America’s birthday with Kevin Schultz: What have we learned about democracy over the last 250 years?

Welcome to This Is UIC, the official podcast of the University of Illinois Chicago. I’m your host, Grace Khachaturian. With each episode, we’re making known the stories of our people, where they come from, and how they’re leading the way to create and inspire a better world. This is UIC. Joining us on the podcast today is Kevin Schultz. He’s a UIC professor of history and religious studies and Amazon best-selling author. Kevin, glad to have you with us today. 

Kevin Schultz  0:34   

Thanks for having me on, Grace. 

Grace Khachaturian  0:36   

Yeah, I’m excited for this. You have made a name for yourself as an Amazon bestseller, but also here in our UIC community, I think you have a ton of insight to share. And at a very timely part of history, commemorating America’s 250^th. Let me ask you this: Why should we care about history? 

Kevin Schultz  0:58   

Oh, you’re killing me, Grace. You’re killing me. I’m the chair of the history department here at UIC, and you’re asking why we should care about history. Well, first, I want to begin by wishing you a happy semiquincentennial. Semi means halfway, and quincentennial means 500. So we’re halfway to 500 years. Happy 250th birthday to the Declaration of Independence, which is an illustrative example of the values and ideals we in the United States live by, and I bring that up just to be a generous guy, but also because I want everybody to practice saying semiquincentennial.  

Grace Khachaturian  1:40 

Yeah, that’s going to take some practice.  

Kevin Schultz  1:41 

So if I had to practice, you have to practice. 

Grace Khachaturian  1:42   

Yeah, absolutely. 

Kevin Schultz  1:43   

But most importantly, I want to get to your question, which is: Why should we care about history? Well, we’re celebrating this 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, which puts ideals out there. Most basically, that all of us are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And when these things are being obstructed, or there’s an imposition that we can see in the way, we have an obligation, duty and right to fight back and to push back on that, and to elect new people to rule over us and to govern over us. We have this mechanism in place where we can, therefore, fight for our ideals, and I think that that put in place 250 years ago is a component of our history, and it’s very important for us to know that not only because it sort of tells us fancy stories about people who wore wigs when they were writing with quill pens and things like that, but also because it sets the table for the kind of world we live in today.  

I know at UIC you’ve got this unbelievably dynamic community of scholars and researchers and thinkers, and all of us, we contribute to this big pie that is the university and this world of knowledge. We all add our own brick to the wall of knowledge, is how I like to think about it. Now, a chemist might understand the world by looking at the chemical makeup of something, and a physicist might understand the world by looking at the physics of something and how it was constructed, and how it was built, and how it was moved when it was enacted upon by certain forces.  

Now, the historian looks at the world, and the way I understand the world is by knowing the story of how it came to be. I’m learning about history in order to understand better the world that we live in today. And the way my mind works is, I need to understand how something came to be in order to understand the way that it is today, and how we can thereby improve it, live with it better, understand it better, and, to go back to history, fulfill our ideals to pursue our own life and our own pursuits of happiness. 

Grace Khachaturian  3:48   

Can’t all be a historian, but we can all take the mindset and maybe the posture of understanding things a bit more, of how things came to be. So, how did this become so important to you? How did you decide? Hey, I care about this country. I care about this world enough to want to be a historian. 

Kevin Schultz  4:09   

So great question. Partly, I think it’s just how I’m wired. So again, it’s sort of you know your your biology dictates some of it, and this is my mental wiring or whatever we want to call it. So I’m sort of wired that even from a young age, I kind of wanted to know the why of things, and, you know, Thomas Edison or some of these famous inventors, they were tinkerers, and I wasn’t necessarily a tinkerer, but I would read and try and learn how something came to be. So, my natural tinkering was to learn its story of whatever it was.  

I grew up in Los Angeles, so I wanted to know about Los Angeles culture, beach culture, the history of surfing, all the things that I like to do. How did this come to be, and why is it the way that it is? So, I was already sort of wired in that direction from a young age. And then I was sort of growing up in the ’80s and in the ’90s and in the 2000s, and I began to experience sort of the culture wars, the political divisions that we see. The sort of, what I now know because I study it, is sort of the crumbling of Americans’ belief in institutions, this sort of general cynicism that politics can be done for good, and to me that was natural. That’s what I grew up with. But it wasn’t to previous generations.  

And so, as I grew up and became, you know, a 20-year-old who was interested in politics, a 25-year-old who was watching the world change in the Supreme Court case of Bush v. Gore, when the Supreme Court had to decide who was going to be the president in the year 2000. I was sort of trying to understand what the history was and how these things came about, and I realized that our current world was actively being shaped by historical precedents and by historical forces, and the way things were today were so — were incredibly dependent on how they came to be in the past, and so I began sort of a quest to marry this sort of political observation, this sort of commitment to democracy as the least worst form of government that we could possibly have. My fiercely libertarian sensibility that most of the time I want people to leave me alone and let me be able to do my thing as long as I’m causing no harm to anybody else. So how does this come to be, and how can we preserve this?  

And that’s sort of how I came to be a historian. I was very interested in these questions. I was already programmed this way. It was a perfect marriage of sort of my biology and also my deep passion for democracy and understanding the instruments and tools of democracy, and then you know, eventually, I hope that it can turn into sort of instruments to preserve democracy, not only in the past but also in the future. 

Grace Khachaturian  6:51   

So, we’ve unpacked a little bit of your how. Tell me about your why. 

Kevin Schultz  6:55   

The why, I’ll take and run with it in two directions, if that’s OK with you. One is sort of ,why you know, did I become so passionate about history, and then two is why did I become so passionate about the kinds of questions that I’m interested in studying and answering and resolving and things like that. So I grew up, as I mentioned already, in California, and sort of the golden land, you know, and the state of sunshine, and but I also knew that my family, my parents, were not from there. They were part of this great Western migration or westward migration that happened after World War II, and so I got very interested in sort of my own family’s history, and it was right in front of me. So, my father is a very secular Jew, and he’s got his own very traditional story of American Jewry that you might have watched on “Fiddler in the Roof” and all sorts of movies and books and television that has happened. When things got bad in the Russian Empire, there were various struggles for power. All of a sudden, those people who saw their power maybe as slipping, took it out on the lowest common person that they could, and all the Russian noblemen would attack the the Jews, and it forced all the Jews to leave. And many Jews came to the United States, including my family. My mom, on the other hand, has deep roots in the United States, Scotch Irish roots that go back before the American Revolution. She was one of only four kids, so her mom, my grandma, was deemed to be a failure because she only had four kids. And in the great Catholic tradition, this was about eight kids shy of what she should have had. And I have this great story that I’ve written that starts out with two of my great-grandmas were born in the year 1900. They were both born in the same year, one is a Catholic in Texas, and the other in the shtetl, the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire forced all the Jews to live in these little towns, which in Yiddish is called shtetls. So, you might have heard shtetl culture. She was most at home when she was at a Jewish delicatessen talking to the other servers in her old Yiddishite language, and so I was struck by this question of this sort of Catholic history in the United States and this Jewish history in the United States. This land was often thought of as a Protestant country.  

I, myself, was not raised religious at all. My mom didn’t know how to raise me Jewish. My dad didn’t care that much about religion in general but would not allow me to be raised Catholic if he had anything to do with it. My sister became a Methodist, so we were incredibly religiously messy, and my parents would tell stories about how their marriage of a Catholic and a Jew in the late 1960s was incredibly controversial. And to me, how could this possibly be controversial, and how could the weight of their religions have so much to do with the discord that was caused by their union? It was kind of shocking to me. So, I guess all I’m saying is, even as a kid, I was sort of feeling the pulls of history, and I was sort of watching conflict arise in areas that didn’t make sense to me, but because of these deep historical animosities and antipathies that continued to exist. And I wanted to know how did I come to be? How did I come to have all this baggage placed on me? I mean, I guess it’s a very human question. So that was sort of my deep family interest in this. And then, as I said, I was thinking about this in preparation of our discussion today, Grace. And I was thinking, so I grew up in L.A. in the early ’90s, and one of the prominent memories that I have was I was working in high school when the L.A. riots happened, and this was in 1992, and there was this incredibly destructive moment that stemmed from the four L.A. police officers beating up Rodney King, but I was really moved by this question. Rodney King’s famous line is, “Can’t we all get along? 

Kevin Schultz  10:46   

And this was, this question is, we’ve got now 250 years in our semiquicentennial celebration of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and the question of can’t we all get along? Can’t we all ascribe to these ideals and find ways for us to make our democracy work for all of us, so that we can pursue our own versions of happiness without infringing on other people? And that became really the foundational question for all of the research that I pursued, not only in my time at UIC but even as a student before then. 

Grace Khachaturian  11:20   

What do you think our founders intended this country to be versus what it is today? 

Kevin Schultz  11:27   

Oh, great question! I mean, so, in some ways, you know, nobody can predict the future. They obviously could not have predicted the Industrial Revolution that we saw in the late 19th century. They couldn’t have predicted the new modes of transportation — the railroad, the car, much less the jet engine, airplane and space shuttles that can go out to space, take humans there and bring them back. I also think they were smart enough, and they were well tutored in the ancient philosophies to be aware that this future was wide open, and they would be foolish if they tried to predict what was there.  

On the other hand, they knew the future was going to be vastly different from what they had encountered in the world that they were living in. They lived in a very international space, so they knew the world was a bigger place than just the 13 colonies, as it were. They also knew that the world consisted of a variety of peoples with different beliefs, and that certain peoples could only be kept down for so long before this sort of inalienable rights and passion for freedom were going to bubble up and lead to violence. But I think it would have been no surprise that people are constantly going to be fighting for their freedoms, and the founding fathers would have hoped that we would have used the tools that they gave us to push back against those who are trying to restrict our freedoms. 

Grace Khachaturian  12:51   

Why is our history important for the future of this country? Those 250 years, when we’re looking forward to the next 250 years, why is it important to remember where we come from? 

Kevin Schultz  13:04   

Well, the way I like to think about it is, our founders gave us some tools, and they didn’t know how we were going to use the tools or what we were going to need the tools for, but they hoped that the tools would be useful. And one way to think about the American project for the previous 250 years is as a collection of people who are trying to use the tools given to us to fight for their freedoms. And I think that is going to be the next 250 years if our nation continues to live on in the way that it has. I’m an optimist. I mean, 200 or 500 years is a very long time for a nation to survive. You know, the United States is already the country that is the longest-lasting country with a single founding document out there. We’re maybe not on borrowed time, but we’re on exceptional time. So, I think that’s a really interesting thing. One of the reasons I think it’s been so successful is because what it promises us are tools, and it hopes that we use those tools to improve our lives and to fight to improve the lives of our fellow citizens.  

So, to get to your question, I think those tools are going to be useful. I think knowing the last 250 years is useful because it shows us how other people have used the tools to push for their rights. Whether that was ending the Jim Crow laws by using the language of the Declaration of Independence to say how America had bastardized its own ideals when it comes to Black people. The Declaration of Sentiments, which was put forward by one of the very first women’s rights movements in 1848, actually used the Declaration of Independence at its starting point, just adding the language of “and women” instead of “men,” to say that these rights were passed to all American citizens. Going forward, you see how someone like Martin Luther King would use the language of the Declaration and the promise and the hopes of ideals of America to put forward a vision for a country where all children, you know, in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, all children can live and fulfill the promises of the Declaration.  

I think our founders recognized questions that were problematic buried within the Constitution. They deal with a question on how my rights and my desire to push for my freedoms might actually infringe on your rights, and how can we then balance and adjudicate between these two questions? So, studying the history shows us the various ways in which the American institutions have adapted to the voices of minorities and have adapted to these kinds of things. So these will be useful considerations because the United States is only going to be a bigger and more robust global player. 

Grace Khachaturian  15:51   

Yeah, this brings up this whole concept of like common good. Can what’s good for one person be good for everyone? Can you define what common good is, and if you think it actually exists. 

Kevin Schultz  16:05   

Ah, good question. I’ll answer the second question first. Yes, I think it exists. One thing I want to say right away is I think that Americans have today, no matter how cynical we might be, we have a bedrock commitment to the common good. 

Grace Khachaturian  16:21   

Yeah, I agree with that.  

Kevin Schultz  16:22   

We believe in public roads, for instance, so that you and I and people who don’t pay taxes and people who pay huge amounts of taxes can all drive on a road. We believe, generally speaking, in public schools. We believe in the fact that there should be public hospitals. If somebody is sick, they should be able to get care for that kind of thing. So there already is a sort of broad commitment to the common good, and the pull that we’re seeing right now, I think, is should that commitment be expanded? In other words, have private interests, people’s right to make as much money as possible, commandeered some aspect of that common good so that they can enrich themselves, and have they bit too much into our common good? And at what point do we citizens stand up and say no, we want public health care for all. Just to give one very, very popular example, you wouldn’t know it’s popular because our politicians don’t actually act like it’s very popular, but I’m studying tons and tons of polling data right now on where the common good lies, on what Americans actually think the laws should be on issue after issue in American life, and so publicly funded healthcare is one that most people, most Americans actually think is a really good idea. So, there is this common good out there. There always has been. There always will be, I hope, knocking on wood. 

Grace Khachaturian  17:49   

OK, what do you think common good will look like over the next 250 years for America? 

Kevin Schultz  17:56   

I have a feeling that we are in the midst now of a battle between the oligarchs, the billionaires and everybody else. I think that any time there’s been an oligarchical power grab in our past, there have been, when it gets so extreme, there have been efforts to fight back and push back. I think those that are predicting revolutionary change will be disappointed, but I think we need to hear those voices because it pushes the center to the to the story of democracy.  

I always say democracy is a slog and a slug, and I say it’s a slog because it takes time. You have to pick yourself off the floor to preserve our democratic rights, and I say it’s a slug because you have to go out there and fight for it. Nobody’s going to give it to you, so it’s heartening for me to see things like the No Kings Rally. It’s heartening for me to see some of the pushes to preserve our democratic institutions. You know, I try to hide my own personal politics because I don’t think they’re actually easily categorized by any individual party. I think if you believe in one particular party and you think that that party stands for you, you need to do better thinking. So, but I do think there will be this pushback against the oligarchs, which is really robbing away the capacity for many Americans to live the American dream. 

Grace Khachaturian  19:17   

Do you think there will be another 250 years of this country? 

Kevin Schultz  19:23   

A lot of empires and a lot of nations and a lot of kingdoms and a lot of whatever name you want to give those sort of collectives of power in the past. They’ve all fallen apart, and in part they’ve fallen apart because they’ve expanded into arenas that they should not have expanded, and because they’ve also succumbed themselves to overreaches of power by one individual or by one particular group, that has led to a revolution. So I think that in the United States, we have been blessed, if you want to use religious language, or fortunate, that the structures of government that we were bequeathed by our founders have embedded in them a huge amount of flexibility and a huge amount of arenas for people to express themselves.  

So, I think that we are better equipped than other nations or kingdoms or empires or whatever you want to compare us to, to adapt to whatever it is that comes down the pike. So, we might. Let me say it that way: We might. There’s always been human beings. So, when one kingdom falls, you know, in our history books, that means, oh my God, what happens to the Ottomans? Well, the Ottomans became whatever the Ottoman Empire was. The various peoples that were composed of mostly Turks, but also Armenians, and also the you know Druze and millions of other people that were there. Those people kept on living. They just had a different structure of government in place.  

So, if the United States goes away, it doesn’t mean all the humans will go away. It means this particular project will have morphed into something else. There’s no reason we need to be overly pessimistic about what that means.  

Grace Khachaturian  21:16   

Right. That’s a good reminder. I am so grateful for your time today, your expertise, letting us understand a little bit about who you are, how you came to be, if you will. As we round out our time, if you were to pick a song that best represents your story, what song would you pick? 

Kevin Schultz  21:36   

Great question, and I love music. And I actually, in my American history survey from 1865 to today, I start off every single lecture with a song that represents that era, and usually it’s from that era if I have it. And so, music is a key component of everything that I teach. And my favorite exercise is the last lecture of every single semester when I teach this class, I play the song that was voted on by the previous semester’s class. It’s called “Your America, Kids.” So, what song best represents them? And so they vote on it on their final exam, and then that’s what I play every single semester. It’s a really fun experiment.  

I want to say one of the things that’s been really interesting about doing this exercise with my students is how long a song will remain in the historical memory. So a song that seems to reflect a certain moment will actually be voted three or four years in a row. So, it seems like now these songs are old songs, but the students still resonate with them, so for many years, although not this year, in the last three years have been consistent, and I’m going to make you wait. But for many years, Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”  

Song: “Born This Way” 

was an anthem that students continually voted. There were other songs from J. Cole. There were some country songs that would get votes, but “Born This Way” really seemed to capture a cultural moment, and I would say that lasted, wow, from the maybe late 20 teens all the way into the early 2020s, the early COVID years. But since COVID, the last four years, the song that has won the most votes has been Childish Gambino or Donald Glover’s “This is America,” 

Song: “This Is America” 

Kevin Schultz  23:39   

which is a much more rowdier song than “Born This Way.” It speaks to the past experience of Black Americans. The video, if you’ve ever watched the video, makes references to Reconstruction era struggles for civil rights and equality, and ultimately how in the United States, this push for equality is always being battled against a system that wants to keep order and uses violence quite readily to ensure that order persists, and how Black people and Black history has constantly been caught in the nexus of this. So, this song has constantly resonated with students ever since, I would say, the George Floyd riots when that came out in the aftermath of that, and it’s been relatively consistent.  

But for me, one song that really sings true to me, both because I love sort of its meaning, and I love the melody, and I love funk music. I would say Sly and the Family Stone’s “Family Affair” from 1971. 

Song: “Family Affair” 

Kevin Schultz  24:49   

The music is amazing. Sly was interracial band that had a lot of his own family members in it, but also he used the metaphor of family to represent the great American project, and so Sly and the Family Stone. Family’s in the word of the name of the band, and “It’s a Family Affair,” is a song that is ostensibly about a love affair between two people. It might also be about two siblings who go different paths of lives, but you can also see it as a metaphor for America. America — mother America — has these children who want to live these different versions of happiness and live these different versions of freedom. And how can we all reconcile ourselves to recognize the fact that we’re all part of one great family? 

Grace Khachaturian  25:33   

Thank you so much for your time on the podcast today and sharing your expertise. It’s been awesome. 

Kevin Schultz  25:38   

Thanks for having me. 

Grace Khachaturian  25:39   

Learn more about Kevin Schultz in the show notes at today.uic.edu. Thanks for listening to This Is UIC, the official podcast of the University of Illinois Chicago. At Chicago’s only public research university, we’re letting the world know what we know. Until next time, visit today.uic.edu.