Take it away, Bill.

America had entered the war.

Reluctantly.

But Germany was not at all a reluctant player.

In one month alone, German subs sank nearly one million tons of Allied shipping.

One million tons.

Germany also caught a very lucky break when a second Russian revolution led by Vladimir Lenin precipitously dropped out of the war and made a peace with Germany.

Let's pick up where we last left off in the middle of Wilson's speech to Congress.

Here again is Bill McClay.

[instrumental music] Staying neutral in the war proved to be difficult, especially given America's desire to continue trading with these warring European powers, and hoping that the longstanding notion of freedom of the seas and sea lanes would hold.

[instrumental music] This idea of maintaining a permanent neutrality through the war was, to say the least, naive, because the policy would never be acceptable to our British friends, which would, in essence, strip them of their superior naval power.

And in doing so, it would favor the new unified Germany.

The Germans only made American neutrality more difficult when they set loose their mighty submarine fleet to attack Allied shipping activity.

They launched countless torpedo attacks on merchant ships, and even ships with neutral flags.

This was not some secret ambition of the Germans.

Send the word, send the word to prepare.

Here's Bill McClay.

The Spanish had control of the Mississippi River.

The British needed to be moved out.

The American patriot soldiers were often not paid particularly toward the end of the war in actual cash, but through extensions of credit.

They were having their land taken away from them through foreclosures, being executed by bankers who didn't go to war.

This is a situation that is just tailor-made for high degree of tension, high degree of social tension, and possible revolutionary or rebellious sentiment.

And there were pockets of rebellion.

What we call the separation of powers.

Take it away, Bill.

So that's how the Civil War began.

[suspenseful music] It was a long road, a century in the making, and one that in retrospect almost had to happen in some form or another.

Few at the time believed it would take as long as it took to end, or that the casualties would pile up as high as they did.

But for Lincoln, there was one goal and one goal alone, the preservation of the Union.

That's important to keep in mind.

It was not until well into the nation's bloodiest war that the ending of slavery itself would become an explicit Northern objective.

Let's return to the story.

In

short, it was a mess.

It would make the likelihood of a Republican victory a probability.

Lincoln won 180 electoral votes from all 18 free states and only from those states.

He didn't get a single vote, a single electoral vote, from the South.

It was the first time a president had been elected on an entirely regional basis.

And some Southerners warned that such an unprecedented, such an outcome in this election would leave the South devastated.

Let's return to the story.

Let's return to the story.

story.Now, this was a big deal because both new territories, both proposed territories, were north of the line established by the Missouri Compromise, thus opening up territory to slavery where it had already been forbidden.

Douglas' proposal led to furious debate for months, but to get the railroad built, both houses of Congress ended the debate with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and President Franklin Pierce signed it into law.

It was a huge mistake.

Some might even call it reckless.

Soon, violent conflicts erupted in competing communities, with pro-slavery mobs attacking the town of Lawrence.

Those attacks were answered by anti-slavery attacks by the abolitionist John Brown and his sons.

Let's pick up where we last left off.

[gentle music]

The American people, having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrated once our disconnected position as regards any other nation, that we have in reality but little connection with the past history of any of them, and still left with all antiquity its glories or its crimes.

On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only.

And so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity.

[gentle music] It is so destined because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, it's universal, it presides in all the operations of the physical world, and it is also the conscious law of the soul, the self-evident dictates of morality which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently man's rights as man.

Besides, the truthful annals of any nation furnish abundant evidence that its happiness, its greatness, its duration were always proportionate to the democratic equality in its system of government.

[gentle music] And now here's O'Sullivan writing about the cruelties and injustice inflicted upon mankind through the ages.

Here again is Professor Bill McClay.

Right

... had to kind of make my way for a few years.

And, uh, uh, it, it, it's, it, it, it doesn't kill you to take a, take a job, uh, that's below what your skill set would determine, unless you have a major in women's studies or gender studies, in which case you sort of deserve what you get.

But, uh, it, you know, there's, there's la- there's that sense that you can't just sort of walk into a really great white-collar job that pays six figures just coming because you went to a prestigious college.

That dies hard for a lot of people.

Especially when they move to New York after they graduate and discover that they're paying 10 times the amount in rent that, [laughs] that, that they paid in their hometown, uh, and, uh, they, they, they, they can't meet their expenses.

And, you know, socialism is a, is, uh, a charmer in, in the sense that it offers an answer to this.

Uh, uh, and in the War of 1812, the odds were probably just a little bit less, and yet we're still here.

[somber music]

The South is different.

We all know that, but at what point in American history did the South become the South? Well, [upbeat music] there are definitely certain factors that we have to consider.

The most important of these probably is climate.

The Southern climate is warm, humid, subtropical in places, and because of the climate, the South has a nearly year-round growing season, a perfect place for the cultivation of certain kinds of crops.

Rice, sugar, tobacco, and one crop more than any other crop drove the economy of the South: cotton.

King Cotton, as it was known, accounted for two-thirds of all American exports.

Let's return to the story.

Take it away, Bill.

[upbeat music] There's some mythology about the notion of Roosevelt as a trust buster.

The fact is Roosevelt favored the consolidation method of regulation, and that view would only grow stronger during his term in office.

He was not averse to using his power to go after what he considered bad trusts.

But the good ones, he let them be.

So what decided the good trusts from the bad? That power would reside in the executive branch, an outfit called the Bureau of Corporations.

They would essentially serve as senior partners in every big business in America.

Let's return to the story.

Here again is Professor McClay.

[upbeat music] Emerson's career-altering moment occurred with an address he gave at Harvard in 1837.

Now, Emerson was himself a product of Harvard.

He'd gotten his education at Harvard College, which was a seminary in those days, and at the Harvard Divinity School.

And he was invited to give the Phi Beta Kappa speech at the beginning of the academic year because he was a distinguished graduate.

[gentle music] Little did those who invited him know that he was going to pour out, not quite contempt, but certainly criticism of everything that Harvard and Harvard Divinity School stood for.

His speech challenged the rationalism, the dry rationalism of Harvard and its academicism.

Let's return to the story.

It's time now for what he saw that was positive.

These are some of the flaws that Tocqueville saw in American democracy.

And yet he proposes ways that American democracy can and already is countervailing against them.

Maybe one of the most redeeming features of American life is the way that we organize ourselves.

Political Associations He marveled at the ability of Americans to form organizations themselves politically, to spontaneously come together without necessarily the direction of government or any coercive authority to accomplish good works for the public interest.

Here's how he talks about it.

The political associations that exist in the United States form only a detail in the midst of the immense picture that the sum of associations presents there.

direction.

Take it away, Bill.

It had been a very rough six months for the very active Roosevelt, who was not exactly a good fit for the essentially honorific position of vice president.

Even his own party wondered if he was the right man for the office.

A friend of McKinley's once told the president it was a mistake to make Roosevelt his vice president.

I asked him if he realized what would happen if he should die.

Now look, that damn cowboy is precedent.

But he was more than just a mere cowboy.

institutions.

[upbeat music]

He taught the country a lesson.

He taught Adams a lesson, the hard way, that to be high-minded and snobbish was not gonna work with this growing, expanding, and diverse electorate, often highly imperfectly educated electorate in America.

That was the reality of the thing.

It's a reality that's still with us.

Mass democracy requires a discourse, a language, a mode of expression that can reach people where they are, instead of telling them, "Well, if you wanna know what's going on, you gotta raise yourself to my level.

You gotta go to college.

[upbeat music]

Take it away, Bill.

It turns out that Brian won more votes, 6.5 million, than any candidate in American history, except for McKinley's performance that year.

The fact was, there was little reason to believe this reform party was some kind of blip.

But to gain enough traction to win the presidency, the reform torch would have to be taken up by the progressive movement, which included a more middle-class and professional dimension.

The progressive movement was filled with educated Americans, civic-minded Americans to boot, who were religious and quite earnest, morally speaking.

They didn't just wish to address poverty and the poor, but to change the governance and systems that brought about that poverty.

And by doing so, they would restore democracy itself.

and interests.

Take it away, Bill.

The two decades after the Spanish-American War are best known for the reform movements that occurred in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.

The urbanization that occurred, centralization, immigration, and that great concentration of wealth and power resulting in all of these changes.

But the reformers were not solely concentrated on the many problems that plagued America's cities.

The impetus for reform also sprang from the nation's small towns, from our national farmlands and our farmers, a group of Americans known best for their self-reliance.

Though they were under intense pressure, not just from declining and depressed crop prices, but railroads, bankers, creditors, grain elevator operators, and a multitude of middlemen who made it ever more complicated for them to get their crops to market.

In short, farm life itself was not as simple as it used to be, and it would never be again.

Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them...

Take it away, Bill.

It seems hard to imagine this today, but after only five presidential elections, one of the two major parties simply vanished.

[instrumental music] It was the Federalist Party.

The Federalist Party was gone, and the Republican Party was ascendant, with President James Monroe running essentially unopposed in his second term in 1820.

[laughs] Can you imagine anything like that today? And this made for relatively peaceful times.

And when you have, when you're running unopposed, that's a, a reason to call it the Era of Good Feelings, which is a phrase that, uh, probably didn't apply to many old Federalists.

They weren't feeling too good.

Take it away, Bill.

[patriotic music] Jefferson's two terms as president ended in 1809, but America's problems with the British did not end as James Madison took office.

He found himself no match for the forces gathering on all sides to overwhelm him.

He couldn't marshal a p- policy resolution with forces outside the country, but he was also struggling with growing divisions inside the country.

So it may have been an era of good feelings, as historians sometimes say, but it was mixed feelings [laughs] at best.

[somber music] Frontier settlers were ambitious and restless.

They wanted to expand.

Here again is Bill McClay.

Here again is Bill McClay.

After the Louisiana Purchase was completed, Jefferson was very excited about the whole thing.

Jefferson, among his many interests and talents, was a great scientist.

He had a great scientific curiosity.

He was curious about what sort of... animals are there in this territory? What sort of flora are there? What sort of growing things? What sort of people? And so he commissioned very quickly an exploratory mission called the Corps of Discovery Expedition, We usually call it the Lewis and Clark expedition after Captain Meriwether Lewis, who was Jefferson's private secretary, and Second Lieutenant William Clark, Lewis and Clark.

These were army officers who were seasoned in the sense that they'd had experience on the frontier, which made them perfect candidates for the job at hand.

And the job...

Let's return to the story.

Here's McClay.

When Jefferson was finally inaugurated, it was not in New York City, it was not in Philadelphia, it was Washington, D.C. [firecrackers popping] A very small town, more like a village than anything, although built according to a great plan by the French architect and planner Pierre L'Enfant.

So Jefferson assumes the presidency, and remember, Washington has laid down a marker about what a president should be like.

Adams more or less tried to follow as best he could.

Jefferson dropped that.

His style was different.

It was more informal, almost casual at times.

Let's return to the story.