We steer clear of works of fiction – not only do we want our conversations to be based in facts, but it’s a hassle to dance around spoilers. Maybe like me you vaguely know that Frances Perkins is an important person in Women’s History, mostly because she was the first female to serve in the United States Cabinet, and like me, you have a blurry visual in your mind of an unsmiling, rather severe older woman who had something to do with the New Deal and the Depression. Maybe you never wondered why Franklin Roosevelt appointed her as his Secretary of Labor, or what made her so effective in identifying social injustices and doing things to rectify them.
Stephanie Dray, explained what compelled her to tell Frances Perkins story – that so many of the things we take for granted today: weekends, food and fire safety regulations, unemployment insurance, social security and so much more. Her deep research has resulted in her latest book, BECOMING MADAM SECRETARY, just out from Berkley Books. Her earlier books, many of which were NYT bestsellers, include THE WOMEN OF CHATEAU LAFAYETTE, MY DEAR HAMILTON, AMERICA’S FIRST DAUGHTER, and THE NILE TRILOGY. In BECOMING MADAM SECRETARY she uncovers the forgotten history of the intellectually brilliant, politically pragmatic and physically courageous woman, who remains the longest serving cabinet member in US History, Frances Perkins.
We spoke with Stephanie Dray via Skype on the Vernal Equinox of 2024.
Long before she became part of New York or the federal governments, Frances Perkins was a “radical” activist to investigate and reform the most lethal aspects of corporate capitalism., as when she worked aas the Director of the NY Consumers’ League in 1909. Just before the signing of the Social Security Act, Frances Perkins had been informed that her husband had escaped from the mental hospital in which he had been confined. Immediately after the signing, she had to rush to New York to try to find him for his own safety.
Not only has she been honored as a national hero with this stamp, but the Episcopal Church celebrates her as a saint in their liturgy on May 13th.
As cruel wars rage across three continents and civilian casualties soar, it is easy to forget, or perhaps never to have known, that people have been analyzing the causes of war and organizing and working for peace for a very long time. These days, the term FREE TRADE is associated with right wing free marketers and multi-national corporate globalization, but this was not the story in the 19th century. Beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the transnational peace and anti-imperialist movements of their times.
Marc-Allen Palen is an historian at the University of Exeter specializing in the intersection of British and American imperialism within the broader history of globalization since 1800. He is co-director of The History and Policy Global Economics and History Forum in London. His commentary has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC, the BBC, and the Conversation, among other international journals. He is the editor of the Imperial & Global Forum. His earlier book is The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: the Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896.
His second book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World is published by Princeton University Press. In it, he explores how political economy, gender, humanitarianism, religion and ideology have shaped global imperial expansion. He documents the evolution of thinking about the impact of trade policies with social theories and the connections made not only across the Atlantic, but around the world, linking those policies with war and peace. Hard as it may be to believe these days, by the end of 19th century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order. And they struggled, too, with rampant nationalism, protectionism and geopolitical conflict, as well as exploitation of underdeveloped regions. The more I learned about the actual history, which Dr. Palen documents, the more dismayed I was that this history has been hidden, and the more determined I became to share it. We spoke with Marc-William Palen on February 20th via Skype.
Michael J. Graetz is professor emeritus at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School. He is a leading authority on tax politics and policy, having served in the US Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy and been an expert witness on a variety of tax matters before Congressional Committees.
He has written or co-written many books, including DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS: THE FIGHT OVER TAXING INHERITED WEALTH; THE WOLF AT THE DOOR: THE MENACE OF ECONOMIC INSECURITY AND HOW TO FIGHT IT; and TRUE SECURITY: RETHINKING AMERICAN SOCIAL INSURANCE.
His latest book, is THE POWER TO DESTROY: HOW THE ANTITAX MOVEMENT HIJACKED AMERICA, published by Princeton University Press. We spoke with him via Skype on February 6, 2024.
We hear much these days about how history should be taught. Although the Civil War was fought and supposedly ended 160 years ago, after the last cannon was shot and formal surrender was signed, a new war began. We are living through it still.
Forgive me for quoting William Faulkner once again, but he said it so well, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The past may not be dead, but there were definitely efforts to bury it, and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, Howell Raines, set about over six decades to un-bury some of that past, resulting in his most recent book, SILENT CAVALRY: HOW UNION SOLDIERS FROM ALABAMA HELPED SHERMAN BURN ATLANTA – AND THEN GOT WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY, published by Crown.
Howell Raines was born in Birmingham, AL in 1943, and as you will hear, his people go way back in the hill country of northern Alabama. You can be forgiven for not knowing that they voted not to secede from the union during the Civil War, and that they were mocked with the moniker “THE FREE STATE OF WINSTON.” They had hoped to be neutral and left alone by both the Union & the Confederacy, but when the latter legislated the first military conscription in our country’s history, and ruthlessly hounded the 22 counties of northern Alabama to purloin their young men, thousands of them fled north and volunteered for the Union army, where they were formed into the bi-racial 1st Alabama Cavalry, and served with distinction. Howell Raines documents the significant role they played in restoring our union, as well as the collusion between northern and southern elites to erase their story.
Howell Raines began his journalism career, 60 years ago as a reporter for the Birmingham Post-Herald. In 1971 he became the political editor of the Atlanta Constitution. He became the NYT national correspondent based in Atlanta in 1979, becoming the Times editorial page editor in 1993 in New York City, where he was known for “the aggressive, colloquial style of his editorials.”
His books include a novel, WHISKEY MAN, set in Depression era Alabama and based roughly on his own family history; and an oral history of the civil-rights movement, MY SOUL IS RESTED: MOVEMENT DAYS IN THE DEEP SOUTH REMEMBERED. We spoke with him via Skype on January 22, 2024.
Her latest book, TRUE WEST: MYTH AND MENDING ON THE FAR SIDE OF AMERICA, was published this Fall by Torrey House Press. She received a doctorate in Environmental History from Montana State University in 2017, her dissertation focused on Mormon settlement and public land conflicts. She has studied various religious traditions over the years, with particular attention to how cultures view landscape and wildlife. The rural American west, pastoral communities of northern Mongolia, and the grasslands of East Africa have been her main areas of interest. She is the president of the Board of Directors of Wild Earth Guardians.
Although TRUE WEST focuses primarily on the intermountain west, what goes on in this region is having tremendous effect on our national politics and well-being. Just two days ago, the Colorado Supreme Court decided in favor of a suit brought by CO Republican and unaffiliated voters, working with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, against CO Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Donald J. Trump, taking advantage of a CO law that allows voters to challenge a candidate’s eligibility. In this case the eligibility was challenged under Section 3 of the 14th amendment, claiming that the former president had engaged insurrection , based on his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack by his supporters at his urging. As you will hear in this interview with Betsy Gaines Quammen, recorded in the Beyond the Deep End Studio on the Winter Solstice of 2023, extremist organizing in this region over more than a decade contributed to that insurrection. We share it with you now.
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware. In addition to being an award winning scholar, she has also been an improvisational comedian. Her 2020 TED Talk (link below) explaining how our psychology shapes our politics and how media exploit these relationships has been viewed over 2 Million times. She publishes extensively in the popular press with essays and Op-eds in outlets including Vox.com, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Her earlier book is Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States.
Her book, WRONG: HOW MEDIA, POLITICS, AND IDENTITY DRIVE OUR APPETITE FOR MISINFORMATION, was just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
As Jaime Settle, author of FRENEMIES: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA POLARIZES AMERICA, writes of it ‘Powerful, distinctive, and utterly compelling, Wrong argues that the way we satisfy our needs for comprehension, control, and community is shaped by our social identities, which are at the core of both the supply and demand for misinformation. Because politicians and the media know this fact, they behave strategically in order to structure politics through this perspective.”
We spoke with Dr. Young on November 7, 2023 via Skype.
Links to articles/videos pertinent to this interview:
In this edition of Forthright Radio our guest is journalist, author, environmentalist, Greg King. I first became aware of Greg’s work back in the late 1980s, when we who lived in the remnants of the once great redwood biome organized to protect what remained of that ecosystem from voracious predatory capitalists, who proudly vowed to “log to infinity.”
Greg King in All Species Grove 1987 (courtesy of Greg King)
Greg is the fifth generation of his family to live in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties of northern CA, – his ancestors having arrived in the 1860s and owned what was then one of the largest redwood mills, the King-Starrett mill in Monte Rio. The The King Range Mountains were named for his great-great uncle, John King, who lived north of Westport in Mendocino County, due to his hospitality to the government surveyor before his mapping that steep coastal range in the Lost Coast. Long before Greg was born, the last of the great redwood forests in Sonoma County were cut, but there were second growth stands and massive stumps of 20’ or greater diameter which served as his childhood playground. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 1985, he joined the staff of the West Sonoma County Paper, now called the Bohemian, where he won his first of two Lincoln Steffens Investigative Journalism Award.
Investigating Louisiana-Pacific’s “logging to infinity” in his neighborhood led him to the Maxxam Corporation’s hostile takeover, financed by junk bonds, of Humboldt County’s Pacific Lumber Company and the ensuing accelerated destruction of the last intact, ancient redwood groves in private hands to pay off the debt. Exploring these untouched forests with the largest, oldest trees on the planet inspired a reverence and awe unlike anything he had ever experienced. The rest, as they say, is history.
In his book, THE GHOST FOREST: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods, he describes how he left his home and promising career to devote his life to identifying and protecting those few remaining giants and the biome centered on them. He is credited with mapping the remaining groves, including The Headwaters Forest, as well as pioneering tree sitting to prevent logging of redwoods in Humboldt County.
Greg King on traverse during a tree-sit in the middle of 1,000 acre All Species Grove, September 1987. Note sleeping platform on the tree in the background, tied under the lowest branch 150′ above the forest floor. (photo by Mary Beth Nearing, courtesy of Greg King)
What might have been merely a memoir became a shocking exposé of the all too successful efforts of financiers and industrialists via their creation of the Save the Redwoods League in 1917, to subvert the growing desire of the public to protect and preserve the remaining redwoods, by promoting instead small “beauty strips” along roadways to hide devastating clearcuts. As one of the first to delve into The League’s archives at U. C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Greg followed the history back to the federal acts of the 19th century, that allowed well organized land fraud syndicates to place what had been 2 million acres of undisturbed ancient forests into private corporate hands. His research led him to the connections between the Save the Redwood League creators and the so-called “scientific racism” eugenics movement, which was so helpful to the Nazis in Germany, and which still plagues our nation even today. We spoke with Greg King on October 18, 2023 via Skype.
In 1996 more than 8,000 people protested ancient redwood logging at the Pacific Lumber log deck along Yager Creek, in Humboldt County. More than 1,000 were arrested. It remains the largest single-day arrest number for an environmental protest in U.S. history. photo by Greg King
On Wed., October 25, The Bozeman Film Society will be screening Butcher’s Crossing, which was filmed in just 19 days entirely in Montana, mostly on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Glacier National Park and Nevada City in Madison County were also locations. We spoke with producer, Molly Conners, about Butcher’s Crossing and producing it here in Montana.
Molly Conners is founder and CEO of Phiphen, an independently owned film, television, and digital media company focused on producing creative, smart productions for a global audience. Her films have been Emmy nominated, and she has produced or executive produced 35 feature films over the last 15 years that have earned a total of 4 Academy Awards and 11 Academy Award nominations. Some of Molly’s notable credits include the 2014 Academy Award-winner BIRDMAN, the 2009 Academy Award-nominated FROZEN RIVER, as well as the films: KILLER JOE, THE IMMIGRANT, JOE, and RULES DON’T APPLY.
Her latest film, Butcher’s Creek, is based on the seminal 1960 novel of the same name by John Edward Williams, with a screenplay co-written by director, Gabe Polsky. An epic frontier adventure, Butcher’s Crossing, is a riveting commentary on human nature, ambition, masculinity, and man’s relationship to his natural environment. Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage stars in this tragedy about the last of the buffalo hunters in the Old West. Young greenhorn, Will Andrews, played by Fred Hechinger, has left his undergraduate life at Harvard to find adventure in the wild west. He teams up with Cage’s character, buffalo hunter, Miller, a taciturn frontiersman offering a hunt of an unprecedented number of buffalo for their pelts in a secluded valley in the Colorado Rockies. Their crew must survive an arduous journey, where the harsh elements will test everyone’s resolve, leaving their sanity on a knife’s edge.
We spoke with Molly Conners on October 13, 2023 via Skype.
Robert P. Jones is the author of the book, THE HIDDEN ROOTS of WHITE SUPREMACY and the PATH to a SHARED AMERICAN FUTURE, published by Simon and Schuster.
His earlier award winning books include WHITE TOO LONG: THE LEGACY OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY; THE END OF WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICA; and PROGRESSIVE AND RELIGIOUS: HOW CHRISTIAN, JEWISH, MUSLIM AND BUDDHIST LEADERS ARE MOVING BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS AND TRANSFORMING AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE.
In this latest book, he reminds us that the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin, but rather the continuation of a pattern of genocide and dispossession that began with the first European contact with the Indigenous peoples of this land. His reframing of America’s origins explores how the founders of the US could build a democratic society on the foundations of mass racial violence, and why this paradox survives today in the form of White Christian Nationalism. Through three stories from our history and current re-examination and reckonings by those living today, he has illuminated the possibility of a new American future in which we finally fulfill the promise of true democracy.
We spoke with him on September 20, 2023 via Skype.
Naomi Oreskes is Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker, she is the author or co-author of nine books, including the best-selling book, Merchants of Doubt, and a leading voice on the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action.
Her latest book, co-written with Erik Conway, is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, published by Bloomsbury Press.
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