Episode 11 of Democracy & Destiny with historian Heather Cox Richardson

[00:00:00] This is Democracy and Destiny with Ciara Torres-Spelliscy. I have the per curiam opinion and judgment to announce on behalf of the court in Buckley against Valeo. We have a cancer within close to the presidency that’s growing. In case 0 8 2 0 5 Citizens United versus the FEC, Justice Kennedy has the opinion of the court.

The First Amendment's core purpose is to foster a vibrant political system full of robust discussion and debate. There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders. With fear for our democracy, I, along with Justices Kagan and Jackson, dissent.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Welcome to the show. I'm Ciara Torres-Spelliscy. I'm a [00:01:00] law professor at Stetson Law School in Florida, and I'm a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

I work on the intersection of election law and corporate law. This show was inspired by my third book, Corporatocracy,

How to Protect Democracy From Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians. Published by NYU Press, election Day 2024. I realized in today's busy world, reading a 300 page book is not on everyone's to-do list, but even I as a law professor, have time to listen to radio shows and podcasts when I am commuting to campus or walking my dog.

So here we are. This is Democracy and Destiny. Today's episode is about history and those who refuse to learn its lessons being doomed to repeat them. I will be joined in a few minutes with my guests, Heather Cox Richardson from Boston College, who [00:02:00] will talk about lessons from American history that can be applied to today.

But first, let's start with pay to play today.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: The term pay to play comes from the radio payola scandals. From the 1950s and 1960s. Record companies would pay radio stations to play their music, hence it was literally pay to play.

Today the phrase pay to play is shorthand for all kinds of political corruption. Especially when government contractors or others with business pending in front of the government paid bribes to public officials to get a private benefit, like a lucrative no bid contract or approval of a corporate merger.

One of the things that I learned while writing my book Corporatocracy is that political corruption is prosecuted frequently, but the media just doesn't report on it [00:03:00] as often as they report on other things, like celebrity news that leaves the misimpression with the public. That corrupt politicians or shady government contractors are always getting away with crimes.

So I swore to myself if I ever had a news generating platform that I would highlight that political corruption can be met with serious legal consequences, including fines and jail time. So our example of pay to play today is from Michigan. This is a press release from the Michigan Attorney General in 2025. Lansing. The Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a lower court decision that upheld the criminal charges against Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl announced Attorney General of Michigan, Dana Nessel in December 2024. The Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the criminal charges against both defendants for alleged voter intimidation and affirmed a circuit court denial of their motion to [00:04:00] quash.

Quote, “I am pleased that the Michigan Supreme Court refused to entertain further delay tactics by denying to hear this appeal.” Nessel said. Quote, “voter intimidation is a direct attack on the fundamental right to vote, and I look forward to finally bringing this matter to trial.” End quote.

Attorney General Nessel filed charges in Detroit in October of 2020 against Burkman and Wohl for allegedly orchestrating a series of robocalls aimed at suppressing the vote of predominantly black voters in Detroit in the 2020 general election by promoting falsehoods, that one, voting by mail would place voters' personal information in a public database that will be used by police departments to track down individuals with outstanding warrants. Two, voting by mail would place voters' personal information in a public database that will be used by credit card companies to [00:05:00] collect outstanding debts. And three, the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were attempting to utilize vote by mail records to track individuals for mandatory vaccines.

The robocall named Burkman and Wohl as responsible for the calls and claim them to be the founders of a civil rights organization named “Project 1599.”

It closed with a message urging the predominantly black residents to not be quote “finessed into giving your private information to the man. Stay safe and beware of vote by mail.” End quote. The Attorney General has called the robocalls an egregious example of voter suppression. Jack Burkman, 57, and Jacob Wohl, 25, are each charged with one count of election fraud, bribing intimidating voters, a five-year felony. One count of conspiracy to commit an election law violation, a five-year felony. One count of using a computer to commit the [00:06:00] crime of election law, intimidating voters, a seven-year felony. And using a computer to commit a crime of conspiracy, a seven-year felony.

The people allege Burkman and Wohl attempted to discourage voters from participating in the general election by creating and funding a robocall targeting specific and multiple urban areas across the country in including Detroit. The calls were made in late August of 2020 and went out to nearly 2000 residents with phone numbers registered to an address with a Detroit zip code. Following the formal charges from the Attorney General, both men were bound over for trial. Burkman and Wohl filed a motion to quash the charges in the Circuit Court. The Circuit Court denied this motion and the defendants appealed to the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals [00:07:00] declined to hear their appeal.

Burkman and Wohl then filed an application to the Michigan Supreme Court, which remanded the matter to the Court of Appeals and required it hear the appeal. The Court of Appeals heard the defendant's arguments ruling in a published opinion that the statutes governed their conduct as alleged, and that it was a constitutional application of the statute.

Defendants Burkman and Wohl then appealed that ruling to the Michigan Supreme Court, which upheld the validity of the statute, ruled that it governed the conduct as alleged and remanded the matter to the Court of Appeals to apply a limiting construction of the law to ensure that it did not ensnare constitutionally protected speech. On remand, the Court of Appeals ruled that the alleged actions here would not be constitutionally protected speech.

Please note, for all criminal proceedings, a criminal charge is merely an [00:08:00] allegation. The defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Our next segment is “Corruption Junction.” I've been writing about money and politics for two decades. I was inspired to write my book Corporatocracy because of the events of January 6th at the U.S. Capitol. One way to think about this book is it's the Supreme Court's horrible Citizens United decision meets the horrifying events of January 6th, so that we are literally on the same page.

Let me read a short excerpt from Corporatocracy. [Reading of Chapter 2 of Corporatocracy.]

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Now we get to the heart of the matter, which is the problem of political corruption. My guest, Heather Cox Richardson, is a author whose books include democracy, awakening How The South Won The Civil War, and to Make Men Free. She teaches at Boston College. She writes the wildly popular "Letters from an American." I'm so glad to have you here today to speak about the state of American democracy. Welcome to Corruption [00:20:00] Junction.

Heather Cox Richardson: Thank you for having me, and congratulations on Corporatocracy.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Thank you so much. What inspired you to become a historian?

Heather Cox Richardson: Growing up in rural Maine meant the way we lived as a community was through storytelling. It became very clear to me the stories people told conflicted with each other, and often they were fairly clearly not necessarily too closely tethered to reality. As you watch this growing older, it became very clear to me that the stories people told were central to who they were, but they didn't necessarily meet reality.

That has always fascinated me, that gulf between. The stories they tell about themselves versus reality. Everything I do is really exploring that place where the rubber meets the road between the stories we tell and the reality of the world in which we live.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: How do you stay sane during these trying times?

Heather Cox Richardson: I read and I [00:21:00] write, understanding what's happening is very calming. Writing every night helps me to get the ground under my feet and to know how to move forward because I know what the reality is, not what people are saying, but what the reality is, then I can make good decisions about how to move forward.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What part of history do you focus on?

Heather Cox Richardson: I am an Americanist. Those of us who study the United States of America, which of course is coming up on its 250th birthday, have this enormous advantage because our history is pretty short in the scheme of things. My heart is in politics. And in the late 19th century, the story that emerged was an absolutely fascinating story of a multiplicity of voices trying to determine what a multicultural democracy would look like.

And I still find that period just fascinating. It's a period in which we have more. Patents than we have in any other period in American history. We have all kinds of new [00:22:00] voices, new newspapers, new art, new clothing, new languages, new traditions, all coming together to try and figure out what it means to be an American.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: one of the things I've been working on recently is William Belknap. William Belknap was the first cabinet secretary to be impeached. Part of why he's impeached is because he has this party girl of a wife named Puss Belknap, he can't afford the lifestyle that she wants. So he takes these bribes, the bribes are ultimately from soldiers out on the frontier, including what sort of blew my mind when I really dug into this story.

The Buffalo Soldiers, which are the black fighters in the Army. But it was these newly freed black men who are paying too much at the company stores out on the prairie in these army posts. It's that money that is going as a kickback to [00:23:00] Secretary of War Belknap. It's American history. You touch just a little strand and oh, I thought I was looking at this to look at enforcement of corruption law and holding someone to account. Actually, Mr. Belknap and his lovely wife get away with all of it.

He is not removed by the Senate. He has no consequences. His criminal case has also dropped, and then she gets away with it because of curvature, because what you would've gotten her for would be conspiracy. But because husband and wife are considered one person at this time, Puss Belknap, lives the rest of her life, not in a prison cell.

Heather Cox Richardson: My all time favorite title for any book is The Whiskey Ring, and the subtitle is 10 Years in a Federal Penitentiary.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: When I was looking for historical examples of corruption, often they don't use the word “corruption,” but once I realized that their shorthand for a criminal [00:24:00] conspiracy was “a ring.”

Then I found the penitentiary ring, the whiskey ring.

Heather Cox Richardson: Well, you know why? The reason for that is because the ring is the group of people who are doing bad things, but corruption is in that period. Literally. The corruption of the body politic. It comes from the idea of disease as corruption. That if a body is, if a human body is corrupted, it is diseased. So a ring corrupts the body politic. It is the disease in the body politic, and so you would find the term corruption, but you would find it in sort of political philosophies, political theories. You wouldn't find it in newspaper articles where they're concerned about the people doing the corrupting.

It's really interesting that idea of the body politic as being the living, breathing embodiment of democracy.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Let's take a short break and [00:25:00] we're back. What inspired you to start Letters from an American?

Heather Cox Richardson: I had been writing on Facebook about once a week for a number of years, and I hadn't written since July, 2019. People were starting to get worried about me because I have in the past run into trouble from the far right threatening me.

They were concerned that something had happened to me. On September 15th, 2019, I was painting the windowsills of my house. I got stung by a yellow jacket and I am allergic. I did not have my EpiPen. I live in rural Maine. It was a Sunday. While I sat there waiting to see how I was going to react to this, and it turned out to be fine, I didn't have an anaphylactic reaction.

Well, as I sat there, I thought, people are worried about me. I ought to tell them I'm okay. So I sat down actually in the same chair. I still write letters from an American [00:26:00] and wrote a piece that simply said, here's what America looks like to me today. It happened that was two days after then Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff had sent a letter to the director of National Intelligence saying, we know there's been a whistleblower complaint, and by law you were supposed to hand that sucker.

I'm paraphrasing. You were supposed to hand that letter over to us after two weeks. Get that over to us now, because you have to do it by law. I recognize that was the first time that a member of the legislative branch had accused a member of the executive branch of breaking a specific law. My email was simply overrun with people asking questions about what that meant.

I'm perfectly happy to answer questions, but certainly nobody is going to want to hear from me the day after. I've already written. I'm not going to spam people, [00:27:00] so I waited until the 17th of September, 2019 to answer all the questions I've written every night since "Letters from an American." Within a month or two, I had more than a million followers.

It's a forum whereby people who care deeply about our country can get simple answers to the questions that involve what's going on in our government. All I do is I say, here are the stories that as a historian, I think are going to be important in 150 years. What historians do is they study how societies change. It provides a coffee pot for people who care about the country to gather around.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: It's very cool. A year ago, I debated Floyd Abrams on the First Amendment and the impact of Citizens United on American democracy and that is a very out of body experience for me. Was talking to President Obama, a [00:28:00] perspective changing experience?

Heather Cox Richardson: When you do an interview, I think of it like when we were kids. We were outside all the time on the coastline, and that involves a lot of running on the rocks as kids. We weren't supposed to, but of course we did it. The trick to running on the rocks is you cannot look at where your foot is now. You got to look where the next foot's going to go, because otherwise you're in real trouble.

You always have to be plotting it out. That's what I think of when I do an interview. I'm always trying to listen and to plot two steps ahead. So the funny thing about that interview is I don't actually remember a lot of it because I was reacting to the rocks on the ground. How can I jump from here to here?

It is surreal to be on stage with somebody whom you know extraordinarily well, but in two dimensions. I know any major figure in America in two dimensions. They're either in a photograph or they're on paper when they turn out to be 3D. It's, it, it [00:29:00] just, I, I'm stammering because. They have their own ideas and my characters don't have their own ideas 'cause they're static and almost always they're dead.

What I found most interesting was how much he seemed to have come with the determination to hold space open for liberalism. Liberalism is the concept that the government needs to protect the ability of individuals to have freedom and to have the freedom to become what they are capable of becoming. In the United States in the 19th century, that meant keeping government small so that it didn't crush an individual through taxation.

That changes dramatically at the beginning of the 20th century. When presidents like Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, start to recognize that unless the government protects individuals from the overreach of corporations, there's your field, the corporations will crush the individual. President Obama was [00:30:00] trying to hold a space open for members of all parties to say, I want a government that protects the rights of individuals to work hard and prosper, that is not skewed toward the extremely wealthy. I've been watching for those voices, and there have been fewer of them of late than one would expect. He seems to be out in public saying, let's hold this space open so that there is room for Americans to reclaim that middle of the road, that was so extraordinarily successful for this country.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: My students had no basis in history. If you're reading Korematsu and you don't know that the Japanese Internment has happened, it sounds bizarre. I would hit the same problem when we would get to a Commerce Clause case because they're rooted in the Great Depression, but they had no [00:31:00] context of what the Great Depression was.

After that experience, I decided I need to do a timeline. On the first day of Con Law, I put a timeline on the board that is blank, and then I invite students up to put what they think is constitutionally significant. I started 1500 and go to the present day, and one of the things that happens almost every single year is law students have no idea what happened during Reconstruction. Why should Reconstruction matter?

Heather Cox Richardson: I don't blame students for not understanding anything about the past. The events that have happened in your lifetime are happening in real time to you, and so they are real. But anything that happened before you were born is equidistant from you. The pyramids coexist in your mind with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And that's the place where people like you and me have to tell the stories so that they do become alive and become incorporated into the memories of people who are alive today. [00:32:00] But The reason we care about Reconstruction is because it is the first attempt of lawmakers at the federal level in the United States to create a multicultural democracy.

The most important way is by constructing the 14th Amendment. It confers citizenship on everybody who was born in the United States. It also gives the federal government the power to guarantee that states do not discriminate against American citizens in their midst. The Congress created the Department of Justice in 1870 to make sure that the 14th Amendment was enforced in southern states.

Creation of the Department of Justice meant that if you were an unreconstructed white Southerner who was riding with the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize your black neighbors into acting subservient to you, into not voting, the federal government could chuck you in jail, which in fact it did in a number of states. After that becomes a [00:33:00] real issue in the southern states, unreconstructed Southerners begin to say that they never objected to black participation in society because of their race, which is ridiculous.

Documents from the time including the state declarations of secession. They're all about race. But they start to say, we don't really care about race. What we were concerned about was class. We are concerned about the fact that the Military Reconstruction Act and then the state legislatures, and by 1871, the 15th Amendment, which is ratified in 1870.

That we are concerned that these new policies mean that poor people who work in the fields and who don't have any education and don't have any property, get to have a right to vote. And if they get a right to vote, they're going to vote for politicians who will promise them roads and schools and hospitals.

Which by the way, white people would use [00:34:00] as well, but they're going to vote for those things and that's going to cost tax dollars because the other thing that the Republicans did during the Civil War was they invented national taxation. So they begin to say, we don't object to black rights on the basis of race, which could get us thrown in prison. We object to black rights on the basis of class. We don't want poor people to have a say in our society because they're going to vote for things that cost tax dollars. And because white men are the only ones who had really have any property in the American South, that's going to be a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white people to what they would call, uneducated black Americans. They begin to argue in 1871 is socialism. That construction, the idea that letting poor people vote is going to redistribute wealth from white people to people of color, from hardworking people to lazy people, from makers to takers is still determining our [00:35:00] society today.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Why do we have the KKK Act?

Heather Cox Richardson: That's one of the Enforcement Acts, and that is, from Reconstruction as well. They're 1870 and 1871, those laws, and that is an attempt to enforce the rights of black Americans in the American South after southern state legislatures first in 1865. Put in place a series of state laws called the Black Codes.

Now, the Black Codes are different according to each state, and they do a number of things, but what they do essentially is to remand black Americans into a form of quasi slavery. They have to work for white people. They have to sign contracts for a year, so they can't go move to a deal. They usually can't have firearms.

In some states they can't fraternize with white people. They usually, depending on the state, stop intermarriage between White Americans and Black Americans. So they put in place these Black Codes. Despite that there is this attempt on the part of right [00:36:00] reactionary gangs like the Ku Klux Klan to stop Black American men from voting and to stop white supporters of black rights from voting as well, because this is not solely Black Americans who want to overturn the white supremacy and the concentration of wealth in the American South in that period.

So when that happens, as I say the federal government works to break the KKK and to enforce the laws in those states, and that's where you get things like the K, K, K, what's known as the KKK Act, one of the Enforcement Acts. One of the things that those Acts do is they enable President Grant to declare martial law in a number of counties in the American South.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: This is the chapter in Corporatocracy about German and American businesses bailing out the Nazi Party in 1933. Are there lessons that Americans today could learn from that history?

Heather Cox Richardson: I am an Americanist. I think about the United States, and it might be of interest both to you and to your listeners, [00:37:00] that if you remember in the United States, there really isn't a concept of a corporation before the Civil War.

We have corporations, but they are state centered and they need a state charter, and their job is to do something that is good for that particular state, like running a ferry line during the Civil War, the Republicans in Congress. Are trying to figure out how to get railroads built. The Congress wants to jump across the Great Plains out to California.

How are you going to create companies that will be able to jump across that great American desert? You get the growth of the concept of the American corporation. After the Civil War, we get the concept that people who run corporations are doing large projects that are good for the American people. So the railroads, for example, or any of the corporations that are going to come alive in the late 19th century, these have huge reach. They're providing [00:38:00] all these goods and products for America. It's helping the economy. They're providing jobs. There's this idea that these people are sort of public benefactors, like Andrew Carnegie. That they're doing something that is good for the American people. And you get the idea in the 1880s that the Civil War Congress actually intended to protect corporations as if they were individuals, which is ridiculous.

And I could tell you the history of that. In the United States, in the late 19th century, what takes shape is the idea that people who are running large corporations are somehow acting as stewards of the American economy, like they're really the guys who are doing the best for the most people.

Now, this is incredibly self-serving, and you get the kinds of messages from people like Andrew Carnegie, who writes what we now know is the Gospel of Wealth. At the time, it was only called "Wealth" in which he talks about how it's a good thing for money to be [00:39:00] concentrating among this very small set of people because they're going to use it, for the good of everybody.

They're going to build concert halls and libraries and operas. Whereas if you actually let that money get distributed among workers, they would, waste it on frivolous things like better food or better housing. And this enables them to be, as they say, stewards of America's wealth. Now, what that comes to mean though is that as they get wealthier and more powerful, they begin to invest in lawmakers who then skew the system in favor of those people. They also invest in media and you talk about, the Dearborn Independent and how Henry Ford is going to invest in that.

They invest in creating a culture that says we are the good guys. And anybody who tries to reign us in are the bad guys. And in fact, in the United States, we call the bad guys, “communists.” [00:40:00] So you get by the 1920s, a period in which you literally have, some of the business people in that period calling everybody but themselves communists because they're looking to regulate business or to say, you need to protect your workers so that if they lose an arm in one of your machines, their families don't starve to death.

So when you think about the people who supported Hitler, the corporations and the corporate owners who supported Hitler, or the people who are, supporting the far right today in the United States, that you can have a number of justifications for that, oh, this is better for my bottom line. Or, I'm scared, or even this is just the way that I'm going to make sure I weather this period in history.

But I think it's important to recognize that there is this constructed sense that by definition corporate leaders are the good guys. Because as a historian, that's a real [00:41:00] skewing of the way the economy and a society actually works.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: I stumbled across the corporate bailout of the Nazi party about eight years ago. I wrote a law review article called it the Slaves to the Bottom Line. It was very much a backwards looking history paper and consciously resisted comparing. That history to what was then contemporaneous the 2016 election. Now I've ripped that Band-Aid off. It is worth comparing what's going on in the United States right now, the democratic backsliding, the rise of fascism in the domestic sphere. But could you say a word about why, and maybe this is my putting words in your mouth, why is comparing any modern person or political party to the Nazis a fraught endeavor?[00:42:00]

Heather Cox Richardson: First of all, I think that there are very fruitful comparisons to be made. Not least because the world that I just described is one in which some people are better than others.

And of course that is the foundation of fascism. That is the foundation of authoritarianism. The idea that, some people are made to rule and logically, ultimately that means that one person, one man is better than everybody else and is made to rule. So those ideologies, I think are quite logical.

They are quite similar. They stand against the idea that we're all created equal and have a right to an equal say in our government, which is of course, what the Declaration of Independence says. Certainly as late as 1950, Margaret Chase Smith on the floor of the Senate said, I am as concerned about a Republican fascist as I am about a Democratic communist. And now, I guess maybe because we had so many Nazi films and the idea that somehow it's the ultimate [00:43:00] insult to call someone a “Nazi,” but it's accurate. I mean, it is actually accurate, just like people don't like to be called racist, but they are. So one of the things that I think we will need to do going forward is to reclaim that language and make it clear that while those people who are trying to institute fascism in the United States are not German fascists, that it is entirely possible to be an American fascist or authoritarian.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: You can tell a lot about a society from their constitution. One of the reforms that comes out of this experience with the Nazi party is the German post-World War II Constitution says that the only unamendable part of that constitution is you cannot get rid of democracy in Germany. The only unamendable part of the U.S. Constitution was that you couldn't end the international slave trade early. What is the impact of the legacy [00:44:00] of slavery?

Heather Cox Richardson: What has it not had an impact on? The very fact we have such an unworkable electoral college comes in part from the real distrust in the United States, especially among white lawmakers of people of color. In 1929, Congress decides it's going to cap the number of people in the House of Representatives because it recognizes that for the first time, there are more Americans living in cities than living in the countryside.

Those people living in cities in the 1920s are often people of color or immigrants. We are still living with this skewed electoral college because of white Americans’ fears of people of color. So it's a little hard to untangle. How important the history of enslavement is, how important the history of white supremacy and racism is. That pushback against the white supremacy and racism still runs like a river through our history. The play between those two very simple [00:45:00] concepts on the one hand. Some people are better than others and have the right to rule. And on the other hand, we are all created equal and have the right to be treated equally before the laws and the right to have a say in our government are in fact what makes up the dance of American history.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: One of the things that I find comforting about American history is that we have survived corrupt politicians like President Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, or Secretaries like Albert Fall or William Belknap. Often these troubling figures inspire new laws so that we can avoid that problem in the future.

Why should Americans learn more history?

Heather Cox Richardson: Studying American history tells us something really important that is: that we are all just people muddling through as best we can. Democracy is not an end game. Democracy is a process. What history teaches us is that democracy is the [00:46:00] process of deeply flawed human beings trying to learn to live together.

Sometimes we do it well, and sometimes we do it poorly, but there is always joy in actual act of creating democracy is itself an enormous commitment to human self-determination, which is after all, I would argue, the end game of humanity. The piece that I find I think most inspirational about history is that literally nobody wakes up one day and says, today I'm going to be a hero.

They wake up and they put their feet on the floor and they think, man, I'm tired. I didn't get enough sleep last night. What am I going to feed the kids? But the reality is that heroes are the people who are going through all that and just do the right thing. Given a choice between doing the wrong thing and doing the right thing, they do the right thing.

Sometimes that changes the world. When you think about it that way and you think about that's what really made American democracy survive and expand. We [00:47:00] are writing our own new chapter, and we all have the potential simply to make that next right step. I would love to hear you talk more about the different comparisons of constitutions.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: I think it just tells you what a society really values. In the Iranian constitution, you can't get rid of Islam. I find it's totally embarrassing that our un-amenable part was you couldn't end the international slave trade early. How in ingrained slavery is in the original constitutional structure. It's protected in the Fugitive Slave Clause. The Three Fifths Clause was incredibly protective of slavery. It was constitutive. In the free state of Florida, they're trying to legislate talking about this out of classrooms.

Heather Cox Richardson: People don't seem to be aware of is that the Euro-American settlement, of the East Coast of North America is a [00:48:00] business. It is designed to extract resources and to do that, they require labor. That idea that from the very beginning we have written into our history the idea of exploiting people for labor. That dovetails with enslavement, but it also dovetails with a lot of other unpaid labor.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: That's true. The Fugitive Slave Clause applies to indentured servants as well. Indentured servant would also be returned to the people that they owed labor to if they got out of their contract early.

Where can the audience find your work?

Heather Cox Richardson: I write on Facebook. I have a Substack publication called Letters From An American, in which every night. I am on YouTube and on Instagram.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Is there a final thought that you'd like to leave our audience with?

Heather Cox Richardson: It's a wonderful book. That you wrote with Corporatocracy and it's got some really important ideas in it and you should be proud of it.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Thanks so much. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Heather Cox Richardson: Thank you for having me.

[00:49:00]

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Let's take a short break and we're back.

As someone who spends your time focused on political corruption, it is easy to end up with a dim view of humanity. But one of the things that has kept me happy and sane over the past eight years is my 100 pound chocolate labradoodle. To lighten the mood, let me share my life motto with you, which is “Loves dogs, hates corruption.”

If we have to go on vacation without our dog, then he goes to boarding at the same place where he goes to doggy daycare once a week. It's called Bark Life and it's great. He loves it there because he gets to socialize with other dogs and he gets to take a break from the annoying humans in his life.

Bark Life has cameras, so if you're missing your dog in the middle of the day, you [00:50:00] can live stream what your dog is up to at doggy daycare. When he is boarding overnight, he has his own room, which I think the doodle finds a little isolating. So he often looks like a man in solitary confinement asking, “hello? Is anyone out there?”

But when he goes to regular daycare during the week, he seems a lot happier because there are other dogs around to play with and interact with. Though one of his signature moves we have found by watching the live stream is my doodle will get up on top of one of the artificial mountains in the play area and he will just look out majestically over the other dogs as if he has installed himself as King Doodle for the day. He looks like a majestic, Vitruvian dog. Okay, now back to business.

[00:51:00]

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Now we get to our final segment. The fix is in. Many of the problems with our democracy seem unfixable, but that is not true. These problems were created by human beings, and they can be solved by human beings. We can improve laws and practices at the local, state, and federal level. And the first step is realizing that these are not unsolvable problems.

We can fix it. Today, we talked about the way that corporations can bankroll the rise of regressive anti small-d democratic politicians. This chapter was about the 1930s and the 1940s. Audiences often asked me why the German industrialists helped bail out the [00:52:00] Nazis. My answer is simple. These businessmen were rich, but they wanted to be richer.

This is also a modern and future problem of corporations propping up anti-democracy candidates. When you see this behavior from corporations, think about your impact that you can have as a consumer. You do not have to pay your hard-earned money to firms that are trying to undermine your democracy.

Also as a FYI, as a constitutional law scholar, I am happy to report that boycotting for political reasons is protected as free speech under the First Amendment because of a Supreme Court case called Claiborne Hardware. So I encourage you to use your First Amendment rights to push back on such corporate political spending because Lord knows corporations will use their First Amendment rights in elections.[00:53:00]

Just remember that democracy is worth defending and a little truth goes a long way.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Thank you to my guests for joining me today. This is a production of Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who can be found on social media as ProfCiara, P-R-O-F-C-I-A-R-A. The episode was mixed by WBAI. Our logo is by entire world. Theme Music was composed and performed by Matt Boehler. This show is based on the book Corporatocracy, published by NYU Press. This has been “Democracy and Destiny with Ciara Torres Spelliscy.”

​You can listen to the full episode here: https://soundcloud.com/profciara/democracy-destiny-with-historian-heather-cox-richardson-wbai-version

Or here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/democracy-destiny-ep-11-with-historian-heather-cox/id1818631157?i=1000724182599

© Ciara Torres-Spelliscy 2025.