Harvard’s Leo Damrosch on Alexis de Tocqueville & Democracy in America

[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Well, hello and happy new year, everybody. This is Albert Cheng, a professor at the University of Arkansas, bringing you another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. This is the first episode of the year and co hosting with me today is none other than Alisha Searcy. Hey, Alisha, what’s up? Happy new year. Happy New Year! Hey Albert, how you doing? I’m doing well back in the, in the grind in the office and still kind of recovering from my holiday travel. How about you?

[00:00:29] Alisha Searcy: Same, trying to get back into the swing of things. I took a couple weeks off and it was wonderful and I did not do too much work and it was nice to disconnect.

[00:00:41] I think we all should do that. I got a little trip into Dominican Republic and that was nice for the New Year. That’s right, that’s right. But yeah, I’m excited to be back, looking forward to this week and this year and all the great guests that we’ll have on.

[00:00:55] Albert Cheng: Oh yeah, yeah. And speaking of guests, we’re going to have Professor Leo Damrosch today. For those of you who were listening last year, you might remember him. Our interview with him on the life of Jonathan Swift. And today we’re going to bring him back on to talk about Alexis de Tocqueville. So stick around for that. But Alisha, we should kick off this episode as usual with some news and some thoughts about the stories we came across.

[00:01:19] So I actually wanted to start the year with a story that I found really uplifting. I mean, this was just fabulous to see. It’s from Plow. The title, I think, would just catch anyone’s eye already. The title of the article is, My Liberal Arts Education in Prison, Studying the Humanities While Incarcerated Restored My Trust in Humanity.

[00:01:40] And I don’t know about you, but you read a title like that and you’re like, wow, this, I got to read this article and hear what this guy has to say. So the author is Sean Sword. So he’s actually a student majoring in criminology at Calvin University and he’s a juvenile offender and served 27 years in prison.

[00:01:57] before he, well actually, you know, at, and at the time he began his college studies at a correctional facility in Ionia, Michigan. And this is through the Calvin Prison Initiative. So this is fascinating to learn about this program and hear about it. And look, I don’t know that I can sum up the article in, in better words than the author here, Sean Sword.

[00:02:17] So let me just read bits of it and just leave it for us to ponder. So he writes the quote, the confines of prison. Compel individuals who seek a path of rehabilitation to engage in a soul searching process and reflect on various aspects of life gone astray. Most of that reflection is done in isolation, or solitude, where human qualities such as kindness, civility, and love are absent.

[00:02:43] Because we are relational beings, those missing qualities severely restrict a proper reception of any type of education. When the Michigan Department of Corrections allowed the opportunity for prisoners to participate in a faith based education, the liberal arts were liberated, freed from their confinements to schools, they broke through prison walls.

[00:03:04] And he just writes about his experience, ending the article, the liberal arts have exposed me to topics such as truth, the good life and justice, and allowed me to restore my relationship with God and his creation in a way that has changed my life forever. So anyway, I just want to share that. I think there’s a story of hope and some really good educational work that’s being done.

[00:03:23] Alisha Searcy: I love that. A story of redemption and hope and future and positivity. I love that. That’s a great way to, to get us started. So my article is from the Digest and it’s about the impact of a Boston desegregation busing program on student outcomes. And I know that on this show, we’ve talked about the METCO program a little bit over the years, and I’ve been looking at it for the last year.

[00:03:51] And just, You know, hearing about the great results that they have had, and so for our listeners who are not familiar, this is the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity Program in Boston. And it’s a voluntary program for urban students and suburban school districts that buses non white students from Boston to Boston.

[00:04:13] to wealthier, whiter suburbs. And so we’ve all heard these debates around busing programs and the impact. I’m a product of public school choice. I grew up in Florida and I went to an elementary school on what’s called a minority to majority transfer. And so I understand directly what it means when you get to go to a school that, you know, because of where it is, right?

[00:04:44] Because of the families that make up that particular community in way too many districts across this country, that also means that they tend to have more resources, right? They tend to have higher quality teachers, the list goes on. And so there’s certainly a conversation that we should have about. The connection between academic achievement and poverty, because there is one, and it does not have to do with the students, it has to do with the kinds of schools that they have access to.

[00:05:12] And so anyway, with this particular program, it talks about how students who participate in this METCO program attend schools that have a much higher percentage of students who plan to go to a four year college. Then, in the Boston public school system, on average, Boston students who are offered seats in METCO by first grade attended high schools in which 81 percent of the students planned to attend a four year college, 92 percent of them graduated from high school in four years, 74 percent of them enrolled in a four year college.

[00:05:45] And so, when you compare that to students who apply for METCO but were not admitted, the numbers are 62, 82, and 55 percent respectively. And so, clearly, this program speaks to the fact that when kids have opportunities, when they’re put in environments, again, with Higher standards with rigor, with high quality and effective teachers, and students who are like minded, right, and families who are like minded, it makes a difference. And I know there are some critics of this program, but I’m one that supports it. because I know the difference that it can make when you just get to go to the right school. It changes your life trajectory.

[00:06:26] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it sounds like both of our stories really underscore the potential of good educational opportunities, whether it’s in prison or whether we give kids in this case, you know, the urban Boston area access to a different school that it can do, do wonders and change lives. So let’s hope to see more of this kind of stuff happening. Yes. All right, well, that’s the news for this week, but stick around because on the flip side of the break, we’re going to have Leo Damrosch join us and talk to us about the life of Alexis de Tocqueville.

[00:07:12] Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Birnbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. His books include Jonathan Swift, His Life and His World, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, and one of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Eternity Sunrise, The Imaginative World of William Blake, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and The Club, Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, named one of the quote 10 best books of 2019 by the New York Times.

[00:07:46] Professor Damrosch is also the author of Tocqueville’s Discovery of America and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Restless Genius, a National Book Award finalist for non fiction and winner of the Winship Penn New Prize. England Award for Nonfiction. He earned a laude from Yale University, was a Marshall Scholar, first class honors at Trinity College, Cambridge, and received his PhD from Princeton University. Professor Damrosch, it’s a pleasure to have you back on the show with us. Thanks for being here.

[00:08:17] Leo Damrosch: Thank you so much for inviting me.

[00:08:19] Albert Cheng: Let’s get into talking about Alexis de Tocqueville. I think a lot of our listeners are familiar with Democracy in America. It’s the product of a nine month journey through the New Republic in 1831 to 1832.

[00:08:32] Could you briefly summarize who Tocqueville was and why his two volume book remains such a timeless portrait of Jacksonian America that also contains many farsighted observations about our democratic society today?

[00:08:46] Leo Damrosch: He was 26 years old when he made that trip with a slightly older best friend named Gustave de Beaumont.

[00:08:52] Came from an aristocratic family in Normandy. The town he came from is called Tocqueville. And he wanted to go into public service. He had a law degree. But when he made that trip, France was having yet another tremendous upheaval. His parents almost got executed in the revolution back in 1789. Then there was Napoleon.

[00:09:12] Then he’d been overthrown after Waterloo. you Made a brief comeback, was exiled for good in 1815, they put back the old monarchy, but now it was being replaced with more like a democratic monarchy, and as a young aristocrat public servant, Tocqueville and also his friend Beaumont felt, this is a good time to get out of France and have some good reason to be somewhere else, because everything is kind of falling apart here.

[00:09:37] So they cooked up a scheme to study France. Penitentiaries in America, which was a brand new idea, and very progressive one, and they certainly were interested, but really what they wanted was to understand much more broadly what this still young nation was like, which had had a successful democracy for 50 years and looked like it would endure, whereas France just kept turning itself upside down.

[00:10:01] So, The real purpose of his book was to try to explain how democracy can work when it’s working right. And of course, he was very interested in Jacksonian America, and he was a very observant traveler and interviewed lots of people, backwoodsmen as well as politicians. But more than that, He wanted to understand democracy as the inevitable future, he thought, of civilization.

[00:10:27] There’s a very good book by Sheldon Wolin called Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, and one world was the aristocratic one, which his family brought him up in, and he shared many of their values. But the other one was the world of modern democracy, and he knew it was coming, and he thought it should come. So he was very well placed in between the two to understand both what’s good and what isn’t so good about democracy.

[00:10:52] Albert Cheng: You mentioned his traveling companion, Beaumont, and originally they were sent to study the prison system. But again, as you said, they, they really studied lots of other things about American society. It’s religious, political, and economic character. So give us a, first of all, an overview of their itinerary.

[00:11:09] Where did they visit? And then say more about Tocqueville’s impressions about American democracy versus European political institutions.

[00:11:18] Leo Damrosch: It’s amazing how much ground they covered. Of course, there were not yet railways, so steamboats were the usual way of getting about when that was at all possible, and they certainly went down the Mississippi in a steamboat.

[00:11:30] There were then 24 states. They visited 17 of those states. And they also went to three territories that were going to be states, West Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, always on the move. I believe their introductory music was that great folk song, I am a poor, wayfaring stranger, that really catches the flavor, catches the flavor of what they were doing.

[00:11:52] They knew they were foreigners, but they also learned English fluently. Interestingly, whereas English visitors, like Charles Dickens, were Very snobbish about American language and habits and so on. Because their English was excellent, but it was not exactly colloquial, they were much more open to whoever they might meet in the backwoods who had something interesting to tell them.

[00:12:15] And Tokfu was a wonderful listener. He wrote down what people said to him and thought about all the different perspectives that he was being given on that trip. And he certainly grasped the enormous regional differences. Boston was still the old patrician class. He met John Quincy Adams and was very impressed with him.

[00:12:34] Then in what was then called the West, like in Cincinnati, it was wide open and brand new and the streets still weren’t paved. And it was an exciting frontier sense of possibility. He made an interesting observation. He had learned that 36 of the members of Congress at that time had been born in Connecticut.

[00:12:55] But it only had six representatives of its own, and the others had all gone West to start over again. And I might tell you about a couple of those later on. And then they went down to the South, first by way of New Orleans, which had a lot of French speakers, so that fascinated him. But he was appalled by the plantation system and above all by slavery.

[00:13:16] And the longest and most powerful chapter in democracy in America is about race relations in otherwise democratic country. And I know we’ll talk about that some more. In addition to which, many people told him, this is going to lead to a civil war. And of course, it took another 30 years, but it was prophetically true.

[00:13:36] Albert Cheng: Well, so let’s get into the book a little bit and Tocqueville’s particular observations about various aspects of American society. So in the early chapters, he examines our Anglo American civic. origins, the federal and state constitutions that were there at the time, and the idea of local self government in cities and towns.

[00:13:56] Tell us more about what his views were on these topics, American democracy, the rule of law in particular, and civic individualism as well.

[00:14:04] Leo Damrosch: Yeah, that’s really crucial to his insights. The power of decentralization, France always was, and I think in many ways still is, highly centralized. Decisions get made in Paris that then percolate all the way down to the remotest places.

[00:14:19] And in the French educational system, Everybody all over the country takes exactly the same final exam at the same time. I was in the island of Guadeloupe one summer, which is still a French territory, they were taking the same exam the kids were taking in Paris. And instead of that top down government, first of all, the federal government was small and not very powerful then, but in fact, it had very little control over local issues.

[00:14:44] People took collective action for themselves, as they wouldn’t have thought to do in France. And what struck him most was the ethos of Democratic equality. Of course, you saw there was inequality of wealth, but everybody, Treated each other as if they might become rich, and as if they were, in the deepest sense, equals, and perhaps he idealized that a bit, but we know what he’s talking about.

[00:15:06] Nobody was born into a servile class as they still were in France. He was struck that there was no, um. American equivalent for the word lackey, which means, you know, a very lower household servant, like a footman. They just didn’t use the word.

[00:15:22] And he noticed that there were, of course, household servants, but they wanted to be called the help. They were just helping out. It was an honorable employment, and one day they’d have servants of their own. They weren’t born to the servant class. He was also a trained lawyer, and very impressed by the rule of law, because after each of those upheavals in France, They rewrote the laws from scratch. And in England, they had common law, but not a constitution.

[00:15:48] What they call the constitution is just historical tradition, which is always open to altering. In America, it was extraordinary the way the constitution had laid out a whole structure. In particular, he was impressed by checks and balances. And saw how important they were. There were certainly people born to privilege, like John Quincy Adams, but we didn’t have a hereditary aristocracy.

[00:16:10] And never had had, for hundreds of years. And in England, the House of Lawrence could still veto any bill that passed the House of Commons. They were about to have the Reform Bill of 1832, one year after Tocqueville made this trip. And even that, in England, just didn’t happen. Expanded the franchise a little bit to somewhat more white males with a certain amount of income in America, it was really universal suffrage. He was totally impressed by equality as an ideal. Of course, it can’t always be in practice, but that this country believes in.

[00:16:42] Albert Cheng: I mean, those are fascinating observations. It’s always revealing to have someone else tell us what it’s like. But let’s get into some more of his observations, particularly some of his economic observations. And so this is Tocqueville who noted, quote, the more deeply one goes into the American national character, the more one sees what they value, that they value everything on earth in response to this sole question, how much money will it bring in? Tell us more about his observations behind that quote, particularly his observations about American materialism and commercial interests.

[00:17:15] Leo Damrosch: Well, he was in some ways kind of startled and put off by it, but he had to admit that the values he was brought up with. These were the privileged values of a class that was born to money and had estates that gave it plenty of income and never had to ask where money comes from so that he could, as he honorably did, and as indeed his father had done, go into public service as a, you know, kind of moral commitment rather than as a job.

[00:17:43] But he also saw that in America because they don’t have, they never did have that kind stratified status, where if you’re born in a duke or an earl, it defines you for the rest of your life. Money was really the one way you could measure status, and he came to say that’s not all bad, because everybody can hope to earn more than they do now, and hard work, or indeed going west and starting over, Might make you quite rich, if that’s what you want.

[00:18:10] So, you weren’t locked into a situation in life that defined who you were. And, on the whole, he thought that, he kind of foresaw the frontier thesis, that it’s because the country was still expanding. But it was always possible to start a very new life. I’ll give you an example. When he was in Cincinnati, he met a 23 year old lawyer who had just arrived.

[00:18:32] He’d moved from New Hampshire because he saw more opportunities in what was in the West, and he was thinking of going into politics. Well, he did go into politics. He was Salman P. Chase. He became a senator from Ohio, then a governor of the state, treasury secretary under Lincoln, and finally chief justice in the Supreme Court.

[00:18:51] And he met that guy when he was 23. And although I didn’t meet him, of course, 300 miles away, Abraham Lincoln was just 22, the red splitter, who was going to one day be one of our greatest presidents. So it wasn’t just money, it was mobility. And I think money is certainly how he thought a lot of people measured it.

[00:19:09] In New York, they would say, so and so is worth 10, 000, that guy’s only worth 5, 000. It was that, you know, defined them morally. But he was not snobbish the way an English person would have been. You could see why it has worked out that way.

[00:19:23] Albert Cheng: He met several US politicians. And so, I mean, the list, you know, I’ll read a few of the names that are on this list that he met. President Andrew Jackson, if I’m not mistaken, John Quincy Adams, which, which you mentioned, Jefferson and Madison Secretary of State, Albert Gallatin,

[00:19:41] James Kent, who’s a former New York Chief Justice. So tell us about the political characters he’s met and then what are his general opinions about the outlook and character of American politicians.

[00:19:52] Leo Damrosch: Well, something it’s clear he didn’t understand, and at the time it might have been hard for him to grasp it, was the populist movement that Jackson represented.

[00:20:03] He had a kind of poor opinion of Jackson when he did meet him in Washington, it was very briefly at the end of his trip, and they didn’t really talk to each other. But his informants, especially the ones in Boston, said this guy is a hayseed, and if he hadn’t won the Battle of New Orleans, we wouldn’t know his name.

[00:20:20] And he didn’t understand. The power of a really expanding democratic. Vote or the machine that Martin Van Buren was constructing. So in that sense, probably he was, he didn’t get it. But of course France was just so totally different. He did end up a member of its legislature and we’ll go into details about that, but it all worked very differently there.

[00:20:41] What he did see was how each of those people you mentioned was an ex impressive representative of genuine public service. In different ways. John Quincy Adams, son of another president, of course, was the best of the old Boston patrician class. He’d been Secretary of State, he spoke perfect French, they got on great.

[00:21:02] But what most impressed him was, after losing the election to Jackson, Adams got re elected as a member of the House of Representatives, because he wasn’t done giving public service. It seemed just extraordinary to Tocqueville. Imagine James Kent, he had been a Chief Justice of New York State, Tocqueville was a lawyer, he wanted to study the laws, and people like that gave him You know, really a kind of an education, because he listened intently and wrote down what they told him.

[00:21:28] I don’t think he mentioned Edward Livingston, that was Jackson’s Secretary of State. He’d been a senator from Louisiana, which had such a strong French influence. That was invaluable for Tocqueville, because Livingston could help him to understand how The kind of law you learned in Paris is not the same as the kind we now have in America, but it was especially interesting with Montesquieu’s distinguished people that impressed him most, but all kinds of people in every walk of life, village shopkeepers, who gave him insights to get into democracy in America.

[00:22:00] Alisha Searcy: Professor, it’s an honor to speak with you today. I’ve got a few questions of my own. The former governor of Tennessee, Sam Houston, wrote about the mistreatment of American Indians. He said, I quote, A succession of injuries has broken his proud spirit and taught him to kiss the hand which inflicts upon him stripes, to cringe and ask favors of the wretch, who violates his oath by defrauding him money promised by treaties. What were Tocqueville’s views about frontier style figures like Houston or Davy Crockett, as well as the condition of Native Americans he witnessed in the age of Jackson?

[00:22:39] Leo Damrosch: Houston was one of the most impressive people he met, and he learned probably more from Sam Houston than any other individual. And it was an example of the, just, good luck by which Tocqueville would have the encounters in this trip.

[00:22:52] He and his friend Beaumont had been on a steamship trying to get down to Mississippi. They got frozen in the ice. It was the coldest winter for 50 years. Eventually, they gave up and trekked overland to get far enough south where the water was free again and took passage in a steamboat to go to New Orleans, and at one point, before they met Houston, it pulled over to the eastern shore and took aboard A contingent of Choctaw Indians who were being deported from the American South to Indian Territory, as they were calling it, which is in today’s Oklahoma.

[00:23:27] It was the very beginning of the Trail of Tears, and Tocqueville was there to see it happening. He was very moved by their grief. I think I’ll read a little bit afterwards about that. Then, a little later, the steamboat stopped again, and a big man on a big horse came galloping up. And that was Sam Houston.

[00:23:43] This is before the Alamo, but he had been governor of Tennessee, and he had actually a Cherokee wife, and he was very, very sympathetic to the abuse of Native Americans. The passage you just read talks about the ones who were finally reduced to grovel, but Houston said most of them are not. They were born to liberty.

[00:24:02] They were trained to be completely independent. They will never, ever, Give up their freedom. They will not assimilate if that’s what it takes. And in the long chapter I already mentioned, in Democracy in America, he contrasts the Native Americans with the slaves who have lost everything. Their language, their religion, their traditions, and yet they’re not being assimilated as Americans. And they’re not allowed any freedom at all. Native Americans are at one extreme, and the slaves are absolutely no fault of their own or at the other.

[00:24:34] Alisha Searcy: Wow, that’s very moving and powerful. I want to talk about education for just a moment. Tocqueville visited America just prior to Horace Mann’s late 1830s common school movement in Massachusetts.

[00:24:47] But nevertheless, he had many interesting observations about education in the U. S., including religious schooling, education in different states and regions, the liberal arts and vocational training, and the education of women. So can you talk about what we can learn from Tocqueville? from his book about the relationship between democratic education and self government.

[00:25:11] Leo Damrosch: It struck him really as a staggering difference from the country he grew up in, which, of course, in later times, had a national elementary educational. Most people in France were illiterate and in many ways it’s been said provincial France hadn’t changed since the fall of the Roman Empire. And his education was private, he had a tutor and so on.

[00:25:35] And if you weren’t privileged like that, there was no reason to know how to read and write and you certainly weren’t going to be able to vote anyhow. And you saw how crucial, uh, Education was to citizen involvement, and also, again, how locally it was managed. So, sure, some places were heavily religious and stressed that, some places weren’t.

[00:25:53] Of course, in France, the only official church was the Catholic Church. In America, they were most impressed with the Quakers in Philadelphia, so we had such a range of ways of learning and understanding. And something else that struck him that flows from education was People being literate, were well informed, they read newspapers, and they were able to come together to make decisions, not just in The polling booths, but what he saw in Massachusetts, and was so impressed by, was the tradition of the town meeting, in which once a year, every adult in the town can come together if they want to, and be in a public meeting where the issues, the local issues are debated, and come to a vote on it.

[00:26:35] It’s a true collective kind of commitment. And I actually grew up in Maine, and we still had an annual town meeting, just exactly like that. And so even when people are voting for their representatives in Washington, they are literally representatives. They’ve been commissioned by the people who know what they are asking them to do, and will certainly vote them out of office if they don’t do it. It was education in that sense that fascinated him, not learning math and so on, which is important, but how education created a committed and intelligent population.

[00:27:09] Alisha Searcy: Don’t we wish we had some of that still?

[00:27:13] Leo Damrosch: That’s right.

[00:27:14] Alisha Searcy: You mentioned a couple of things earlier about his analysis of slavery and the comparison with Native Americans. And you also mentioned that there was a prediction of the Civil War. So I want to go back to that for just a moment. You talk about in Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s primary analysis of slavery was based on slaveholders financial interests as he viewed the desire for profit. As the root evil driving slavery, he also made clear that slavery was undermining democracy’s claim to equality, while he also accurately predicted that the political battles over slavery were pushing the country towards civil war. So can you talk more about his views on American slavery and its moral and political impact on democracy?

[00:28:01] Leo Damrosch: Well, it shocked him in the South with the illusion that white people had that they were a kind of upper class, like the old chivalric knights, uh, when I used to teach at the University of Virginia, and our sports team were the cavaliers, that they were, um, slosh buckling swordsmen, and they all had slaves, and it was taken for granted.

[00:28:22] Not just the slaves did the work, but they were literally chattel property. Even a very poor backwoodsman would have a slave or two. Toto stayed once, in that trek I mentioned, when the river froze, in a little cabin in the woods in Tennessee, and it was snowing outside, and fire was going out. And the master clapped his hand and one of the slaves went outside and you heard chomping and he cut down a tree then and there and cut it up and brought in logs and they burned them and the master wouldn’t have got up out of his chair.

[00:28:53] And Tocqueville saw that commitment, not just the financial blow that would happen in slavery was abolished, but that way of life, which he despised, was so endemic that he thought the South was literally a cancer that was likely to destroy the Union. And of course, many people in that. Said much the same thing.

[00:29:12] Alisha Searcy: Wow. Toward the end of your book, you quote Tocqueville as saying, When inequality is the common law of society, the greatest inequalities don’t strike the eye. But when everything is more or less at the same level, the slightest inequalities are wounding. Tell us more about the lessons drawn from Tocqueville that we should be learning to better understand the nature of human inequality in our democracy.

[00:29:39] Leo Damrosch: Well, that’s like the ultimate challenge, isn’t it? Because it’s true, if you were born to be a lackey in France, you just understood that your kids are going to be lackeys, too, and that’s just the way it’s going to be. And it’s, of course, true that if inequality is just a matter of income, that you may become resentful, because this guy had rich parents, and he doesn’t have to work as hard as I do.

[00:30:02] But I think Tocqueville would have still thought. The real problem is much deeper than that. One of his heroes was Jean Jacques Rousseau. The social contract certainly influenced our American founders, but it sounds earlier and very great work that Tocqueville is Pressbuy is called A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and Riccio has an almost tragic vision of inequality as built into civilization, that there’s no tribe in the Amazon that doesn’t turn out to have a chief and, you know, status levels and so on, and Riccio said you might imagine if Earliest men and women were totally independent and completely taking care of themselves.

[00:30:45] Then they really could be equal. But as soon as they got together in a village, there starts being structure. And as soon as the village turns into a town or a city, there starts being a police state and the rest of it. And maybe that’s just human nature itself. So he was not You know, the way Marx might have later been idealistic about how you can just abolish inequality by some kind of stroke of the pen, maybe it’s just what we humans are like.

[00:31:13] Alisha Searcy: So my last question before I ask you to read an excerpt for us is, your book observes that Alexis de Tocqueville is More quoted than read. And so commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. Can you share with us what you believe his legacy is and how basic knowledge of democracy in America could help policy makers, educators, And students alike comprehend our shared democratic ideals and turbulent politics.

[00:31:50] Leo Damrosch: Well, he never thought of himself as a prophet and certainly not an oracle, and certainly the America that he experienced was very, very different from ours today with the Industrial Revolution and everything else that happened subsequently. Also world wars, because back then America was so far away from every place else that it was able to be completely self contained.

[00:32:12] Transcribed But what he did get was a range of opinions that helped him to understand what the ideals are that America stands for, and I think we today still should try to live up to. And I’ll just mention two of the most important, both suggested by two people he met, both in Boston as it happens. One was the then president of Harvard, his name is Jared Sparks.

[00:32:35] He was engaged in writing a book. biography of George Washington at the time. And he gave Tocqueville the phrase, which has become well known, the tyranny of the majority.

[00:32:45] And the idea is, if you disagree with the majority, you don’t go to jail, but you get ostracized. There’s very great pressure to go along with the crowd. And he saw that as particularly American. In England, because he could, I don’t know, in France, especially, you could see where the power structure was. Keeping you in your place, and you had more reason to fight back, but if you’re a part of Behold, you want to be accepted by the others. And the other was a German immigrant, his name is Franz Liebre.

[00:33:14] He changed it to Francis. He became a distinguished political scientist in this country. He gave talk show the expression, Habits of the Heart. Which has often been quoted. And Lieber said, you know, what makes the union work is not the legal system or the constitution, it’s the shared values that we see at those New England town meetings.

[00:33:35] People have to feel a mutual commitment and an investment. So if you vote on the losing side, well, you may disagree, but you think the majority had a right to win the vote. And you don’t say we’re gonna have a revolution and overturn them. And the question was whether that kind of Common cause could survive in a developing modern world, and Tocqueville had some doubts about that, and I think he was right to have them.

[00:34:01] Alisha Searcy: For sure. This has been absolutely wonderful and enlightening. We appreciate you being here with us. Would you be so kind to read perhaps your favorite paragraph from the book, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America, to close out the interview?

[00:34:16] Leo Damrosch: Yeah, I thought I would read actually, um, it’s a quote that didn’t get into the book because it suggests aspects and depths in his personality that this rather technical and very carefully argued treatise on democracy can’t include, partly because he wrote it to impress French people with how democracy need not be a threat.

[00:34:37] So he tried to make it as unemotional as he could, but he and Beaumont traveled into the northwoods of Michigan, totally uninhabited at that time. And he wrote an account of it called Two Weeks in the Wilderness, and he talks about a kind of zen like fullness of being that he experienced in the Northwoods.

[00:34:55] Now, let’s read this paragraph. At midday, by the way, I translated his French myself, it tends to kind of sound stilted in most translations, so I tried to get the rhythm and feeling into it. At midday, when the sun beats down on the forest, you often hear in its depths A sound like a long sigh, a plaintive cry, that lingers in the distance.

[00:35:17] It’s the last effort of the dying wind. Then all around you everything subsides into a silence so profound, a stillness so complete, that your soul feels penetrated by a sort of religious terror. Then the soul, half asleep, balances between the present and future, enveloped in the beauty of nature, at peace with yourself, You listen to the steady beating of your arteries, and each pulsation seems to mark the passing of time, flowing drop by drop into eternity.

[00:35:49] Alisha Searcy: Mmm. Very good. Thank you so much, Professor, for being with us. This was a great time spent with you today.

[00:35:57] Leo Damrosch: Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure.

[00:36:13] Alisha Searcy: Wow, that was a great interview. As usual, learned so much. He’s so smart and knowledgeable and sharp. That was really, really good.

[00:36:21] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. I’m definitely love his work. I mean, he’s, I think one of the best biographers that are out there. I actually even read his biography on Jean Jacques Rousseau last year and I found it one of the best treatments of that person. So yeah. Great interview.

[00:36:34] Alisha Searcy: Very much so. Well, before we go, I’m going to do our Tweet of the Week, which I’m super excited about. It’s from U. S. News World Report, and it’s about the top 20 historically Black colleges and universities, and how HBCUs are some of the country’s top producers of Black doctors, scientists, and engineers.

[00:36:56] And this is something that I have been knowing and hearing about for several years. I think the number is more than 50 percent of the nation’s Black doctors, scientists, and engineers come from HBCUs. And I’m just going to brag for a moment and say that if you look at the list of these top 20, number one, for I think what is the 15th or 16th year in a row, is Spelman College, which is my alma mater.

[00:37:24] Albert Cheng: Well, congratulations. You got, you know, we began the show talking about educational opportunity. It sounds like you had a great one.

[00:37:30] Alisha Searcy: I absolutely did. Great institution and, and many of our HBCUs are doing just extraordinary work. So I’m excited about that tweet and glad that people are learning more about the role and the value of HBCUs in our country.

[00:37:44] So, that’s our Tweet of the Week. Next week, I’m super excited that we’re going to have Dr. Kimiana Burke. She’s a Senior Policy Fellow at Excel in Ed, focusing on a comprehensive science based approach to K 3 reading policy, and I think what people May also remember is that she was certainly one of the architects of the Mississippi Miracle and implementing the science of reading there.

[00:38:09] So I’m super excited about having her on next week. So that does it for us. We look forward to seeing you all next week. Albert, great to be with you as usual. Oh yeah. Yep. Likewise. Pleasure is a mutual here. And everybody have a great week. See you soon. Hey, this is Alisha. Thank you for listening to The Learning Curve. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we invite you to donate at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.