but emotionally it was something that took a lot longer. I sort of needed their forgiveness. Second, they said, Thank you for writing this book. No one is dead until they’re forgotten, and by capturing this Evan’s memory will persist. Read More

Q. You write that American civilization is “a palimpsest of world experience” but also unique in world history. What’s distinctive and what’s inherited?

A. The United States has been from the beginning a nation of immigrants that is open to foreign ideas and lawful people.

Q. What are the most important currents that fed into American civilization?

A. European ideas.

Q. You describe American civilization as utopian and cosmopolitan. What do you mean by that?

A. Because America is cosmopolitan and free to absorb world ideas as well as freedom for its people it strives toward a utopian condition. It is not finished yet.

Q. In Beyond the Revolution you are writing consciously against a tradition of historical writing that defines American civilization in terms of the open frontier. How did you come to disagree with that view?

A. The frontier offered a vast area for population but intellectually the ideas germinated in the east where communications were more accessible.  In “Army Exploration in the American West,” I showed that the federal government laid out the ways west and the army built outposts that became towns and cities. Read More

Q:  In Engaging the Muslim World you set out to debunk myths and misconceptions about the Muslim world.  Talk about a few.

A: I think there was an attempt by politicians and pundits, especially after September 11th, to reconfigure the Muslim world as a kind of monolithic block. And of course the Muslim world is not monolithic.  Nor is it unrelentingly hostile to the United States; in fact, I can’t think of another culture region outside Europe that has as many active allies as the Middle East does or as the Muslim world does.

Q:  You have a chapter titled “The Wahhabi Myth,” referring to the puritanical strain of Islam most prevalent in Saudi Arabia. What is the Wahhabi myth?

A: The thing I was concerned to dispel [in that chapter] is the idea of Wahhabism as some sort of special nexus for the rise of Muslim terrorism or radicalism.  I can’t find a stronger connection between the Wahhabi tradition and the terrorist groups than I can with regard to the Sunni Muslims of say Egypt or Syria or the Shiites of southern Lebanon or Iraq and Iran. Often nowadays in Washington people say Wahhabi, and they really mean “terrorist.” Of course, they’re reading off Osama Bin Laden as a Saudi, but actually his family is from southern Yemen and I’m not even sure he is a Wahhabi. Read More

The fifth Summit of the Americas begins tomorrow in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The summits bring together the thirty-four democratically elected leaders whose countries comprise the Organization of American States (so no Cuba) of the Western Hemisphere to discuss common concerns and “jointly seek solutions.” The last summit, in Argentina in 2005 was a lively affair. Argentina and Brazil teamed up to derail the free trade agreement of the Americas over agricultural subsidies. Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez held a a parallel people’s summit held outside. Chavez railed at length against George W. Bush, who left early.

What should we expect from this Summit? What will the main topics of discussion be, in public and private? Will Obama change the (jarring) tone or the policy substance of US-Latin American relations? To get some answers to these questions, I asked Greg Grandin to give us a quick guide to the summit. Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and author of the excellent Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (available for $1 when you join PBC!) and the forthcoming Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Q: What’s the purpose of the Summit? Aren’t these things mostly theater?

A: Well, they were really set up to advance the integration of the Americas economically, kind of a NAFTA writ large.  They’re orchestrated—mostly protocol, already established agreements, and a lot of photo-taking and stagecraft, but there’s some room for surprises, and for substance.

Q: What will be the main topics of discussion?

A: The main topic will be, I think, the economic collapse in the global economy and outlook for growth.

Q:  This is Obama’s first summit of the Americas, of course. What kind reception can he expect, given the unpopularity of his predecessor and the fact that the current crisis was Made in America?

I think Obama is enormously popular in Latin America.  Even Fidel Castro, when that congressional delegation was visiting, said he wanted to know what he could do to help Obama! There will be good will all around, I think, but I imagine that Obama, if he was apologetic in London and France, admitting U.S. arrogance and [a degree of blame for the] financial crisis, he’ll be even more so in Latin America, because a lot of these countries have just been digging out of the hole that the twenty year disaster of neoliberalism of the Washington consensus has created and they were just beginning to not just grow over the last five years, but actually reduce inequality and reduce poverty. Read More