As Trump, Musk, and the DOGE children dismantle our government and attack working families coast to coast, we speak to Georgetown History Professor Joseph A. McCartin about how history can inform us about these kinds of struggles and perhaps even guide us out of them.
RICK: And, you know, I have people go, “Well, you don't seem all that distressed.” And I say, “I'm not distressed.”
I'm motivated because, look, history does tell us we've been in these kind of scenarios before. We've been in crisis before. There have been problems. There have been depressions. There have been civil wars. We had the robber baron era where they controlled literally everything.
I do believe in the spirit of the American people. I believe in the spirit of the Constitution and all of that stuff. It's just sometimes we've got to relearn a little bit. As I say about labor, you've got to relearn the concept of solidarity. And I think we're moving towards that relearning phase.
DR. McCARTEN: I think that's right, Rick. I think one thing about our culture and our society is it tends to have a kind of built-in amnesia. And this is especially true, I think, for the history of workers and their movements.
Not many working people know about the history of the movement, where the weekend came from, where the eight-hour day for the time when it prevailed, where that came from, where union rights came from.
Because we don't know a lot of that story, because we're never taught it, it doesn't exist for us as a resource we can draw on to help and guide us in moments like the one we're now in. It's always possible to pick up on that.
Events right now are making a lot of people think back to like, well, has anything like this happened before? And the fact is, yes, you alluded a moment ago to the gilded age of the robber barons. And some of the same things that we're seeing going on now did happen then. There were figures like Elon Musk who basically controlled our government. They were not named Musk then. They were named Rockefeller and Carnegie and folks like that.
Back then there was a tremendous anti-immigrant feeling stirred in the country. That was happening then, it's happening now. Workers were divided then and in some cases duped by the reigning political figures of their time to believe that that these people were really going to deliver a better life for them.
Donald Trump likes to talk lately a lot about one of the leading political figures of that long ago era, William McKinley. McKinley loved tariffs like Trump did. McKinley promised like Trump promises, tariffs will solve all your problems, workers. It took workers having to actually live through that period to learn that actually they didn't help at all. And this is not necessarily the best way to go.
So, we're being directed back to learn from periods like that about what is going on now. And I think that that can be helpful to us as we, as you say, get ready for what is to come.
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