Beverly Gage, who is a professor of American political history at Yale University, was last on The Vital Center podcast in 2022, shortly after the publication of her monumental work G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. The following year, G-Man was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Her exhaustively researched Hoover biography had taken more than a dozen years to complete and, as she says in this podcast episode, “I wasn’t quite ready to jump into another giant tome based in the archives.” So instead she embarked on a series of journeys that took her around the country and through 250 years of the American past.
Those journeys formed the subject of her new book, This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History. It begins with her travels in and around Philadelphia, the cradle of the American Revolution, and ends in California, where Disneyland embodied the post-World War II American Dream. In between, she visits the Alamo in San Antonio, Henry Ford’s automotive empire in Michigan, the burned-over district of western New York, the research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico where government scientists built the atomic bomb during World War II, and hundreds of other sites with a historical cast of thousands. It’s an enormously entertaining journey that sheds light on how America’s history always has been the subject of acrimonious debate.
In this podcast discussion, Bev Gage talks about how she came to write This Land Is Your Land, what she found on her journeys, how America’s history is full of surprises (even for an American historian), and why she has affection for both “very serious, somber historic sites” and for “more kitschy, commercial historic sites.” She reflects on “the challenge of facing American history, really knowing it, engaging with its deepest and darkest aspects, and still figuring out a way to say that you love your country.” She also discusses her work as co-chair of Yale University’s Faculty Committee on Trust in Higher Education and the issues facing elite universities in a time of intense political polarization.
Transcript
Bev Gage: I just met so many people out there who are curious about the country that they live in. And for me as a historian, but also as a citizen, curiosity has become one of my highest virtues.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Beverly Gage. She is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale University, and I previously interviewed her for this podcast in December of 2022. I will repeat what I said then, which is that she is one of our nation’s greatest historians, but I will now add to that by saying that since that discussion, her book, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and The Making of the American Century, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It was also awarded the Bancroft Prize and the LA Times Book Prize and a shelf full of hardware in addition.
She also served as the co-chair of the Yale Faculty Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which made national headlines when that report appeared this spring. And this summer saw the appearance of her marvelous new book, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, published by Simon & Schuster and currently at bookstores everywhere. Congratulations on all these things and welcome, Bev!
Bev Gage: Thanks, Geoff. It’s good to be here. I’ve never done a podcast like this where we’re in the frame…
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s a new format; we’re being experimental for historians. I should add also that in this time since we’ve seen each other, you had a health episode and you also got married, so it’s been an eventful few years.
Bev Gage: It’s true. It was a busy few years, but most of it good.
Geoff Kabaservice: Fabulous. And congratulations again on the publication of This Land is Your Land, which I actually have and can show for the camera. This for me was an immense pleasure because I am myself an inveterate road tripper around America and through history, and I’ve been to many of the places (although not all) that you visit. But what I also really like about this book is that while I really appreciated G-Man — it truly is a magisterial history which continues to fascinate, but it’s a big history resting on mountains of archival evidence — this is a book which is informed by deep history but it’s written in a kind of conversational, approachable, very public tone which I think readers will find fascinating. And I thought the chapters were like eating potato chips: I just couldn’t go through them fast enough. It was absolute catnip for me, to mix my metaphors.
But I think it also works on another important level, because this is a book that was written in conjunction with America’s semiquincentennial, which is to say the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And you remind readers that our country’s history has always been a matter of contestation. The terms of this particular contest change from era to era, but this is a particularly fraught moment, I think, in the history of the battles over our nation’s history, precisely because of the political polarization and partisanship of this era.
So on the left, you have The 1619 Project, to choose a kind of typical example, where the flaws of the nation going all the way back to its founding and even before its founding are highlighted to the extent that people on the right fear that the whole project is to delegitimize America as an enterprise. And then the compensation from the right is to, number one, put forward a vision which definitely highlights the nation’s virtues over its flaws (which tend to be airbrushed away at best) but has included even active censorship and coercion. And in fact, here in DC, on July 4th, the White House greeted the occasion partly by releasing a report on the National Museum of American History. It’s called “Saving America’s Story,” and it accused the museum of promoting a radical activist ideology. I used to know Roger Kennedy, who is the person who was really responsible for the creation of the modern Museum of American History, and he’d be rolling in his grave right now, I’m sure.
But your book seeks a middle path between these two opposed viewpoints. It embraces a kind of critical patriotism, I would say. And it’s an intervention in the contemporary national historical dialogue which, as you put it, “tends to emphasize veneration or damnation over real understanding.” Is my characterization of your approach basically accurate? And tell me something about how you went about deciding to write this book.
Bev Gage: I started writing the book in early 2023 as I was looking ahead to 2026, and there were a couple of things going on. One is, as you say, I had just finished doing this giant tome on J. Edgar Hoover. I wasn’t quite ready to jump into another giant tome based in the archives, so there was a little bit of wanting to get out of the office for me. But the real concern that I saw was that 2026 was coming. It wasn’t clear to me that people were going to know and understand exactly how to celebrate it or to market it, and so I wanted to lean into some of the biggest questions and tensions about the country and give people a way to do that.
Geoff Kabaservice: And of course, the report on the Faculty Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which you chaired, also comes in the context of this moment of contestation over national narratives in scholarship and academia more generally. So you obviously have been traveling around the country for a long time, and the thirteen journeys that form this book are not journeys to places you’ve never been before…
Bev Gage: Some of them were. Some of them were places that I had been. Others were quite new to me.
Geoff Kabaservice: But most of these journeys were actually completed in 2023 and ’24, is that right?
Bev Gage: Correct. So in early 2023, I set out to take these journeys that were going to be not only all over the country — or at least the contiguous continental United States, since it’s all conceived as a road trip — but that would also be a journey through time. And so the book has these thirteen places and they cover all 250 years of American history. Every chapter is both a place and a period of time combined, and so you travel geographically but also chronologically.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the book is arranged somewhat chronologically as well, in that you start in Philadelphia with the American Revolution and all that took place in Pennsylvania in those years, and you end in California in the Cold War or post-World War II era.
Bev Gage: Right. It is more chronological than it is geographical in the sense that these were thirteen discrete road trips: Philadelphia at the beginning, California at the end. But in between, you probably wouldn’t want to do them in the order that they are in the book, at least if you were not going to take any breaks. Because for a while, we moved from Philadelphia to Virginia to look at slavery, Tennessee to look at the problem of Indian removal, Texas to do Texas in the 1830s and ‘40s. But then you start moving back to upstate New York, so you wouldn’t necessarily want to drive it all in that direction.
Geoff Kabaservice: If you were to do it on Google Maps, it would be a very…
Bev Gage: Exactly, exactly. But it’s a straight shot through the history.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s a straight shot through the history. And one of the other devices that I like very much in this book is that the person who tends to be the last character in the chapter also tends to be the first person in the next chapter, which is interesting because it really does remind you that some of these characters span time and place.
Bev Gage: Right. Every chapter of the book opens with a fellow traveler — not in the communist sense, but really just someone in American history who either took a road trip or moved from one part of the country to the other and took a lot of what they had had in one place to the new place. And that was partly just a device, as you say, to bring these chapters together. But I think it also really emphasized the mobility that is so central to American history, the dynamism of American history, and also the fact that our imagined map of the moment — which is a very fixed red-blue map — doesn’t capture actually how a lot of people either historically or in the present have lived their lives, which is that they don’t stay stuck in one place with just one set of ideas their whole lives.
And so I wanted to have some of these travelers who were curious. George Washington is the first one. He opens the book going on a road trip, when he’s the first American president, to see this so-called country that he had been put in charge of.
Geoff Kabaservice: One of the other things that comes across very clearly in your book is the vast span of America, this continent-sized country, and frankly the difficulty in many cases of getting from point A to point B. Some of the places that you went to along the Northeast corridor would have been familiar to Washington. Some of these places are way out there.
Bev Gage: It seems obvious, and we all know this as a fact that this is a very, very large country. But you really feel it and experience it differently when you are driving. As you suggest and as we know, a lot of the population of the United States is concentrated along the coasts. But if you approach the United States geographically, one of the things that really struck me is that we are still in many parts of the country mostly a land of farms and churches, and that’s what you see. There’s this deep continuity with an earlier period of American history in that sense.
Geoff Kabaservice: You have a number of recurring characters in this book. One of them, certainly, is George Washington. As you say, shortly after he became president, he didn’t want to give the impression that he was just this general in the White House; that he actually had a connection to the people and the land. And therefore he very consciously set out on a kind of tour to visit America. And it’s funny because I know all the places you listed until it came to Brandywine. And then you start to realize that there are some places that thought they were going to be big places in American history — and they weren’t. They are still relatively tiny.
Bev Gage: Brandywine, which was the site of a major Revolutionary War battle, is in there in part because of that fact and in part because it is the battlefield that was closest to my own upbringing. I grew up in Delaware County right outside of Philadelphia, and so going to Brandywine was something that I did as a child. And of course, I didn’t really think very much about the history then, and going back was really an attempt to grapple a little more seriously with the history of the Revolution. And it’s not a particularly heroic battle. It doesn’t go very well for the Americans, which is perhaps one of the reasons that I didn’t end up knowing more about it as a kid growing up in the area.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. I learned from this book that you grew up in Delaware County, which is known to locals as Delco.
Bev Gage:Delco. Delco.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s a very corporate sounding name, and I was wondering… There used to be a brand of spark plugs called AC Delco. Does that have any connection to Delaware County? Actually, it doesn’t. It was the Delaware Engineering Laboratory Company or something of that sort, invented in Dayton back in the nineteenth century or something like that. But one of the recurring characters — I don’t know that anyone else besides me noticed this — but Independence Hall appears at three different points in your book. It appears obviously in Philadelphia where presumably you would have visited on many occasions as an elementary school person being taken on tours of American history. Then it appears again in Dearborn, Michigan at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, where he put up a larger-than-life replica of it. And then again at Knott’s Berry Farm, the Orange County, California entertainment park.
Bev Gage: I’m glad you caught that. That was very deliberate, and I was really interested in the ways that these kind of touchstones, symbols, moments in American history that we can think about as being history are made and remade, and in this case literally reconstructed by people with their own ideas about the past. Henry Ford built the Independence Hall in Dearborn, Michigan to house the museum of American history that he thought was really the way you should tell the story of the past. Henry Ford’s most famous statement about American history is that “History is bunk,” and what he meant by that was it’s all fake news, the historians are all lying to you, and that the movers and shakers of the past are people just like him: scientists and inventors and businessmen and men of action. And so he built an Independence Hall to house all of that.
And then Walter Knott, out in Southern California in the 1950s and ’60s — another entrepreneur, someone who became a great funder of conservative causes in Southern California, free enterprise, anti-communism… Like many people in the early Cold War, he was really concerned that Americans were losing their sense of patriotism and he thought, “What will really make everyone patriotic again?” And he thought, “I know. We need an Independence Hall in Southern California.” So it was very funny to stand there in the SoCal sunshine, and this Independence Hall is just in its own place, in its own field. It’s right near a water park and near Knotts Berry Farm itself, which is a theme park. But unlike the real Independence Hall, it’s not embedded in any urban landscape, so you can just stand there and get a tan and go to Independence Hall.
Geoff Kabaservice: As a child, I lived in Malibu and Pasadena, and my parents took me on occasion to Knott’s Berry Farm, which I remember much better for the flume ride than I do for the Independence Hall replica. But something else that’s great about this book is how you’re actually, as a historian, getting out to these historic sites, some 300 of them around the country, and almost all of them, you’re experiencing as the average American does when families or individuals go out to see these places. Just to say also that merch plays a large part in the overall experience.
Bev Gage: It’s true. I very much wanted to do this as an ordinary tourist, so I didn’t try to get behind-the-scenes access. I didn’t walk in and say, “Hello, I’m a Yale professor of American history and I’m here to engage with your historic sites.” Now, of course, if people asked me because they saw me saying voice memos to myself or scribbling in my notebook or taking a photograph of every single plaque in the museum, of course I told them what I was up to, and that really sparked some great conversations. But I wanted this to just be literally a roadmap for people who want to go out and explore American history. And I have great affection both for very serious, somber historic sites and for more kitschy commercial historic sites, and so I did in fact gather a lot of merch on my journey.
Probably my favorite thing is a little felt Christmas ornament of the Alamo which now hangs proudly on my Christmas tree. But what’s particularly great about it is that it is very proud of having been made by women in Kyrgyzstan. And I thought: What do the women of Kyrgyzstan think as they’re sitting there apparently hand stitching Christmas ornaments of the Alamo?
Geoff Kabaservice: They probably think that Americans are very strange.
Bev Gage: And they would be right.
Geoff Kabaservice: They would be right. It does seem like you got a lot of really good swag in San Antonio.
Bev Gage: I did. Well, the Alamo is really swag central — and a little bit less so now I think because they have… When I visited, there’s the church, and then they opened a new collection center near it, and then there were all these tchotchke shops along the plaza. But I think that they are reclaiming a lot of that land, and so the tchotchke shops are getting moved to the outskirts so that it can be a slightly more somber historic site. But that has upsides and downsides.
Geoff Kabaservice: That is all correct. You are a better traveler than I am in the sense that when you go to these museums, you sit through the introductory films and multimedia presentations, and then you listen politely to the guides. I am too impatient to do all of that.
Bev Gage: Well, that was sort of the heart of the book, and I learned actually quite a lot. For me, this was partly an excuse to go back to some periods of American history that I don’t know as well, that I really haven’t thought about in any deep way since I took my oral exams in graduate school, which is now a very long time ago. And so I was really curious about these stories. And then what I learned at the sites also became a jumping-off point to then go and read the historical literature as certain characters and certain episodes and certain places rose to the fore as central to the story.
Geoff Kabaservice: We had talked in our previous interview about your educational background. I was interested to note in this book that you observed that even though you were studying twentieth-century American political history at Columbia, you still were going to get an awful lot of nineteenth-century American history as a graduate student there.
Bev Gage: That’s right. Well, Columbia was great… I don’t think this is the case anymore, but when I was there, if you were a U.S. history graduate student, you had very little discretion about what you could do with your oral exams. And you had to do a colonial American history field, you had to do a nineteenth-century field, you had to do a twentieth-century field, and then you had to do a field that was about some subject that was not about the United States. And if I hadn’t been forced into that colonial history field, in particular, I wouldn’t have been nearly as well-equipped either to write this book or really to think about the big scope of American history and see some of these resonances and conversations that have been so central to it over time.
Geoff Kabaservice: I still think there’s some comedic potential in guides sizing you up, nice white lady, and saying, “Do you know what slavery was?” It would have been even better if you were with David Blight, say, but yes…
Bev Gage: It’s true. One thing that’s different about actually being in person on a historic site, going on a tour, talking with other people, is that they can see you and make their own judgements and their own assumptions about who you are. In this case, I was a middle-aged white lady traveling by myself. And actually, of all the things, certainly my race shaped some of these conversations, my gender too — but actually, it was the fact that I was by myself that seemed to really puzzle the most people. Because most people, if you’re going to a historic site, you’re probably going with your friends or your family or someone else who’s interested. But this lone traveler was the source of some suspicion.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have experienced that myself as well — probably in different ways, but something like that. Something that I really like also about your travels here is that although the twentieth century of America is your field of expertise, you have this great magpie eye for the curious and weird details of history, not just from your period, but from the entire span. What were some of the weirdest and most surprising things that you encountered on your travels?
Bev Gage: I do like to tell history that way. I mean, I wrote a whole book about J. Edgar Hoover, who was really, really weird — personally weird — and so I like these human stories. I like the oddity, I like many aspects like that. Some of what I found in that vein were quite serious and fascinating pieces of history that I myself was not as familiar with. So, for instance, in the Virginia chapter, which is about many of the major eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historic sites, but particularly eighteenth-century in Virginia: Mount Vernon, Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg. It really looks at the way that they grapple with the question of slavery in particular.
I got really fascinated, and read many, many books on this, about something that wasn’t in the historical landscape much at all except for a few mentions that sent me down this rabbit hole, which is this period in the very late eighteenth century, right after the revolution, when Virginia decides that it is going to become much easier to manumit enslaved people — which is to say that people who legally owned enslaved people could give them their freedom through this voluntary process. This period didn’t last very long in Virginia, but there are all of these fascinating and wild experiments by Virginia slave owners who decided, either because of the revolution or because of their Christian faith or because it just wasn’t very profitable anymore, that they were going to try to engage in mass manumission. And so there are these fascinating stories of people upending their lives and starting new lives. I got very interested in all of that in Virginia.
I also tried to keep an eye out for some of the comic relief of American history and public history. Speaking of the Alamo, I was very enchanted by the idea that Phil Collins, the British rock star, became one of the world’s great collectors of Alamo artifacts and has now donated those to the city of San Antonio. So you can in fact go to San Antonio now, take a tour of these collections, and then have a whole little diorama and light show narrated by none other than Phil Collins. And so it’s this kind of familiar British voice telling you the story of the Alamo.
Geoff Kabaservice: Davy Crockett is one of those characters who appears in three distinct places in your narrative, first in Tennessee where he was born and where he also became elected to Congress in that time. Famously, he had one of the best losing politician kiss-off lines of all time. I’ll give that one to you. When he was turned out by his voters, he said…
Bev Gage: “If you do not want me, you may all go to Hell and I will go to Texas.”
Geoff Kabaservice: And indeed he did.
Bev Gage: And Texas loves that slogan. It’s all over t-shirts.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have seen it many times. So there he goes to Texas and of course is in the Alamo and dies there — we know not quite how. But then he has a curious resurrection, courtesy of Walt Disney in many ways. And he becomes, through Fess Parker’s character, the figure on a regular Disney show which will be known to people, particularly boys. The people who were boys then — like Phil Collins, like me — will remember: “Davy, Davy Crockett…” I’ll spare you the whole song. But it’s interesting, because I remember having gone to both Disneyland and Disney World when they were awash in Davy Crockett paraphernalia, the coonskin caps, all of that. Nowadays, nothing. It’s an interesting lesson in historical memory, I think.
Bev Gage: Yes. I never expected to write nearly as much about Davy Crockett as I ended up writing, but from that first visit in Tennessee, I got really fascinated by him as a much more complicated and interesting figure — both the story of the myth of Davy Crockett, but also as a living person. The most interesting thing to me is that he was the only member of the Texas congressional delegation who voted against Indian removal. He had been an Andrew Jackson protégé, he had been voting with Jackson for a lot of his career. But his experiences and, I guess, his moral center made him think that Cherokee removal in particular was a great stain upon the nation, it wasn’t necessary, it was cruel. And so he actually took big political risks in defying the president of his own party to do what he thought was right — hint hint to many people in our own day. But it’s a very interesting piece of his story.
Geoff Kabaservice: I would actually even go further there and say that it was a lesson then, which is very relevant now, as to what is the true meaning of American populism. And I would say that Jackson, as somebody from the middle of the state, which is where all the plantations were around Nashville and further west, was from a very different position than someone like Crockett from the eastern part, which is very mountainous. He was actually born in the Free State of Franklin, and of course as a backwoodsman had a particular tangled relationship with the Native Americans in a way that Jackson did not. So that was an interesting episode and I’m glad that you got into that.
Bev Gage: And there is a whole history, too, of this kind of Tennessee-to-Texas move. He wasn’t the only one who made it: Sam Houston is another example. And the politics of Indian removal were not the only thing, but they were really enmeshed in that story of migration.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. My sister has been living in the Morristown, Tennessee area, which is where Davy Crockett’s cabin is and a lot of other things relating to his life. But I also have spent much of the last few years in the Houston area, and you and I both are probably among the only non-schoolchildren to have visited the San Jacinto Memorial there. It’s this enormous New Deal-era obelisk topped by the big Texas star, but an interesting phenomenon really about the many different ways that that history can be read of the Texas Rebellion of 1836.
Bev Gage: I was really fascinated by the intersections between the story of 1836 and the Texas Rebellion, and then that monument was built in 1936 for the Centennial but at the height of the New Deal. And to look at the ways that the New Deal put its stamp on the story of that tale… It is in many ways a story of all the different ethnic groups who come together — in this case, mostly white ethnic groups. This is so central to New Deal politics, so central to the Democratic coalition in that moment, and you can see that they’re then telling the story of the Texas Rebellion through that New Deal lens.
Geoff Kabaservice: So where did you like best and maybe least-best in your travels?
Bev Gage: Hmm… Well, I think I learned the most, and therefore I would say maybe enjoyed the most, the places that I knew the least well. So it’s easy to enjoy going to Disneyland, which I did enjoy. It’s also easy to think it’s the worst place in the world, so I go back and forth a little bit. I don’t think it’s the worst place in the world, but it has its challenges and downsides. But I got really interested in the places that were the most distant from my own experience. So there’s a chapter that is about the West — really the Mountain West, the Great Plains and the 1870s through the 1890s. And while I had lived in Montana for a summer…
Geoff Kabaservice: On a dude ranch!
Bev Gage: On a dude ranch, I was cleaning cabins and serving food for a summer when I was in college. I hadn’t spent as much time in the Dakotas, in Wyoming, and so that was really interesting. I fell in love with Medora, which is this tiny little town in North Dakota that is almost entirely devoted to the memory of Theodore Roosevelt. And it’s not all great history, but it was just a place that I hadn’t imagined could possibly exist, and there it was and I actually learned quite a lot. So I would say those are the places that really lit me up, the ones that were a little off the beaten path, places that I didn’t even expect to go.
Geoff Kabaservice: Part of the fascination of your book is seeing all of these resonances between different places and times. I worked very closely with Amo Houghton, who was one of the last moderate Republican members of Congress, and he was from upstate New York from the area known as the Burned-Over District, which features so prominently in that chapter of your book. It’s a place where there were all these religious and political enthusiasms, which made the nineteenth century in particular such a fascinating place in that era. And he was raised in what was a very WASPy, upper-class family, but as was the tradition of that time, he was sent out to the West to go to essentially a ranching school, mostly for the children of the privileged elite — because it was though that the young gentlemen were getting soft from luxury and they needed to connect with the Western frontier past of America, and this would toughen them up. And this connection surfaced in an unexpected way because one of those ranch schools in New Mexico was the Los Alamos School…
Bev Gage: That’s right. The Los Alamos story is really fascinating for a couple of reasons. One is that it was, in its original iteration in the twentieth century, in the couple of decades before it became Los Alamos, was the Los Alamos Ranch School, which was this elite boarding school for boys. Gore Vidal went there, William S. Burroughs went there.
Geoff Kabaservice: Neither of them liked it much.
Bev Gage: Exactly. But there were many more conventional sons of the elite who spent their time there as well. And that family who founded it was a family from Detroit, which had been my previous chapter. And so they were a great example of Americans who came of age in one place, picked up and moved and started an enterprise in an entirely different part of the country, but that in certain ways ended up making all sorts of connections.
And then of course, there’s the story of what happened in the 1940s, when the US Army came in and said, “This looks like a good site for something we’re not going to tell you about. Shut down your school, get out.” And the American government built this whole secret city up there, and we know what happened from that point on.
Geoff Kabaservice: Not easy to get out to those parts in New Mexico?
Bev Gage: One of the things that you learn when you even try to go to someplace like Los Alamos — which now is still a federal lab space and is a sort of a federal city, though it has privately owned homes now, not like it was during the war — is just how hard it is to get there. You’re driving way up through the mountains along these, even today, fairly narrow roads. And so it really allowed me to make this leap of imagination and think, “If I had to haul everything that was required to build a nuclear weapon up these little mountain roads in the 1940s, what was that like?” It gives you a sense of the scale of the challenge and then of the achievement.
Geoff Kabaservice: Speaking of another imaginative leap, one of the other places you went to which is hard to get to is Manzanar, California, which was a site of internment for Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Bev Gage: Right. That chapter is primarily in the Southwest, and it tries to look at World War II and the early Cold War in the landscape of the Southwest as it’s still there today. So Los Alamos was one example, but Manzanar is another, almost simultaneous with Los Alamos. In both of these places, you’re building almost from scratch a city that’s going to house about 10,000 people during the war, but for radically different purposes. And one of the things that you see when you actually go is that Los Alamos continued on the internment camp, partly because it was, even in 1945, considered not just obsolete, but a source of shame and controversy and division. It was wiped off the map, and so the National Park Service has now come in, reconstructed some of the buildings, and tried to give you a sense of what it was like there. But you really see how remote it was, how daunting it was, how harsh the conditions were there. And again, being there allows you to take an imaginative leap that’s harder to do when you’re just reading about it in a book.
Geoff Kabaservice: Do I recall correctly that it was under Ronald Reagan that Congress in a sense gave reparations to the survivors and their descendants of those camps?
Bev Gage: Yes, it was the Reagan years and then H.W. Bush, and that was after years of Japanese-American activism and reckoning. But it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s, yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: So as I said at the beginning, you mostly play your history down the middle and not avoiding the extremes of either side, but of course this opens you up to fire from both sides. So your book was very well received in most publications around the country, but was not as positively reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Charles Lane of AEI, who’s a reasonably conservative writer, wrote about this and he said: “This warts-and-all look at the American past dwells a bit predictably on the warts. Visits to Mount Vernon and Monticello are treated mainly as occasions to remind us, as if any reader of this book will need reminding, that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were deeply implicated in slavery. Wasn’t World War II a proud moment for the country? Ms. Gage deals with it by visiting the remnants of a Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, Calif., and the resource facility in Los Alamos, N.M., where US government scientists built the atomic bomb.” How would you respond to that critique?
Bev Gage: Well, I didn’t expect that everyone was going to buy into my way of seeing things. I think, as you said early on, we live in a pretty polarized set of historical discussions. And so I wouldn’t characterize myself as wanting to go down the middle, exactly, but wanting to put those stories in interaction with each other, in tension with each other, look at some of the complexities and dynamisms of the American past. And sometimes that puts you in something we might call the middle, but not always. So part of me thought, “Well, did you actually read the same book?” Because I personally think it has lots of elements of being celebratory and is I think quite funny, but maybe he does not share my point of view.
But the end of that review I actually agreed with. And it said in the end, “In the daily plebiscite on America, this Ivy League historian votes ‘Yes, but.’” I think that is a hundred percent true. I think that actually very well captures the spirit of this book, which as I say in the introduction is about the challenge of facing American history, really knowing it, engaging with its deepest and darkest aspects, and still figuring out a way to say that you love your country. And I think lots of people — particularly on the left and liberals in this moment, but I think lots of people even more broadly than that — are really struggling with that set of tensions at the moment. I thought that was going to be one of the big questions of 2026. I think it has been one of the big questions of 2026 as we’ve gotten through the 4th of July. And this book is really just an invitation for people to think about some of those tensions, to go out and explore it on their own and to wrestle with that question.
Geoff Kabaservice: To play it “straight down the middle” is a metaphor for fairness, but it does convey some implication of moderation. I was actually looking in my library at home because your book reminded me of this book, Inside U.S.A. by John Gunther, published in 1947. It even still has the Book of the Month Club News insert here. And he went all around the country, as you can see on this map here, doing a mixture of reporting and history. It was somewhat reminiscent of your book in a way. And the conclusion that he came to in this book about the country as a whole… He called it “the greatest, craziest, most dangerous, least stable, most spectacular, least grown-up and most powerful and magnificent nation ever known.” This is not a world away from your conclusion that the United States is “a big, cruel and transcendent nation” as well.
Bev Gage: I love that phrase. I don’t know that book, but it sounds like I should read it. Part of what I wanted to do, in taking this approach to thinking about history, was actually to tap into what is itself a great American tradition and an American methodology, and that is the road trip. So there are the really famous examples of that: Jack Kerouac or John Steinbeck. But it is also a very ordinary and popular way of seeing, thinking about, engaging with the country. And so it has this literary tradition, but it also has just family traditions and individual traditions. And I hope to some degree that my book helps to inspire people to throw their kids in the back and head out on the road.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m sure it will. And there’s a guy out there who’s offering overnight stays in a disused missile launch facility, is that right?
Bev Gage: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: That guy’s going to benefit a lot from this book.
Bev Gage: The Atlas Missile Silo. So I spent the night in a former nuclear missile silo outside of Roswell in New Mexico, also exploring the Cold War and World War II, parts of it. But yeah, that was a wild experience. I actually do highly recommend it.
Geoff Kabaservice: That is a fantastic tip. But let me come back to this question about the history and historical consensus. This reporter, John Gunther, was considered a racial liberal by the standards of his day. He writes about the South as “problem child of the nation.” He quotes extensively from Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. He cites many examples of African-American progress and oppression, and he’s also alive to the understanding that it actually is returning Black servicemen, in particular, who are behind the resurgence of the Civil Rights Movement in that era. Having seen the world, having been treated differently by white people, they’re not going to take the old status quo anymore.
But having said that, his view is that although sometimes Southerners agree to forget the defeat in the Civil War, nobody in the South ever forgets Reconstruction. He says, “To this day, the South has not recovered from Reconstruction. This was one of the most cruelly outrageous episodes in all the wantonness of history.” And he points out that the Southerners themselves classified as rebels were not allowed to vote. He says, “By chopping up the South and ruling it by an absolute dictatorship of the military while every kind of economic and social depredation was not only allowed but encouraged,” it reminded him of Budapest or Warsaw under the Nazis in the 1940s. And this is a racial liberal, keep in mind.
And he quotes James Truslow Adams, who was considered an authoritative historian of that period, saying, “The war left the South prostrate. Reconstruction left it maddened.” And yet this is not something you would hear from any historian I think nowadays, particularly not an academic historian. So it is to some extent just a kind of analogy into how consensuses shift, and the consensus that we have nowadays (or that academic historians have) may not be the consensus of the future either.
Bev Gage: That was, I think, the conventional wisdom, the mainstream view of its moment. I think it does still have some currency. I went to Columbia, Tennessee, to the National Confederate Museum, which is run by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And there, you would see that description of Reconstruction as unjust tyranny that attempted to subdue the South and heap misery upon white Southerners and former Confederates.
You also see Reconstruction actually being dealt with for the first time in an explicit way within the National Park Service in the last decade or so. In South Carolina, there is a new Reconstruction Era National Park, and that is attempting to tell very much the counter-story of Reconstruction, which is about Black emancipation, particularly in the South Carolina Sea Islands, which were some of the first places that the Union military took over during the war in 1862. And so it became a place of some of the first experiments in emancipation and Black land ownership, Black education. And it’s a really, really fascinating set of stories, which amazingly, is really only being told in our national physical landscape to some degree for the first time in the last decade or so.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the figure of someone like Robert Smalls being recovered as a great American, not just somebody whose story was about Reconstruction.
Bev Gage: Right. Robert Smalls is this amazing character: a man who was born into slavery, was working as a skilled craftsman and a boat pilot and was pressed into service by the Confederacy early in the war. When his white crew ended up leaving, he took that boat, piloted it over the Union lines, became a Union hero. He served the Union in the war and then returned to Beaufort, South Carolina, where he had come from, as a newly prosperous and independent person. He ended up helping to write the Reconstruction-era South Carolina Constitution. He went on to serve in Congress for many, many decades, and so he was one of the great Black political figures of the era. He’s one of the last Black politicians to last in Congress well into the 1890s. So his life story is at the center of this new way for the Park Service of engaging with the Reconstruction era.
Geoff Kabaservice: Speaking of politics, let’s talk about the Yale Faculty Report. Tell me just in broad outline why you think the committee was convened and what your main points were in the report that came out.
Bev Gage: Yeah. Switching gears a little bit, it is funny for me because I was working on both of these things at the same time. I do think they’re quite separate projects, but to some degree there is a little bit of overlap of sensibility in the sense of wanting to analyze the moment we’re in, navigate a way through that’s maybe a little bit different from the ways that these things are being fought over in our current political sphere.
So this was a committee of ten faculty members that was charged by the president of Yale, Maurie McInnis, with taking on the question of trust in higher education. We were charged to do this in April of 2025, which as you might recall, was a rather fraught moment in higher education. We worked on it for about a year and we released the report this past April in 2026.
Over the course of that work, we talked with hundreds and hundreds of people from all over, both within Yale, outside of Yale, many, many different points on the political spectrum and people with many different views on higher education. In the end, we produced a report that both tried to analyze why trust in higher education has been in decline, particularly over the last fifteen years, and then we made a list of about twenty recommendations that were a little more particular to Yale because that’s who we thought was listening to us and who had charged us to think about ways of dealing with this.
Geoff Kabaservice: So obviously, in any kind of faculty committee, there are going to be disagreements. The report that gets produced is more or less a consensus report. But outside of Yale itself, why do you think universities or even just the subset of elite universities have lost public trust and what could they do to regain public trust?
Bev Gage: We separated our analysis into two different ways of thinking about trust. One is public trust, and I think that’s the most obvious and most important. Why do people outside of higher education view it with such suspicion these days? There, it’s clear there are three big ones. One is cost and value. As the price goes up, is higher education worth it, however you wish to define either one of those terms? The second is admissions: a loss of faith that the admissions process is navigable or legible or fair, a sense that there are too many thumbs on the scale for too many different kinds of applicants, particularly at a selective place like Yale. And then finally, the politics of the campus: you have questions about free speech, about the political makeup of the faculty, about the nature of the curriculum — particularly in humanities and maybe social sciences departments. But the sciences obviously, as we can see from recent developments, are not immune to those sets of questions as well.
And so those are absolutely the big three, and each one contains many, many multitudes once you start to take it apart. But we didn’t just look at questions of public trust. We also, as we talked to people, thought that it was really important to think about questions of internal trust. And by that we meant: Do people within these institutions trust each other and trust the mechanisms of the institutions to be doing what they say they’re supposed to do? Do faculty trust students? Do students trust faculty? Does anyone trust the board of trustees? And then particularly things like grades. Do we trust that grades, in an era of grade inflation, are actually accurate, that they are real forms of assessment? So it was a pretty wide-ranging inquiry, but that’s some of what we took on.
Geoff Kabaservice: You’re taking an admirably broad perspective. I’m a narrow person in some ways, and I tend to think of: What would Kingman Brewster say about this situation? He was the Yale president in the ’60s and ’70s. I actually am trying to take a step sideways and think: What would his best friend, McGeorge Bundy, think about the current situation and the report in particular? And I actually do have a primary source that I’ve been mulling over for a while.
In 1970, more or less at the height of the student protests of that era, Bundy wrote an essay for Daedalus called “Were Those the Days?” And in it, he was revisiting his role as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and whether the charges made against the university by the student radicals in the 1960s were accurate and could be retroactively applied to Harvard in the ’50s.
He said no, he thought not. But there were a few observations that particularly bore on the Yale report, one of which was the question of the university’s overall mission. Bundy had an interesting comment about that. He said, “The university is for learning as an airplane is for flying. This is its elemental and defining purpose.” And, of course, the committee encountered a certain amount of controversy in more or less restating that proposition. He also said, “No institution which depends on society for its resources will be allowed, as an institution, to choose sides in the general contest of the democratic process.” And I think that’s relevant to this question of ideological diversity and viewpoint diversity. Because of course what has accompanied the university’s becoming more lopsided, in terms of the ratio of progressives to conservatives on their faculty, is also a bifurcation of the American polity along educational lines. It is more or less the case now that college-educated voters vote Democratic and the non-college-educated working class votes Republican. And as the college-educated more and more take on the kind of ideology that seems to be inculcated at the elite universities, the wider the gap grows. I wonder though whether you think there’s anything that can be done about this?
Bev Gage: I think it is one of the great challenges of the moment. And there is no question that universities — particularly elite universities — have a structural political problem, which is that they are so heavily weighted toward one of the two major parties that it seems in our moment that the other party sees very little to lose (and a lot to gain) in mounting pretty aggressive attacks. But that’s a little bit of a structural political problem, which I think is somewhat different from the intellectual challenge. And what we really tried to do with this report, in thinking about these questions, was to return to this question that you raised and that McGeorge Bundy was talking about: What is a university for? And that’s why we engaged with the mission statement: that it’s about teaching and research, it’s about the production and preservation and dissemination of knowledge. This is what gives a university its distinct purpose in American society.
And then really to build out our answers to public trust from there, because one of our assumptions, or one of our ways of understanding what trust is, is that you trust an institution or you trust a person if they do what they say they’re going to do. And if that’s true, you have to know what they’re supposed to be doing. And we thought that universities in the last couple of decades have come to mean so many different things to so many different kinds of people — have had so many competing and often contradictory agendas and claims — that it was a time to return to basics, to make sure you’re doing that well, and then to build your solutions from there.
All of which is to say that for us, the real question — and the thing that really mattered about what’s often called ideological diversity — is whether or not it is producing enough of a vibrant and interesting intellectual life, whether it is equipping students on campus to understand the full range of ideas and the world that they are about to enter, whether it’s challenging them to ask really big and important questions, whether this is a campus that still prioritizes curiosity as opposed to everyone knowing what they already think. So for us, that was what really matters about this question: how it affects the educational and scholarly and research mission of the university.
All of that said, this was by far the most contested question on everything that we took on. And you see a huge range of opinions out there, from people who think the moment has come for some really Draconian, top-down looking at everyone’s syllabi to make sure they’re saying the right things, to people who say there’s no issue whatsoever, it’s all a big conservative plot. And then a lot of people are wrestling with how, within the principles of expertise and professionalism and educational priorities that are so central to the way universities work, how do you make inroads about this in this moment?
So we ended up recommending kind of a grab bag of things and saying that we don’t think that there is any university out there right now who has gotten it exactly right, but that there are a lot of interesting experiments underway. One that we proposed was that Yale faculty should be asked to do some self-examination. We understood ourselves to be engaged in institution-wide self-scrutiny of a rather difficult and sometimes harsh kind. And we thought that around this question, one place to start was by asking the faculty to really take these questions seriously, address them. They might look different from discipline to discipline. And then we had a lot of other possibilities as well.
Geoff Kabaservice: You have an interesting perspective on this question as well by virtue of having been the director of the Grand Strategy Program at Yale from whenever it was, 2017 to 2020…
Bev Gage: ’21.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the Grand Strategy Program is something that actually is explicitly concerned with the formation of elites and leaders. If you go back to the university in the 1940s, it is understood across students, faculty, and administrators that the elite universities are for producing the leadership class of the country — that’s almost an unquestioned piece of dogma — and that this carries with it certain responsibilities as well as opportunities and privileges. But what I felt from going back to the campus and also taking part in some of these Grand Strategy murder boards and the like, is that there is this dilemma that you’ve spoken about before that you’ve also written about in your excellent essay, “The Blob and The Mob” in the Rethinking Grand Strategy book. Universities like Yale are in the business of producing elites, and yet that fact cannot be acknowledged or even talked about.
Bev Gage: Well, I think this is one of the places where universities — particularly these kinds of selective, private, elite universities — have gotten into some confusion in recent years and have been doing what, as I said, the committee saw a lot, which is promising all sorts of different things to all sorts of different constituencies. So on some level, it’s great that universities have adopted a language of inclusion and of wanting to have lots of different kinds of people on campus, right? Intellectual diversity, diversity of all kinds, that’s great. But it’s very strange when they adopt a language of inclusion that doesn’t acknowledge that, actually, this is one of the most exclusive institutions out there. Whether you’re talking about Harvard or Yale or Stanford or any of those sorts of places, they deliberately set out to exclude 96%, 97%. We’re in these wild admissions numbers now of the people who apply.
And it doesn’t mean that you can necessarily resolve all of those tensions. It doesn’t mean that you need to choose one or the other. But you do need to be honest and frank about some of that fact. And there are just lots of places where I think we’re seeing a kind of evasiveness of language and of purpose.
Geoff Kabaservice: Kingman Brewster had a saying that no university is as good as it is hard to get into. And I think that kind of humility is called for both in the universities themselves and in the people they educate who may become our leadership class.
Let me go back to the Hoover book quickly. Part of what I so much admired about that book is that Hoover is a difficult and in many ways unlikable, dangerous character in American history, and yet you treat him fairly, with understanding and even a certain degree of sympathy. You point out what actually were his admirable qualities which helped make him one of the most admired men in America for years, decades on end.
By the same token, traveling around the country as you do in This Land is Your Land, you again surface moral complexity, because two of the people most responsible for creating the Japanese internment camps were some of the most admirable figures in American life: Earl Warren, the governor of California who later became the Supreme Court’s head justice, and Henry Stimson, the godfather of the establishment, who served in significant positions in the cabinet in both Republican and Democratic administrations. And it’s a paradox that the wise can be foolish and the foolish can be wise. The moral can act immorally and vice versa.
How do you come out feeling about America and its history in this moment, then, as we, in our weird way, celebrate the 250th anniversary, this semiquincentennial?
Bev Gage: For the record, Franklin Roosevelt supported Japanese internment and J. Edgar Hoover opposed it.
Geoff Kabaservice: The paradoxes abound.
Bev Gage: You want some sense of the weirdness and paradoxical nature of American history, there it is. I would say I came away from these road trips feeling more heartened about the state of the country, really in two different ways. One is that when you get away from screens and actually get to people, it turns out that they are more complicated and interesting. I just met so many people out there who are curious about the country that they live in. And for me as a historian but also as a citizen, curiosity has become one of my highest virtues, and I think we have too little of it at the moment. And so it was really exciting to see that alive and well out there and just have a set of really fascinating and interesting conversations with some of the people that I met. So it was good to get away from the algorithms and the screens, and that taught me something.
I would also say that one of the things that you see in American history — and this goes back to I think what you were referring to in your introduction — is that it’s been really quite violent and contested and divided. And there are certain eternal questions that come back again and again in new forms for each generation. Is the country on the rise or is it in decline? Is it going to hang together or is it going to go flying apart? Is it living up to the best aspirations of its founding ideals and its political traditions or is it tossing them in the trash bin and violating those solemn commitments? And those are not new questions. What does a democracy look like? How is it supposed to operate?
And so in a funny way, seeing those questions recur again and again and again, seeing some of the historical actors who took them up in creative ways, reinterpreted them for their generation and the challenges of their own moment — that turns out to be really quite… I don’t want to say “comforting,” because realizing that the past was a very dark time too maybe isn’t such a comfort. But it is a form of agency, it is a form of understanding. And it helps me think that what we are experiencing right now is just history. We’re just in history, with all of its messiness and challenges and cruelties. We’re in our own variation of that story, to be sure, but there is a long past to draw on.
Geoff Kabaservice: As Wordsworth observed more than a century ago, both about himself and America, Americans: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” I congratulate you again, Beverly Gage, on this great new book, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through American History. I encourage everyone to buy it, to read it, to internalize it, and to go out there into this big self-contradictory country and see the history for yourself. Thank you so much for being with me today.
Bev Gage: Thanks, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
