#1562 Ten Things: Counterfactual History

guest Professor Lindsay Chervinsky about 10 historical counterfactuals.

Historians are warned never to indulge in what-if history.

We just can't help it.

It's such fun.

What if the British had won the Revolutionary War?

What if Alexander Hamilton had become the President of the United States?

What if Jefferson had never owned an enslaved person?

What if the South had won the Civil War?

What if John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated on November 22, 1963?

What if Adolf Hitler had beaten the United States to the punch and gotten an atomic bomb

for use at Moscow or Stalingrad?

If some of the pivotal moments in world history had gone the other way, how might things have

been different?

Join us for all that and more on this week's Listening to America.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America.

Across from me is my dear friend, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, about to finish your second book,

going to the publisher soon.

Welcome, Lindsay.

Yes, it's an exciting day.

I have a title.

I have a due date.

I am almost there.

It is Making the Presidency, John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic.

Somebody, somebody, and the something, something that saved America.

Somebody, somebody, and the Scottish Enlightenment, but that's become a kind of a well-employed

title formula and a good one.

but it's also good for things like search engine optimization.

And like our other books titled that, you know, there's so many different factors that

one has to consider.

There are 200 books around my kitchen.

If I wake up at 2 a.m., I'm up for the rest of the night.

I wake up with a verb in my mouth, or I got to check that footnote, or I'll bet that is

not the date that that happened.

And then you can't go back to sleep.

You're a complete wreck.

If there's anyone around you, they move into a hotel or go on vacation in Jamaica.

It's exhausting.

And it's, it's a wonderful thing, isn't it?

I mean, it's kind of wonderful to be in that stage where you can see the ending.

You're totally exhausted.

You're sick of life.

And yet you're going to make it.

I am.

I am not my best self at the moment.

And I am grateful to those who continue to put up with me.

Thankfully, Quincy doesn't seem to terribly notice what's going on.

So he's still thinks I'm great otherwise.

I don't want to stand up.

I don't want, I just want to be in bed for like a week.

I can't wait to read it.

And we'll talk about it, of course, once it's out.

And now you have two books on the founding generation and so and more coming.

So today's program was your idea, I think counterfactuals.

Most historians get a little edgy about counterfactuals, but we're just having fun here.

So what if it happened the other way?

And so we have 11.

We may not get to them all.

What if Abraham Lincoln wasn't assassinated on April 15th, 1865?

What if Garfield wasn't assassinated in 1881?

What if Pearl Harbor hadn't happened, hadn't been attacked by the Japanese Navy in December

of 1941?

What if George Washington had died of his very serious illness in 1789?

What if the Constitution had been rejected by the people if it hadn't been ratified in

1788?

Those were yours.

Mine were.

What if the South won the war in 1865?

What if Hamilton had become the president of the United States, horrors?

What if Hitler had gotten the atomic bomb first?

What if JFK had not been assassinated?

What if Martin Luther had never been born in 1483?

And what if Britain had won the revolution?

So I dare say we won't get to all of them.

If we don't, we'll do a second program.

But let's start with your first one on your list.

If Abraham Lincoln had survived, if he had not been assassinated at Ford's Theater on

April 15th, 1865, how would history have been different, do you think, Dr. Chervinsky?

It's one of the counterfactuals that people regularly point to, partly because his successor,

Andrew Johnson, was so absolutely ghastly.

And really, I think one of the top three worst presidents or bottom three worst presidents,

the order of those sort of changes, depending on who you're talking to or what factors you're

looking at, just terrible.

And by all accounts was really thought of as terrible at the time, too.

And so to go from the moment of winning the Civil War with Abraham Lincoln, who was really

most Northerners, not all Northerners, but a lot of Northerners, and of course, by most

African-Americans, to Johnson, just presents such a stark contrast that one can't help

but wonder, had he not given that speech that provoked John Wilkes Booth, or had he not

been at the theater that particular night, what might have happened?

And I think where counterfactuals are useful, we can't, of course, take them too far, because

then you kind of just get into the historical fiction or science or fantasy realm, where

they help us understand turning points.

They help us elucidate causes or outcomes of particular actions or people, or they help

us better understand why things did happen.

And in this particular moment, I think what's useful about this moment is trying to figure

out how reconstruction might have worked better.

And so there's no doubt that Lincoln did not want a super vengeful reconstruction.

Yes.

of the 1860s.

It should not be confused with the Republican Party of Jefferson's time or the Republican

Party of today.

The Republicans at the time actually thought that Johnson might be better, because they

knew that he hated especially the wealthy white planter class in the South.

He had a real chip on his shoulder about the elite, and so they thought he actually might

be more vengeful, and they thought that was great.

And what ended up happening is that Johnson quickly realized he was not going to have

any sort of constituency within the Republican Party, and he thought the only way that he

could have any power was to allow Southerners back in quite quickly to the Union.

He granted widespread clemency.

He allowed basically all of the politicians that had been in power before the Civil War

to be in power again, with very few exceptions, maybe like Jefferson Davis, and that's about

it.

And so one wonders what might have happened if Lincoln could have carved out a middle

ground in that he rejected the rise of the lost cause, and he would have, I think, been

a little bit more protective of African American civil rights for the recently emancipated,

but not vengeful.

And that presents really interesting questions about might reconstruction under those terms

have lasted longer.

A lot of newspapers said when Booth killed Lincoln, you destroyed the one chance we now

had, that Lincoln was the one chance that the South had to be brought back into the

Union with something like Christian grace.

Now you have made it much more difficult to see the future.

So let me ask you this question.

We need to move on in a minute.

But could reconstruction have worked?

I think the real impediment to long-term reconstruction success was not Andrew Johnson or even any

other politician per se, but it was a growing fatigue in the North among white populations

about doing what it took to enforce civil rights for Black Americans in the South.

Because when Grant was president, Congress passed the KKK Act, which gave him authority

to basically break up the Ku Klux Klan and to enforce civil rights.

And he did.

But then they got tired of it.

And so he stopped and he withdrew troops.

And so that is in many ways a missed opportunity.

And so I just don't know if the willingness was there to see the project through.

The South stalled, prevaricated, undermined, gaslighted.

To this day, Alabama trying to prevent African-Americans from having a second congressional seat, largely

majoritarian at this time.

When we're watching attempts to undo the civil rights movement, I never thought that sentence

would come out of my mouth.

But it's true, Lindsay.

So all right, leaving it there for the moment, related, we'll come back to our assassination

Kennedy.

But if the South had won the war and Britain sort of tried to help the Confederacy win

the war, what would have happened?

much like we saw on the European continent.

And what that would have meant was many wars.

Because as we know, when you have nations that have intensely conflicting ideologies,

you're going to have conflict.

And even if the South had won, let's say the South had won the Civil War and had preserved

slavery, enslaved people were still going to seek freedom.

And so they were still going to try and run away to the North and self-emancipate.

So the bone of contention between the new nations was not going to go away.

And so I think we would have seen a series of conflicts.

We would have seen the continent divided up into several nations.

And it would have been a much messier, even more messy than it already was, a much messier

process.

War II to become the policeman of the world.

A divided nation might not have had the capacity to do that for good or ill.

You know, I often think, just let them go, just let them go.

Any state that wants to secede, go for it.

Moving on for the moment to Garfield.

Garfield comes from Candace Millard.

He was assassinated in 1881.

So this is a generation after Lincoln.

He's the second American president to be assassinated, McKinley third, Kennedy fourth.

And I agree with you.

Everything I know about Garfield, I pretty much know about from Millard's work, which

is brilliant.

And if anyone hasn't read it, you should get on that pronto.

I think that from all that I can tell, Garfield was a very good man.

He was a decent man.

He was a moral man.

He was brilliant.

And he was actually a pretty good politician because he had spent a lot of time in Congress.

And so I think what Millard presents as a possibility, and I think other scholars have

backed her up on this, is that that was actually the last real moment of Reconstruction, because

he believed in equality of opportunity.

He believed in the importance of civil rights for all American citizens, and seemed to have

the support from at least the majority of his party for making that so.

And so it's possible that there could have been sort of a grant part two in trying to

figure out how to better support Black Americans in the South.

And I don't know that he would have been fully successful, but I don't think we would have

seen the onslaught of Jim Crow laws and the incredible violence in the South that did

emerge in the 1880s that really kept most African Americans as second-class citizens

until the Civil Rights Acts in 1950s and 1960s.

I'll just say this much about it.

John Hay was a great man with an unlucky life.

He was a secretary to Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated.

He was closely associated with Garfield, who was assassinated, and he was closely associated

with William McKinley, who was assassinated.

So he had, and he talked about it, about that's why he wanted to escape from political life,

because he believed that he lived in an age of political violence, as we seem to be in

our own time.

We'll take a short break.

I'm talking with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky about counterfactuals.

We've talked about Abraham Lincoln.

We've talked about the Civil War.

We've talked about Garfield.

In fact, we're going to talk about John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

You're listening to, Listening to America.

Welcome back to Listening to America.

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, exhausted, but still at the top of her game, talking about counterfactuals.

What if history had gone the other way?

There's a distinguished sort of science fiction literature about this.

I had a friend who read all these books.

I've never been able to really stomach much of that, but I am fascinated by this conversation.

So you weren't alive.

I was on November 22nd, 1963.

I was a child.

I remember nonstop black and white coverage for about four days, commercial free.

Walter Cronkite broke down on national television when he announced that the president was dead.

I saw my father cry for the first time in my life while he watched the coverage.

And many people believe that this was one of the losses of innocence that sort of set

forth all the chaos that followed in the next years, whether that's true or not, I don't

know.

But what do you think would have happened if Kennedy had filled out his term and stood

for election in 1964?

overrated.

I think that it would have been harder to get the Civil Rights Act passed.

LBJ masterfully used Kennedy's legacy to get that done.

I don't know if the Vietnam War would have gone differently.

I certainly don't think we would.

He would not be as remembered.

He would not be remembered as fondly as he is, because the American people tend to, the

longer they know a public figure, they tend to like them less.

And I think that the catastrophic and tragic way that he died, and of course, leaving behind

a young family who, I say this with complete admiration and not in any detrimental way,

were masters of the imagery of the White House and the presidency, and put on a program that

started to cultivate the legacy of JFK and Camelot in a way that they wanted him to

be remembered.

And so I think all of those things created a legacy that wouldn't necessarily be there

if he had served through eight years.

What do you think?

I do think he's overrated.

I do deeply love him.

And of course, we have one lens when we're talking as historians or with a historical

perspective.

And then we have another lens when we think of the mythologies of our lives and Kennedy's

history is gigantic.

Dallek thinks that Kennedy might not have lived through a second term, that he was a

very fragile, he was a very ill man, and he was being propped up by steroids and other

dangerous cocktails of medicine.

And so there's that.

You know, I think the big question everyone asks is Vietnam.

Say that, oh, he would have withdrawn, he would have pulled back from Vietnam, he never

would have allowed himself to be drawn in to 500,000 troops and the quagmire and so

on.

I think that's very far from clear.

We don't know what he would have done.

And yes, LBJ felt that he had to fulfill what he took to be JFK's purposes and legacies,

which as you say, got us the civil rights laws, which probably would not have passed.

We probably landed on the moon in 1969 because of the martyrdom of Kennedy.

A lot of things happened because of the martyrdom of John Kennedy.

And Johnson was a very good fulfiller of what he took to be the Kennedy vision.

But I doubt, frankly, that Kennedy, who was a cold warrior to the core, just read his

first inaugural address, would have been willing to pull back from Vietnam.

I think Vietnam was going to happen more or less the way it happened, partly because of

the military industrial complex, but the domino theory and so on.

What say you?

And that was, I think, produced by two things.

One, back then and still today, you know, Republicans are considered to be the party

of national security, although I would argue that in 2023, they're not really holding up

that end of the bargain.

But nonetheless, and that's partly because Kennedy came after Eisenhower, who was never

going to be accused of being militarily weak or weak on foreign policy.

So if you're going to come after Eisenhower, you better not look like a weakling because

that's not going to go well.

And then second, very early on in his administration, he had the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

The American people are forgiving, but only so much.

And so I think that if he had had another fiasco or had appeared weak, that would have

been a real fear.

And so I think you're right to suggest that that would have been a concern.

There's, of course, no way to know, but it would have been a concern.

Yeah, I think that's probably about right.

You know, one is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

And the second shortly thereafter was Hitler's declaration of war on the United States.

been tiptoeing closer to the war.

They had come up with every, the country had come up with every possible way to assist

Britain. The Lend-Lease Act was an extraordinary legal loophole of arming an ally without

actually arming an ally.

You know, FDR wanted to get into the war long before the nation did and had been, was a

master at gradually moving American sentiment towards that.

And yet there was still a very considerable isolationist strain in the United States, a

commitment by a lot of people that, you know, we have these gigantic oceans between us.

We're fine. We don't need to worry about it.

It's a European problem.

The United States had intervened in World War I, and a lot of people felt like it had

been a terrible thing and was a waste of blood and sweat and treasure.

And so what was the point of doing it again?

It was not our problem.

I think that strain would have continued with a much stronger force, especially against

Japan, because while Asia was a very important financial hub and trade hub, then as is

now, it didn't have the same emotional significance to a lot of Americans.

Americans saw the Nazis march into Paris and that meant something to them because the

Eiffel Tower was iconic and a lot of Americans went to France.

Not as many Americans went to Japan or to China.

And so there was a real difference there.

And so I think the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war really removed

any questions. It removed any likelihood of outcomes.

Whereas if those things hadn't happened, I think that the nation probably would have

remained anyway, but it would have been much more complicated.

There would have been much less unanimity, especially in Congress.

There would have been much less bipartisan support because one of the big isolationist

strains was on the far right of the Republican Party.

And once the nation was attacked, then that sort of silenced that strain.

And so I think that it made the war a very different experience than it would have been

otherwise. And I think we would have remembered it very differently.

And it may have actually caused the war to last longer because I don't think that the

war would have committed itself in the total war way that it did.

The American people were isolationist in 1916 and Woodrow Wilson won re-election, but he

was already planning to take us into war.

FDR was much more devious and he worked hard to maneuver us into the war.

And he did some things that I regard as extra constitutional to make that happen.

And the American people were really reluctant to get into that war, too, partly because

they saw that World War One had not resolved really anything, but also because we're

natural isolationists.

We have a 3,000 mile ocean between us and that crazy world.

Jefferson kept saying, thank goodness we have that moat.

And so it should bother us, shouldn't it, that when the will of the people is to stay in

peace, that our governments often maneuver us into war.

That really raises some questions about democracy, doesn't it?

regardless of whether or not it is in American interest to be isolationist and regardless of

whether or not it's moral to be isolationist.

The isolationist is a principle that is universal in its application.

And so there are times like World War One where I think the isolationist sentiment made a

lot more sense. In a lot of ways, it wasn't an American conflict.

It was very much a European, deeply rooted, multiple generation long, messy conundrum.

I would argue that World War Two was pretty black and white in its morality.

It was in our interest at some point to get involved.

Democracy is a pretty terrible form of government, except for all the other ones, or however

I didn't know you were an anglophile.

Sticky widget comes from cricket.

My words start to get creative.

So I'm going to say he's a wanker, that Hitler.

I'll say that I'm chuffed by something.

That's my favorite.

And this is sort of me because I'm obsessed with the Oppenheimer film.

I hope you'll see it when you come up for air.

But it's a brilliant film and it's historically accurate in a way that almost no

historical film that I've ever seen has been.

So if Hitler had had the atomic bomb, would he have used it?

And my answer is absolutely yes.

That if he had had it in Moscow, if he had had it at Stalingrad, if he had had it in

the Battle of Berlin, he might have even blown his own country.

No, he got into kind of a gutter demarong end of the world fantasy at the end and

wanted the whole German infrastructure to be destroyed.

And it was prevented by a number of people, including Albert Speer.

Do you have any doubt that if Hitler had gotten the bomb, he would have used it?

So I don't know why that would all of a sudden change just because he had an extra

was lost. A revenge bombing of London, certainly in the cards.

Probably he would have bombed Dachau and Auschwitz and

to to make sure he could cover up, literally cover up his race crimes.

However, let me ask you this question.

Big debate occurred after Hitler killed himself and and Germany

surrendered. Question was now what?

And many people, about 85, signed a petition of eminent scientists saying the

the Manhattan Project was designed to prevent Hitler from using the bomb.

He's dead. We should not, therefore, use it on Japan because that's not what it was

designed to do. And Japan is on the ropes anyway and can't continue the war much

longer. And here's the question.

Is there a race element here?

In other words, would we have used the bomb against Berlin or Frankfurt or

Warsaw if we had had it in time to affect the outcome of the European theater?

Is there a race element that that we regarded the Japanese people as less fully

human than Europeans?

We would have been reluctant to use it on our own stock, but we showed very little

reluctance to use it on an Asiatic stock.

As you know, this debate continues.

Dresden and Tokyo, I mean, more in Tokyo than at Hiroshima, the imaginative impact of

a nuclear bomb was much more because of what it was.

But the experience of living through the Dresden firebombing was probably not all

that different, except for maybe the radiation.

whereas the people of Dresden suffered long, agonizing deaths.

atomic bomb. Now, where I think maybe there would be a difference would be, and

you've talked eloquently about this before, the difference between the first and the

second bomb. There was a sense that a lot of Americans felt like the Japanese

didn't have a sense of humanity because they were willing to fight to the death no

matter what. And so they wouldn't surrender.

And that was one of the explanations given for the second bomb.

I'm not sure that same argument would be applied to a European foe.

And so my guess is they certainly would have been willing to do it once.

I don't know if they would have done it a second time so quickly.

point. But, you know, FDR was softening and there's some speculation that he might not

have known either of the bombs against Japan, that Truman didn't know of the

existence of the Manhattan Project until the day he took the oath of office and he had

to make some decisions of world historical importance within a few weeks.

And there's some sense that FDR might have been much more reluctant to use the bombs.

The second thing that has to be factored in here, aside from the fact that it was only

three days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hardly enough time for Japan to consider

what was in its best interest.

But Japan was ready to surrender if they could keep the emperor.

And we said absolutely not.

But in the end, we let them keep the emperor.

So if we had said a month before this, OK, you can keep your emperor, but everything

else has to go, they might have surrendered.

Thank you for sharing that with me.

One other one other piece about, you know, especially when we talk about we were

talking about JFK and and Eisenhower.

I think this is true for Truman and FDR.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be Truman, to come into office after FDR has

been in office for so long, has seen the country through the Great Depression and most

of the war. You come into office, you have no idea that you're going to be in office.

You've met with FDR maybe twice in the presidency or in your time as vice president.

And a week after you're in the office, they say, hey, by the way, we have this giant

weapon and you have to figure out how to how to lead, how to how to finish out the

war with no sense of what the plan was from FDR, really.

I mean, you know, he had his advisors, but nonetheless.

And I wonder how much of that was, again, not wanting to appear to be weak or to let

down at the end, to let down the legacy, to somehow not follow through what FDR had

So Meriwether Lewis is one of my interests, and he would not have probably been

discredited by the War Department if Jefferson had still been president.

Jefferson has retired.

Madison is president.

Madison is not a fan.

Madison is not really interested in the West.

Madison is frustrated by Lewis.

Jefferson probably would have said, I can make, you know, don't let it.

I'll work this out.

This is going to be OK.

But because Jefferson is gone and also washed his hands of government, left it in the

hands of his trusted disciple and partner, Madison, Meriwether Lewis gets caught.

And I think Truman and LBJ were both victims of the interstices.

So LBJ is not a was not close to the Kennedys.

In fact, Robert Kennedy loathes him.

And so he doesn't really know what his duty is, except he's got to fulfill Jack's

duty. And Truman comes, Truman's a haberdasher from St.

Louis. He's not he's not a statesman.

And I don't know why FDR chose him in 1944.

I'm sure that there's an answer to that question.

I just don't know it. But he was put into an impossible situation.

And there's there's an incident, Lindsay, where on the day he took the oath of

office, Eleanor Roosevelt sort of said, I'm praying, I'm praying for you.

You're going to need it. I mean, she said a snarky thing to him.

Poor bastard. You know, he's got to be.

And she said, oh, no, no, the the you should be the one we're sorry for, like a

recognition of what the office was going to be.

you're not really up to it, buddy, but, you know, I'll help you in any way I can.

So here are two historians looking at the same text and not sure which is the right.

You're giving a very much more generous reading of that, because she was a deeply

generous person, as we know.

Taken on such a huge role, partly because she had to.

But, you know, she she saw firsthand what the role was and how hard it could be.

And I think that she didn't envy didn't envy Truman that task.

And also, once she was out of the White House, she felt quite liberated and was able

to do a lot of the things that she didn't want to do beforehand.

And so I think that that sense of liberation maybe caused her to be more genuine.

But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong.

She's, I think, one of the greatest first ladies in American history, without

question. I have two special interests in her besides her own greatness.

She defended Oppenheimer when he was destroyed by the Cold Warriors, and she

defended John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath when he was being pilloried for attacking

the agricultural interests of the country and being un-American and so on.

She said, I've read that book and I think it's very accurate.