To kick off season three, The Bully Pulpit, we are starting with an episode on what we are affectionally calling The Big Speeches™. Moments when the president has used his unparalleled microphone and those words have left a major imprint on history.
We start where it all began, with George Washington. In September 1796, Washington printed an address to the American people and announced he would not seek a third term. Not only did Washington buck almost all political precedent, he also gave warnings and guidance to future generations.
Seventy years later, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office for his second term and delivered a remarkable inaugural address. As the Civil War drew to a close, Lincoln mapped out his vision for the post-war United States and how to win the fight for peace.
Finally, the summer of 1979 was, as Jimmy Carter’s domestic policy advisor described it, the worst of times. There was an energy shortage, rampant inflation, and widespread unrest. But President Jimmy Carter took to the podium to address something much bigger than a gas shortage — a moral crisis in American life.
We have two excellent guests joining us today. John Avlon is senior political analyst and fill-in anchor at CNN, appearing on New Day every morning. He is also the author of two books about our topic for today, Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations and Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.
Dr. Meg Jacobs is a Research Scholar in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She is the author of Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and The Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, and Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989.
To kick off season three, The Bully Pulpit, we are starting with an episode on what we are affectionally calling The Big Speeches™. Moments when the president has used his unparalleled microphone and those words have left a major imprint on history.
We start where it all began, with George Washington. In September 1796, Washington printed an address to the American people and announced he would not seek a third term. Not only did Washington buck almost all political precedent, he also gave warnings and guidance to future generations.
Seventy years later, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office for his second term and delivered a remarkable inaugural address. As the Civil War drew to a close, Lincoln mapped out his vision for the post-war United States and how to win the fight for peace.
Finally, the summer of 1979 was, as Jimmy Carter’s domestic policy advisor described it, the worst of times. There was an energy shortage, rampant inflation, and widespread unrest. But President Jimmy Carter took to the podium to address something much bigger than a gas shortage — a moral crisis in American life.
We have two excellent guests joining us today. John Avlon is senior political analyst and fill-in anchor at CNN, appearing on New Day every morning. He is also the author of two books about our topic for today, Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations and Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.
Dr. Meg Jacobs is a Research Scholar in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She is the author of Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and The Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, and Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989.
39. Season III, Episode I: The Big Speeches
Release Date: March 24, 2022
Guests: John Avlon, Dr. Meg Jacobs
Interviewers: Dr. Lindsay Chervinksy, Dr. Brian Franklin, Dr. Monica Kristin Blair
Lindsay: Welcome to The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, a podcast production of Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History. I'm Lindsay Czerwinski. And along with my colleague, Brian Franklin, we are your historian hosts for this season three: The President and the Bully Pulpit.
That's right. We are switching things up a bit this season. Our intrepid cohost, Jeff Engel is taking a bit of a break to work on new projects, but rest assured he will be back in the future. In the meantime, I'm really excited to introduce you to Brian, as well as some of the postdoctoral fellows at the center, who you might hear from time to time. I know you'll enjoy hearing from them as much as I enjoy working with them.
This season, we are turning to the president and the bully pulpit. The president has an awful lot of power over foreign policy, domestic policy crises and everything in between. One of the softer tools in the president's box compared to war and legislation, perhaps is the Bully Pulpit.
But what is the Bully Pulpit? How do presidents use it? How does it shape American culture and the pivotal moments we see in our history books? These are just a few of the questions we will consider this season.
To get things started we are beginning with an episode on the big moments, what we are affectionately calling “The Big Speeches, TM,” the moments when the president has used his unparalleled microphone and those words have left a major imprint on history.
There are so many that we could choose from, and it was really hard to narrow down. But for this episode, we're going to speak to experts about three moments in particular, George Washington’s Farewell Address, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address and Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech.
Just like last season, we will speak to two experts, then chat about what we learned, what we took away from those interviews and why they matter when their expertise fits with the subject.We might welcome a special third guest to join our conversation at the end.
So let’s get to the first episode. We have two fantastic guests today who have thought deeply about the Bully Pulpit and the president’s role in American society. We are going to start where it all began with George Washington.
Careful listeners will have noted that technically the Farewell Address was printed, not a verbal address, but let’s not get caught up on those fuzzy details. In September 1796, Washington printed an address to the American people and announced he would not seek a third term. Not only did Washington buck almost all political precedent he was willingly relinquishing power and retiring as a private citizen, which established a critical tradition for his successors. He also gave warnings and guidance to future generations. The address is remarkably prescient and more relevant now than ever. 70 years later, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office for his second term and delivered the most remarkable Inaugural address.
Well, there are lots of remarkable inaugurals, but this one is definitely the most beautiful. As the Civil War drew to a close, Lincoln mapped out his vision for the post-war United States and how to win the fight for peace. With a phrase like with malice toward none with charity for all, how could we not include this address?
For these first two speeches, we have the perfect guest. John Avlon is a senior political analyst and fill-in anchor at CNN; appearing on New Day every morning. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief and managing director of the Daily Beast. He is also the author of the books Independent Nation: How Centrists can Change American Politics, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations, and most recently Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.
So, he’s literally written books about the first two addresses in today’s episode, and he especially focuses on the long-term impact of these exemplars of the Bully Pulpit. I think you’ll really enjoy this conversation.
We then jumped to the 20th century and explored a presidential speech that is a little less glorious. To learn about Carter and the Malaise Speech we spoke with Meg Jacobs, who is a research scholar in the Princeton school of Public and International Affairs, teaching courses in public policy and history. She has also held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Harvard business school, the Charles Warren Center, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.
She is the author of Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and The Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America, which won the Organization of American Historians 2006 prize for the best book on modern politics, and Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989. As an expert of the 1970s and energy policies she is the perfect person to talk to.
Okay, let's get to our interviews.
Lindsay: Let's start with the hardest question. Can you introduce yourself to the audience and tell us a little bit about yourself?
John: My name is John Avlon and I'm a senior political analyst and anchor over here at CNN. Before that I was editor in chief of the Daily Beast for five years. I'm on the morning show, New Day, and I have my own digital series called Reality Check with John Avlon.
But as with all authors, that’s the main passion. And this is my fourth or sixth book, depending on how you count it. My last book was Washington's Farewell about George Washington's farewell address. And before that I wrote a book called Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, and a book called Independent Nation, which was a history of centrist leaders in American politics.
The most recent book is Lincoln and the Fight for Peace. They all tend to be on some level about how we overcome polarization and hyper-partisanship and the secrets to effective leadership that can unite the nation and not play to the base and play to the extremes.
Lindsay: Aside from the more obvious contemporary parallels, we're going to be talking in particular about your Washington book and your Lincoln book, what drove you to tell those particular stories?
John: They’re are continuation of the same story in some way. What drove me to them is not the iconic nature of both men. If anything, that was a hurdle to find a differentiated take. But as I began writing Washington, I was coming off the campaign trail covering the 2010 election, the Tea Party wave was riding high and I was troubled as a centrist and an independent by the constant misappropriation of the founding fathers by groups who were pushing their own ideological and hyper-partisan agenda. And I kept running into the farewell address.
His core message in the farewell was really a warning about the forces who he feared, could destroy our democratic republic. It was what we would call hyper-partisanship. And that he was all about emphasizing national identity. And there's so much about Washington's farewell, that's incredibly relevant. It had been the nation's most famous and widely published address. He talked about the dangers of hyper-partisanship, excessive debt, foreign wars, and foreign interference in our elections.
The Lincoln book was written during the Trump presidency predominantly and he offered such a powerful contrast to President Trump in the most heartening sense. But also a reminder that our nation has been through far worse before. As divided as it may feel, where Lincoln himself as a young man had famously warned in his Lyceum Speech, that as a nation of free men, we must live for all time or die by suicide.
It's the story of his vision of national reconciliation and reunification, and also his plan for winning the peace after winning the war. And I think that too, on a level of a citizen and an a student of history, is something that we have struggled with as a nation in recent years.
And I think that story of how you think about winning a peace and the best practices and in both cases, I've carried the idea forward after the individual's lives. So it takes it takes the book some unexpected places, including the occupations of Germany, Japan, and the Marshall Plan.
Lindsay: Excellent. We're definitely going to get to that part at the end, but let's go back to the beginning and dig into Washington's farewell address. First, can you tell us a little bit about what it was?
John: First of all, the Constitution itself and the invocation of a president came about because our nation was in chaos during the Articles of Confederation, it was not centralized enough. There was no clear chief executive and that in some ways, I think, gives us historic perspective on the perpetual debates we have about a stronger central government versus being as simply an amalgam of states, obviously there's a wise balance that needs to be struck.
One of the concerns that followed being a president without precedent was whether the president would be a new kind of Monarch. And to walk away after two terms settled that question in a definitive way, it was a final revolutionary act. It was a very well thought out public letter that he'd written over a period of months, indeed years, at various points with James Madison and most importantly, Alexander Hamilton.
But he decided to write it as parting wisdom from a friend about the forces he feared could destroy our democratic republic. Specifically written not only to his contemporaries, but to future generations, and it contained all his hard-won wisdom from a lifetime in service, in war and peace, to his country.
And it's the equivalent of Moses coming down off the mountain and you've got this memo that the first president wrote to future generations; wrote to us.
Lindsay: What were some of the things that he really wanted people to understand? And if it's helpful to you to get to dig into the key points while exploring those motivations, that's great too.
John: He's writing it for future generations. And that's what makes it such a unique document.
If people want to know why they should study history, the founders gave us a really good example. It's partly so we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. So we're not flying blind. We should be guided by history.
One section where he talks about the danger of extremism is so relevant to what we deal with today.
Washington wrote: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it.”
There, you have it straight from Washington. And the people who often invoke Washington, the founding fathers, while waging hyper-partisan war against their fellow citizens are deliberately and willfully ignoring one of Washington's core concerns, the essence of his wisdom, that we have a patriotic obligation as citizens of a democratic republic to focus on what unites us rather than on what divides us.
And Washington understood exactly what could happen if people start putting their partisan identities ahead of their loyalty to the common good. That should exist. That needs to exist in a self-governing society. And that's just one of his warnings but it is the core one.
Lindsay: You mentioned how he has been either misinterpreted or outright ignored by those who often, try to pick up his mantle. One of the other ways that I think he's most often ignored or misconstrued is how he talks about foreign policy. People interpret this as an isolationist document.
John: Yeah.
Lindsay: What is your take on that?
John: It sounds like we are in violent agreement that this is not an isolationist document, and it's one of the things, that’s the legacy of how the Farewell Address was misused, particularly in the thirties and forties.
First of all, one of the ironies of Washington’s Farewell is the phrase people think they know from it, which is “no entangling alliances,” appears nowhere in the address.
It's actually from Jefferson’s First Inaugural, which is itself a great speech by the way. But one of the great ironies is that Jefferson has been waging war, politically, within the Washington administration, as Secretary of State creating a rival political party in effect against Washington's wishes and desires.
But then when he steps into the office of president, he becomes a born-again Washingtonian, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. He understands that America’s great strength is that we do not need to be embroiled in the conflicts and squabbles of European continents.
And the essence of Washington’s advice about foreign policy is not a policy of isolationism at all. It's best understood as saying that, as Will Rogers once joked, America’s got the two best friends, any country ever had, who they are, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The idea that we do not need, nor should we be dragged into other nation’s conflicts, we should be driven by our own self-interest, but it's specifically with an eye towards building strength as an independent nation.
In these earliest days of the Republic, we should be focused on building our own military and economic strength and not be drawn into these fights, particularly as it applies to the French Revolution, which, Jefferson has this sort of bloody-minded utopianism about; and Washington and Adams and Hamilton were much more skeptical.
About these dangers of democratic excess, mostly because they understood that in the pendulum swing of politics, anarchy is actually the quickest path to tyranny.
And one of the things that I think our greatest leaders understand is they root everything in an understanding of human nature. They don’t believe in the perfectibility of men. And that;s one of the things that I think makes their wisdom durable and them more relatable as it applies to foreign policy, because it’s so often misunderstood.
And I'll say a little bit about how it was misappropriated because it's a surreal story. The most indelible example is a American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1938, hosted by the German American Bund. Now Washington is warning about foreign interference in our elections throughout his speech, the German American Bund is pretending to be a patriotic league of German Americans. In fact, they were being funded by the Third Reich.
They're arguing for the United States to remain neutral in the Second World War; to stay out of it.
There is a giant 30-foot picture of Washington in front of which these guys in Nazi regalia are giving their keynote address, which is all riffing off the Farewell Address, trying to bend it to their own ends. And this is on the back of the America first movement in its OG form, in which Henry Ford and other folks are arguing for American non-involvement in the Second World War even as Hitler's designs and aims and ambitions and violent expansion is clear.
And it creates this illusion that it was an isolationist address, and nothing could be further from the truth. What Washington does say . . . and I'll read you just what he actually says so we can root it in reality, not perceptions or characterizations:
“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations, cultivate peace and harmony with all. The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
But, he says:
“The period is not far off, when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality, we may at any time resolve upon, to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel”
So he’s, first of all, he is, he’s a realist to the extent that he’s saying, look, nations don’t have permanent allegiances, and we should not be compelled to go to war on behalf of another nation. But as we grow more strong and stable as an independent nation, with commercial interests and military strength, we may indeed choose war or peace as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel. That is not an isolationist doctrine it is an advocacy of a foreign policy of independence.
The wisdom of the founders should always guide us, but America doesn't have the same luxury of remaining isolated from world affairs. And as our history over the last century or so shows us the world is in a better place when we act as a Republic, that is a responsible actor on the world stage.
And we create these international institutions that can secure liberal democracy and an order in which large nations cannot destroy small nations at their will or their whim. That's, what's been different about American intervention.
As was often said after the Second and First world war, we didn't conquer any territory. We didn't ask for any land other than which to bury our dead. That is a very different model than what most days other nations have done throughout history.
Lindsay: So you’ve talked a little bit about how this has been used over the many decades since Washington published it; for good and for ill. But at the time it was a truly remarkable revolutionary moment. I’m giving my personal interpretation here, but it was a groundbreaking paradigm shifting concept. Did his contemporaries see it that way? Do they have this thunderbolt moment reaction or was it a more gradual build of an understanding of what Washington was doing?
John: When Washington’s Farewell was published in the Philadelphia Daily Advertiser the repercussions were immediate because it established a precedent that an American president would not be a king. It was a revolutionary gesture because it solidified the gains of the revolution.
That’s one of the clear flow throughs in my study of different presidents. Character is the single most important quality of president, far more important than formal education, which neither Washington nor Lincoln had. And it was the final gesture that Washington being so acutely aware that he was establishing a precedent with everything he said and did as president.
Lindsay: So let's transition now to our second big speech. I don't think it would be unfair of me to say that most inaugural addresses are fairly unremarkable, perhaps forgettable especially second inaugurals. Because presidents have already had a shot at it. And usually second terms are less great than first terms.
And yet you have a book that is primarily focused on this second inaugural and it is remembered in history. Why what makes this one so remarkable?
John: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is I think by general consensus, the greatest inaugural speech; it is notably not about politics or policy. Lincoln is speaking from a place far beyond, above those concerns. He’s also speaking from a place far above the din of battle. It would have been the most natural thing in the world for a president who has been presiding over civil war to divide the nation into us against them to throw a lot of rhetorical red meat to demonize his opponents as they demonized him.
He doesn’t do that. It is a speech about war and peace, it's a speech about reconciliation and race. But it's also a deeply religious speech in which he casts the war as sort of divine retribution for the original sin of slavery. He notably and crucially, and importantly, doesn’t allow the North to rest easy with any sense of moral superiority.
We all are being judged for America’s sin of slavery. It's a very Old Testament vision of the purpose of the war for the vast majority of the speech. And then in the last paragraph, the last 70 odd words of a 700-word address, it’s short, he pivots from the Old Testament to the New Testament. And that last paragraph is the most famous of the address and arguably of any inaugural address.
And in it, he sketches out a roadmap to national reconciliation, what it means and what it would take to have a just and a lasting peace. And in that spirit, I'll just read the last paragraph:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Ultimately winning the peace after winning the war will require a radical forgiveness. With malice toward none with charity for all. Determination is essential to complete the war, but it cannot slip into self-righteousness. With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right. There is no assumption that any one of us can truly claim to know the will of God.
And it's also about the courage to reconcile. To do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. So it's this idea of America as a cosmic democracy, we are going to be elevating the example of America, again, to be a beacon of freedom and opportunity as we were originally intended.
And we will do that by finally addressing and removing this original sin of slavery and rededicating the nation to the principles of all men are created equal that the declaration promised, but which we fell so far short of in the original conception of the union, as codified by the compromises in the constitutional convention.
Lindsay: What was the context in which he was delivering this incredible speech? And how did people respond to it at the time?
John: In the case of the Second Inaugural . . . only a few months before Lincoln thought he would not win reelection. Once he wins reelection, the entire calculus changes, he knows that the Union will ultimately win the war. But he's the first president to be reelected since Andrew Jackson, we forget. This was in every sense, an existential crisis, not only for the United States of America, but for democracy itself.
It's a rainy day in Washington. And one of these fortuitus things happens; that it's where history strains credulity. It's been raining. It's muddy. It's the first integrated inaugural address crowd.
As Lincoln steps up to the podium and begins to speak the clouds part and sunlight hits his face and it really does seem to be a providential gesture.
People are still finding their seats when he concludes the address, the lines where he talks about divine retribution for the sin of slavery were not well received by many of the whites in the audience, and certainly not many of the journalists covering it, but they were understood by the African Americans in the audience, who started to call and response and bless the Lord, that Frederick Douglas recognized and was gratified by that.
And after the speech, the people who it resonated with recognized, it was a sacred effort. In the words of Frederick Douglas, he said it contained all the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets. One of his friends, Lincoln's friends, a congressman, Isaac N. Arnold from Illinois compared it to Washington's farewell address.
But other people noted that it didn’t receive any sort of rapturous applause. And I think it was because it came from such a higher plane.
Lindsay: You nodded to this at the very beginning, and you talk about this so eloquently in your book, but this address has had a long life in American history, but in ways that people might not necessarily expect. You detail the importance of it in terms of World War One failures, World War Two successes, things like that. So could you talk to us a little bit about how has this address shaped American memory?
John: Sure. The last paragraph of the address is the distillation of Lincoln's thoughts on that. You win the peace, but Lincoln understood that after a civil war, you can't pound your opponents into submission and salt the fields; you need to find a way to live together again. And there’s never been a civil war on this scale.
So Lincoln has no one to look towards. There’s no historical precedent to draw upon. Lincoln’s basic prescription as a matter of strategy and policy and politics is unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace. But he is a man of peace in a time of war.
And he’s thinking about how you win a peace because he understands if you don't win the piece, you don't really win the war. But while he's pushing his generals to be more aggressive on the battlefield, he’s already coming up with plans and structures that he believes can help heal the nation.
But it’s the line with malice toward none with charity for all which ends up symbolizing the attitude of reconciliation. The generosity of spirit, the fact that Lincoln understood ultimately healing through words and actions, and how he as president could help steer the nation towards a horizon of reconciliation, but the real work would be done on the community level between individuals.
So it required that generosity of spirit, which of course is difficult even in good times, but especially during a war. What happens of course is after he's assassinated, we fall off the Lincoln path disastrously.
Andrew Johnson is as a matter of personality and temperament and character, the opposite of Abraham Lincoln. He, to his credit, had been a war Democrat, the only Southern Senator to refuse to secede. But he was viciously bigoted, and he did everything he could to resist the rise of equal rights and also to accelerate the reacquisition of power by the planter class, by ex-Confederates, which was precisely what Lincoln didn’t want. [Lincoln] said, give the Confederate rank and file the most liberal and honorable terms. Give them their guns to go home, to shoot crows with and their horses to plow with, but he didn't want to just say, forgive and forget to the people who should have known better. The people who had abandoned the Union in Congress and the courts and the military; they should not be simply be able to reclaim their power.
One of the things I was struck by in my research for the book is that the Black Codes in the Southern states are implemented as soon as the Fall, late Summer and Fall of 1865. It's basically slavery without the chains.
So that shows us that the impact of a bad president with bad character and how it can have these trajectory-defining negative characteristics.
Grant, who had heard from Lincoln over and over again, personally, his vision of reconciliation briefly, I argue, gets us back on the Lincoln path in particular, by going to Congress directly as president and lobbying for the passage of the anti Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts.
But then after the corrupt bargain and the end of the 1876 election, reconstruction is abandoned. These efforts to undo the gains of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment, particularly the 15th amendment, are done through a pattern of voter intimidation, violence, voter suppression, election subversion and slavery is replaced by segregation for a century.
And so I look at the way that Woodrow Wilson misapplied the lessons of Lincoln and the war. Wilson is a son of the Confederacy. Grew up in Reconstruction; he felt the bitterness. And so when war breaks out on his watch, he actually goes to Congress and pursues and proposes a peace among equals; a peace without victory. And if you read the speech, you can hear him pretty clearly. It’s a guy who grew up in a state that lost a war, saying, isn’t there a different way to do this.
But Lincoln had what he called three indispensable conditions when Confederates came to negotiate with him towards the end of the war. He was willing to be incredibly flexible on all sorts of details; had actually a very Federalist vision of how reconstruction could be implemented, but he was going to be inflexible on these three core issues during the war.
And one is acceptance of the federal Union, two an end of slavery for all time, three, crucially and curiously at the time, no cease fire before surrender. Why? He is concerned with good will. That if he grants the Confederates a cease fire before surrender, that there will not be the political will to end slavery.
And unless you remove the root cause of the war, it’s just going to break out all over again. How does this apply to Woodrow Wilson? Of course, World War One ends with a ceasefire before surrender. The Germans never accept the fact that they are decisively defeated. There’ve been no allied troops on German soil.
Lincoln actually hangs over the proceedings of the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson traded away a lot of his principles for the League of Nations, but he never got bipartisan buy-in to enact it. So it never even gets put in place. So it really just sets the stage for the Second World War, as some people recognize at the time. And nurtured is a new Lost Cause mythology that was taken up by Hitler and the Nazis.
After the Second World War we finally apply Lincoln’s principles correctly and completely. Unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace. Unconditional surrender is the explicit policy of FDR and Churchill. In fact, FDR in a press conference explaining it does this whole roundabout recounting of the surrender at Appomattox.
The occupations of Germany and Japan are conducted on this principle.
The seed that sparked the book was a quote from General Lucius Clay that I found, who was the American general who oversaw the German occupation. Somebody asked Lucius Clay, what guided your decisions? What guided your decisions in the occupation of Germany?
I tried to think what Abraham Lincoln would have done for the South if he had lived. That magnanimity of spirit, that commitment to reconciliation, that American exceptionalism that says that we will defeat our enemies, but then reach out a hand and build them back up as liberal democracies.
And that’s what worked; and the cornerstone of it all is the Marshall Plan where Harry Truman, who himself is also the descendant of Confederate sympathizers learns the lessons of Wilson, applies the lessons of Lincoln and works with his secretary of state George Marshall and Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg to sell and build the Marshall Plan as an investment in peace.
It's the opposite of reparations. And it works. It works. We finally apply Lincoln’s ideals in a way that only America could have. Unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace; balancing strength with mercy.
But one of the things we're confronting today, as we speak, as we see Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine, is the fact that not only can we take democracy for granted, but internationally we can take the liberal democratic order that was so painstakingly put in place after the Second World War, which has created an unprecedented 75 years of relative peace and prosperity on the continent of Europe. Something that was unheard of before this. And when you take these things for granted they become threatened, which is why every generation of a self-governing society and a free people needs to stand up and defend these principles and apply the lessons of history.
Lindsay: What do these speeches, or these addresses, tell us about that power of the president?
John: They're a reminder that the best American tradition is not one of dogmatic ideological or divisive leadership. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s leaders who always think about the national interest over all special interests, who draw on the past to inform the present and guide us towards a future, who are always focused on how to unite, not divide us; because they believe even in times of civil war, that there’s always more that unites us than divides us as Americans.
I think with Lincoln in particular, there’s also a reminder that suffused in the speech is that kindness can be consistent with effective leadership. That’s enormously important. That's what makes his leadership resonate around the world. It's why he cited by Nobel Peace Prize winners so often. And I mentioned some of the peacemakers who revere Abraham Lincoln's example from Gandhi to Nelson Mandela, to Martin Luther king, to Willy Brandt it’s this reconciling style of leadership.
That’s really the most powerful thing is that, if there’s a gap between what the president's saying and doing the whole thing’s counterfeit, it reflects a lack of character. Which is not to say that presidents need to be perfect, but that there needs to be a direct connection between that spirit that infuses the speech and the way they treat other people and talk about other people.
Lindsay: Before we turn to our next conversation, you might be wanting to learn more about the very first president, his life at Mount Vernon and the enslaved community that lived on the banks of the Potomac. If so, we highly recommend the new podcast series by our friends at Mount Vernon's in Washington's library.
It's called “Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” And it tells the story of the more than 577 men, women and children enslaved at the Virginia plantation during George and Martha Washington's life. Narrated by Brenda Parker and told through the biographies of Sambo Anderson, Davy Gray, William Lee, Kate, Ona Judge, Nancy Carter Quander, Edmund Parker, Caroline Branham, and the Washingtons.
This weight-part series explores the lives and labors of Mount Vernon’s enslaved community and how we interpret slavery at the historic site today. Subscribe to Intertwine on your favorite podcast app or at www.georgewashingtonpodcast.com.
Next we spoke with professor Meg Jacobs about Jimmy Carter, the 1970s and the Malaise Speech.
Lindsay: We will start with the hardest question, which is, can you please introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about your work.
Meg: Sure. Thanks for having me. I’m Meg Jacobs and I am a historian at Princeton university where I teach history in public affairs. I write about American political economy in the 20th century. I’ve written books on the New Deal and World War Two, and most recently on the energy crisis of the 1970s.
Lindsay: That is both perfect for our subject today and also shockingly relevant in a way that I’m sure no one anticipated or wanted for this current moment when we were recording. This episode we’re affectionately calling The Big Speeches TM. And we are looking at moments where presidents have given addresses and they have lasted longer in historical memory than maybe most average presidential speeches.
And so we of course have asked you to come on to talk about what is known as Carter’s “Malaise Speech.” But let’s maybe start with . . . can you set the stage fresh for us in 1979, what was going on in the country? What were some of the concerns? What brought him to the podium? Just give us a sense of the context.
Meg: Sure. So the summer of 1979 was, as Jimmy Carter’s domestic policy advisor described it, the worst of times. And when Stuart Eizenstat, his advisor, wrote that memo Jimmy Carter was abroad in Tokyo at a G7 summit where OPEC had just announced a substantial price increase.
In the summer of 1979, prices were already increasing in advance of this price announcement, because of unrest in Iran and the shortfalls that was causing in global oil markets. And when Eisenstadt wrote to Jimmy Carter, he said, people are furious. They are waiting on long lines. They’re upset about rising prices. It is the first time Americans have to pay more than a dollar per gallon.
The gas pumps at that time did not even have three digits on them. So this seemed like a historic, shocking, unprecedented moment in America’s sort of decline and vulnerability. And Eisenstadt said you need to skip that trip to Hawaii and you need to address the American public. People are really suffering and they need to hear from you.
Lindsay: What were some of the factors that led to this at that time? It was at the time historic gas prices. What were some of the global factors? Was there anything that was a precipitating cause?
Meg: So people talk about the energy crisis of the 1970s as punctuated by two oil shocks. The first happened in 1973/74 and started with the Arabic oil embargo in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. And then the second oil shock, which occurred under Jimmy Carter’s presidency, because of the unrest in Iran.
And throughout the whole decade you had a substantial increase in prices and OPEC for the first time was able to flex its muscles and translate this global (or geopolitical) unrest into rising prices; because they had become a really substantial player in the oil market. The United States was, and is, a substantial producer of energy, but as American’s energy needs increased so too did reliance on imports from abroad. It’s not only the United States that was increasingly dependent on Middle Eastern oil, but specifically our allies in Western Europe and Japan. So all of that together gave OPEC its increased leverage to wield what its leaders called the oil weapon.
Lindsay: What were they trying to achieve by using this oil weapon?
Meg: They were trying to reassert control over their own natural resources.
Lindsay: Okay. So, Carter is coming back from his trip. He skips his Hawaiian vacation, and he comes back to give his address. Did they have a while to prep or was this sort of a last-minute rushed address?
Meg: What's interesting about Carter is that he had been worrying about the quote unquote energy crisis since he came into office, and his main line of attack for the energy crisis was to urge Americans to use less. He appeared on national television, beside a fire in the White House library, wearing a cardigan.
And the point was a sort of symbolic gesture that in the face of shrinking supplies and rising prices, the solution is not turn up the heat, but actually just put on a sweater. And so that had been the mindset of Carter and those immediately around Carter, particularly one of his advisers, Patrick Caddell, who believed that the right approach was to talk to Americans about a larger, what they called the crisis of confidence; that American’s lives had lost meaning, that they had come to have a lack of faith and trust in their politicians.
What happens in the summer of ‘79 with this OPEC rise in prices is much more specific, much more requiring an immediate response because gas lines are snaking around the country. People are “hot, summer mad.” There are fistfights, there’s violence, there’s chaos. And Carter’s team is trying to figure out what is the right response? Do we give this crisis of confidence speech or do we, as Eisenstadt suggested in his memo, come back and blame OPEC. And Carter comes back, they have a speech prepared and Carter says, I’m not giving that speech. I want something bigger.
I really want to talk to Americans about fundamentally changing who they are, how they consume, how they live their lives. And in order to do that, he retreats to Camp David for 10 days. He draws on the works of people like Daniel Bell and Christopher Lash. You talk about the culture of narcissism, Robert Bellah, as well as a wide range of voices and politicians. And there's a sort of workshop a 10-day sort of mountain top musings over what to do, what should Carter say?
And Caddell thought this was his moment to really press hard with this crisis of confidence speech. There were others around Carter who thought that would be a disaster. So specifically Walter Mondale, his vice-president, who came from a much more traditional New Deal, liberal Midwestern side of the Democratic Party, as opposed to Carter the Southern peanut farmer; and Mondale says, this is a disaster. Don’t say this, don’t say this. This is not what the Democratic Party’s constituents want to hear from you. They want to hear how you're going to help them out, how you’re going to sort bring back that Roosevelt magic and actually ease their lives and make their lives better. Not asking them for sacrifice, but Carter ignores all of that. And then he goes on live television and essentially delivers a sermon in which he tells Americans they have to change their ways.
Lindsay: Why is it known as the Malaise Speech?
Meg: He never used the word malaise. As I was suggesting, the ideas for this speech had been circulating around and in all of those sorts of memos and policy positions and discussions with Caddell, the word malaise had been used.
And so it wasn’t an out of nowhere label and many of the White House spokesmen who were sent out to preview what was coming and then talk about what had been said. They use that word. So you know, so much for sort of a gotcha kind of moment and a deeper level. I think the word is really very interesting because I think that it gets at this idea that there is something more fundamental at work, a sort of general discontent people at the gas pumps would say no, we just want gas prices to come down.
Gas prices are this very interesting thing because there are very public way of imagining that you can chart inflation. It doesn't really matter how significant gas prices are to your consumption, to your overall sort of spending. It's a way of charting oh my God, look at that. You could see on every quarter down to the 10th of a penny, how bad things are getting. And that was what people wanted Carter to speak to. The malaise sort of thing was an effort to talk to underlying conditions, underlying dissatisfactions with the nation’s politicians, with the country at large, with the economy, which was suffering from more general inflation, as well as a rising unemployment.
And so, malaise captured that. It is, of course then what Ronald Reagan, when he runs against Jimmy Carter a year later in 1980, throws back in his face and says, there is no crisis of confidence. There’s just a crisis of confidence in you, Jimmy Carter.
Lindsay: So you alluded to the political response the following year, but what was the immediate public response to this speech?
Meg: Again, this is something else that scholars like to point out, like Americans love this speech. But pretty soon public opinion is against Carter. And not just because there's a sort of shakeup in leadership just because these were not the kinds of messages that Americans wanted to hear or were used to.
Lindsay: Do you think it was the fact that he was honest or the fact that he was not, he was honest, but he wasn’t giving a good solution. He was requiring them to sacrifice. I guess what I mean by that is if he had said, this is a really bad moment and, but here’s what I'm going to do to fix it as opposed to here’s what you have to do to fix it. Do you think honesty is the problem or is it that he was asking Americans to tighten their belt?
Meg: I think that’s interesting and I think it’s worth pointing out and perhaps clarifying that this was not simply just a scolding message. So he had many bullet points of action in the speech. Those get drowned out both at the time and in our historical memory, by the sort of, “you need to use less” piece of it because it was so striking and jarring. But he has many concrete things that he wants to do. So the immediate thing that he does and goes out on the hustings the next day and he pushes for a big, huge synfuels bill, which is basically a way of taking oil, but really coal and synthetically producing more energy. Which is not the thing that Carter is most known for.
Very few people know about the synfuels bill. Even though it was a major investment. What Carter’s more known for, of course, are the solar roof panels that he installs on the White House. And he was the first president to really embrace solar power as a real alternative.
Again, the problem with the solar panel and even the synthetic fuels is that they didn’t promise to do anything right away. Where Jimmy Carter ran into a lot of trouble is what he wasn’t prepared to do, because he didn't think it was right from a moral perspective. He didn’t think it was right from an economic perspective. He didn’t think it was right from a national security perspective.
He wasn’t prepared to do something about rising prices. He believed that we had to increase prices and that would dampen consumption. That would be good for America’s soul. That would be good for the environment. That would be good for national security to make us less dependent.
He really genuinely believed that. So he had a lot of things that he was prepared to do. None of them were going to bring any kind of immediate relief and moreover, I think this is really noteworthy too, even as he’s pushing for alternative fuels what he did not do is sell them as a jobs program.
He did not make it as if this can all be a win-win situation. We could decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. As we transition and plan for greater prosperity, greater employment in the future, there was no green jobs program attached to any of his alternative energy plans.
Lindsay: You’ve talked about how public opinion starts to turn against this concept and you just gave some excellent reasons why that was the case or where Carter could have gone differently in terms of selling this approach. How has the speech been remembered in the last several decades?
Meg: People love this speech. The more and more focused we have become on climate change this looks like the moment where finally, a president said something that we needed to hear So people love it for that reason.
I just taught this speech to my class at Princeton and they had the same response to almost anyone who actually bothers to read the speech which is, oh my God, I can't believe that American president gave this speech.
Lindsay: It strikes me that maybe the way that people feel about the speech is the way they feel about Carter. They maybe didn’t like it in the moment, but then afterwards they really love it because he seems like a really great guy. And once he’s no longer in office, is that correct?
Meg: That’s fair. Certainly lately there's been a lot of Carter nostalgia. There's a couple of excellent biographies that have come out about Carter and yeah, there’s this idea that we could be our better selves. Carter is a president who hoped for us to become our better selves.
And so I think that there is some sort of Carter nostalgia, and of course he has had a long post-presidency political career where he’s done a lot of good. And so that reinforces the idea that Carter was this sort of ethically concerned responsible public servant.
Lindsay: This season is all about the bully pulpit. And I’m wondering what you think this moment says about the presidency and the bully pulpit. What does it reveal about its power or authority or limitations when it comes to that particular tool that they can use?
Meg: I think that’s an excellent question. And I appreciate the question because I think the larger context for the Malaise Speech is not simply Carter’s moralizing mentality, but his own vision of the presidency. He had on the one hand, he was a micromanager sort of meticulous, he’s famous for that: down to scheduling the White House tennis court, that kind of thing.
He had that engineering mentality where he could fix any problems. At the same time, he did not really have that sense of an Imperial presidency. He believed in himself and he believed in, in, in using the bully pulpit to articulate directions he thought the country should go in.
But in general, he had a much more humble approach to the presidency starting with his decision in his inauguration to get out in freezing cold weather from the motorcade and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. Now that was political too. He had run as an outsider and he wanted to discard a lot of the pomp and ceremony of his office as a way of becoming some alternate president, but I think it wasn’t just at the level of symbolism.
Some would say that one of the biggest problems Carter had was not actually understanding how to use the power of his presidency. And then one of the problems he had is that he relied on his quote unquote peanut brigade of Georgia advisers, who were Washington outsiders.
And when he came into the White House, he really was not skilled and adept at how you use the office of presidency to negotiate on Capitol Hill to bring in all the various interest groups to really use your power to push policy along.
Lindsay: A lot of recent presidential biographies have explored which presidents see as their models. So for example, Theodore Roosevelt was really inspired by Abraham Lincoln and Abraham Lincoln was really inspired by the founding generation. Was there anyone that Carter saw himself as trying to replicate or model, or did he really think in other terms, in terms of leadership?
Meg: That's a really good question. My sense is he really believed in a different style of leadership. He was a peanut farmer. He had political ambitions, but he grew up and was deeply influenced by the sort of simple means that he hailed from; his sort of orientation as a small businessman. He was governor of Georgia, and he was a skilled politician. But I think he had a different kind of ambition for how to accrue power. I know we might be running out of time. I did want to say one other thing if that’s okay with you
Lindsay: Yeah, please. Let me just pass the baton to Monica and just say, thank you so much. This was so perfect because you have such concrete, concise answers, and that is just a dream for a podcast. So, thank you so much. Monica, thank you for continuing. And I’m really excited to get this episode up.
Meg: Great. So the other thing that I want to say you could have asked me to speak about a different Jimmy Carter speech, which is his 1980 State of the Union address, where he famously delivers a speech that becomes known as the Carter Doctrine and we get, and that conversation I think, is very relevant to the moment right now. And I think would defy or go against a lot of what I’ve been saying.
This is a speech that he gives in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in November, 1979. And this is a moment where it’s insufficient . . . Carter understands this . . . it is insufficient to simply just repeat calls for sacrifice and austerity.
Instead, Carter believes that the true national interests of the United States are at stake and makes a very clear statement that any effort to close the Persian Gulf to shut down the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf will be understood as an attack on American interests and the United States will respond with military power.
And that is a really significant moment. It will be about 12 years before the Gulf War when that actually comes to pass. But it is a really significant moment where Carter really is embracing the full force of his office as Commander in Chief to map out what the country has to do and what the government has to do to protect.
Monica: Yeah, that is so interesting. And we considered having a focus on that speech rather than the Malaise Speech you’re exactly right. So why do you think that this kind of alternative vision that he set out in 1980 didn’t stick in the American memory the same way the Malaise Speech did?
Meg: Because Ronald Reagan outdoes him. That is, he gives this speech: it’s 1980 campaign season and as strong and forceful as a speech as it is, Ronald Reagan runs to the right of Jimmy Carter and portrays everything that Jimmy Carter does as weak and insufficient, and it becomes a sort of partisan issue.
Monica: One last question I had for you was: this speech touches on a lot of issues that are important to American politics today. Inflation, present gas prices, trucker protests. So what lessons can President Biden and other political leaders learn from Carter's Crisis of Confidence Speech?
Meg: I think the main takeaway is that it is important not to simply ask Americans to sacrifice, but to explain to them why they need to sacrifice, especially as it pertains to oil. And we’ve seen this already, the need to frame our energy use in a larger global geopolitical context.
That’s one. Two, the other takeaway is that politicians need to be immediately responsive to the perceived pain that Americans experience at the gas pump. And three, when they propose fuels and energy sources, which Biden is much more able to do today because we’ve had so much longer time to develop wind and solar, et cetera, that when they do that, that they sell it not as well you’re going to have to change your ways, but instead here’s a way that you can actually continue with your lifestyles and at the same time, gain new jobs and greater security.
Monica: Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Jacobs, for sharing all those insights with us.
Lindsay: Well, hello friend. It is very exciting to introduce our audience to you. And I’m so excited to be doing this season with you. I think it will be great fun. You had the opportunity to listen to these interviews. What is your big takeaway?
Brian: I'm really glad to be here and looking forward to filling some, some really big shoes from past seasons. I did have a chance to listen, and I’m not going to surprise anyone in this audience, I think, with my big takeaway, which was religion. Every one of these interviews brings up a speech and either explicitly talk about the role of religion in the speech or alludes to it.
My real big takeaway—it might be a little bit more of a question—which is what does that say about Americans or us as U.S. citizens, that these great speeches, which we remember all seem to hit on deeper existential religious questions about who we are, what we’re supposed to be, what it means as citizens to look to something more than ourselves,
Lindsay: Our audience couldn’t see my reaction to when you talked, but I absolutely chortled because for those of you who don't know, Brian is an expert in religious history and we have had many conversations where I generally like to put my head in the sand about the role of religion in American history.
And he’s like, no, you can't do that. And I’m like, okay. But I’d really like to, so I love this point. I love it because it didn't even occur to me to make that point. Like it didn't even cross my radar.
Brian: Because of your interests and because of your background, you're trained to recognize them differently. So I read Washington’s speech and it’s all about sacrificing yourself for the broader good of the country and talks about religion and morality as these indispensable supports for society.
And you read Lincoln's speech and it’s basically a sermon, which our guests pointed out.
And then Carter’s is, no surprise with Jimmy Carter, but it's just filled with these nods to the role of faith.
And some of that is specifically religious, like faith in God. But some of it is a broader usage of the word, faith, faith in one another, faith in the future.
Lindsay: My takeaway is that I am struck by how unbelievably contemporary and relevant all of these things feel. These are speeches that were or addresses that were written and crafted at times over several hundred years in very different contexts, by very different men. And yet they all feel so important to our contemporary moment and so relevant. And I wonder if that’s really what the big speeches actually is. It’s these moments that defy chronological categorization that speak to us far beyond the time that they were initially issued. And that is why these ones of, you know, I don’t even know how many presidential addresses there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, why these ones stand out.
Brian: I think so. I think that the ones we remember and what we remember about them say much more about who we are and what we value than they do about that particular moment and the longer term. I think of Lincoln’s speech and Lucius Clay, and how he was thinking of explicitly how Lincoln would have handled the situation. So the thing that was in common, wasn’t really Lincoln’s words but Lincoln’s character and the way you treat people after a war. And I think of Dr. Jacobs talking about Jimmy Carter’s speech really striking her students right now because the fact that they've so value questions related to climate change now.
And so the words that have to do with consumption and sacrifice means something deeper than oil crisis language and the 70s.
Lindsay: Absolutely. Well, I'm really glad we started with this episode because I think these “Big Speeches TM,” as we've been calling this, this episode demonstrates the highest peak of bully pulpit potential. And it’s going to go downhill from here. So we're starting with a really good moment to show you the apex of what a president can do with the incredible microphone they have.
And, uh, it’s not gonna stay on this very high mountain top.
Brian: The podcast itself, of course will go up from
Lindsay: Naturally, naturally, we’re only going to get better, but yeah, so the presidents maybe not so much. All right. Well, I'm really looking forward to it. This should be really fun. And thanks to everyone for coming back this season. We're really excited about it. And, uh, looking forward to chatting with you more about Bully Pulpit.
Lindsay: That's it for today’s episode on “The Big Speeches.” Thanks so much to John Avlon and Meg Jacobs for sharing their insights and experience with us today. The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, is a production of Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History. Our thanks to the office of the provost and the Dedman College of Arts and Sciences for their support and special thanks to the entire CPH team for producing this episode.
Our original theme music was composed by Marshall Engel. For show notes, more information on our experts, guest’s recommended readings and so much more about the Big Speeches and the other presidents we are talking about this season visit pastpromisepresidency.com. Tune in next week to learn about Presidents, the Bully Pulpit, and healthcare.