E265 - Texas’s Radical Roots w/ David Griscom

0:00150 years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America wherever you get your podcasts. Hey Prestigeheads, Danny here. I wanted to let you know about two upcoming book talks I have that are free to attend, but you need to RSVP to them. The first will be held on Wednesday. It's online and will be hosted by the Quinty Institute and it'll start at 9 a.m. p.s.t. 12 p.m. e.s.t. You can register for this talk at the link in the show notes. The second talk will be held on Thursday in Seattle and it's in person only. It'll be held at Elliott Bay Book Company and will start at 7 p.m. You can RSVP at the link in the show notes.

1:02Both of these events again are free because I think it's important to model a post-capitalist society. Hope you can make it and as always keep on rockin' in the free world. Hello Prestigeheads and welcome to American Prestige. I'm Danny Bessner. Here is always my friend and comrade Derek Davidson and we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today. Our old friend David, I think we're coming up on knowing each other a decade and that is of course David Griscoe. David's co-host of the podcast left reckoning. If you haven't yet checked it out, please do though I'm sure many listeners have already become listeners. He's also the author of a sub-stack named The Rattler which is about Texas politics which

2:02is what we're talking to him about today and he's also the author of the new book The Myth of Red Texas link in the show notes. So David, thanks so much for coming on the show my man. Hey, I'm really, really happy to be here. So I was thinking we will of course talk about the book but I wanted to talk a little bit about Texas politics today because this is one of the major issues of American politics. Texas has oftentimes been the center of national politics it will likely remain so in the future George W. Bush came from Texas many important political figures come from Texas. So what is the state of Texas politics today? Long time, blue state, LBJ then became a red state, long time red state. Now is it a purple state? What is Texas today? What are the major issues facing people which I think ironically will help us provide context for understanding the book itself. So Texas politics go. Yeah, I mean there's a lot there. I mean so Texas right now I'll answer the first question up top.

3:06Is it becoming a purple state? Not really yet. It could be but a lot of the fantasies that if you've talked to anybody about Texas politics over the past few decades they'll tell you a couple of bad time stories. One of them is the demographics is Destiny which is the idea that as Anglos declined as the majority population Texas white people that rising Hispanic population would turn Texas into a democratic state. But that was a very much a racial senseless way of looking at politics and as we've seen Hispanic voters are just as willing as their point of view. David, come on the democratic party doesn't need to do anything. They can just wait for the demographics and everything will be fine and it'll be that way forever. Come on man like let's let's get with the program here. I mean it definitely made a lot of people some money. A lot of consultants got a lot of money by pitching kind of bold ideas. That's awesome to get money for pitching. Don't do anything. It's going to be fine. Just wait 15 years. All the white people are going to die off and then we have it's big it'll be great. And you get paid for that.

4:06That's perfect. Well, I mean this is a I think the problem everywhere too is that like you know you get a lot of money losing campaigns and especially in Texas I mean even for losing race they're raising so much money and that doesn't just get lit on fire and maybe in a metaphorical sense it does but that goes into people's bank accounts and you know they're fairly well off. So there's like a kind of perversive sense we've actually in some ways wrong the democratic party consultant class but you know this idea that demographics were going to change Texas I think was totally wrong and what it meant was that sense Texas went to the Republican party which no democratic is one state wise as 1994 that you know the democratic party has is completely hollow. Now that's an exciting thing I think if you want change politics because it means that the apparatus is kind of weak but that's why I say like you know there's nothing really showing that it might be a purple state. Tellerie Gump show will get it to him in a second but you know he's obviously got people excited for a lot of legitimate reasons but the big issues in Texas I mean one it's effectively a one party state that's a one party state that has been having a pretty significant civil war within the Republican Party for the past few years.

5:09There is that kind of Bush Republican that kind of won the state. I mean now they're all pershundan on grotto. You know that whole old wing of the Texas Democratic Party is seen very much as an oppositional force to this rising kind of maguang but a really a wing that is wholly dependent on a few major oil billionaire donors Tim Dunn being probably one of the most famous ones and what that is meant is that the Republican primary obviously becomes very important in the state of Texas but the things that we're getting in practice in legislation aren't really reflective of the values of Texans. You know we can have an argument about whether or not Texas is inherently conservative. I wrote a kind of a book about it but you know even if you just think if you think Texas is Republican there's different shades of being a Republican and for example you know we passed a kind of a you know school privatization voucher system here in Texas recently there was no grassroots support for this at all and in fact the only way they were able to get it done was the far right done back wing of the Republican party just

6:14shot a money cannon not any Republican who said that they wouldn't support these vouchers. You even look at things like abortion in Texas you know Texas you know as you expect you know isn't like a hardcore you know pro-choice state but it's not actually like an extreme like when you look at opinion polling it's not a state that people really support these hardline bands that we have on abortion. So we're having right now it's like a significant disconnect and then you have the economic question which Texas used to be you know. A fairly I mean for most of its history Texas is a very poor state. You have wealthy people but kind of resource extraction and now in the past few years because of corporate relocation you've seen this new class of super wealthy people moving to Texas which if let's kind of like economic problems for everyday people I mean I live in Austin as my hometown and it's unbelievably unaffordable in the city. I mean it doesn't really have the working class industry to actually like allow everyday people to keep up. You know so there's a lot of kind of things that you know that kind of plays out I think

7:14politically in a lot of you know bizarre and interesting ways people kind of you know taking their grievance at the economic question the economic difficulties that they're facing and it gets directed into whole all kinds of culture wars and things about California all the time everyone's always talking about California and how that's the recent Texas is screwed. But you know I mean it's definitely it's a very interesting place you'll never get bored kind of looking into Texas politics even even if you don't care about you know me and my family and my friends it's also filled with a lot of morons and weirdos who have a lot of pathwriters. Yeah it's the heart of America. Didn't be with some butt head take place in Texas I mean Mike Judges from Texas. Yeah I'm pretty yeah exactly and obviously King of the Hill. Yeah you know and all of that and like and I think you know Mike Judges I think you know I mean King of the Hills the phenomenal show for many reasons but I think it actually kind of so there was the there was the the world's fair taking the Dallas hosted a world's fair you know back I was maybe the 30s and that was kind of Texas is introduction to the

8:15country and that's really where they pushed this cowboy myth that's where we got big Texas this huge honking you know larger than life cowboy they have the Texas state fair. King of the Hill in many ways I think was like a second introduction to the country in Texas because it showed I think obviously the things you expected Hank Hill and all those kind of figures but also like you know the kind of like diversity of the state and also just I think the kind of characters I get forgotten because people think Texas I think of Cowboys I think of country music they think of barbecue maybe Mexican food something like that but you know Texas is a very well wild place and has a very I think interesting relationship to kind of pop culture in general just because it's so far away from everywhere else that you have people who kind of consume American media in the same way that I don't know maybe somebody in a foreign country might be kind of obsessed with American media because it feels very different that makes sense. Well absolutely and it's also very big it's so big that you're able to have like these various internal sort of spaces that I think allow it to develop like interesting cultures

9:21within you know a state itself but before we before we go to the book I'm just curious what do you think are the major questions of Texas politics going forward if it's not a purple state if it's still a red state I mean it's traditionally been an oil state obviously the United States's national governments have been doubling down on oil but this is probably not going to be the case in 50 years or maybe even sooner than that so much like Saudi Arabia is driving to re you know try to reform itself along different economic lines what do you think is the future of Texas in this moment of very significant transition. I mean I think Texas is can continue to be you know center of American politics in the US I mean it is you know there's a reason it's one the fastest growing places in the country and I always remind people that you know when immigrants are coming to the United States they're not going through Ellis Island to move into New York they're going to Houston so in many ways these kind of

10:22you know changes that Texas becoming a kind of a global powerhouse not just a national powerhouse I think are really going to affect Texas politics going forward and that's going to you know I think we're going to see some really ugly examples of that change coming up I wrote on my my sub-sack the rattle are about the Texas GOP convention the Texas GOP convention was organized around one specific principle and that was the invasion of Sharia law into Texas and I mean it is as ugly I'm usually one who tries to encourage people to become alarmist because right wingers say all kinds of discussing things this is this stuff I am genuinely worried about because we're seeing the government kind of come at people in a way that they haven't done in beyond rhetoric we're having the governor for example like they shut down like a Muslim they at the water park like people going to water park in the governor of the state of Texas got involved to get that shut down I mean it is not it doesn't take too much for us to kind of imagine where that's going to go over the next

11:23few years if the Republicans are able to kind of maintain the control that they have and I also think you know again like the big question is going to be is Texas going to be a place that looks out for everyday working class people in Texas the people who live in the cities or is it going to become like a big-ass Delaware a lot of the major things in Texas has done they set up an independent business court for big corporations to to use here obviously they're using all these kind of incentives to get companies to relocate I'm not just physically but like legally the Texas they're trying to compete with Delaware so I think those are going to be some of the big fights here and you know the the hope and the possibility for Texas maybe shifting is that as the Republican party becomes less and less interested in actually doing politics of like winning everyday folks and more and more trying to kind of open up Texas for big business there's an opportunity and I think one of the most exciting things that's happened in Texas recently was this guy Taylor who won one of the reddest counties in Texas it was a county tarant county I was support worth

12:24effectively um it went 17 points to Trump in 2024 and remett I believe won that by 14 points by like a huge margin and he did it by doing something that it's crazy the Democrats haven't tried before which is just talk about bread and butter issues how unfordable life has been you know talking about supporting schools you know the fact that he's the kind of a blue collar guy I think helped him out a lot but whenever they try to get him to do cultural war nonsense talk about you know trans kids in sports or whatever he would just immediately pivot kind of Bernie Sanders style maybe not the same effect but the same strategy to be like hey I'm kind of more worried about like the things that people my district are asking me about so that's exciting and we saw some opportunities is Taelrico when he won against Shazmy Crockett he won in the counties that Bernie Sanders won when Bernie Sanders ran in 2020 and Bernie Sanders didn't win the state of Texas but he put a pretty good showing and really what we saw Taelrico was actually expanding on that that base uh that I think a lot of progress in Texas have looked at and he did it I think by doing the

13:28opposite of what a lot of consultants tell Democrats to do which is basically run as a conservative light and which is what Colin already did and you know Taelrico I think sometimes people have got a little too excited about him I think he's maybe more left-wing or populist than he is but this is somebody who talks about billionaires this is somebody who talks about money and politics this is somebody's talking about affordability in the cost of groceries and I'll tell you you know even though you know I'm still card carrying DSA member and you know haven't joined the Democratic Party I think like that it's very encouraging to see the Democrats at least uh play ball a little bit versus what they've done the past few years. If you were to start a business right now what would you create would it be that idea that you had been working towards since you were a kid something that came to mind when you were in college or perhaps a passion project that you've always wanted to put out into the world but never quite gotten around to Shopify is the go-to place to finally put that idea you've had for the last decade into practice it's easy it's useful and it gets you where you need to go

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16:41prestige get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in canada in the UK too that's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash prestige so let's turn to the book because one of the major purposes of the book is to prove the myth that Texas is inherently conservative and correct so there's a lot of different places to start but what made you want to write this book and what did you discover that sort of pushed you into devoting so much time to discovering this left-wing history of Texas. Yeah i mean for people who know me know i'm from Texas but i you know i worked with on michael brook show with my brook so i lived in new york city for a while when i lived in new york you want to solve a triple parenthesis when i would tell people i was from Texas there'd always be this kind of moment where people would look at me and they'd wait for me to kind of apologize or to say oh i don't like this place or

17:44a rand or blah blah and that's not you know anyone who knows me know that's not the case at all for me so like part of it was just always kind of you know feeling that my people my history and my culture has been kind of left out of like the left-wing political conversation um but really what started the intellectual aspect of like really diving into this was after Bernie Sanders lost in twit-twenty after Bernie Sanders lost in 2020 and i said i really need to sit down and kind of think through what that was and that kind of drew me to looking at american populism because i think a lot of the kind of the best hopes that we had for Bernie Sanders were in the the populist movement the idea of just kind of mobilizing a late population into political action um and alone behold you know i find out that texas had like you know one of the most effective populist movements in the country in fact a populism i would argue it was founded in texas and lampassas texas um and you know i find out that the people's party in texas uh um was uh you know one of the most successful third parties uh not again not just in texas but probably in a country by many

18:46measures um at least in the kind of modern era um so that that was really the the beginning of it and then another quick story is uh um when i started reading more about texas history i wrote a piece for uh jackamon uh that megan day edited and it was about the fence cutting uh wars and the way that that story is always presented i'm sure we might be able to talk about that a little bit but that story's always presented as this is how law and order came to texas because the fence cutters which is a group of working class people who are cutting down barbed wire fences right you know to fight against the enclosure to end of the open range um the way the story is always told is like oh the texas rangers put down these like you know horrible hoodlums who are like ruining the state of texas but if you think about it fence cutting was so major in texas that if you are somebody gets a six seven generation texan you're way more likely to be related to a fence cutter than you are to a texas ranger so it's also a kind of recognition that not only that i need to convince my left uh liberal and yanky friends about texas but also i needed to reintroduce texans uh to their

19:46radical roots as well so let's start in the 19th century in the beginning of working class radical ism in texas and and why did you situate us there what were the major issues facing texan working class people at the time and how did that proceed over this turn into the 20th century yeah i mean so texas is um different from a lot other southern states in the sense that it wasn't as kind of physically decimated at the civil war but it was extremely economically devastated you also have somewhere to today this massive migration of people internal migration americans into texas all across the south uh people will write gtt and their go door gonditexas so you have this like group of poor people uh particularly um southerners uh both black and white moving in the safe texas so you have this influx of people and you also have big industry the railroads uh and a lot of european capital start buying up a significant portions of the land in texas so there's this question of like who owns the land does it belong to the people does it belong to the super rich

20:47there's this question of like the end of the frontier um which is very much a part of this is like will you be able to go out to the quote wilderness and build a life for yourself that's disappearing um but really the the the kind of thing that really ends up creating this radical generation of texans is a debt crisis texas has uh not doesn't have a lot of currency which means that there is a constant crisis in in prices and what ends up happening is most people particularly caught farmers in texas were talking a little bit about cattle but cotton really is the economy in texas at this point most people were just living in a constant cycle of debt and they were in debt to the merchant class the people who they would buy their their their seed and their tools from but also address for their wife um or fat back for cooking and just also uh internationally this southern economy takes a gigantic hit during the civil war because the south strategy is the king cotton strategy and what they tried to do is basically limit cotton exports to the united kingdom was was which was its major export market in the uk is like okay we're just going to do this in India

21:50because we're not actually going to support the Confederacy so like in the global context cotton takes the gigantic hit uh after the civil war too no that's i mean that's a great point and you know there's an aspect uh to this that is it's kind of frustrating if you look at it because you ask yourself throughout this period why don't they move on to another crop um you know one of the reasons at least for the the poor and working class people the tenant farmers is because the merchant demands they say we you know you will pay your debt and cotton so they're they're they're they're they're it's kind of pushed um and then there's also just kind of cultural and knowledge based reasons like this is what we grow here um but you know this this crisis leads people to start organizing themselves um into kind of political organizations the farmers alliance uh was founded in lamb passes texas it's absolutely fascinating group because um they start asking themselves this question why is it that those who work most get least and those who work least get most and they realize that like while there's a lot of pressure to maybe like modernize their techniques or change the crops at the groan they realize that they just won't behave but get ahead unless they get out of the debt

22:51system which is called the crop lean system um so first they start arguing for cooperatives and to create their own kind of like competing cooperative economy so they would have cooperatively run stores and they would sell collectively but the the the the the the merchant class and the banking class they just do a capital strike effectively they won't sell them goods and they won't uh let get the these groups credit um so the farmers realize that they're probably going to have to get the state involved if they want this to happen the government is got to get involved so that leads them uh to get into into politics and all this again is happening at this like wild time where the west is changing the cow drives are changing i read about the great cowboy strike which is this incredible moment in texas history um there's offense cutting wars so there's also in addition to like this kind of base economic uh thing going on there's also just like this this kind of um the eruption going on of all these different versions of like working class revolt and rebellion uh to the new status quo so this is obviously a moment of gigantic transition um for texas one thing

23:54that i want to talk about before we talk about the farmers alliance was like everyone has this image of of the cowboy but but texas is actually much more diverse than maybe people in in vision particularly give it you know this is like you said there's not only the the state fair but there's also hollywood uh and you know the western being the major film in the middle of the 20th century really like creates the image so like who were these people but what do we know about yeah well i mean you know and cowboying work is going to change the region to region so the vast majority of cowboys you know this is a a poor working class job um obviously you know there's a lot of poor whites are doing this but as people know um most of the cowboy in culture comes from the vicaro culture it comes from spain it comes from mexico and by extension i mean in a fascinating way it actually goes all the way to north africa um so it's it's a fascinating kind of convergence of cultures and historical accidents um you know that kind of create this very specific way of working

24:59cattle working cattle on horseback that's what makes it different there's obviously other places that that raised cattle but in texas in spain and in mexico the kind of working it on on on the horseback was a very specific development so um you know in east texas and south texas it's extremely diverse um you have a lot of black cowboys you have a lot of Hispanic cowboys um especially in the border regions as well um kind of you know kind of a lot of cross-border aspects going on um in texas in the panhandle intended to be a fair about fair amount wider and that was just because of the the flows of people were coming from like the midwest more so um but i would just also note that i think one thing that support to remember about the cowboy work this is highly collective work the idea of like the lone man on the lone ranger version i mean they work cowboy have a you don't see these people in westerns working cattle very often and there's a reason for that most of of the cattle work was done collectively um it kind of large groups um and for people who

25:59were what we were called cow punchers cowboys um you also had um it was very transient work so people kind of give it a go um so you had a lot of people who were fairly green uh doing this work which is similar today to like what we see with amazon and other industries um is one of the reasons it was kind of hard to organize this because there was an assumption for most people that they would you know maybe only do it for season or two so let's speak about organization um and let's speak in particular about the farmers alliance and how does that come to be and how does that um type of organization reflect distinctly texan patterns of organization and how does it relate to other types of labor organizing that's going on around this time yeah so um the farmers alliance is founded in lampassist texas which is a short drive from here in austin very much central texas um and as i said before it was an organization that first started out as a kind of an investigation as to why people were in the cycle that um there are other groups that they were competing with

27:01at the grain is one of them people might have heard about before um well i what i think makes the farmers alliance different from these other groups is it very quickly kind of um starts to develop if not like a proper class language at least like a class perspective a lot of these other organizations while they were like fraternal organizations they were very much like looking at people as like individuals all right this is what you should do you should be kind of a proper person you know you should you have good uh you know practices in home and in that word um while the the farmers alliance had a bit of that um but eventually starts to realize as i said again that like this is probably going to be needed to take on uh collectively um in addition to the cooperative stuff that i noted before i think one thing that's really interesting about the farmers alliance uh was their usage of things called traveling lecturers um so they would hire people and they would send them across not just texas but the us um because again the farmers alliance is founded in texas but it's really the kind of precursor to populism they send these lecturers all across the country and they go into small towns and they start talking to them about the alliance um about the

28:05cooperatives um about all these things they can do to kind of improve their lives and that allows it to grow exponentially not just again across texas but across the south um and as this is going on there is this political question and one of the things that's interesting about the farmers' alliance as an organization that also you see in populism is that it's not a proper like Marxist class organization obviously um because you have wealthy people maybe they're not the super elite but you have people who like feel you know a solidarity with the other farmers but they're you know more comfortable so this is always a kind of attention within the organization particularly when it comes to politics the wealthier um the more conservative and membership of the farmers' alliance really doesn't want to get involved in politics and then when it does it just wants to be kind of a pressure group on the democratic party um but almost from the very beginning there's a lot of membership in the farmers alliance particularly its radical membership we're just saying we need to not only be involved in politics but we need to have a third party they start meeting with other groups like the Knights of Labor which people are probably familiar with one of the countries

29:08um done first labor unions and what's really interesting about that and I think what's really interesting about the Texas case is that these farmers start to align themselves with industrial workers they start to align themselves with railroad workers and my book is probably only book on Texas history that has like a long quotation of Karl Kalsky in it um the reason for that is because a lot of times uh socialist did not see um you know farmers as proletarian as possible of being like proletarian subjects but as what's happening in the southern uh economy in particularly in Texas is that um you know the weight of this work is is going it really is becoming more and more akin to wage work and I think that the the farmers understood this so they start aligning themselves with the railroad workers and when the railroad workers go on strike against the uh you know the odious gould um the farmers actually deliver food to the striking workers so um unlike a lot of other places where the kind of the peasant class or the farming class is antagonistic to industry

30:10um in Texas actually there is this interesting solidarity um and you see this in some of the early founding documents of the farmers alliance like the cleaver demands uh where the farmers they list themselves as farmers and members of of the working class like they're using this kind of language very early on so let's advance things and and talk about what happens here the farmers alliance sort of develops into or feeds into uh the rise of the people's party or the populist party toward the late 1800s how does that process unfold yeah i mean so it starts with i would argue the cleaver and demands and the cleaver and demands are is the set of demands uh that one of the early radicals in the farmers alliance movement uh puts forward um he's rebuved to buy the party by the farmer alliance's leadership and by the newspaper men but he was somebody who worked very very closely uh with uh uh with with the farmers so they start talking about capitalism they start talking about the importance of unions they start talking about the needs for collective ownership

31:11and they end up founding the people's party um in the early 1890s um and it's a very interesting group so it brings in obviously the farmers but they also do very well uh in areas where there were lots of nights of labor so they're doing well in industrial areas it also incorporates black people into in the people's party i'm i should note that during this whole period of the farmers alliance there's another organization called the colored farmers alliance uh which was doing uh similar work uh amongst the black community and there's a whole world that we could get into there but uh just note that and you know the people's party i think is interesting because uh you can look at the way that they kind of are interacting with African-Americans in Texas um and obviously there's a lot to be desired um but this was also probably only political organization that was interested in looking out for black people in any serious way at this point the Republican Party of Texas is just a pure party of business uh you have what's called the lily white movement um and the idea of that is to kind of kick out all the black membership uh black people do have the right to go to the name lily white on the nose right right i mean i like a name that tells you what it what it is right

32:16i mean it tells you what it's about no hundred percent um so you know you have these interesting members though uh from the black community you have melvin wade who is this like very fascinating leader nice of labor leader black man um and he asks at the founding convention what she was in attendance of you know where is like where what is the you know the people's party kind of plan plan for for black people um and the uh one of the leaders um h stump ashby who is a former rodeo clown uh this should be many other fun jobs before i gave a speech about how we're pushing a battlefield in which many errors have been made in the past and he makes this argument for white black solidarity wade believes that convention unconvinced but over the next couple of years because the people's party is winning and doing stuff melvin wade becomes a very important member of the populist movement uh there's also a black member uh james b reiner uh who is if melvin wade was the kind of the city an industrial working class uh member of of the kind of black text and political leadership a reiner was the country uh the the country guide he would go and give these incredible speeches

33:18all across texas and across the south um but almost immediately this becomes a political force first within the democratic party and rather democratic party we get the railroad commission of texas uh which and we know which kind of was a very significant organization in regulating uh you know corporations here um but in very the the populist very quickly um kind of get attacked by the leadership of the democratic party because they've realized that this is a threat to them um so so the populist in just a few short years and of becoming uh the second major political party in texas and in 1896 just a few years after their founding i would argue as with many other scholars uh that the elections in texas were rigged and the texas in a texan won the gubernatorial election but the democrats uh stuffed the ballot boxes uh burned them and also threatened uh and attack people at the polling places um populism in texas lasts way longer than it does in other places everyone probably knows our boy um when you abstinence marine and his cross of gold speech uh where he

34:22did by the way put his arms out uh in the shape of cross when he delivered that speech um but texans refused uh the texas delegation refused to endorse him and they fought very hard against fusing with the democratic party um so you know texas actually has this very interesting thing where populism was not a movement that was defeated politically um in many ways texas had this kind of revolt from the bottom early on in in its history of it was really the democratic establishment of powers that be that refused to seat them um and probably the more things change right yeah i mean i mean this was these were brutal i mean i read in the book about you know a gun fighting grimes county texas uh you know this wasn't just like oh there's some irregularities here i mean these are thugs showing up uh to the polling places with sick shooters and saying you know will come at you so um you know the the poppies movement i think has influenced texas culture and political culture a lot uh but i also think you know it's created a kind of a paranoia um or maybe a depression in texas politics in the sense that like hey you could win but it doesn't really matter

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36:29mint mobile dot com slash american prestige cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mint mobile dot com slash american prestige that's it there's no catch up front payment of $45 for three months $90 for six months or $180 for 12 months plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy includes up to 20 gigabytes hotspot capable device required availability speed and coverage varies see mint mobile dot com right now news and politics are moving awfully fast it can feel overwhelming to say the least i'm evan osnos a staff writer for the new yorker on the political scene podcast we slow things down to understand how power really operates in washington dc and what it means for you my co-hosts jane mayor and susan glass or an i have decades of reporting experience and every friday we have conversations

37:31with insiders and experts to understand the forces remaking america join us friday's for the washington roundtable from the political scene on mondays and wednesdays you can also hear insightful episodes from our new yorker colleagues david remnick and tyler foggett available wherever you get your podcasts so let's let's move on to socialism so um obviously in the imagination socialism is a product of the urban north elites uh not not a not a late the urban north immigrant world where many people are exiled from europe in the latter half of the 19th century they come to the big cities in the northeast uh they are uh help organized socialist and communists and other marxist-esque movements um but but you're resiguating the

38:32history of socialism at least partially in texas and something that you and i have talked about there was a moment when marx almost moved to texas and i think there'd be a great graphic novel sort of a hinge point where marx does move to texas and he starts the you know texas socialist revolution in the 1850s um in 1860s but that unfortunately didn't happen but why did you tell us about texas socialism where does it come from how does it relate to what's going on in the larger world of socialism and then we should place it in the context of the of the socialist party which is getting off the ground also in the united states at this turn of the century moment yeah and i think we should do that book dandy um so texas socialism was interesting i mean there's kind of two tracks here uh one is the german track this would be the car mark's track there is this radical group of germans very close to me actually here in austin in place like friday spurg and comfort texas um and there are people who kind of come after the the failed 1848 they're the they're the forty-eighters and they bring this kind of radical oftentimes utopian version of socialism um to texas um so there is this kind of uh you know check and german

39:39community in texas that was very very socialist um you know what's it's interesting the way it develops because on one level um you know people kind of look at that and say well that's the genealogy and that's the history but i would kind of see it as something that's happening in addition to a radicalization of the um like american or the southerners removing the texas who are also coming towards a socialist party a lot of the focus of socialist party history in the us tends to like really look at the european influence um which is undoubtedly very important but i think it was at least interesting about texas is that they did end up bringing in a lot of uh again people who were born in in the us uh versus people in these kind of more isolated german communities into the socialist party so you know uh so so there's the german contingent and then there's a lot of people who just go through the experience of populism they go through the experience of populism and by the way uh for people who um you know one thing that's really fun about the book one thing i really like doing the book so i try to put these things in the words of these people as much as possible and we're really lucky to have an incredible database of

40:42newspapers so you know a lot of the stuff that is in this book is just you know me quoting at length you know some of these newspaper articles and people with the populist movement were using words like socialism they were using words like capitalism and there was just this recognition that they needed to kind of hone in on capitalism as like the fundamental uh crisis of democracy um so there's this version of kind of like populist socialism let's say and there's incredible later labor leader mart irons you know we're always talking complaining about the PMC and how you know the leftist to university of james um this is like a railroad worker um you know not an educated man and he has this very academic metaphor for populism and socialism where he says uh populists are like juniors and socialists are seniors uh but uh you know this uh this idea basically says there are a lot of people basically come through populism to be socialist including Eugene Debs uh Eugene Debs uh you know for a long time uh you know resisted even kind of radical labor organizing he believes in

41:42labor peace um you know he goes through this period of populism people are really trying to encourage him to maybe be the leader of the populist movement he refuses um but after seeing what happens with the brutality of the railroad companies Debs comes to socialism um and I think Debs there's an interesting dynamic in the socialist party that's kind of outside the mouths of Texas but there always was this kind of tension between this european immigrant Marxist uh contingent and socialist party and Debs because Debs was seen as like an unsophisticated American you can never really understand uh you know social theory and just to give people like a sense of this like in New York City where there was a fairly large socialist movement especially in the 1890s the Germans refused to print their papers in english because they they thought that the Americans and the english speakers were way too uh you know silly and stupid and trivial to be able to understand this kind of thing uh you know which who knows i don't speak german maybe i'd understand socialism better if i did but it's not a good way to build a political party if you're

42:44just gonna make it a kind of an ethnic regional thing so this is a tension that it just exists within the socialist party that i think is worth um thinking about and i mean um there's a lot to get into so there's the rebel um which is the newspaper or the Texas uh of of the Texas socialist party has an incredible tagline um it says the the the powerful only look mighty to us because we are on our knees yeah i did want to so how does the sort of Confederate culture play into this because you have this like the rebel you know like and and this becomes actually i i would say a theme in 20th century american history really until the last ten or fifteen years where like the Confederate flag is it's not a symbol it is a symbol of racism and it is used by the Ku Klux Klan it is used by the neo nazis but it is also it is also a symbol of general rebellion you know like i guess linoid skin hurt it's kind of the sort of liminal space there um but but how does this sort of Confederate culture of rebellion and anti-establishmentarian thinking that basically evacuates the pro-slavery element of the Confederacy play into you know the the fact that a socialist

43:46paper is using clearly Confederate discourse well i don't know if i would work yeah i don't know i would say i don't know if i would say the rebel because i think this is something that kind of pops up to me as a bottom reader um i don't think that the rebel the intention there was actually to to use it in the sense of like a rebel in this as a Confederate i think that they just had a different meeting there but Danny i think this is an interesting thing that exists in both the populist and the socialist movement is you have people who were Confederate veterans in both of these movements um and i and i think that that is a like it's a very interesting thing um because there is a kind of a language of like you know honor and gallantry and also people not you know getting what was due to them people who have like sacrificed the blood for the country uh not being respected to go back to the populist movement i mean there's a lot of really fascinating characters there's one guy who is a Confederate veteran um who ends up becoming one of the leaders of the uh the the colored farmers alliance um this is a wild thing this guy who fought for slavery fought for the Confederacy ends up you know dedicating his life uh fighting for black political representation so like that's

44:51kind of floating around um i think for sure i think in texas specifically with tom hiki he was the leader of the texas socials party uh did um as well and he was he was irish um he would really look to the texas revolution the texas revolutionary language was a big kind of uh metaphor um or or kind of touchpoint um in that in that movement for sure um but you know i mean uh one of the covington hall who's like one of the great he's like this poet um he was he got elected leader of like the sons of Confederate veterans uh effectively in in noralans and the first thing that he does is try to extend membership to black to black people and he gets kicked out of the organization so you know the the the Confederates that is certainly like throughout uh this period um and i do think that you're you're totally right to kind of note that there are some overtures too like this idea of like we've bucked the trend before like we stood up against the government before maybe we could do it again yet you know so the rebel ends up becoming a massive uh newspaper in texas and uh it has

45:56a has a a subscription that i think would make jack abin today very proud um and um it's uh the newspaper culture i think is really interesting because it allows the parody to really grow and expand into rural areas because you were able to kind of um have a chapter in a community that's maybe kind of geographically isolated from the rest of the state um but that kind of um decentralized organization creates major problems for them in the 1910s when uh the circuit cracked out on so one of the things that you focus on is how um the peculiar characteristic of texas socialism is this religious character you know i mean obviously this is a religious country this is a deep theme of american history broadly speaking which is very different from the official atheism of other socialist parties and particularly the communist party that takes over the soviet union in 1917 um so could you talk a little bit about the religious character because i also think it's

46:56actually quite important because i think religious socialism will be an important idiom in the united states in order to have socialism spread and and this is not um for various historical reasons there was a powerful religious socialist element even in in the 20s and the 30s in europe like i think paul tillic was a famous religious socialist so this is this is actually there there is a tradition here but can you talk about it in the context of texas and also i'd love to hear thoughts on that question today as as well yeah i mean i'll just say um i think that one of the things that made the religious socialism so effective was was the fact that it allowed people to speak a common language there was just a common understanding and this was a grammar that meant something to other people um so i mean i think maybe one of the best ways to introduce the texas religious socialism is by talking about one of my favorite characters in the book uh reverend gg hamilton reverend gg hamilton uh is invited to go to a series of debates against Stanley Clark

48:00who was a socialist and to debate communism versus socialism and hamilton took the position that socialism was not good particularly because it encouraged people to practice free love once they were very worked up with him at the time um so he goes and he engages in these debates across texas and oklahoma and i think it was on the second or maybe it was a third debate after hearing the arguments and being given a set of uh religious arguments for socialism hamilton goes and reads it and he converts on stage to socialism and the paraphrase him he says um i love this because this is the last person we can verify was actually changed his mind in the interview i never put the document seriously by the veil i think you're 100% right and i mean it must have been an incredible scene because he goes up on stage and he converts and he says um he's a paraphrase and he says well socialist air will they make mistakes of course they're only human but i would

49:03rather stand with the masses then with the masters which i just think is such a beautiful line um and then he goes on to write the five-minute sermon in the rebel so every week there would be uh you know a religious sermon from him connecting socialism to Christianity and i will just say this really quick because i think some people have really really misidentified texas and southern socialism and its religious elements as maybe not being materialist these people the arguments that you can read in the rebel people can go read them themselves you don't have to rely on me are very sophisticated like they are extremely sophisticated Marxist debates uh that i would argue are probably more sophisticated than what you're seeing in a typical dsa meeting these days um so the idea that because these people were religious they didn't understand Marx i think is kind of laughable but yeah this this religious element is really important using devs of course uses the the gospel a lot in his speeches and i think it adds this very unique thing that existed in texas called the encampments which are just these incredible gatherings of literally thousands of people in the summer this time of year and they would uh you know go out and they would listen to

50:09sermons from people like gg hamilton they would listen to mother jones or uh gg devs speak um they would um learn about socialism and they would e-barbeque advance and you know spend the the summer uh with other members of the socialist party and interestingly enough they also had mass literacy campaign so there are people in texas um you know who's you know their granddaddy or their great might have learned to read at texas socials party a camman and they happened all across the state it was a really interesting kind of festival like gathering and i think you know to talk about the contemporary stuff Danny i think these are the kind of things that we are certainly missing on our side today it's one of those things you know it's it kind of glib to say like oh we should make it more fun and interesting of course man you know what i mean well it is very true that this was a lot of fun so this is my big question when i think about the religious particularly the evangelical movement which like arguably does have like socialist impulses but the fact that since the 70s anti abortion politics has become so central to the movement just seems like a such a

51:11difficult obstacle to overcome because otherwise you could see like clear inroads and you know you could have like american ideas about liberty if you want to live a trad life thing that's fine but i just don't see how any socialist could support reproductive unfree them so that that to me is like how do you get over that one because like that that's the big problem to me well you know it's interesting i will just say in this context and one thing that i've come across not just in texas but also my next project i'm working on something on the center of farmer's union which is like this massive union in the new deal era in south very interesting aspect is the way that preachers evangelical preachers were kind of paid off by the ruling class at this time this happens texas a lot they had these kind of anti encampments where they bring a conservative preacher in and he would say hey the reason that you're poor is because you're sinning and you need to stop sinning and then you'll be rich like me like it's kind of like a very very explicit version of prosperity gospel not the nice one but we get to bear with people like jolos thing you know so there's an

52:11aspect to i think that evangelical Christianity didn't just kind of become right wing i think there kind of a concerted project at least in the south to use of to kind of you know amplify of certain version of christian you know conservative Christianity i mean today i mean look there's plenty of you know new denominational churches and stuff that are trying to work around so i think that really what would need to happen is there would need to be movements that were attracting normal people every day people into them for that to maybe be reflected in the religion if that makes sense like you know the fact it was like the the socialist preachers they became socials because a lot of their flock were becoming socials and i think that that's probably what would be needed here but you know it's been a lot of times it's i've been in sawdust suddenly service so maybe maybe i'm missing out so david what was the texas program how does this emerge from the socialist party what is it and why does it why is it part of the success story or to the extent that there was

53:16a success story for the socialist party in the in the 1910s yeah i mean it's an interesting divide within within the socials party effectively the the texas program argued for a more decentralized way of organizing this was something that was very effective for for texas it allowed them to kind of build up a lot of strength this again and just to note like texas was one of the largest socials parties some people say it was a second some people say it was a third it depends on if like if you count like official membership or votes are but this was a very significant socials movement it's not just fast-saint because it happened in texas it was a big one so the texas program really kind of sets a division i think within the national party where texas and particularly a lot of the western and southern states wanted to have a little bit more freedom they wanted to be able to do things like for example you know one of the things that's fundamental to this movement is the fact that it has ten of farmers in it and that means people who might aspire to or might own land on some level particularly the northeast and

54:22even some of the Midwestern socialist did not see this as like a kind of a viable group to organize with so they wanted to put things in the platform that kind of like were anti-farm or anti-dismar landholders and the texas program and the texas socials are saying like no the conditions you're totally different and like without getting to in the weeds of like those specific arguments you should understand it's like should a socials party be able to like you know Bob and weave with different conditions that like they might need to adapt for the specific conditions that exist in Louisiana or in texas or should you have a very strict kind of national line on these kind of things um and this is i think the the period of the 1910s on the national level for the socials party i mean these are the kind of fights that are happening you also have the iw the industrial workers of the world um you know big bell haywood gets kicked out of the socials party because of his positions on sabotage um and there is this kind of tension between i think maybe the more radical

55:23of version of uh you know us socialism that's kind of developing at this period and the fairly pragmatic one i mean you know we've been talking a lot about the sewer socialists in jackman world but just for people like the sewer socialists and tom hickey and the the texas breads were um at odds with each other so what happens to texas socialism over over the teens in the 20s and and how does it come apart during the new deal so i think the most fascinating part of this story there there's a few of them um and just encourage people to read the book about the who timber workers is like a big expansion into like black membership for the texas socials party um and then their relationship with the um mexican revolution i bring both of these up because these kind of lead into the crisis in texas um because texas for a long time that the movement this early decade was a wider movement than the populace movement but in the 1910s it starts to grow within the black

56:25community with with the brotherhood of the timber workers and then what's the mexican revolution happens uh the texas socialists are very favorable to it um and it's a really fascinating moment because uh you see a lot of the bigotry that did exist within the texas socials party and there's the texas socials movement get immediately challenged there's an incredible line in the rebel um from from somebody you know lambasting people who use i won't say them here but derockatory names for for mexicans and he said like no these are real men these people are doing the revolution the thing that you only talk about like you have you know you you you you you would be good on you to learn uh for somebody like this who's a real man and there's a whole fascinating aspect to this history too by the way uh about manhood um the way that that's used it's a constantly invoked um anyways the the mexican revolution really changes the kind of uh relationship of the texas socials party to his spanic membership um as well as really starts to worry the government about this group um so there's like challenges and questions about whether or not the texas social

57:26sort of like running guns across the border uh to help out the mexican revolutionaries um so there's a lot of surveillance that starts coming down amongst uh upon the texas socials party another uh real crisis here is uh world war one uh so the texas socialists much like the socials party in the national level um was very much against um was very much against uh the war and they were um they you know they're advocating for people to like oppose being conscriptive conscripted and there's a lot of really kind of radical maybe illegal activities happening in Oklahoma uh to this effect but the important aspect is that the texas socialist party the rebel was the first newspaper that was shut down under the espionage act and tom hiki gets arrested by a group of texas rangers um the texas uh the rebel it's completely shut down they're not allowed to send it out and that effectively ends the texas socials party um you know it's it's a kind of cruel

58:29irony the thing that allowed them to really grow was the fact that they were so decentralized and that they used the newspaper as their kind of communication hoe once that got shut down everybody was isolated and they didn't have that kind of central organization that was necessary and it's obviously even worse in texas because it was such a big place you know you're you've effectively cut off communication here they sort of resting a lot of the members as well um so the story of texas socialism is not again that it gets uh defeated politically it gets made illegal um and you know the the period of the 20s is kind of ugly they kind of tried to build up a nine non-partisan league um and all these other kind of new ways to kind of revive and uh create a new version of the texas socials movement none of them really take off uh tom hiki that goes to florida you know it's just like people kind of like disappear um and and hide out there's a group of socialists who uh end up becoming oil millionaires of out of the dan handle uh they buy some land and they they strike oil on it and they kind of fall out of political activity um

59:29but there is this kind of tradition that does keep up with in membership and the way i and the historical part of the book is by telling the story of amitena yuka um who's one of the great labor leaders in texas in american history um and she grows up she becomes a member of the communist party but she grows up listening to veterans of the texas socials party giving stump speeches in san and tonyo and that's where they kind of through line to her and the resistance that continues um in that period of time but i mean just to to you know to bring this up i mean this is one of the themes of of my book here um is that yes these movements don't win but in each generation there is another challenged capitals there is another kind of fight and what ends up happening um with the end of the socials party and then later with the red scare is that that connection gets ultimately severed hell even amitena yuka um when she's written about today's often times spoken about not as communist not as a labor leader but as like a mexican-american-african uh man i don't mean to take away

1:00:30like her fights against like the racism bigotry at her time but you can see how there's a shift in the way that people are talking about and remembering these figures uh not so much for their you know fights against capitalism uh but you know for uh you know a bunch of other uh reasons of things that they want to highlight but what will david we'll closing the banks and racism i don't think so does it's a message this is the theme of our show maybe um just as a closing question one of the things that i found so inspiring is that like um you've had such a great book tour and so what do you think about the prospects uh in the sense that like people are really coming out and lots of people way more than for a normal book tour and so like what do you think this suggests about the future of socialism in texas even though that it is a republican state and likely to remain so into the at least immediate future i mean i've always thought the the great hope of texas is that the democratic party and then liberalism is so weakened defeated uh that you know we might as well build a strong socialist movement here uh because you know we have an easier immediate opponent as we build strength

1:01:31to take on um the uh uh the republicans you know texas i mean one thing that's important remember texas is uh a very urban state and the vast majority of the cities here are run by uh democrats and in those cities say Antonio for example has three members of the dsa out of city council here in austin texas we have a member of uh dsa on our city council probably going to let another one this year um you know we have a membership in in corpus christian i mean i'm not going to go through all the cities but like there are like strong dsa chapters and things growing across the state um and as you said you know and this isn't to like puff me up but it's been really inspiring to go across the state and to talk to people not just in austin not just in Dallas but in places like browns uh there's a hunger for something different uh from status quo democratic party politics and i think you know when it comes to like the the longer tradition in texas i think being able to connect to that is going to be important one thing that the left is so good it has become so good at is like busting myths right i wrote a book trying to bust them as well but i hope that i left the reader

1:02:35with heroes and like other ideas and the historical tradition to hold on to i think that's going to be really important especially in texas it's a place where there's a lot of anxiety about what it means to be a texas and if texas will still be the same place and being able to say hey our ideas aren't new york city and invasion from new york city we're actually like a long standing texas tradition i think is going to be really important um last thing i'll say is that labor in texas is really on the uh not only in terms of uh you know there are attempts to kind of expand membership but they're becoming much more militant and involved in politics i think that's been a really good thing for for the state of texas texas is a state um you know then uh we have some of the most regressive labor laws on the books in in the country in fact the state government banned water breaks water break protections at the same time in texas we have laws that say that if you have a dog and you leave them outside uh you have to provide this and that for them uh it's shameful to say about a texas we treat dogs better than we treat workers um there's a lot of people who are

1:03:36really upset about it and i think there's a lot of frustration at the democratic party as well um so i think there's a lot to grow i just think that this thing that we have in texas the same thing that we're having to deal with across the country when it comes to left is like are people going to get serious about politics or do they want politics to just be a small you know side show uh social club well we've seen the new york city has been really incredible and a lot of times people i think have misread that is like wow socialism is super popular well there's a political organization there that is just like winning and has like serious um chops when it comes to a ground game um and like actually saying hey this is an organization that being involved with it can improve your life because we're gonna win political power in texas we still have the same and again this stuff is chicken and egg um but i think people need to get way more serious um about the things that really matter to people unfortunately uh some of the dsa chapters in texas went from being some of the best organized ones to in the past few years becoming uh some of them have become a little bit more focused on symbolic victories um and kind of disciplining membership

1:04:36and and base and the things like that instead of expanding it i think this is not the time to do that i think we really need to be brand people to the movement well we are a disciplined forward podcast so i'm not sure we agree with that david now i'm just kidding everyone check out david's podcast left reckoning check out the sub sack the ratler uh and of course check out the book the myth of red texas david thank you so much for joining us love to have you back again anytime yeah thank you so much really appreciate speaking with both of you all right now news and politics are moving awfully fast it can feel overwhelming to say the least

1:05:38i'm evanosnos a staff writer for the new yorker on the political scene podcast we slow things down to understand how power really operates in washington dc and what it means for you my co-hosts jane mayor and susan glass or an i have decades of reporting experience and every friday we have conversations with insiders and experts to understand the forces remaking america join us friday's for the washington roundtable from the political scene on mondays and wednesdays you can also hear insightful episodes from our new yorker colleagues david remnic and tyler foggett available wherever you get your podcasts