The Weight
The Weight
"Ethic Of Objectivity" with Joe Crespino
Show Notes:
Historians aren’t always objective, and objectivity is not the same as neutrality. These are important distinctions for Dr. Joseph Crespino. For him, studying history is about a commitment to fairness, honesty, and justice, and accepting evidence that doesn’t automatically align with preconceived notions--advice that can be used in all sectors of life. Learning about history, especially the dark parts we’d like to ignore, gives us greater understanding and insight into today’s world.
Joe is a professor, author, historian, and Mississippi native who serves as the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University.
Resources:
Buy Dr. Crespino’s books here.
Hi, I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly:I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester:Today our guest is Dr Joseph Crispino. He is a professor at Emory University. He is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History, and he has had a career where, as a southern, he's a Mississippian, he has written and talked about Mississippi and race, but he's also one who got to know President Jimmy Carter. And so, Chris, a great conversation today. Covered a lot of ground.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, we talked a lot about his current work and some of the lessons that he learned teaching a course out of the archives, the presidential archives, for President Jimmy Carter, and we talked about some of his interactions between the students and the former president, and then we kind of go back into kind of his roots, the origins of some of his research with this dissertation about Mississippi, and the way he kind of tells the story from 1964, the civil rights movement, to the the current, well, I guess until 1980 when Ronald Reagan comes to the Shelby County Fair to launch his presidential campaign. He tells that part of Mississippi history.
Eddie Rester:Which is a significant piece of history, not just for Mississippi, but there's a great shift in conservatism that's happening at that time that he...
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, it's an important part of understanding kind of the current political moment that we're in in terms of kind of a counter conservative movement after the civil rights movement, very fascinating history, especially if you're a Mississippian, and we delve into that. And then we kind of come back around at the end of the conversation to talk a little bit about the power of a certain kind of ethic that I think is needed, both in scholarship, but also just in institutional life, that would include a kind of an ethic of objectivity, empathy, and a way of being that seems very needed today. And so, man, I love the conversation.
Eddie Rester:Great conversation today.
Chris McAlilly:I read this book, I don't know, 15, 20, years ago, and I've wanted to talk to Dr Crispino about it. And so grateful to have the opportunity.
Eddie Rester:Well, and it just a reminder that history is a critical piece of how... Learning about history is a critical piece of how we can engage with one another and for another. And so...
Chris McAlilly:The takeaway is don't read tweets.
Eddie Rester:Don't read tweets. Xes.
Chris McAlilly:Xes.
Eddie Rester:Xes?
Chris McAlilly:TikTok or other social media content. Don't even read headlines, but go read a long historical book.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, or the audio book. They don't want to read. Some people don't read, Chris.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, if you only listen this conversation that will be enough.
Eddie Rester:That's enough.
Chris McAlilly:That's enough.
Eddie Rester:Thank you for being with us. Share, like, leave us a review.
Chris McAlilly:[INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise. It requires deep wisdom to navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems, and unwarranted hope to inspire durable change
Eddie Rester:As Christ-centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the academy and the marketplace, we all carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.
Chris McAlilly:But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition tradition offers us centuries of wisdom if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.
Eddie Rester:That's why The Weight exists: to create space for the conversations that challenge our assumptions, deepen our thinking and renew our spiritual imagination.
Chris McAlilly:Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness in tradition, and responsiveness to a changing world.
Eddie Rester:So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a non profit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of Christ-centered leadership today. Welcome to The Weight.[END INTRO] We're here today with Dr Joe Crispino. He's from Emory University. He is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History. I hope I got that right. Is that exactly the title?
Joseph Crespino:Yeah.
Chris McAlilly:No one, no one that listens to the podcast regularly would be surprised if you got it wrong.
Eddie Rester:No one would be surprised. We're so thankful you're here. You're a native of Mississippi, Macon, Mississippi. We'll talk a little bit about that eventually. But one of the things we were talking about before we started, hit the record button, was President Jimmy Carter. And we asked if you knew him, and you said you had shared time with him along the through the years, in your time at Emory. And talk a little bit about him, and in this moment, kind of your thoughts about him, who he was, and what he meant.
Joseph Crespino:Sure, when President Carter left the White House, he came, he went back to Plains, but the first, the president then of Emory, Jim Laney, who's a Methodist minister, who is the dean of the of the Candler School of Theology. Before he became president of Emory, reached out to President Carter and invited him to come be a university professor. And so Jimmy Carter was a university professor at Emory from 1981 until his death. And I came to Emory in 2003 and one of the first things I did when I moved to Atlanta was to go to the Carter Presidential Archives, because I was finishing up my first book, and I was writing about private schools and Christian schools in the 70s, and tax, federal tax policy, and the Carter administration, and all these things that I wrote about at the last chapter of my first book about Mississippi. And I realized what an amazing resource it was to have a presidential library, you know, so close to campus. And I was determined to start a class out of those archives. And I did. It took me a couple of years, and I would all, I would... President Carter would regularly come to classes and visit classes. And I taught that class about eight or 10 times. And every time President Carter would come to the final class, students would have done 20 to 25 page original research out of the presidential archives on some topic. And then they would ask President Carter questions, you know, that came out of the research, and it had led to some really amazing exchanges between students and President Carter. And you know, sometimes students would write on topics that President Carter talked about a thousand times. You know, the decision to boycott the 1980 Olympics. But other times they would do topics that he hadn't thought about them in years. And that was really fascinating. One of my favorites was a student who had studied to... He wasn't... He didn't seem like a very serious young man. I think he went the whole semester At least he understood that, at least without like, where... He wore pajama bottoms the whole semester, until the day that President Carter came, he finally wore a pair of pants. He wrote...
Chris McAlilly:I know that kid. I've seen him walking around campus. We...
Eddie Rester:Actually there was an intern one time. That's a different story. Yeah. Sorry, yeah.
Joseph Crespino:You know the type. And he, his junior year, he had studied in Hungary, and I think he drank a lot of beer in Budapest. And he just, he wrote about this topic that I didn't know anything about, and it was about the decision of the Carter Administration to return the Crown of Saint Stephen to the Hungarian people. And this was really important. And so he didn't know if President Carter was even involved in this at all, but he wrote the paper up. He thought it was like a second-level decision of the State Department, and he told President Carter what he was writing about. And President Carter was like, "Really? You're writing about that?" And President Carter was very deeply involved, and it was a very meaningful thing for President Carter. Part of the strategy, late in the Cold War to open up, you know, to provide an opening with Eastern Bloc countries, you know, to try to promote religiosity. The Crown of Saint Stephen is a relic of Hungarian Catholicism that in the end of World War Two, the Hungarian freedom fighters gave it to the American army and said please take this and protect it, because we think the communists are going to destroy it. And so it sat in Fort Knox Kentucky for decades, and then it was a decision about whether to return it or not. Anyway. I could go on and on.
Chris McAlilly:It was amazing.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, that's, that's one of those little pieces of diplomacy and history that nobody remembers, really, except...
Joseph Crespino:But as ministers, you'll appreciate, President Carter got misty eyed telling the story because it was very, as a devout Christian layman, it was very meaningful to him to promote Christian faith among people, Catholics in Hungary who had been starved of open religious expression for so many years under communist rule. So it was really profound, and But anyway, when President Carter passed away, Emory it was one of those great moments in my teaching career. decided to do a little memorial service for him, you know, after the the main events. They want to do it in a respectful period afterward all the major events. And so we did it this past week, and I told some stories about President Carter in those classes, and just how serious he took that, the exercise. He never showed up and just, you know, bloviated, or, you know, told the all the same stories. He always wanted to know what students were writing and answer and be as much help to them as he could. And he also, you know, he was just so humble, and he would always, he never showed up on time. He was always early, and he just was really remarkable. And I reflected on, at the end of those remarks, about one of the most remarkable speeches I think President Carter ever gave, and one of the great, kind of, I think speeches in late 20th Century American rhetoric is the Georgia Law Day speech he gave in 1974 before he ever ran for president. And it was, it would kind of launch him as a national figure. And Hunter Thompson, the gonzo journalist, was there covering the event, because Ted Kennedy was the main speaker, but he wrote an article, he said, you know about this little-known governor for Georgia who stole the show. And at the end of that speech, and it was right in the aftermath of Watergate. It's the fall of 1974. Nixon resigned two months earlier. It was a low period in American history and American's faith in their government and then their leaders. And he gave this great, gave this amazing, hard-hitting speech about kind of criminal law in the state of Georgia and how the law... It was a room full of lawyers in Athens, and he just let them have it about how the bar was not doing enough to pursue justice and criminal law reform. And at the end of it, he closes by this riff on Tolstoy's "War and Peace," which he had read, checked out from the Plains, Georgia library as a 12-year-old and read all 415 pages. And he ended with this riff on the final chapter of that book is Tolstoy's kind of grand theory of history. And then Carter provides this synopsis of Tolstoy's grand theory of history. And he says, the point of the book is that the course of human events is not determined by presidents or senators or congressmen. It's, you know, it's determined by, you know, the wisdom and goodness and judiciousness and integrity, you know, of the common, ordinary people. And he said, if that was true in Russia, where they had a czar, and in France, where they had an emperor, how much more true is it in our own country, you know, where we have a constitution that empowers the people themselves to determine what the government is and ought to be. Just the most incredible, you know, ending to that speech, and it really did launch, help launch him as a singular voice in American political life in 1974 and '75.
Chris McAlilly:People have different ways of assessing his presidency, but I think across the board, one of the things that I've heard as people have watched his funeral that was publicly displayed quite broadly in the media, is that he was a man of character, a man of deep character and integrity. And that was, you know, I think that's, I mean, there's so much that he did, but I think it was the person that he was.
Joseph Crespino:Yeah.
Chris McAlilly:That ultimately defines his his life, his work, his witness. And, you know, I wonder just having been with him up close and kind of observing him in the context where he's over-investing in the next generation by showing up and kind of giving them an opportunity to ask questions. What did... You know, are there any characteristics or qualities that you, beyond humility, that you would lift up, that were a part of his character, that you saw in his engagement with the students?
Joseph Crespino:Oh, just, yeah, just this. Well, I think you said it right there. I mean, it was his... He understood it as an investment in the next generation, right? And just the, you know, he worked so hard. And he was, he was in his early 90s, when he was coming to my class, classes. And he would he would have his assistant call me three weeks before he was to show up, and he wanted to know the the list of topics, so that he could think about them and have his talking points ready before he came to the class. And you know the second time I taught the class, it was the same year when he published his book, "Peace Not Apartheid." And that was a really... We have a large Jewish student population here at Emory, and that was a really controversial book on this campus. One of my colleagues, who teaches Middle Eastern history was on the Carter Center board and resigned, or was an advisory board. It wasn't the board of the Carter Center. But anyway, it was, and he held a press conference, and there was a lot of hard feelings. And for several years, several times after I taught that class, I would have Jewish students who would show up and were ready to argue and ready to kind of, you know, prove him wrong on the claims he made in that book. And one of those students was this Ami Fields-Myer. He's a fellow right now at the Harvard Kennedy School. He's a great Emory graduate, alum, and doing great things in the world. Worked in the Biden administration and worked for the mayor of Los Angeles, and he talked about being one of those kids who wanted to ask President Carter the questions that he had been hearing since he had been in Jewish summer camp. About Jimmy Carter, and his attacks on Israel, this kind of thing. And he has, he published a piece. He wrote it up in Haaretz, the Israeli publication, and it's a beautiful little memory, and he talks about how Jimmy Carter changed his mind. Jimmy Carter took him seriously, but also he changed his mind. And he remembered President Carter saying that, you know, he just believed that it's never a bad time to work for peace, and because the issues always were, Carter was always critical of Israeli leaders for putting too many conditions, too many preconditions, on when they would sit down and talk to the Palestinians about peace talks and yeah. So anyway.
Chris McAlilly:That's extraordinary.
Joseph Crespino:That was part of his, that's part of his character.
Chris McAlilly:What an incredible experience as an educator and a professor, to be able to bring... It brings to life what Faulkner said, the past is never dead. It's not even the past. Just you know, for those, to have young people and the archives of a presidency and a living president there.
Eddie Rester:How fun would it be to get all those students back together sometime?
Joseph Crespino:Yeah, I know.
Eddie Rester:Just to have a general see where those conversations took them, where that research, those encounters with President Carter, took them or changed them, because I'm sure for many of them, just like that student you just mentioned, being in the presence of someone who knew great power but also lived great humility, would be life changing to people.
Joseph Crespino:Yeah. yeah.
Chris McAlilly:That's where you are. But as you began your
Joseph Crespino:Yes.
Chris McAlilly:And where are you from? What part of career, I guess your research as a historian, the work that you were doing is on the place that you come from, which is also the place where we are from. You're a native Mississippian. Mississippi?
Joseph Crespino:Yeah. So I grew up in Noxubee County, in Macon. It's where my mother's side of the family has lived since the 1830s. They were some of the first white folks to be in Noxubee County. You know, that was Choctaw country that was opened up because of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. And they came from North Carolina. So that's all my mother's side of the family. And then my father's side of the family, Crespinos, not a ton of Crespinos in Mississippi, but they were all in the Delta, and they were part of a Sicilian immigration, first into New Orleans and up into Delta. So my father was born in Duncan, Mississippi, and grew up in Benoit.
Eddie Rester:I know exactly where those places are.
Joseph Crespino:Went to Benoit High School and then played his senior at Greenville High School, and then went to Ole Miss and played football on the great teams of Johnny Vaught and Bobby Crespino was, he was first round draft pick of the Cleveland Browns in 1961.
Eddie Rester:Hall of fame player.
Joseph Crespino:Both my parents are from Mississippi, Dad from the Delta, Mom's from Macon. And I grew up in Macon. Yeah. So that's my Mississippi.
Eddie Rester:And you developed a love of history. And so where did that come from? Where what kind of ignited that in you, that desire to know?
Joseph Crespino:I just felt like, you know, I mean, you mentioned Faulkner, and I did feel like, you know, growing up in Macon, Mississippi in the 1970s and 80s and coming... You know, it was a place where the kind of legacies of segregation were still just very real. You just saw them everywhere. And so I grew up with a mother who was very, who taught Sunday School and who, she was the force. She was more popular than the ministers in our Methodist Church.
Eddie Rester:Really.
Joseph Crespino:You know, she had the following of the young adults class. And young adults was everybody from like 22 to 70. And so she was just a power, and she was extraordinary. And so, you know, she read broadly, and she just had a great witness, and was a very formal influence on a lot of people. But I was just interested in the world, and my parents worked really hard to be able to send me to a school. In Macon, we had a, you know, we had two schools. We had a white school and a Black school. We had an all white private academy that been formed in 1968 basically to avoid public school desegregation. And we had Noxubee High School, which was all Black, and it was like a Delta town. Macon and Noxubee County, the demographics are a lot like the Delta counties. It's a Black majority county and so it was in the, as I talked about in my book, it was really the Black majority counties that ended up having segregation academies. There was, you know, roughly a tipping point, if you had about a 40%, about a 45% Black population, or higher, chances are you would have a splinter school. There were some exceptions, like in Yazoo City, where you had a lot of good leadership in the public school, and there were whites who stayed in the public school. But in most of those towns, Black majority counties, the white folks left to form a private school. And so that's where I grew up. And so it was, you know, it was neither school. Both schools were under resourced and struggling and that kind of thing. And my parents, I liked school a lot, and they wanted to give me opportunities. They sent me to a boarding school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And then, I wanted to get out of the south, because I liked my home, but I wanted to experience other things and see the world. And so when I went to college, I went to college in Chicago at Northwestern and I got involved in a community organizing project on the near west side of Chicago in what was the Henry Horner homes. They don't exist anymore. The United Center is built on top of where they were. But it was, you know, a federal housing project there in a poor neighborhood in Chicago. And I would meet residents there, and I would tell them I'm from Mississippi, and they would say, oh, you know, "My people are from Winona," or "I've got folks in Ackerman," you know, and that kind of thing. And you saw Chicago, and Chicago in the early 90s, in the mid 90s, too, you know, it was one of the most segregated big cities in all the country. Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, you know, it was filled with folks who had the historic part of the historic migration of African Americans out of the south to the urban north. And so it just, it made me, you know... And just like... I think that I'm from this place in Macon, Mississippi that has such a unique racial history that's so different from other places around the United States. And then I go to Chicago, I was like, oh, no, you know that whole Black-white thing? It's pretty important up here in Chicago, too. You know? And they've got some problems up here too. And so it made me want to study history, and study the history of civil rights and races and and to go back and tell the history of Mississippi in a broader national context. And so that's what I was trying to do in that first book, to write about kind of white resistance to civil rights in what was considered the most recalcitrant southern state. And it was the most recalcitrant southern state, Mississippi was.
Chris McAlilly:So as a Mississippian, I went to college in Birmingham, and then I ended up in Nashville, and then Atlanta. And in that journey, it was post-college, and I was trying to kind of reckon with the fact that I had grown up in this place that I both loved and had a great affection for, but also had these mixed feelings about, and, you know, didn't know why I might want to leave and not come back and all this. I was trying to understand the church and my place in the church and the church's history, especially as it related to race. And a big part of that journey for me was just trying to figure out what happened. You know, what was happening. And you know, you go back and read the history of Mississippi, and there are different ways of reading it. And your book, I discovered, you know, as I was in seminary, the book is called "In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution," and it begins on August the fourth, 1964 with the recovery of three civil rights workers beneath an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. I lived in Mississippi, in Philadelphia, Mississippi for four years, and didn't know, didn't really know that story when I was a kid. And then the book then kind of moves forward to 1980 when Reagan comes to Neshoba County Fair to launch his presidential campaign. Why did you decide to write about that, that period, that gap, and why was that such a poignant place to begin the story?
Joseph Crespino:Yeah, because it just created two markers in time. And I mean, you could write that story in a lot of different ways. In some ways, history is always just, it's just one thing after another. And so the job of the historian is, how do you begin your story? How do you end it? And what are you trying to tell? And in that book, I was trying to tell the story about how in 1964, white Mississippians, that's the year that Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act. It's the year that the bodies were found in Neshoba County. And Mississippi is kind of a moral and political pariah within the larger liberal nation that is finally acting to pass this landmark legislation to right the wrongs of the past century, since the Civil War. And then only 16 years later, Ronald Reagan goes to Neshoba County, and now they're this kind of carefully courted constituency. You know, they're the swing vote, white Mississippians are, kind of the swing vote in that really closely contested 1980 race. And you have a Republican Party that is, you know, actively courting white Southerners who had left the Democratic Party. And so that's a remarkable kind of transformation in the political fortunes of white Mississippians. And I was interested in seeing how did that happen? What was going on in Mississippi and America that would enable that to happen? So that's the book I tell, I mean, that's the story I tell in that book. And, you know, I would probably, as we were talking earlier, that book was a dissertation. It started with a dissertation, and it became a book. And if I were writing that history today, I probably would write it a little bit differently.
Chris McAlilly:How would you write it?
Eddie Rester:Yeah, yeah.
Chris McAlilly:What would you do?
Joseph Crespino:Yeah, I know. I knew you were gonna ask me. Now I actually have to answer that question. I don't know. I mean, I would tell it... It's not fair to say I would tell it differently. I just I have so many more skills as a historian and a storyteller now that I would write a different book, and I probably would write a book that had more of me in it, you know, because one, I have tenure, and I can do that, and I can write whatever I want. But I guess, I guess what I would say, too, is, one of the things that I think people who... There's a certain strain of criticism of that literature that I contributed to that's now almost 20 years old. You know, what we were trying to do... My book came out at a time when there were a lot of other people writing about the history of conservatism, and we were trying to understand the history of conservatism and the history of the south and make it you know. And I wanted to say, you know, that Mississippi, a place like Mississippi, was actually really important in the story of modern conservatism, even if modern conservatives don't want to admit that, because that makes it uncomfortable, and that makes racism a really important part of the conservative coalition, in a way that makes folks uncomfortable.But, we were trying to register... You know, we, but we were also trying to take conservatives seriously and say it's not only about racism, it's about other things. And so one of the things that might get have gotten short changed in that book is how isolated Mississippi was. And one of the things that I would say today, and one things I teach when I talk about Mississippi in 1963 and '64 you know, when Ross Barnett is elected in 1959 and he takes office in 1960... I mean, the Citizens Council is really running the state of Mississippi, right? You know, and the sovereignty commission was spying on people, and the Clarion Ledger allowed no freedom of speech. The Clarion Ledger was a total, you know, just a segregationist organ and a mouthpiece for the segregationist politics of the state. And so it really, I was on a panel here at Emory the day after the election. So it was whatever November 6 of last fall, and I was on the panel with Andrew Young. Andrew Young, you know, chief lieutenant of Martin Luther King, member the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And I'd met Andrew Young a couple times, but I'd never been on a panel with him. And I just publicly, I said, I began my remarks by saying, Ambassador Young, I just want to thank you, as a Mississippian, for having the courage of you and your colleagues to go into Mississippi, which, you know... We don't... I mean, you know, America does have a history. We don't think of it as this way, but America does have a history of authoritarian rule. I mean, I think racial authoritarianism is a pretty good description of what of the kind of government you had in Mississippi in the early 1960s, in that period of reaction after the Brown decision. And I know not a lot of Mississippians would be happy to hear that, but it's true.
Eddie Rester:I was in Hattiesburg, Mississippi for years and Freedom Summer, when Freedom Summer happened, and there were riots in other places, there were none in Hattiesburg. And the reason was, at that time that the governor of Mississippi was from Hattiesburg, and he insisted that there be no riots, no violence, nothing in Hattiesburg, in his hometown. And he dictated how that summer would play out in Hattiesburg.
Joseph Crespino:Yeah.
Eddie Rester:In a lot of ways
Chris McAlilly:I think...
Joseph Crespino:Well, and Paul Johnson, I mean, is a big figure in my book. And one of the things that Mississippi's leaders are--and Paul Johnson was one of the first and important one. He and JP Coleman and others, is like, this is a losing hand we're playing. You know, the kind of embittered resistance that Ross Barnett and the Citizens Councils were leading is not going to be in our best interest long term. And that's when the Citizens Councils, I mean, excuse me, when the sovereignty commission actually starts trying to mitigate the Klan and work against the most extreme forces to try totroubleshoot, as they say, and not have the riot, and those kinds of things. So that's a more, and that's the kind of complicated story about managing this racial transition that I tell in my book.
Chris McAlilly:And that's the piece of it that I was most grateful for. I think when I read this, I don't know as a 20, in my late 20s, is because, I think because I was in it. I had left Mississippi, and I was intersecting with people from all over the country. And I think when I have done that in my life in other places, and talk, you know, you tell the story, and you're in a conversation, it's like, "Well, where are you from?" And I'm, I'm from Mississippi, and there's a flattening of the cultural complexity of the state that that I would sometimes experience in people's perception of it from afar. And what I experienced in your book was just the specificity of the story and the complexity of the story in these various cases. And one of the ways in which you tell that story is county by county decision making around, we've already mentioned it a little bit earlier, around public and private education. And so I I graduated high school from Tupelo High School, and was very grateful to hear the story. But Tupelo has this great tradition of public education. And one of the things that you helped me understand is how that came to be about because you had, you know, a local business owner, downtown department store Reed's department store. Jack Reed, Sr. was a...
Joseph Crespino:Yeah, I know
Chris McAlilly:Yeah. He was a member of the the Mississippi Economic Council and the local business leaders and some of the civic leaders of that time were very forward thinking, and the way in which they navigated some of these questions. The Klan was less active in that community, and they were able to kind of navigate in such a way that allowed for the integration of the schools and ultimately that promoted health, strength, and vitality for the community.
Joseph Crespino:And Jack Reed, you know, I got to know Jack Reed before he died. Our mutual friend Andy Mullins, who was at Ole Miss for a long time and helped start the Mississippi Teacher Corps, which I participated in for two years in Indianola, Mississippi. And I taught there at Gentry High School and made many great friends in Indianola, and had great students, but Jack Reed, when I was there in Mississippi, I got to know Mr. Reed, and I remember interviewing him for the book, and we went to dinner many times. And, yeah, he was a great leader for Mississippi and for Tupelo.
Eddie Rester:One of the things I was thinking of as you talked earlier was I was at Ole Miss from 1989 to 1993 so that was a full, by the end, 30 years past the riots. In my time at Ole Miss, we didn't have a single conversation about the riots at Ole Miss. There was not a story that I remember, there was not a speaker, there was not an event. It was just like it was forgotten. And I think sometimes in Mississippi or southern states, or really the United States as a whole, sometimes we have this amnesia about our history, but what I've found over the last couple of decades, grappling with our history has really begun, I think, to help us in some ways, even though it's been a struggle. Did you sense that and if you did, what turned the tide to help us finally begin to talk openly about our history? Was it just people finally writing about it? What?
Joseph Crespino:Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. I'm not sure. You know I had gone to Tennessee by'86 and I was living boarding school there, and I went to college in Chicago. My wife was at Ole Miss, you know, from '88 to '92 and she had a different experience from you at Ole Miss. I mean, she was very, you know, she remembers being in an English class her freshman year, and had an assignment to compare the headlines about the Meredith integration at Ole Miss from the New York Times and The Clarion Ledger.
Eddie Rester:Oh, wow.
Joseph Crespino:And it was, that was when it kind of smacked her in the face about, like, how isolated Mississippi was, you know, and just the power of the press. People can believe certain things because they're only getting one side of the story. And, of course, that's the world we live in today, despite the fact we have almost information at our fingertips, and yet we're in these bubbles, you know.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, and I guess the thing that I would say about that is that what I what I learned from doing the kind of reading of the book that you presented is that there's a deeper and more complex story behind the headlines. And I do think that perhaps we're in a moment where I think it might be wise not just to read social media posts or not even to read headlines from newspapers, but it may be a time to really delve into and explore some of the historical complexities and dimensions that are in the background of some of our conversations today. I think that that may... I think that's one of the things in remembering reading this book, that I think I'll take away from this conversation, is that it may be time for me to do more deep reading. This is, this was, as you mentioned, your dissertation. You haven't just written about Mississippi. There's other work that you've done. What are some of the projects that that you've kind of put the most energy in, kind of over the last couple decades, that you find that students connect with the most, or that you find kind of an inexhaustible passion for?
Joseph Crespino:Yeah, well, I will... I want to pick up that thread that we were just talking about, because I think this is important for you and your parishioners and other ministers. I have a lot of friends who are ministers, and I know that you guys are feeling the effects of polarization, political polarization. And I go to an Episcopal Church here in Atlanta, and you know, you feel it a little bit in our church, although we're pretty homogeneous. I mean, it's pretty much a pretty liberal church, as you might expect an Episcopal Church in Atlanta to be. But you know, one of the projects I'm working on right now is I'm writing this textbook. I'm writing and revising a textbook on American history, and I do the 20th and 21st century chapters. And so I go up until... You know, I had to write the book. I just finished the last chapter, and I had to write about the election. That's where the book ends. I mean, it really, you know, it's, you know. And so it was, it's a challenge to try to write about very recent American history in such a polarized political moment, you know. And this is a book that's published by WW Norton, New York Trade Press, you know. But they sell a lot of copies of it in community colleges in Texas, and have conservative readers, and so it's really hard. And it's not just about trying to please both sides or trying to stay neutral. This is an important thing I think to think about is that neutrality is not, as a historian, is not what I'm going for. But objectivity is not the same thing as neutrality. There's a great historical essay by historian named Thomas Haskell, intellectual historian, objectivity is not neutrality. And the point of the essay, really is that, you know, I think particularly in academic circles, we have been way too glib about the possibility of objectivity. Of course, we can't all be objective. You know, objectivity is always the distant horizon. The closer you get it, the farther it recedes. But what objectivity is, it is an ethic. It is a commitment to a set of principles. And they're just basic principles of fairness, honesty, not rejecting evidence that doesn't fit with your preconceived notions. Being fair, you know, absolutely fair minded in your investigation of a topic. And if you're objective and you submit honestly to those principles of fairness, openness, honesty, that's the scholarly ethic you're committed to. And if you come to a conclusion that's not neutral, that ends up taking a side, well, that's okay. That's what you should be doing. But what you're true to the principles and the ethic of objectivity. And I think that is vital to the intellectual process, and it's vital to the academic process, but it's also vital to the democratic process.
Eddie Rester:Yes.
Joseph Crespino:You know?
Chris McAlilly:I mean, I guess the thing that I would say is that, to kind of bring it all the way back home to a place like Oxford, Mississippi. I think that Oxford is such an interesting social location to be experiencing American history in real time, because you have people who are... You've got a university setting. So there are people that are progressive. You have people that have more kind of openly liberal views, which would not be as progressive or liberal as they would be in either the urban south or in the urban north, but nevertheless, they're here. And then you also have folks who grew up in Mississippi who haven't really ever left. They're culturally conservative, and all these folks love the Ole Miss Rebel football team, and so they happen to be in the same place, and they enjoy the same community. And so I think, by virtue of,friendshi you know... There's a... It's not just... I mean, I think there's an ethic. I so appreciate this kind of distinction between neutrality and objectivity, and this idea that objectivity is a scholarly ethic that would include fairness, honesty. I think that, I guess one of the things I'm learning as a pastor, as I'm seeking to read the scriptures with the community of folks in a tribe that didn't vote all the same way in the election, is that there's great wisdom in simply kind of loving another person you know like that, to love a neighbor as yourself, and to try to put yourself as much, as best you can in their shoes. As you read American history, I think there's great... There's a humility that can come with that, and there's a wisdom that can come with that. And you know, coming back to kind of this perspective of the young student, I can't remember exactly where they ended up, but you were saying that Jimmy Carter's way of engaging with them helped to change their mind. I think there's a great lesson to be learned, and it really is a character. It's the kind of character that would love the neighbor as yourself, to engage in a certain kind of ethic of fairness, honesty, and pursuing the evidence that would do us all a lot of good.
Eddie Rester:It makes me think of Will Campbell. I'm sure...
Joseph Crespino:Yeah.
Eddie Rester:Joe, I'm sure you've read a lot about him, who is Ole Miss campus minister chased off for his views on civil rights, but ultimately his ethic of loving others really helped him engage folks that some people were uncomfortable with him engaging towards the end of his life, so.
Joseph Crespino:Yeah, no, absolutely. And "Brother to a Dragonfly" is such a wonderful book and a great memoir and important book that when I remember reading it in college. But I want to say to both of you all, and to hopefully the ministers who are listening, that it is so rare, I think, in our life right now, to be a part of any institutions that are heterogeneous, you know, because we have done such a good job in our modern lives of segregating ourselves. And that's kind of been, if you think about the history of polarization, it is over the last 50 years, the way that, whether it's living in neighbor, we're so much less likely to live in a neighborhood now where we have people who voted differently than we are. And once you take that online, and you've got all algorithms that are sorting us for all sorts of reasons, that we're only seeing the things that either we agree with or that absolutely drive us crazy and make us outraged, you know. And we have to be aware that these are the water that we're swimming in. And so if you have parishioners who, some are Democrats and some are Republicans, embrace that and celebrate it and say that you are part of the minority of institutions that have political diversity and heterogeneity, and what better place to have those conversations than in the church, where you really can practice the work of putting yourselves in another person's shoes and trying to understand somebody who sees the world differently than you?
Chris McAlilly:I got a funny story to tell. So I live in this neighborhood, and it's the best neighborhood, but we have people all over the map politically. And the other day, someone put on the neighborhood group chat that that she wanted to get rid of her chicken. I mean, it was a rooster. The rooster was, was harassing the hens, and so she was going to just let her go out into, you know, just let the raccoons have her. And you would have thought there was... It was very polarizing, this position that she was going to just let the rooster out for the raccoons. People were up in arms. There was kind of a, you know, a chicken kind of patriarchy conversation. There was the guy that... Anyway, this ended up ,like deep fried...
Joseph Crespino:I know exactly the way that went. The Democrats didn't want her to put him out, and the Republicans will have, of course, just put him out.
Chris McAlilly:Put him out and actually give him to me, and I'll deep fry the thing, you know. It was quite an amazing conversation. And I thought to myself, What a gift to live in a place where this kind of a conversation... It was hilarious, and also...
Eddie Rester:Very southern.
Chris McAlilly:Hey, Mississippi, y'all. Do not read... This is what I would say. I would say read Joseph Crispino. Don't watch, what is it? Kings of Tupelo that recently came out?
Eddie Rester:Maybe watch that.
Chris McAlilly:No, don't watch that.
Eddie Rester:Well...
Chris McAlilly:Do not. Don't watch that.
Eddie Rester:I think what you're saying is, is that there's a gift, and the institutions that used to bring us together have disintegrated or become polarized themselves. And so one of the folks that we listen to around here, guy named Ryan Burge. He's a social scientist who tracks a lot of stuff for the church, but said in the 1980s 50% of Southern Baptists were Democrats, 50% were Republicans. And so you know, if you track the deep fall of the church over the last 40 years, some of it probably is because we've let our places, our institutions of worship become so polarized.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, so, yeah, I guess you kind of put a fine bow on this, or to wrap it up, is the institutions where there's opportunity to engage, really, to practice the ethic that you're talking about, the ethic of objectivity, that's empathy. Yeah, that those are super important to cultivate, and we need, we need more opportunities to do that. We really appreciate the ways in which you've encouraged this conversation today, Joe. Thank you for your time. Thanks for taking the time to be with us. We're so grateful. And just yeah, thanks a lot for encouraging some interesting conversations.
Eddie Rester:Absolutely. And if you and the wife get back to Oxford sometime, please, please look us up.
Joseph Crespino:Good. Thanks so much. So great to be with you guys. Thanks for what you're doing.
Eddie Rester:[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review,
Chris McAlilly:If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]