You're Disorderly

Who’s your daddy?

In most societies throughout most of recorded human history, your answer to that question would be the primary determinant of who you were allowed to be. A community in which your prestige and your birth-status determine who you are is what’s called a society of orders.
But as a person of the present, you are disorderly.
This episode begins with an irritating experience in the waiting room at your local DMV. But then we explore the controversy in the early United States around a group called the Society of the Cincinnati. Many political leaders feared it might represent the beginning of a new American aristocracy that would undermine the new republic. To discover why this seemingly innocent club for Revolutionary War veterans and their families concerned so many U.S., we accompany Thomas Jefferson to France and learn why living in an absolutist monarchy changed his mind about the Cincinnati.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | Episode107 | Doug Sofer

You’re Disorderly, Part I

©2023 Doug Sofer

Intro

•   Welcome back to this crisp and refreshing [soda can noise] new podcast about how the historian’s craft helps us all in understanding the Strangeness of Now.

•   [pause]

•   [articulate slowly and carefully] Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar:

•   [pause]

•   You’re stuck waiting—and waiting—at the Department of Motor Vehicles, trying to renew your driver’s license. You’ve already waited in Line Number One and Line Number Two now you have to wait again in order for your number in Line Number Three to be called up on the big, half-burned-out LCD screen at the front of the room, so your forms can be processed.

•   [DMV crowd noises]

•   You got here early, so at least you get to sit down on one of the butt-numbingly hard plastic chairs that are bolted to the floor.

•   Other folks who got here after you have to stand.

•   One of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling flickers to an erratic, disjointed beat.

•   To your right, there’s a haggard mom with a rambunctious 11-year old kid who’s playing some horrible video game called Oyster Ninja on a single tablet with the volume at full blast. 

•   [Robot voice from videogame “Oyster Ninja” keeps shouting about different kinds of oyster-eating sea creatures: “Diamond Squid! Emerald Starfish! Ruby Octopus! Ruby Octopus! Emerald Starfish!” with explosions, laser & gurgling noises]

•   [pause]

•   And so you’re just waiting there. And waiting. And it seems like forever.

•   [pause]

•   But then suddenly two members of the Regional Guard burst in through the door, to announce the imminent arrival of one of the local aristocrats.

•   Everyone goes silent, anticipating the noble’s grand introduction.

•   A clerk rushes in and turns off the malfunctioning light.

•   [kill buzzing]

•   Someone even fades out my theme music as this grand peer of the realm makes his entrance.

•   [fade out theme]

•   The nobleman is presented to the crowd:

•   [brass horns]

•   [With a little room reverb] “Prepareth thineselves for the imminent arrival of his lordship Sir Daveburton Hasterspamforthson, Ninth Baron of the Ville of Knox of the Grand State of Tenn-Eh-See!”

•   [pause]

•   “Oh great,” you’re thinking. “Here we go again.”

•   [pause]

•   But you obviously don’t complain out loud.

•   Because that would be illegal.

•   [pause]

•   So in struts the Baron, and of course, you’re required by law to rise and uncover when he walks in. You stand up and remove your baseball cap with the findyourselfinhistory.com logo on it.

•   [footsteps]

•   Everyone abandons their hard-earned spots in line and the Baron walks  right up to the third license renewals desk.

•   All of the DMV employees immediately rush forth and tend to the needs of this one well-born man.

•   One frantic clerk sprints out from the break room and spits out a mouthful of a tuna melt into a nearby garbage can so that he’s not chewing in the presence of his lordship.

•   [pause]

•   And you’re wondering what is the Baron of Knoxville even doing here? After all, it’s not like he drives himself around town; that kind of physical act would be beneath his station.

•   [pause]

•   Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all just another moment illustrating the power of the lords temporal and spiritual who make up the national, state and regional aristocracy here.

•   Just another example of nobles literally lording their power over the vast majority of commoners like you and me.

•   Just the way things are, right?

•   [long pause]

•   Right? Isn’t that just the way things are?

•   [pause]

•   No, wait: I guess not. But it’s definitely just the way things were.

•   [pause]

•   In fact, as annoying as waiting on line at the DMV can be, one of the upsides about modern bureaucratic institutions is that they’re supposed to be equally annoying for everyone.

•   [pause]

•   Yet that kind of equality is a new and strange idea.

•   For the majority of recorded history, official, legal special treatment for nobles has been common—an essential part of most societies worldwide.

•   [pause]

•   Hey, I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you that it’s more unlikely than ever that you’ll meet your career goal of becoming the Countess of Cleveland. Or the Baron of Burlington. Or the Margrave of Missoula Montana.

•   But despair not, noble listener: It’s going to be okay. I’m a professional historian and I’m trained to aid folks in your exact situation who may be suffering from historical delusions of grandeur.

•   My name is Doug Sofer, and I’m a weirdo. Just like you.

•   [Theme]

Sponsor blurb

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•   And find out other ways to sponsor this project at findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors.

The paradox of America’s fight against aristocracy

•   The very fact of one’s birth used to place people automatically into different social categories. You were born a royal—directly related to a monarch. Or a regional noble.

•   But you were far, far more likely to be born outside of the aristocracy.

•   If you were lucky, that meant being a free commoner—a small landholder or a craftsperson living in a town.

•   But in many eras, it was also extremely likely that to be born into some system of forced labor.

•   Like serfdom—where folks were tied to a piece of agricultural land that you were obligated to work on.

•   Or many other systems of servitude—or worst of all slavery in which people were recognized by the law as a kind of human property.

•   And, for the most part, that was it.

•   You were only legally allowed to become what society’s rules said you were born to be.

•   [pause]

•   Today popular depictions tend to imagine nobles as simply being people with a lot of money.

•   But places where privileges of birth and prestige are more important than other social divisions are called societies of orders.

•   And the world of today is abnormal for attempting—even attempting—to move beyond those distinctions.

•   Which is why today’s episode is called: You Are Disorderly

•   [pause]

•   Most of us simply think differently from our not-so-distant ancestors about what makes a person powerful or vulnerable or grand or humble.

•   [pause]

•   Some of that difference in thinking emerged out of more modern countries—like the United States, a place without any legally recognized nobles. Not a single one. Sure, you might think it could be fun to be one and establish your own noble dynastic house.

•   But tough noogies: you can’t—at least not officially in the United States.

•   How do I know? Because it’s literally prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

•   It’s right there in Article I, Section 9:

•   “[QE] No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.”

•   And you can’t sneak around that prohibition by going to your state legislatures or state governor either. Article I, Section 10 states plainly that even US states shall not:

•   “[QE] …grant any Title of Nobility.”

•   So maybe you can’t hold a noble title, but You ARE A Weirdo

•   [divebomb]

•   Is the name of this podcast, so we can at least talk about why the Framers of the Constitution thought you should not—why you must not—become a noble.

•   Before we do that, though, we’ll need to do a serious reality check.

•   Outlawing aristocratic distinctions—even in the constitution—does not mean that all people in U.S. are—or have ever been—treated equally.

•   Let’s return to our DMV scenario: Rich people can hire personal assistants or lawyers to do most of the bureaucratic work for them.

•   But they don’t have a whole other set of rules that apply only to them—or at least it’s not supposed to work that way—not in America.

•   [pause]

•   That said, the U.S. fight against aristocracy on the grounds of eliminating distinctions of birth, is in and of itself strange and even contradictory.

•   [pause]

•   In fact, in some ways, the United States had been full of some extremely stark inequalities of birth from the get-go.

•   The most obvious of those distinctions of birth in U.S. history were based on race.

•   The express version goes like this:

•   Prior to the U.S. Civil War, the vast majority of Americans of African descent had come to the American hemisphere in chains—as enslaved people.

•   Meaning that the entire U.S. plantation economy—the whole economic basis of states especially, in the U.S. South—ran on distinctions of birth.

•   From the colonial period through the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath, enslaved people made the owners of tobacco plantations in places like Virginia into wealthy men.

•   Just a decade after the Revolutionary War, the 1794 invention of the cotton gin made cotton plantations possible throughout the South. 

•   These places became wealthy on the backs of people who in nearly all cases were not free—and could not legally become free—because they inherited the legal status of slavery.

•   After the end of the Civil War in 1865, came Reconstruction, a movement which attempted some reforms to remove some—though not all—of those distinctions for formerly enslaved people.

•   But by 1877, Reconstruction failed and new state and Federal governments created a system that’s known as Jim Crow segregation—laws that literally treated Black people different from White people.

•   And those laws stayed in effect in the U.S. South until they were decisively overturned in the 1960s.

•   [Pause]

•   The U.S. North did not have the same official Jim Crow laws on the books. But access to housing, schools and jobs were also segregated through a complex web of rules and social phenomena. Those included:

•   So called “white flight”—white populations fleeing from urban areas and taking resources with them out of places where Black populations were living.

•   Conflicts between immigrants of European descent and Black populations.

•   Neighborhood covenants—agreements in Northern neighborhoods that were not laws per se but which kept African Americans out of many mostly white neighborhoods.

•   And there were now well-documented guidelines that white real estate agents used that were designed to prevent Black people from settling in White Northern neighborhoods.

•   [pause]

•   And that whole short history is just talking about some aspects of African American history.

•   We haven’t even begun to talk about Indigenous Americans—American Indians—or the Latino-American experience, or other situations where one’s birth prevented access to equal opportunity.

•   [pause]

•   So okay, let’s not sugarcoat the situation; U.S. history is simply full of unequal distinctions of birth, both legal and informal.

•   [long pause]

•   But simultaneously, for a ton of U.S. history, there’s also been a clear, consistent, drumbeat that emphasizes equality—breaking away from European distinctions of birth.

•   As we’re about to see, this notion of equality defined—and continues to define—a major part of political identity in the United States.

•   [Separator music]

•   [pause]

The Society of the Cincinnati

•   Since the earliest days of the American republic, politically minded people in the early U.S. were so concerned that future Americans might attempt to build a new aristocracy, that they gravely mistrusted any attempt to offer any hereditary honors that smelled even a little bit like a system of inherited nobility.

•   [pause]

•   Take, for instance, the once-very intense controversy about an organization called the Society of the Cincinnati that took place in the immediate aftermath of the US victory in the War of Independence.

•   [pause]

•   You’d totally be forgiven if you thought that a group called the Society of the Cincinnati took its name from a city in Ohio that has a stripey-helmeted football team and where the people eat a wackily spiced-but-super delicious chili served over spaghetti.

•   But it was actually the other way around: the city in Ohio got its name from this society.

•   And the society got its name from an ancient Roman leader of the early Republic named Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus was an old gentleman farmer who was given absolute, unrestricted power in order to save the Roman Republic and who then famously handed that power back and resumed his life as a small farmer.

•   In fact, George Washington himself was known as—and is sometimes still known as—The American Cincinnatus. It’s a shout-out to this ancient Roman.

•   The idea is that Washington could have seized political and military power for himself following the Revolution.

•   Instead, Washington returned to his not-very-small, 8,000 acre plantation called Mount Vernon.

•   [pause]

•   Cincinnati is a plural in Latin. It literally means something like “the Cincinnatuses” or a rougher but more complete translation would be:

•   “The guys who are like Cincinnatus in that they saved the country but are now going to put down their weapons and go back to their normal lives.”

•   [pause]

•   In other words, the association was basically humble-bragging about how modest they were in not having seized military power after winning the war.

•   And its membership was to be restricted only to Revolutionary War officers and their families, including future generations of these officers’ descendants.

•   [pause]

•   In 1783, the very same year that the U.S. Revolutionary War ended, a South Carolinian named Aedaneus Burke produced an influential political pamphlet that condemned the society. And it got a lot of attention.

•   Writing under the pseudonym “Cassius”—after another Roman—the senator who helped plan the assassination of Julius Caesar—Burke accused the Society of the Cincinnati of deliberately planting the roots of a new hereditary aristocracy in the soil of the newly formed United States of America.

•   His argument went like this:

•   The society of the Cincinnati were some of the most powerful, best-connected men in this new republic.

•   Over time, these powerful men and their descendants would support putting only their fellow society members into positions of power.

•   In so doing, the Cincinnati would become patricians—Roman nobles—and everyone else would be converted into plebeians—Roman commoners.

•   In Burke’s own words:

•   “[QE] The Cincinnati… would soon have and hold an exclusive right to offices, honors and authorities, civil and military. And the whole country besides themselves, a mere mob of plebeians without weight or estimation, degraded in the eyes of our patricians, as the Roman people were….”

•   [pause]

•   On the other hand, the Society was really just a veterans’ club for officers and their families, right? Was Aedaneus Burke flying off the handle here?

•   [pause]

•   George Washington, for his part, seems to have been confused by the positive reception that Burke’s pamphlet received, especially in the New England states.

•   And Washington worried about the optics of how it would appear if he himself took part in high-profile Society of the Cincinnati events.

•   Seeking clarity, in April 1784, Washington wrote to Thomas Jefferson to see what Jefferson thought about the issue.

•   [pause]

•   We’ll look at Jefferson’s response in just a sec.

•   But we can say with the benefit of hindsight that this society does not seem to have lived up to Burke’s fears.

•   In fact, it’s still around today—continuing to operate, mostly as an educational nonprofit that teaches about the Revolutionary War and, in the society’s own words from their webpage:

•   “[QE] …we strive never to let America's revolutionary ideals be forgotten.”

•   Its main category of members are still descended from Revolutionary War officers—but it also has an entire other group of so-called “associate members” who do not have to have a family connection.

•   [pause]

•   Other groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, have similar hereditary requirements for membership.

•   [pause]

•   All three of these groups boast individual members who are well-connected. Some have gotten involved in politics, or in the military, and have had some legitimate sway as individuals.

•   But as far as I know, they still have to wait in line at the DMV just like the rest of us.

•   [pause]

•   On the other hand, real historical researchers strive to understand the mindsets of the people living in the places and times we’re studying.

•   The fact is that from the viewpoint of the 1780s, the threat of a new order of inherited elites seemed like a genuine, realistic danger.

•   Why? Because up until the founding of the American Republic with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the American colonists were British subjects.

•   And being a British subject meant living in a society in which aristocrats enjoyed special, noble privileges.

•   In other words, it was the only real political system that anyone in the Thirteen Colonies had ever known.

•   [pause]

•   And the nature of the Society of the Cincinnati therefore alarmed all kinds of people who believed Americans could easily slip back into these older ways of thinking about political power.

•   Like Thomas Jefferson.

•   Jefferson seems to have taken his sweet time in answering Washington’s question. By the time he did, more than two-and-a-half years had passed.

•   My students may tell you I’m not always the fastest at responding to email—but Jefferson has me beat—by a lot.

•   To be fair, though, on November 14, 1786 when he penned his reply to Washington, TJ was living across the ocean, working as a U.S. diplomat in Paris. He explained to Washington that his past couple of years in France had changed his opinion about the Cincinnati. He writes:

•   “[QE] I have never heard a person in Europe, learned or unlearned, express his thoughts on this institution, who did not consider it as dishonourable and destructive to our governments.”

•   [pause]

•   He reports that it was only in coming to Europe that he came to understand fully the grave threat that a group like the Cincinnati could pose in some distant future date to the newly formed United States. He adds:

•   “[QE] I did not apprehend this while I had American ideas only. But I confess that what I have seen in Europe has brought me over to that opinion: and that tho’ the day may be at some distance, beyond the reach of our lives perhaps, yet it will certainly come, when, a single fibre left of this institution, will produce an hereditary aristocracy which will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.”

•   [pause]

•   Whoa!

•   So what was it about living in France in 1786 that so utterly freaked out Jefferson?

•   To understand his perspective, we’ll need to cross the Atlantic, and find out for ourselves.

•   [separator music]

Royal Absolutism in France

•   Thomas Jefferson, the man destined to have his face on nickels everywhere—was living in a kingdom that had taken the ideas of inherited power to a whole new level in France’s interpretation of what’s called an absolute monarchy.

•   In that kind of system, the monarch becomes the living personification of the state itself. Everyone in society works to serve and to glorify the monarch’s reign.

•   According to this system’s proponents, the king’s power comes directly from God himself—a concept called the Divine Right of Kings. The idea had been around a long time, but in Europe it was only in the 17th century that kings achieved this system on a truly France-sized scale.

•   [pause]

•   Absolutism is very simple in theory.

•   But in practice it can get downright bonkers.

•   Perhaps the most famous example of a successful absolute monarchy is the kingdom of Louis XIV of France who reigned between 1643-1715.

•   Louis himself was a capable administrator and an especially good judge of talent; he put some very effective people into positions of power in his kingdom, especially into economic, military, and diplomatic roles.

•   Most clever, though, was the way he built his base of power and justified his reign by building a whole new kind of universe at the palace complex at Versailles.

•   There were something like 10,000 inhabitants at Versailles.

•   If you look at it on satellite view on your favorite map app, you can zoom back pretty high up into the atmosphere and still recognize the shape of the palace buildings and garden. It’s just that enormous.

•   [pause]

•   But Versailles wasn’t only a mega-mansion with a mega-garden.

•   Louis XIV made it into a place to make French nobles entirely dependent on him.

•   When Louis was just a kid, the nobles had almost killed him. There’d been an anti-tax rebellion called The Fronde that had been led by nobles, and which had lasted from 1648-1653.

•   The Fronde was put down, but Louis wanted to keep the nobles in check from then on.

•   He did so by making sure that nobles’ prestige and honor came mostly through connecting to the king at Versailles.

•   Louis required nobles to spend time at Versailles—and nobles who needed or wanted favors from the national government were especially obligated to attend frequently, for long periods of time.

•   [pause]

•   But Versailles was not just a place, it was practically its own alternate dimension with its own customs and rituals.

•   A courtier—a noble seeking favor at the palace—needed to learn a whole labyrinthine system of rules and customs and hoops to jump through before getting anything done.

•   Here are some examples:

•   Say you’re a noble from a part of France that’s distant from Versailles. You’ve grown up in relative luxury, you’re well-educated, sophisticated, well-mannered.

•   You show up at Versailles and try to contact someone in an office at the palace, so you politely knock on the door to see where the official is. [knocking noise]

•   [BUZZ!]

•   No, sorry: 

•   You’ve just made your first mistake: No one knocks on doors at Versailles: You’re supposed to scratch the door with your left pinky—and you’re supposed to have grown a long fingernail on that digit expressly for that purpose. [scratching on wood noise.]

•   [pause]

•   Okay, so maybe you already knew about the scratching-instead-of-knocking thing, so you go out to meet another, higher-ranked noble at their house, just outside the palace, and you scratch at the door:

•   Nope again! You should have knocked that time; the pinky scratch trick only works at the palace Versailles—try it anywhere else and everyone thinks you’re a buffoon.

•   So next time you go to visit a noble lady’s house that’s outside the palace and knock. [tap-tap-tap]

•   Another Nope. You’ve messed up again: One only knocks once at a lady’s house outside of Versailles. [single knock]

•   [pause]

•   But  let’s say you got some coaching ahead of time; you managed to find a fellow noble who was in the know and who warned you all about the complex rules about doors.

•   Maybe you’ve even conducted yourself well enough to be invited to an event in the palace. You find yourself inside an enormous hall full of nobles from all over France. The king is at the other end of the hall, dozens of yards away, and you’re smart enough to know that you’re not supposed to talk to him yet. Luckily, you spy an old friend who’s near you and, in your noble French, you refer to your bud using the word “tu”—the informal form of the word for “you.”

•   Wrong again: Even your own best friends can’t be referred to informally if you’re in the same room where the king is present.

•   Or maybe you’re sitting in one of the many halls of the palace and trying to impress a fellow aristocrat with your manners, when a number of servants and waiters walk by carrying the king’s dinner. And you continue talking to the noble.

•   You messed up yet again! As one book about Versailles puts it:

•   [QE] “...if you encounter the royal dinner on its way from the kitchens to the table, you must bow as to the King himself, sweep the ground with the plume of your hat, and say in a low, reverent, but distinct voice, La viande du Roi?”

•   That translates to something like: “the king’s dinner, I presume?”

•   [pause]

•   Okay, so let’s say you did all of those other things right:

•   You got the doors down, you know to be as formal as possible with everyone when anywhere near the king, you’ve saluted the king’s dinner and you were lucky enough to be invited to actually share a meal with the king.

•   And maybe you were even coached well enough that you knew not to dig in to your meal before the king.

•   But at Versailles, even the touching of one’s own plate was complicated. Really complicated.

•   All guests touched their plates one after another in order of their position at the court. So how could you know where you stood?

•   You had to study the family of Louis XIV and know who the other guests were just to know the order in which you were allowed to eat—

•   But of course, the king was also allowed to change up the order when certain visitors were being honored—or sometimes if he just felt like it. 

•   Your job was to know not only the rules but these ever-changing daily exceptions too.

•   [pause]

•   If you did everything right, you might get one of the most coveted honors possible:

•   You could help dress and bathe the king himself.

•   [pause]

•   That’s right: the culture at Versailles trained nobles to revere the actual, physical body of the king; the king himself was literally holy.

•   Reinforcing that idea were some of the best connected religious authorities in France.

•   [pause]

•   For example, the bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet who lived from 1627–1704, argued that a king is not just lucky to be born into that position. It’s God Himself who makes this happen.

•   The king, therefore, is a vessel—a conduit—of the divine will.

•   Writing in the late 1670s, Bossuet asserts:

•   [QE] “…kings, although their power comes from on high… should not regard themselves as masters of that power to use it at their pleasure…. They must employ it with fear and self-restraint, as a thing coming from God and of which God will demand an account.”

•   Over time, this concept gets interpreted to mean that although kings can make mistakes, only God can actually judge them. Humans just aren’t qualified to judge whether or not a king has used God’s own power correctly.

•   Bossuet continues, explaining that the king lords over his cabinet of advisers; from those advisers come orders to agents of the government, military officers, soldiers, and everyone else—everyone with a specific role to fill.

•   In this sense, the king

•   “[QE]…is the image of God, who, seated on his throne high in the heavens, makes all nature move….”

•   The idea of absolutism—exemplified at Versailles—is that God endows the king with royal power. That power then filters down from the king to all of the nobles, military and lesser orders of society.

•   Nobles therefore only gain favor, fame, power and prestige when the king’s royal authority seeps down to them.

•   [pause]

•   The levels of absurd complexity—almost a new language of rituals and customs—built into the system at Versailles meant that the nobles were jumping over one another to prove that each was more couth, more savvy, more in the in-crowd, more able to gain the king’s ear, than the other.

•   [pause]

•   The system was remarkably effective in keeping the nobles in check and keeping them competing with one another so that they could not conspire to rule for themselves.

•   [pause]

•   Over the span of two more King Louis-es—Louis the XV and XVI—this system meant that the royal family and the nobles all over France basically lived at least some significant parts of their lives in this entirely different universe—one that operated under different, bizarre rules from those used by everyone else.

•   [pause]

•   By the time Jefferson wrote back to Washington in 1786, France’s absolute monarchy was just three years away from imploding.

•   The French Revolution began in 1789 and the next year, the new government abolished the system of hereditary distinctions that had existed in one form or another in France since the early middle ages.

•   And in 1793, revolutionaries also ended the reverence for the French king’s body, decapitating by guillotine Louis XVI—the great, great, great grandson of Louis XIV.

•   [separator music]

Conclusion

•   Some of the inspiration for the French Revolution had come out of the same ideas about human equality that led to the American Revolution. 

•   Jefferson’s line in the Declaration of Independence

•   “[QE] We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….”

•   —plays out similarly in the French Revolution with the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Parts of that document read:

•   [QE] “Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.”

•   [pause]

•   The concept of equality before the law and before the government was radical in its day. It means that no matter who your daddy was, you’re still in the same boat.

•   And still stuck waiting in the same DMV.

•   [pause]

•   The simultaneous existence of inherited inequalities at many different points in U.S. history, coupled with a genuine obsession on the part of the founding generation with rooting out those same inequalities—constitutes a major contradictory theme running throughout U.S. history.

•   [pause]

•   And only by examining—and struggling—with this historical paradox can we start to understand our ideals—how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.

Teaser

•   For next time: Our adventure in disorderliness continues!

•   [pause]

•   I got so excited to talk about the early U.S. and France for this episode that I couldn’t get to all the other cool stuff I found from many other parts of the globe.

•   Let’s make this one a two-parter and see what happens.

•   Stay tuned!

Outgoing credits

•   [Vamp]

•   You can—and you should dangit!—find references to the historical sources, audio clips, and other stuff used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

•   Speaking of places in which to find oneself, I work at Maryville College:  Incredibly close to the Great Smoky Mountains. Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu 

•   [Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect Maryville College, its administrators, faculty, staff, students, board of directors, or the lords spiritual and temporal of the Grand Ville of Mary, where Chilhowee’s lofty mountains pierce the Southern Blue.

•   This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2023 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

•   Thanks for listening.

•   [Fade out.]