Soul to Soul

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The following is special programming sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5. The content of Soul to Soul does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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Soul to Soul, universal ideas for a brighter tomorrow. This show that airs at 7 30 on the third Sunday morning is a show that is a free for all of positive energy. This show talks about books, music, politics, books, food, COVID-19, books and Las Vegas history. Today Las Vegas history is the topic and I am with Dr. Michael Green. If you have never taken a class from Dr. Green you have missed the opportunity to learn history in an engaging intellectual way. So today he is going to talk about, oh we're just going to talk about this and that and all kinds of good things. Michael how are you? I'm okay

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thanks Gladys, it's a pleasure to be with you. It's wonderful to have you here.

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You're very kind. So Michael you did a presentation not very long ago and you talked to some Rotarians and you talked about their history but you did something that I really admire. You didn't just talk about that group of men but you also let the public know that there are other

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people here also. So talk about that a little. Talk about how you think it's important. We're talking about critical race theory all the time. So let's talk about how important it is for us to remember that we were not alone, that white men were not alone. White men are the easiest history to write about. They First day of my lecture classes, I'll often say, you have to understand that originally, history was the story of rich white men, written for rich white men, taught to rich white men by rich white men. Now, I'm a white man, not rich, and more's the pity. But thankfully our profession has changed. I think the 60s were a key turning point, though you could certainly see things happening before that. There were, I guess we'd call them outliers, because there weren't that many. And we realized that the written word is not the only source. Material culture is important. And that's helped us reconstruct the lives of people who didn't necessarily leave a written record. And this is part of the great coherent whole, if you will. And I don't think we understand what's going on simply that way. We had a professor, Gene Mooring, who talked about this. He had a professor named Herbert Gutman, and Gutman read a book called Time on the Cross by two economic historians trying to explain how slavery worked. And they used sources that were not from the enslaved. Well, you're not gonna know how slavery operated that way. And it probably took a few years off of Gutman's life, who's a marvelous scholar, and he wrote a book answering them. And I think that that's an example of how you can go the wrong way, as the original book did, and then you look and say, well, all right, what can we learn about the lives of people who we wouldn't normally, at that point perhaps, talk about, too often not even think about?

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So Michael, parents today are afraid of history. We're using the term critical race theory. And I think I know what they're afraid of. I think they are afraid that their children will be introduced to the

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truth of history that are not going to be pleasant. What would you say to parents like that? There's a little story I like to school. And a woman I was interested in, why don't I put it that way, was studying with another professor and he came into class and he said he had a student teaching a course called Contemporary Civilization, kind of the great books course. And the students were upset because it was all the old white guys. And they were refusing to do the work. And he said, well what do we do? And so she said to me, what would you say? And I say, know thine enemy. Well, in this case, they are the enemy themselves. And they're not. History is just complicated. And that's what I would say. History is not yes or no. When you say to me, well, tell me the facts. Okay, here's a fact. Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. Okay, why did he do it? Uh-oh, now we're getting into interpreting it. What's more, if you want just the facts, which facts do you want? I mean, if you want to know about the life of Clay T. White, then we can recite everything from day one, and it's not going to be that interesting to you or to anyone else. We pick. We choose. We all do this. Another thing is, I like this, I used to do this, I taught at the community college and I taught only courses really that you had to take. A lot of people do not want to have to take the courses they have to take. I was that way. And I would say all of you are historians and may not know it. So any of you thinking of going into the medical professions, I have a few hands go up. I pointed to someone, what do you want to do? I want to be a nurse. I said, okay, cough, cough. Made noises with my nose. I said, I'm coming in to see you. Talk to me. What do you do? He said, well, what are your symptoms? Okay, stuffy nose, cough, when did they start? Uh-oh, you're doing history. And we don't tend to think that way. It's not that because we're historians we think everything is history, but everything has a history. And what we discussed five seconds ago is history. Might not make a textbook. But I think conveying history is complicated. And I read a line the other day, and I'm not sure I think the historian was Richard Ellis, who did the Jeffersonian era, but he said, you don't refer to Jefferson as he did this but, you say he did this and. And so you can have a founding father who wrote some of the most inspiring words in our history, and he also was impregnating an enslaved woman. And then, as we know from the great work of Annette Gordon-Reed, and I do an age where I don't go fanboy on a lot of historians, but I did on her, which scared her to death, frankly, at a conference. Some guy's bearing down on her. Okay, what kind of negotiation was there? And history, we're reminded, is not simple. The simple fact Jefferson got Sally Hemings pregnant. Well, we don't know the details and I doubt we ever will. And it's alright because it's all complicated. None of us is perfect. Exactly.

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So thank you for that. I'm hoping that as people hear more and more explanations that it will become less fearful to learn history.

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Yeah. And related to that, I mean, I began a little crusade. I would email reporters around the country when I'd read a story where they'd refer to critical race theory or someone commenting on it. And I'd say, did you ask them what it is? And, you know, I was talking with a prominent Las Vegas from our history the other day who told me several stories I cannot repeat. Okay. And he said, you can't repeat them. But it's good for background. It's good for you know. Yeah, that's true. And critical race theory, as an example, may be in the background when someone is teaching a class. It doesn't mean you're teaching critical race theory. But, you know, we underestimate children in the first place. And one of the ways we underestimate them is we forget that at a certain age, our favorite word is why. And that doesn't go away entirely until we're boring adults.

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Exactly. Yes. So I hope that people will allow American history to be taught in classrooms. All of it.

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I agree. And at the same time, again, history, perspective. This is not new. You can substitute a lot of different words and phrases for critical race theory. And you can apply it involving gender. You can apply it to religion.

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Intersectionality.

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Yes. And it's all there. But you may say something in class. It happened to me. I was doing this talk or this lecture in class and I forget exactly what it was but I said something about well if you take blonde people, or if you said you have blonde people, you have red-haired people, you have brown-haired people, and apparently I had a student who was not a native speaker who was blonde and thought I was singling her out. And I had to say, no, no, no, that's not it. Well, we learn from our mistakes, and I made a mistake in not being clear enough. But we think it's critical race theory is the only issue, or if we talk about this, the issue of don't say gay. This is a continuum, unfortunately.

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Yes. So I do oral history here on this campus. People might not know that you're one of the best oral historians around.

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Oh, well, no, I'm being interviewed by one of the best oral historians around. I did an oral history of an attorney, Ralph Denton.

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And I want you to talk about it. Give me some highlights of Ralph Denton. Tell the audience who that gentleman is, was.

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Ralph was born in Caliente, North of here in 1925, lifelong Nevadan, went to law school in Washington on the patronage of a few different people. In the day when we didn't have a law school, no Boyd School of Law yet, and if you were going to go to law school as a Nevadan, you went to Washington, D.C., your member of Congress got you a job and you work part-time and one of the people who tended to Ralph or helped him was Senator Pat McCarran and Ralph was loyal to McCarran throughout his life he also disagreed with a lot of what McCarran stood for the beauty of it is McCarran knew that he didn't care he wanted Nevada kids to get their law degrees and go back to Nevada. Now, would they be loyal to him and help him? Yeah. But he was afraid of what we now call a brain drain. Ralph over-married. I can say I did the same. But the example of this is when he was going to marry Sarah, who's still with us, 97, totally with it. He got a call, or actually Sarah got a call, to come see McCarron. Ralph wasn't invited, and she went in to see him, and Ralph was told to wait outside. And when she came out, she was just smiling. What happened? Well, McCarron wanted to know what they were going to do after they got married. Sarah was from Kentucky, and she said, well, Ralph wants to go home and practice law, so that's what we're going to do." And he said, good, we cannot afford to have Nevada kids leaving. And it gives you a different view of McCarran, and I completely supported taking his name off the airport. I think Ralph would have. Now Ralph finished law school, eventually moved here. First he went to Elko. And he moved here in 1955, and he represented a lot of different people, including some characters, including the guy whose name is on the building we're sitting in for this interview, Hank Greenspun. And Hank took on McCarran and McCarthy. Bless him. He was tough. He was willing to take a position that would not make him popular in certain quarters. But Ralph told a story. He had an autographed photo of McCarran in his office, and every time Hank would come into the office, he'd stop, turn, look at the photo of McCarran, turn, look at Ralph, shake his head, and then they go about their business. He did ACLU cases. He did civil rights cases. He didn't really want to hold public office. He was appointed to one, or he ran for one, DA in rural Nevada, Esmeralda County. He thought he should run for office to see what it was like. Ran for Congress twice because he thought the incumbent was just wrong, lost both times, and spent the rest of his days, as he put it, practicing law for his friends and neighbors. And a great storyteller. And this goes to the point of oral history. Because I had a great horse to ride, and I did this for the Reno project for the university there.

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You weren't here yet. We didn't have an oral history center.

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And Tom King, fine oral historian who ran the project there, he called me after the first couple of tapes I'd sent in and he said, you know, it can be a conversation. And I said, you don't understand. I say, I give the information, we're recording, it's this date, and I say, Ralph, Pat McCarran, then I just sit back, and Ralph's off! He didn't need me! But this goes to, I think, interviewing, not just oral history. That we were friends, we became better friends through this, but he felt comfortable. He talked his great friend Grant Sawyer into doing an oral history and the interviewer had done some oral interviews for his dissertation, the late Gary Elliott, good friend of mine, but they were comfortable together and Sawyer still was careful. There were things he wasn't going to talk about and that was fine and Ralph said he didn't have, he said Grant had more sense than I did. So he said I talked about all kinds of things. But I think it's a wonderful book and Ralph would say, oh you wrote such a great book, and I didn't write it. That's correct. He turned it into a narrative by taking the question, putting it into the answer and reorganizing, but it's his story, it's his words, his book. And that's, I think, what a great oral history is and what a great oral historian like yourself does.

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So if you could do, conduct any oral history project you wanted to, if you could, the sky is the limit, money is no object, what would it be? Does the person have to be alive? No. Okay, then

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This is easy. It's easier than you think Lincoln Lincoln Tell me about Lincoln. You tell me about the new book. Well, here is why I say Lincoln, okay

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The three most written about people in the English language are Jesus

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Shakespeare and Lincoln Now that makes sense if you think about it, they have something in common. We know very little about them. We don't know a lot about their lives. They're personal. Yeah. Okay. And there's a long, if you read the Bible, there's a lot of long periods in there where you don't know what Jesus was up to. Exactly. Or you have a general idea. Shakespeare, there's a lot of mystery. Lincoln's papers, the published letters, were nine volumes. Jefferson, I think, is at 50 and they're still going. Well, I pity the Jefferson scholar, but the Lincoln scholar has a similar problem, kind of in reverse. You just cannot dig it all up and you kind of have to make some guesses. And my least favorite phrase in historical writing is must-have. Lincoln must have? Now if you don't know, then he did not must have. So I had done a dissertation on the politics of the Civil War and wound up writing two books for a series called the Concise Lincoln Library, which I take credit in part for naming because they were originally going to call it the Concise Lincoln. And I said, no, Lincoln was concise. The historians are not. And I put myself in this category. And I did one on the 1860 election, the first presidential election he ran. And they had wanted to do one on Lincoln and Native Americans. And this is a subject that has not gotten a lot of attention. And it's a difficult subject. I don't go into this saying, oh, I love Lincoln. He started out perfect and got better. No, he's a complex person like the rest of us. And one of the things I found was how easily people just dismissed or ignored whatever he did with Native Americans or said or thought, and in turn, how if you want to say he grew on the subject of African-Americans, you don't see the same growth with Native Americans, not to the same degree. And I think it's partly that... you know how we'll say a president was great or not great. What if the president had been president at a different time? The times demanded certain things. What are the big issues on Lincoln's mind? Now Native Americans were important. I'm hardly minimizing them. But the Union itself, what to do about human slavery, how to keep yourself in office, that kind of matters. And then set aside the personal stuff that might have been going on. So tell us just a tiny bit so that we

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will run out and buy the book. Tell us a tiny bit about his relationship with Native Americans.

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He didn't hate them. I want to start there. In the 19th century, think of Andrew Jackson, who didn't necessarily hate every Native American, but hated them as a group. Yes. And Lincoln lived, grew up on the frontier. Piece of trivia I figured out working on this book, he was the first president who spent his entire life before the presidency living west of the center of the population. He was a westerner. If the center was in Ohio, he would... so anyway, in the West, there was a tendency to, oh well, just kill him, push him out of the way. So he serves and he took great pride in it. He was in the Black Hawk War. The Sock and Fox were driven from their land. He was elected captain of his militia unit. Okay, his unit never saw any blood never fired a shot in anger you might say they got into the war late they were kind of a clean up crew he had a little trouble managing them there were some rowdies from new salem one day this elderly native american comes into the camp and they go wow finally an indian we can kill somebody. The guy had a letter giving him passage, or whatever, from the Secretary of War, Lewis Cass. And they're saying, it doesn't matter, it could be forged, whatever, and Lincoln said, no, no, it is not right to do this. And they start arguing with him. And he said, you will not touch this man and they said well what are you going to do about it? He said I will take on whoever I need to take on he said well you're bigger than we are and he essentially said then come at me in multiples he was ready to fight about this and that's not someone who hates native americans but is also is ultimately someone who doesn't think a lot about them in the way he's sitting there puzzling over African-Americans and slavery. And that helps explain why not much changed. But there's something else and it goes to my point about president serving at the right time. You had abolitionism. Yes. Yeah, strong abolitionist movement. You did not yet have a strong Native American reform movement. So they didn't have a voice. They really didn't at that point. There are a few, but they're very few. One of them got to talk to Lincoln. Lincoln told him we need to do something about this. But the most famous incident, I don't like the word incident or case situation, even that doesn't work, involves the fact that there was an uprising, if you want to call it that, by the Dakota in Minnesota. I say if you want to call it that because they were supposed to be fed and they weren't. And they took action. And in the end, the Army court, if you can call it that, sentenced 303 of them to hang. And Lincoln said, no, hold up, send me the files. They're all sent. He gets three lawyers in the Interior Department and says, go through them. I want to know who committed war crimes. I want to know who violated anybody, male or female. We end up with 38, actually 39. There was one that was confusion and he let that one off. Meaning, he ordered the largest mass execution in American history and the largest commutation of death sentences in American history at the same time. So, a couple of years later, Lincoln being Lincoln, he's a political animal, and he mentions to a congressman from Minnesota, you know, my majority wasn't as big in Minnesota in 1864 as it was in 1860. What's going on there?" And he said, well, you know, if you hanged all 303 of them, you would have done better. And Lincoln said, I could not afford to hang men for votes. Well, I can think of presidents who would

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have. But thinking about that, as we are almost at the end of our time, this is a wonderful segue into what just happened in one of the shopping malls here the other day. There was a display, an exhibit put up and it shows a person with a noose around his neck and his hands behind his back and that display stayed there for a day I believe until someone complained. But the people who put the display up up didn't seem to think it was any big deal to show a scene of a lynching in a

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shopping center in 2022. So what would you say to people who saw that and

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and people now who are protesting against it.

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What would you say about this incident? Well I would say to those who are upset they had every right to be upset. I'd say to those protesting you absolutely have the right to protest and you might well be right to protest. This goes to my political attitude. Let's talk about the kind of protest. The people who did it may not be, I don't want to sound the way I was going to sound, they may not be bad people. They may be people who don't think and were raised in a different time. And this goes to something I said in class a few years ago, early in his administration, I think, Donald Trump said something about Frederick Douglass that implied that Douglass was still alive. And in class, I brought this up and I could see there are liberal students, there are conservative students, there are students who don't care. And the students who were Trump supporters, I could see who was a Trump supporter because you could see people tensing. And I said, let me tell you what is wrong with that statement and it has nothing to do with Donald Trump except for one thing his age. He was raised in a time when we had as I guess it was then called Negro History Week and all we heard about was George Washington Carver and the peanut and great scientists who did great things but I think there's more to the story. Now I can criticize someone for not having thought about it or read a book since, but this is how a lot of people were raised and education should be constant. My favorite writer of all time was Russell Baker of the New York Times, who wrote what I still think is the best autobiography I've ever read growing up. He did a column called School vs. Education and he says at some point when you have graduated and gotten your degrees maybe you will open a book and

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start to become educated. Good, that's excellent. So we have about two minutes and I think that is a wonderful place to stop. I want to say how grateful I am

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that you decided to come on the show today. Well thank you, I'm grateful that you asked me and it was fun and interesting to talk about

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these things and enlightening for me. They're not always things I sit and think about and I think it's important to think about them. That's correct. We just never have enough time, that's the problem. So this program is And we talk about books and we talk about history and all the good things in life. So please join me every third Sunday morning at 730 a.m.

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Bye-bye.

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You've been listening to special programming sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Transcribed with Cockatoo