Brené Brown: Hi everyone, I’m Brené Brown and this is Unlocking Us.

BB: And welcome back to our eight-part series that I’m calling On My Heart and Mind. We kicked off the series with my conversation with Valarie Kaur on the power of revolutionary love and being a sage warrior. I also talked to Dr. Sarah Lewis on her just life reorganizing, new book, the Unseen Truth. Roxanne Gay and I talked about her provocative new essay on Black gun ownership, and my friend Mary Claire Haver and I talked about menopause and what it means to get great medical care for the entirety of our lives as women. We have a couple of episodes left after this two-parter where I’ll be talking to my sisters about grief and joy and love, and in this two-parter, oh my god, I’m so excited, y’all. This is like… They say, never meet your heroes. Well, let me tell you, I have met my hero, one of them in Heather Cox Richardson, the historian, and we have an amazing, just I think, pretty mind blowing two-part podcast on democracy and her book, Democracy Awakening, and history, and how we got here and what she’s seen. It’s just incredible.

BB: Before we jump in, I’m going to tell you a little bit about Dr. Heather Cox Richardson. She’s a professor of history at Boston College. She’s written about the Civil War Reconstruction, the Gilded Age in the American West in award-winning books whose subject stretch from the European settlement of the North American continent to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, among many other outlets, and she’s co-host of the Vox podcast Now and Then. Without further ado, let’s jump in and let’s talk, now, yesterday, and tomorrow. So good. Heather, welcome to Unlocking Us.

Heather Cox Richardson: It’s such a pleasure to be here.

BB: Thank you. I’m rarely… I don’t want to say starstruck, but I’m rarely intellectually teacher struck and I’m a little bit today, I have to say.

HCR: Well, back at you. I can’t tell you how many of your books I have given away. [laughter]

BB: Oh, thank you. I want to start where we always start. Tell us your story. Where were you born? Tell us about growing up.

HCR: It’s funny you asked me that today because tomorrow is my 62nd birthday, and you always kind of take stock, at least I always take stock. Right? Because you sort of feel like you’re starting a new year. Right? So, I was actually born outside of Chicago. My mother had been a WAC in World War II. She was from Maine, but she had been a WAC in World War II and gone back to Chicago for her master’s degree on the GI Bill after World War II. And my father was from Mississippi and had come up to Mississippi during the Depression, and they met there. And for the first few years… I was the youngest… So for the first few years they were in Illinois. We were always in Maine in the summer. And then we moved to Maine permanently the day after I turned seven, some 55 years or so ago.

HCR: Anyway, so my family’s from Maine. I have always associated myself with Maine, but my dad was from Mississippi and grew up in a small town in Maine. Got a phenomenal education, but as a result, I’ve always had feet in both worlds. Both a rural town that is characterized by people who don’t have college educations for the most part. And at the same time, I got the Exeter Harvard Education. So, and I’ve lived all over the country and always been interested in America and in the American people in part because I have had such a wide experience from my best friend growing up, didn’t have running water. And then the other end of the scale I have seen the fancier side of America.

BB: Tell everyone what a WAC is.

HCR: It’s a woman who served in the Army during World War II in the Women’s Army Corps. And that is, I think, a really interesting moment in American history, because when women first began to be official parts of the U.S. Army, they had been part of the Army, obviously all along since the American Revolution. But in World War II, they become an official part of the Army so that they can get benefits, especially was they’re sent into really dangerous theaters of the war, especially the Pacific. And, at first, when they go into the war, they go in as the Women’s Auxiliary Army Committee, I think is what it’s called, the WAAC. And they got a reputation of being what they called “khaki wacky.” That is people said, “Oh, they must be basically looking for men or easy women if they want to go be in the Army.” And they professionalized that really quickly and they became the WACs, the Women of the Army Corps, and the WACs then become instrumental in helping to fight World War II. Mother was not overseas, she was stationed in America. But that whole generation of women who became WACs, and all the things women did during World War II, seemed to me to be foundational for what became of the baby boomers like me. Who grew up with those women who had, had very different experiences than the women, for example, who had come of age in the 30s.

BB: Your mom seems like a really interesting, strong person. Was she a driving character in your life?

HCR: Oh yes. Oh yes, yes. Mother was, just a wonderful woman. I miss her every day. She’s been gone, heavens, 40 years or so, and I miss her every day. She was the writer, she’s the woman who wrote letters every night. She worked as somebody who wrote during the war for the Army. She was a force of nature, Mother was. Shy, retiring, but obviously had a lot to do with who I became.

BB: Tell me about the conversations at the dinner table growing up. Like high school. Tell me what did y’all…

HCR: You’re killing me. That was a long time ago. [laughter]

BB: I know, but I just want to understand, you. [laughter] I just want to understand how we got here. Like did y’all talk about politics? Did you talk about history?

HCR: No, I mean, yes and no, as any family does, I suspect. What was more formative for me about what I became was the fact that my mother cared very deeply about history. And my father was one of the people that I have mentioned before who were storytellers. Remember we grew up in a place where we really didn’t have access to a lot of television. We did have three channels, but they were in a perpetual snowstorm. And we really grew up around people, especially older men, but also women who told stories to make sense of the world. So when I think of my childhood, I think a lot less of the dinner table when, as with most people, kids are coming and going and the dishes to be done and all that. As I think about the times when we just sat without television or radio or anything around a table and people just told stories.

HCR: And that was central, I think, to my understanding of the world, because it was very clear, I think from the time I was quite young that people’s stories about the same events were all very different. And so you had to understand from where they came. And that… And mother, of course, was a very good interpreter of that, where she would say, for example, “Well, you have to remember that X.” And one of the the things that always jumped out to me, even as a kid, was that there was an older man here in town who people kind of made fun of. Like, he never really held a job. And if you talked to him, he was always telling you about his latest ailments and whatever. And so he was kind of a figure of fun in some ways. And mother always treated him with absolutely profound respect.

HCR: And somebody once was sort of making fun of him in her presence. And she… Mother never lost it. But she was very firm that we were to give this man extraordinary respect because he, during World War II, had saved his platoon, I guess it was, I don’t remember what unit he was with by ferrying men to safety through fire and had been injured in that. And she said he never was okay really after that, he won some kind of an award for it. But I can still remember her story of him firing on a ridge and then rolling through the bushes to fire from someplace else and going back and forth to make it look like he himself was more than one man. And under that cover then he was part of dragging people to safety. And so you never look at the world the same way again after you have seen the contrast between a kid making fun of an older man who’s maybe not the most stable. And an older woman who is, as I say, mother was very shy, but very proper in a lot of ways, coming down very strongly that this man who lived in a shack without running water and couldn’t hold a job was somebody that one should profoundly respect because of what he had done for other people.

BB: I like your mom.

HCR: Yeah, she was a great lady. You know what, I look more like her everyday.

BB: Oh god, me too. Which is sometimes like wonderful and sometimes like “Oh god, shit, that’s my mom. Oh no, I’m my mom.” [laughter]

HCR: Exactly. Exactly.

BB: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Tell me, college, do you study history?

HCR: I did, actually, I started in folk and myth, not deliberately, my major was history, but I took more classes in folklore and mythology than I did in history at first. And I realized I didn’t have credits to graduate in folk and myth, but I was always interested there the same way I have always been in life, in literature and religion. And all the different fields of the relationship between the stories that people tell and reality. And the idea that we are never utterly fact-based. We tell stories about ourselves and ultimately of course that’s what I do for the nation, is talk about the stories the nation tells itself and how those intersect with reality. So my undergraduate degree was in history. I went on to graduate school. My master’s is in literature and my doctorate is actually in the history of American civilization, which later became American studies.

HCR: But when I went into it, I was the very tail end by a few years of the original construction of the program in American civilization. And the reasoning behind that program came out of World War II. And that was the idea that there must be some reason that the United States had fallen neither to communism nor to fascism. So what was it that made the United States different? Not better, but different. And the people who began to study in the program, the history of American civilization, focused on those myths, on the symbols of America, on what people believed about themselves and how that intersected with reality. So I was really very well trained in the theory behind what I do. I was extraordinarily fortunate. My first advisor had won two Pulitzers, and he taught me to write. And my second advisor had begun as a data physicist, and he taught me to do research. And between the two of them, I came out having a pretty good idea of how to write books.

BB: I see and feel the formation of Heather Cox Richardson in this story. Like I see the lesson from the guy that probably everyone’s afraid of and makes fun of, who’s a war hero untreated PTSD. A strong, powerful, quiet mother. And then these influences in school, the folklore, studying the artifacts of what it means to be American and the language of what it means to be American. Then the data. This is why I love your work. It is a singular voice I think you bring to us, made up of a thousand stories and backgrounds. Like it’s, yeah, it’s amazing.

HCR: Well, let me add a piece to it that you didn’t ask and would not know. And that is, I live in the same town that is the only town of my memory, which is unusual, I think in America in the 21st century. Which brings a layer of… I was swimming in the harbor a few weeks ago and I thought I feel like I’m the same as I did when I was 12. I’m swimming in the exact same place. It feels the same. I have the same friends. I have been extraordinarily lucky not to have lost that many of my friends as adults, lost a bunch as kids. But that sort of double vision, if you will. I am an older woman living in the same place where I literally walked the same street… it’s only one street… in the 1970s, I think gives a much clearer sense of what the passage of time has meant in my lifetime.

HCR: But then remember, my family has always been here. They came from before the Pilgrims. They were fishermen who came from before the Pilgrims. So my great-great-great grandfather’s house is still standing. And that connection to the past is, I think really rare in the United States in the 21st century. And helps, I think, to provide a sense of grounding for me and also perhaps for other people who can see through me that continuity. And I don’t want to romanticize it. There is of course, as all people are, and you would be the first to say this. There’s negative stuff associated with that as well. But there is a sense of endurance and care that is palpable to me in a way that it might not be if I were traveling all over the country.

BB: It’s interesting because I’m a cognitive person more than I’m an affective person. But that resonates for me in such a body emotion way when I read your work that almost like a social scientist, you have held a variable, for better and worse, constant in your observation of our country. And I think it’s very hard to do that. I don’t know anybody but you that’s done that. It’s just, it’s amazing. And I’m so glad you added it because I can feel it. We cannot go into history until I hear about the lobsterman.

HCR: I tease him, and he’d be mortified. I hope he doesn’t listen to this. I always say he walked out of a romance novel because he really did.

BB: Say more.

HCR: What would you like to know about him?

BB: How did you meet? How long have you been together?

HCR: Oh, so this…

BB: Why are y’all so great?

HCR: This is a great story actually. So we are both from this town. I grew up with his brothers. I knew all three of his brothers and my brother worked with him. But somehow we just never crossed paths. And this is a town of like a few hundred people. It’s kind of astonishing.

BB: It’s crazy.

HCR: We literally never crossed path. I knew his parents, but I don’t know. I just… Somehow, we just ne never were in the same place at the same time. And so one of my dearest friends was dating his brother, and his brother is also a fisherman. And he would come in in the evenings. And my now husband buys and sells the lobsters for the guys in town. And I have to say, having your husband get out of bed every morning and go, “I’ve got to talk to my dealer,” never gets normal, let me tell you. [laughter] And so she would go down to see the guy she was dating and I was wingman and they would be chatting away down there and it was like la da da dad da if anyone’s ever played wingman, you know what that’s like.

BB: Oh yeah, yeah. It’s terrible.

HCR: And so Buddy was there, and we would chat, sort of. And then my friend and his brother got engaged, and I was like “Well, it’s pretty clear we’re essentially family.” Because literally I met my friend in a playpen. We are like sisters.

BB: Wow!

HCR: And so I thought “I better get to know him,” because it’s pretty clear that he’s going to be standing up with his brother at this wedding, and I’m going to be standing up with Nancy, who doesn’t have any sisters… blood sisters… she’s got me. So we better start chatting. And so we started chatting and chatting and chatting and then my friend and his brother broke up.

BB: [gasp]

HCR: Yeah. Right? And I was like “Hmm.

BB: Oh my god.

HCR: I’m not sure where this is going to go. Because I mean, I thought he was just the cat’s meow. But for years nothing had happened. And, we’d finally, finally, finally, finally, we went out on a date, and we have been together ever since. And so that’s eight years I guess. I knew right away. He’s like “Well, we circled for a while.” I’m like “No, you circled. I was like a freaking bird dog, man.”

BB: I was locked down, brother.

HCR: Yeah. Really [laughter] from the second day I met him. Once, once I met him. I mean, he’s really interesting. He loves history. He’s incredibly visually acute, which I am not. He’s very good at film. Once I saw his photographs, I’m like “Wow.” He’s the only person I ever sort of met on the street who had read Geronimo’s autobiography and the entire body of work of Harriet Beecher Stowe. And he just was absolutely fascinating. So we got married about two years ago.

BB: Sometimes when I’m not in the mood for history, I just scroll through all of your letters to see if there’s any updates on the love story. That’s like… yeah.

HCR: I mean I think that is part of the charm that people find in the stuff I do every day because we are sort of an old-fashioned love story. Buddy always says that the Navy for him was his institute of higher and lower learning. He graduated from high school, he did not go to college and runs a successful business. And I did go to college, did go to graduate school. And all the markers that became so important in the 1980s about social divisions, we are before that in a way and after it. Those sorts of things have never ever mattered in our relationship. And we were both saying that we each think we are the ones who got lucky. He thinks he’s the one who got lucky. And I’m like “No, you are so wrong. I’m the one who got lucky. You walked out of a romance novel, and I happened to catch on to you.”

BB: Thank you for sharing that with us. I love it. I have to give more thought to why that’s so central to me in your work is knowing that part, seeing some of the photos that he’s taken. Like, I don’t know, maybe it’s just trust and story and narrative and connection, but I really like him, and I feel like we’re the lucky ones that y’all found each other, because we get to be reminded of what’s possible.

HCR: There has not been a moment since I met him, actually, that I just haven’t thought the sun rose and sat over him. And every day I say to him, “There’s never enough time. I want more time.” And he’s like, “We’re lucky we found each other when we did.” I’m like, “No, no, no. I want all of it. I want more,” which is, how blessed are we?

BB: I mean, thank you for sharing it. I love it so much. This is the cheesiest thing I’ve ever done on the podcast, which I hate doing with you because you’re so whatever the opposite of cheesy is. But I want to start with a weird question about history.

HCR: Shoot, go ahead.

BB: I am not from this planet.

HCR: Intelligent Martian, we call them. We actually use that in writing.

BB: Okay, I have landed. And I am watching what’s unfolding leading up to the election in November. And I turn to you. You’re my journey woman. I’ve been assigned to you. And I look at you and say, well, if I was an alien, I’d probably just say whatever alien language for “Jesus, what a shit show.” Then I would say, “Can you help me understand what I’m seeing?”

HCR: And you’re a Martian. Okay, so I’m going to be all intellectual back here and say, I’m going to have to assume that Martian society is parallel to human society because, you know…

BB: Yes, yes.

HCR: Okay, so give me that. Give me that.

BB: Yes, I’m going to give you that. And I’m going to say we are parallel. But me, the Martian, I’m way more advanced. I don’t understand kind of this eating cats and dogs, but that’s not true. Making fun of candidates’ children, making promises of not ever having to vote again. I’m not understanding what I’m seeing.

HCR: Okay, so we’re going to start really simply and say that in order to understand what’s happening in the United States in 2024, in our way of counting, you have to understand the concept of power. The concept that there are a number of people in our society who want to have power over the others. And most people don’t want that. Most people are just trying to get along. They’re trying to feed their families and to create and relax and have a good time. But there are some people who want power. And the way that you get power in our society is by whipping up anger against somebody else. And if you think about people, like 10 people, six of them just want to get along. They’re just go with the flow kind of people. Two of them want power over everybody else. And the way that they get power over everybody else is by turning those six against the two at the bottom. And so what you’re seeing here is the construction of this story that will convince those six people in the middle to join with the two people at the top to go after the two people at the bottom.

HCR: And those six people in the middle are maybe doing it because they’re angry about something or because they’re easy. They don’t want to be concerned about how to run their lives or how to run the government. They’re happy to hand it over to somebody else or crucially because they’re afraid that they might become one of the two people at the bottom who are going to get attacked by the other eight unless they go along with those people. So if you start at that level, you can look at all the pieces that you just identified and more and see how much the idea of power, if you expand it to society at large, is the attempt of a very few people to tell a story that will take the majority of the rest of the people along for the ride to give those people at the top power. And here I’m going to go another step forward and say that if you are the Martian now, going, “Horrors. What can one do so you don’t end up having a terrible slaughter of the people lower down in that pecking order?” What I would say is you have to change the story. You have to take the power away from those two people and return it to those people in the middle, those six people in the middle who are like, “You know, we’re all just trying to get along here and we don’t really hate anybody and the people, little people at the bottom, aren’t the ones causing the trouble.”

HCR: “The people at the top are the ones causing the trouble. We need to put guardrails around the people at the top so they can stop squishing the people at the bottom and we need to put guardrails around the people at the bottom so they don’t become victims.”

BB: Okay, this is really helpful. I’m frustrated as hell with the six. I often say if you can exploit people’s pain and give them someone to blame for their pain, it’s a very fast track to accessing power. Do you think that’s true?

HCR: Yes, although you don’t even necessarily have to find people who are in pain, you can create that pain. Let me step back a little bit and hang on to my Martian here for a minute because human beings, the way I think about them, are in a way different from any other species because of the fact that they make sense of the passage of time through the stories they tell. We know that other species understand the passage of time differently than we do because they do it through smell or they do it through any number of different ways of understanding time, but we tell stories, and stories become absolutely central to who we are as people but also who we are as societies. You could take some random person and convince them that they are under attack, even when they’re not, by telling a certain kind of story. So you don’t even necessarily have to have those six people in the middle hurting in some way, although that certainly helps. That’s how we get the rise of authoritarians, we know. You create a situation in which those people in the middle or you find a situation in which those people in the middle are feeling dispossessed economically or religiously or culturally, and you can build on that.

HCR: But you can simply say to people, and just randomly here, say, for example, the federal government is not responding to Republicans who have been devastated by a hurricane. It’s not true, but you can convince them that they are in pain, in a certain kind of pain, even when they are not. It’s about the stories we tell.

BB: I think for a long time in sociology and anthropology, we knew through observation and ethnography that the stories mattered and that the stories were everything. And I think in the last 10 years with fMRIs and PET imaging, we can say without a question, without a doubt, that as a human species, one of the big differentiators is that we are a meaning-making species. We are literally hardwired for narrative. We are hardwired for the narrative arc of beginning, middle, and end. We’re hardwired for the three-act story, the monomyth, and absolutely not wired for uncertainty. So if you’ve got a good story that can limit our sense of vulnerability and uncertainty, that’s really attractive. That’s really seductive.

HCR: Yes, I think that’s right. But let’s back up just a little bit there, as in we all love certainty, but we also love possibility. And one of the ways of changing the narrative is to emphasize not the certainty, which is very comforting for a lot of people, but to emphasize the possibility. So if you think, for example, of something like the cowboy myth in America, which people like me have spent many years tearing apart of how it’s not real and how it’s done so much damage both to women and to people of color, and I could go on at length about the downside of it. The upside of it is the idea that you can create your own destiny. A great example of how that plays out is in something like Star Wars, where Luke Skywalker in the first movie in ’77, 1977, that’s a cowboy myth. And you can look at the negative side of that, you know, the idea that you don’t have to have an education, you can just sort of go with The Force, that you have this hotline to the powers of the universe so long as you are willing simply to ignore society. I mean, you could make that argument, but you can also look at the reality that is depicted in that film of a young man who is poor.

HCR: He is denied opportunity. That’s, remember that scene with the two moons where his uncle says he can’t go to college, and instead creates a new set of friends who are from all kinds of different species, from all kinds of different places. He learns to trust moral values rather than societal values. And that idea of possibility is also epic, and in a way is more epic than the idea that I’m just going to stay here like Luke’s uncle and work the farm.

BB: I love that we’re here. So tell me about the tension inherent in the cowboy myth. You know, in Texas, I always call it death by hyper individuality. We’re going to die in a terrible way. And our last words are going to “Be but we needed no one.” That’s the cowboy myth. I’m fifth generation Texan. So that’s I totally understand that. And then there is in me, I mean, I’ll just use me as an example, because it’s personal, and I know what’s under the hood here. There is an absolute draw for me to the hyper independence and kind of tough disregard of the cowboy. That’s a part that I’ve been unwinding in therapy for 20 years. But then there is a part of me that doesn’t want to lose the possibility that there’s something… there’s like the strong back. I just need to add the soft front and the wild heart to it. So tell me about the tension inherent in the cowboy myth. Tell me about dispelling the mythology and holding on to the parts of it that I think are very American.

HCR: So let’s just dispense with the idea that the cowboy myth stands entirely alone. That idea of the individual taking on something large runs throughout Western mythology. I can’t speak for any other kinds of mythology. So let’s just get that one off the table. But it’s important to understand with the cowboy myth where the cowboy came from. And that comes out of Texas, of course, in 1865 initially, but then in 1866 with Charles Goodnight. He becomes a major symbol of the American cowboy. After the… Is this more than you want to know about the cowboy?

BB: Hell no. This is exactly what I want to know.

HCR: You’ve heard of the Goodnight-Loving Trail.

BB: Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah.

HCR: So the cattle industry had started before the Civil War in Texas, because it’s such great land for cattle and basically on the Texas-Mexico border. But during the Civil War, the Union blockade means that you can’t move boats out of Texas, and the destruction of the rail lines, they degrade and some of them get ripped up out of that part of the country, mean that the cattle go feral essentially in Texas. There are way more of them than… I mean, people are afraid to go quail hunting because they’re afraid they’re going to get run down by the longhorns. So in ‘65, 1865, if you were to buy a beef, you would pay about $3, maybe $4, if you bought it in Texas. And Texas is, of course, just this incredibly dangerous place after the Civil War because the entire law enforcement structure collapses with the Confederacy. One of the reasons Juneteenth is so late down there is because Texas is just a mess. They have a thing there called rifle whiskey because the joke is that whiskey could kill from as far away as a rifle, it was that bad. So in Texas, you could get an animal for $3 to $4, but if you could get it to Chicago or to St. Louis, even more important, if you could get it to St. Louis and get it onto a railhead, you could sell it in a place like Chicago for about $30 to $40.

HCR: So this is where you’re going to see the genesis of the cattle drives because Charles Goodnight, who had been a cattle drover before the war and had lost his hearing because he got the measles in the Confederate service, decided he was going to round up some of these animals and get them to a railhead. And so in ’65, he does that. And interestingly enough, he pulls together a crew that is made up of former Confederates, one of whom was dismissed from the Confederate service for mental instability, which shows you just how on the edge that dude was, but also formerly enslaved people. They needed to be able to ride a horse and they needed to be able to handle a gun and they had no money, these people. So he pulls people together. He tries to move them out of Texas, and he runs into the Comanches, and that’s the end of that drive. Well, he does the same drive the next year in ’66. And when he does that, he runs… on his way out of Texas, he runs into Oliver Loving, and he and Oliver Loving make the drive out of Texas actually to an Army post, where they sell the animals to the Army and the cattle drives are on. They actually get $12,000 in gold for the cattle that they’ve delivered to the Army, which is an astronomical sum of money for Texas in ’66.

HCR: And actually they tie the money onto the back of a mule and the mule gets washed downstream. And it’s one of those moments in American history where obviously they get the mule back, but if they had not, would that have been the end of the cattle drives? So the reason that I just gave you all that information is because the idea of these destitute people taking the resources that had gone feral in Texas and moving them to a railhead is going to become the stuff of myth. It’s a miserable life, right? But it’s going to become the stuff of myth largely because of what’s happening back East, east of the Mississippi, at the same time. What period is this? It’s Reconstruction. So the Southerners in the southern white myth makers, if you will, are complaining about the federal government because the federal government is stepping in to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people in the American South. And what they begin to say is that this is a form of socialism.

HCR: This is a socialist government. They begin to say that in 1871. And they contrast it with the American cowboy, where they say, these guys want nothing to do with the government. They just want to be left alone. It’s ridiculous. I mean, literally Loving and Goodnight sell their animals to the federal government.

BB: Yeah, right, right, right.

HCR: And the federal government is what’s protecting the cattle drives from the indigenous Americans and so on. And we now know that about a third of the cowboys are people of color. That’s an interesting story as well. But in mythology, they all become these young white men who want to do it all on their own and want to have nothing to do with the federal government. And this is the real heart of America. So if you remember that image as being one about reconstruction, one about we don’t want the government to step in and stop white Southerners from mistreating their Black neighbors, all of a sudden, you can see the negative side of the cowboy image. You with me so far?

BB: Oh, god, yes. I mean, I’m seeing as you’re telling this story, my visuals are going from ’67 to 2024.

HCR: Well, but you need to stop in the 1950s. Because the cowboy image really falls away in the early 20th century. During the teens, during World War I, the American West did very well, because in large part, it was supplying the European people who were in the middle of this terrible war. By the 1920s, the overbuilding, the over farming, the overgrazing, putting too many crops in those Western lands really makes the prices plummet during the 1920s. So while the East is booming, Eastern cities are booming, the Western plains are in real trouble in the 1920s. By the 1930s, the image of the American cowboy is one of dirt and poverty. The Marlboro Man is from a Time Magazine expose of this cowboy whose life is essentially miserable, but he’s very picturesque. And there is really much less emphasis on the idea of the cowboy as anything other than a figure in a sense of pity. But then we in that era, this is when the federal government is actively stepping in to help people in the American South and help people in the American West, and they like that a lot.

HCR: We get the rise of the image of the American West or the American cowboy again in the 1950s. Hollywood made no cowboy movies during World War II. What it made instead were buddy movies or women’s movies, but they didn’t make Western movies. Westerns come back into the American lexicon after Brown versus Board of Education, where the Supreme Court says that the federal government must use the 14th Amendment to protect the rights of Black, and by the way, Brown Americans as well. And we get the idea that segregation is unconstitutional. This is the beginning. It’s not exactly the beginning, but you see it as the beginning of the use of the federal government to protect minority rights. And with that, we get the takeoff of the image of the American cowboy. And that image in the 1950s, but especially in the 1960s, is going to be one of white young men. It is a land of men. There are very few women, and the women who show up in that are either wives and mothers or sex workers. There’s really no image of women as working outside the home or being part of the community. Think about Bonanza, for example. Rawhide.

BB: Oh yeah.

HCR: And that image is the one that you are going to associate now with Ronald Reagan, because Ronald Reagan really, really hammered on this idea, as did George W. Bush. And Rush Limbaugh talks a lot about the cowboy with the white hat versus the bad guys and shooting without asking questions and so on. That I think… I mean, I could expand on that, but I think that’s a really interesting thing because I think we are seeing exactly what you just identified in this moment, the playing out of that image, which is a number of young men who were socialized to believe that they should act as these autonomous individuals and not be part of a larger community. And they don’t have the emotional skills to be part of that community. And where that has gone now is with this sense that they need to shape the world to answer to their needs rather than for them to participate in the larger world.

HCR: And one of the things that I think really jumps out in the moment in 2024 is the degree to which we are seeing people literally talking about taking women out of society and putting them back in the home as wives and mothers. Or otherwise, they simply are objects for sexual assault or for as sex objects. And the thing that is, I think, so crucially important to understand about the cowboy myth is it was always a myth. The reality was, to survive in the American West, you needed to be part of a community. You know, the way you made money as a fur trader, somebody like Kit Carson, you marry into, in his case, a Hispanic family that’s got connections or you marry into a community. It’s the women who are always working outside the home who bring education and who bring government services that make it possible for people to survive.

HCR: If you go to the Iowa State House, which was built in the early progressive era, all the images of the government on the walls of the State House with a very few exceptions, are women. You know, it’s this idea of community. So that cowboy image with its embrace of possibility and heroism and endurance and self-reliance, I see a lot… in a lot of professions, including the Maine lobsterman, kind of where I started thinking about it when I was a teenager, being out with some of my lobstering friends. That is really important that in fact, if you try and organize a society that way, you end up with exactly what you’re talking about.

BB: It’s so painful because it’s so not real.

HCR: See, I would not call it painful. I would say we really need to do is recognize that it is not real because aspirations and dreams are not real. The trick is to make those have those dreams and to recognize how to construct a society where they can become real for everybody.

BB: I don’t know if this is going to make any sense at all, but I’m going to ask you because it just keeps popping up in my head right now. During the Democratic National Convention with Harris and Walz. I remember feeling hopeful when I saw a photograph, and then I saw it in real time on television, where there were placards that said, “When we fight, we win.” And there was a part of me as a, you know… just full media disclosure. I would self-identify as a progressive democratic, I think… Was so in some ways relieved to see that language and to not see us backing away from the fact that we’re going to have to fight for what we believe is this great nation and this experiment in democracy, that it’s okay to say we have to fight, as opposed to like, “Let’s not use anything that has any kind of fight energy because we’re not that party.” We’re like, “If we love, we win.” And then I think about history, and I think about every expansion of democracy that we’ve seen has had a lot of fight in it. So, I mean, what am I trying to say?

HCR: Well, it sounds to me like what you’re trying to say is sometimes in order to love something, you have to fight for it. And again, to go back to your, your Western stuff, there was in the late 19th century, a deliberate attempt to counter that cowboy idea with the idea of a community that values education and compromise and negotiation. At times, that community has to fight for what it believes in. There’s a wonderful moment in 1856 when for decades, Northerners had tried to make peace with Southerners. Okay, we’ll compromise on this. Okay, no, we’re not trying to make you angry. And as they did that, the more they did that, the more outrageous southern elite enslavers got, the more they brought their guns to the floor of Congress. They threatened people. They lynched people. They did all kinds of stuff. And then in May of 1856, a Southerner who was famous for being just a blowhard, came up behind Charles Sumner, who was a senator from Massachusetts.

HCR: And Sumner was a large man, but his legs were wedged under the desk, which was bolted to the ground where he was sitting and writing. And the guy comes up behind him and he starts to beat him over the head with essentially, what is a blackjack. Everybody always says “It’s a gutta-percha cane.” Well, gutta-percha is that heavy black rubber that has a little flex to it, but not a lot. And he beats him almost to death. He cuts him to the bone in the head in three different places. You can imagine how bloody it was. And there are senators, democratic senators standing around and they won’t help. And they actually stop some people from helping Sumner. And Sumner actually wrenches the desk out of the floor in his attempt to stand up and fight back against a guy.

HCR: But he’s beaten almost to death. And the Southerners think this is just hilarious. This is great. And the guy who does it, Preston Brooks, resigns from Congress, goes back to South Carolina, which unanimously reelects him to go back into Congress. And this guy stands up, from Massachusetts, a guy named Anson Burlingame. He’s in the House of Representatives after this happens. And of course, Sumner’s from the same state as he is. And he stands up and he says, “You guys are making a big mistake because we will fight. We will fight for our rights. We will fight for the principles of this country, and we will win because you think that we are all a bunch of shopkeepers because we’re busy minding our own business, but you’ve gone too far.” And all the Southerners are like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. How can you say this? He’s attacking us.”

HCR: But the bottom line was, I think about that a lot because if you think about people like you and me, we’re basically living our own lives over here and, you know, working in our communities and doing everything, and we’re happy to give a lot of ground. But then there comes a time when we say, “No.” And it always reminds me, and I think this might resonate with you, it always reminds me of somebody who’s been in an abusive relationship of some sort. And you give and you give and you give and you give and you give trying constantly to make things work for everybody. And then there’s one day where it’s just too much. And that’s when you say, “No.” And when that happens, the abuser says, they double down. And we know this from all the studies of domestic abuse, that’s when people become really dangerous.

BB: Yeah.

HCR: Because they don’t want to lose control.

BB: Yeah.

HCR: And I, I’ve said this for ages about the Republican party and the American people. We are at that moment where the American people are saying no. And we all know how that comes out. Either the abuser wins and destroys the victim, or the victim stands up regains control and says, “You have never mattered. You have always been smaller than me, and my future is going to be absolutely spectacular, and you are not going to be part of it.” And I think that’s what we’re looking at in the 2024 election.

BB: In 2015, I was asked to write a forward for a book that was being published by a group of women who were Nobel Peace Prize winners. And it was a collection of essays on courage and activism. And I thought Trump was going to win before the election for sure. And I thought mostly that because I had been doing a really deep dive on the emotional power of nostalgia, and I thought, “Wow, this is going to be strong.” And I remember writing that my concern at the time was that we were facing not just white male power, but a very specific kind of power. Power over, not power with or power to, but power over. That my greatest fear is that we were on the precipice of experiencing white male power over making a last stand. And that my concern came from the fact that if you study last stands over history, they’re long, they’re violent, they’re unrelenting. I mean, desperate people are dangerous people. Do you think there’s anything valid about that, because of shifting demographics, because of immigration, because of reproductive rights? Does it have a last stand feel to you?

HCR: Oh yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, if you look for example, at what the… what people are calling the TheoBros trying to reassert power over women and get women, especially out of the public sphere, that is pretty clearly an attempt to guarantee that they are not outvoted any longer. Because we know women break heavily for the Democrats now and have since Reagan in 1980, although that gap has been increasing. I think that’s absolutely right. And you know, to go all Texan on you, the dying mule kicks the hardest. But one of the reasons that I’m really trying to emphasize that community idea is because this is not inherently a gendered division. It is one that has been artificially created, I think by that cowboy emphasis that Reagan took on in 1980 that kind of was pioneered by people like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1950s.

HCR: And the early 1960s. And that was never real. It was always a myth. As I said earlier, the whole concept of a real man as being one who protects a community who makes it possible for people to get educations, who negotiates, who tries to get an education, you know, one of the things that I think you’ve seen is the isolation, especially of a certain group of young men from the tools that they need to survive in the 21st century as an economic actor, as well as a social actor. That, you know, the denigration of education has, you know, as that men don’t need education, has basically walked a lot of young men into a cul-de-sac. Whereas young women, of course, have continued to get educations. So now they’re looking and they’re saying, “Well, we’ve got to stop women from getting educations.” Well, the answer to the fact that young men are in this dead end, if you will, is not to say, “Well then we’re going to take that road away from women.”

HCR: The answer is to say, “We need to get rid of the ideology that said to you, ‘You didn’t have to do this in order to participate in the 21st century economy.’” And of course, we’re answering that in a number of different ways. The Biden-Harris administration has gone out of its way, as have a number of states. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania is one of them to say, “You don’t need a college education to have these kind of jobs.” And that helps, I think, to defang that a little bit. But it really isn’t a question of men versus women or the individualist versus the collectivist. It’s really a question of the image versus the reality and reclaiming our history in those community values that were the centerpiece of the American West for sure, but also of all of American history. So somebody my age, you know, the, all the parents, and I won’t even just say the men, but all the parents we grew up with had been through World War II.

HCR: And the men, many of them were scarred. And I am not suggesting that there was nothing in their lives that should not have been celebrated, but they were 100% about the family and the community. And, you know, I learned to shingle a roof from a guy who was with Patton’s Army. I learned to sail from a guy who was a POW in Japan, and they weren’t blood relatives, but you took care of the kids in the community. And nobody would’ve looked at either one of those men and said they were not alpha men. You know, they were not betas, they were not Coxs. They were people who cared about the next generation and creating a world in which people could get along. And that was really a definition of masculinity in that era that the MAGA Republicans have completely left behind.

BB: It’s so interesting that you’re saying that because, you know, as a Houstonian, when the rodeo comes to town, even when my kids were in elementary school, we would drive them in buses to watch them. But the rodeo that we all watched come in every year and they still, they, this is the one they line up for. It’s hundreds of Black cowboys. And when you think about Houston, like my kids went to public school here for elementary school, 51 countries of origin in my daughter’s school, first generation. And to me, when I think about Black cowboys, when I think about the Houston Medical Center, where it’s like “We don’t build walls, we build really long tables,” and the number of people represented in cultures, it’s like the Texas that’s real. That works. That is no walls, long tables. All you have to do to have a seat is work hard, be kind, and then come on.

BB: You know, like it’s so different than the mythology. And so what I want to understand is, like we’re talking about the cowboy image. I just, the Republican National Convention with everyone with the ear bandage on and the fist up, you know, and it’s like helped by medical workers, helped by science, helped by all the things you’d put down. It’s like the cowboy image here. And what I see in a lot of young white men here is kind of fuck science. We don’t believe in education. We don’t trust anyone or need anyone, and we want to be physically capable of killing you with our bare hands. And we are absolute victims. I can’t make sense of it.

HCR: Well, well this is your territory more than mine. But it always strikes me that that bravado masks extraordinary fear of vulnerability, fear that you can’t do that because the reality is that nobody can live like that.

BB: No.

HCR: And that might say something about the extraordinary mental health crisis in young men, young white men because they’re trying to live up to a myth that has never been real. It has never been real.

BB: This so much reminds me of the research from John Cacioppo who passed away recently. He studied loneliness at the University of Chicago. He said, “If you’re a social species, the mark of great development is not the ability to be autonomous. But the greatest prize you can win in the human species context is to be a person on whom others can depend.”

HCR: Right. Right. Which, you know, I’m working on a new project and one of the things that I think has the radical right, and I always like to emphasize by the way that the people who are currently in charge of the Republican Party are not traditional Republicans. They are an extremist fringe that has taken over what once upon a time was a grand party. It’s the reason it was called the Grand Old Party. But I think when Francis Perkins wrote and put into place the 1935 Social Security Act, what she did with that act and what FDR did, but I think it’s important that it was Francis Perkins who did it. She was the first female cabinet secretary, she was at the Department of Labor for I think about 12 years, is that she used that law to recognize reality. That is, until then, what essentially the government did was it had an economic function.

HCR: It was designed to negotiate between workers, employers, and resources. And the government, the government stepped into that. And that’s really the language on which the people who launched the American Revolution based their idea of independence, the idea that, you know, they wanted a different kind of economic relationship with the government than they had with the king. And what she did with the Social Security Act in ‘35 was to say, “No, no, no, no. Government is not about economic relationships. Government is about community. And everybody is equally valuable even if you’re a child, even if you’re disabled,” et cetera. And that was an attempt to recognize the reality of society, because American society had always depended on community, always on everybody participating in it, people of color, women, brand new immigrants, the disabled, the elderly, and so on. And that shift, that recognition of reality and the pushback on it from those who wanted to get rid of government regulation that was inherent in it. And the social safety net that was also inherent in it has been central now to this attempt to return power to a few white men and to limit the power of government simply to negotiating those economic relationships, because that permits a very few people to take over society, rather than reinforcing that idea of community. But community has always been the centerpiece of American life.

BB: I mean, that goes down to our neurobiology. I mean, we’re neurobiologically hardwired to be in connection and in community. And in the absence of that, there’s always suffering. So it makes a ton of sense. We’re going to stop here. Join us next week for Part 2. We’re going to do an interesting historical rapid fire with Heather in Part 2, a shorter episode. But dang, I’m grateful for you. Really.

HCR: Well, this is a great deal of fun. Because I don’t usually get to bring in the myth stuff, but I’m laughing. We’re going do a rapid fire that’s going be fun. For whom? Is it going be fun for Heather as well as for you? [laughter]

BB: No. No. No. It’s going to be fun for me.

HCR: Oh, okay.

BB: No, I think it’ll be fun for you too. I hope it’s going to be fun for you. And I think our listeners, I mean, I just artifact, mythology, history, you know, if you want to get scrappy with people around what’s on the surface, it’s just a waste of time without understanding the mythology and the story and the narrative behind what’s driving this. Everything that you just walked us through is, I think not only the political tension that we’re seeing, tension is an understatement, but it’s also a tension inside a lot of us. And so I’m grateful for the folklore and mythology part of your work.

HCR: Well, thanks. It’s been great to be here.

[music]

BB: What did y’all think? Oh my god, I love history so much, and I love Heather Cox Richardson, and I love talking to her. And I’m so grateful that y’all joined us for this conversation. I just cannot think of anything more important right now to talk about. So I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you got Part 1. Part 2 is, oh my god, so much fun, so hard, but also very hopeful. You can learn more about this episode along with all the show notes on brenebrown.com. Just go to the website, pick podcasts, pick Unlocking Us, and you’ll see this one come right up. We’re going go link to Heather’s book, Democracy Awakening, and also she has got the most amazing daily letter that she writes. It is incredible and I highly recommend that you look, I mean, I really… Look into it. It’s just, I find myself sometimes I’ll read it every day. Sometimes I’ll collect them and read three or four in a row. She just, I think, makes the world a better place. We’ll have transcripts for you within three to five days of the episode going live. You can sign up for our newsletters on the same page. Stay tuned for Part 2. It’s really good. And stay awkward, brave, and kind. And register to vote. Bye y’all. Please show up and vote. Take Care.

BB: Unlocking Us is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group. The music is by Carrie Rodriguez and Gina Chavez. Get new episodes as soon as they’re published by following Unlocking Us on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media podcast network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcasts.voxmedia.com.

 

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