The Last Best Hope?: Understanding America from the Outside In

Eugene V. Debs is a reminder of the possibility of a different kind of American politics. Five times the Socialist Party's candidate for president in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Debs argued that the promise of America -- the last best hope of earth -- could be fulfilled only through socialism. Debs lived in an era that, like our own, was characterised by dramatic economic dislocation, extremes of wealth and poverty, and high rates of immigration. So what is his legacy, and why does he still matter? Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American InstituteGuests:Michael Kazin, Professor of History U of Georgetown, the author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918 (2017), American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011),The Life of Wm Jennings Bryan (2006), and most recently What it took to win: A history of the Democratic party (2022).Allison Duerk, Director of the Eugene V. Debs Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

ELECTION SPECIAL (PART 1)The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid and presidents sometimes won huge landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we’ll be examining the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and tracing the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today. We begin in this episode in 1992 – the first post- Cold War election, the first to be won by a Democrat since 76, the passing of a generational torch to the 46-year old Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and the ringing declaration on the right that America was now convulsed in a culture war. Presenter: Adam SmithGuests: Bruce Schulman, William E. Huntingdon Professor of History at Boston UniversityDan Rowe, Director of Academic Programmes, Rothermere American InstituteThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

In a special 4-part series for The Last Best Hope? will take a deep dive into the 4 key US elections that have shaped the 2024 race:Bill Clinton’s generational-shift victory in 1992,the drama of 2000 in which Bush beat Gore even while losing the popular vote,the election of the nation’s first black president in 2008,and the norm-shattering rise of reality TV star Donald Trump in 2016 one of the biggest political upsets in US historyWe'll explore the campaigns and the characters and the underlying political dynamics which has created our contemporary age of polarization.

Wealthy Americans have always found ways of spending money on political campaigns in the presumed expectation of a return on their investment. But in 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision ruled that legislation that restricted how much money could be spent on influencing elections was unconstitutional, opening up vast new possibilities for wealthy individuals and corporations to support candidates. The Court's argument was that to stop someone spending as much as they liked to push an agenda or a candidate was a violation of the first amendment right to free speech.  The official campaigns still have to be transparent about how much money they’re raising and from whom, but there are now effectively no limits at all on what people can spend trying to influence the outcome of an election in indirect ways. That’s where so-called “Super PACs” come in (the PACs is an acronym standing for Political Action Committee). It turns out that it’s really easy to hide a political donation by giving it a Super PAC rather than directly to a candidate. So the problem today – in the post-Citizens United world -- is not only the amount of money being spent but that we no longer know who’s spending it.Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American Institute.Guests:Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Brennan Center fellow and professor of law at Stetson University College of Law, where she teaches courses in election law. Her book Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians Hardcover – published by NYU Press- is out in November.Brody Mullins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. He spent nearly two decades covering the intersection of business and politics for The Wall Street Journal. He’s the co-author of The Wolves of K Street The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big GovernmentThe Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.ukProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

For as long as there have been elections, there have been those who’ve refused to trust them. But anxiety about elections has peaked at particular moments in American history – in the run-up the Civil War, in the late nineteenth century, in the Civil Rights era, and again today. All periods when sections of the population became convinced that the rules were being bent in ways that robbed ordinary Americans of their political power – by new immigrants, African Americans, or liberal elites. At each moment of anxiety, attempts have been made to purify the electoral process, and all have had mixed and unintended consequences. In this episode, Adam discusses the long history of anxiety about election rigging with Frank Towers of the University of Calgary, an expert on electoral history, and Sarah Henry, the Chief Curator of the Museum of the City of New York, with whom Adam discussed a curious glass ballot box.Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith. The Last Best Hope? podcast is a production of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.

In 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, Thomas Jefferson wrote that if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”. Easy for him to say – but in reality, US presidents and the press have always been locked in an embrace fusing mutual respect and mistrust, cosiness and outright conflict. Both feed off each other, but who’s in charge?  But who has the power in that relationship? How does it work and how has it changed? From Woodrow Wilson, the first president to hold proper press conferences, to the present day, this is a story of how presidents sought to project themselves as presidential, using charm, threats and distraction techniques. Adam talks to Kathryn McGarr, author of City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington. And to Nick Bryant, former BBC correspondent in the US and author of multiple books including The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with itself.

At the heart of the "promise" of the American Revolution and the new republic's claim to be the last, best hope of earth, is the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal". How did Black Americans react to the Declaration? How did they seek to shape the character of the new Republic? And what was the relationship between the Black struggle for freedom and equality and the American Revolution? To examine this once-hidden history of Black Americans in the founding era, Adam is joined by Professor James Basker, the President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College. Jim is the editor, with Nicole Seary, of a remarkable new collection published by the Library of America called “Black Writers of the Founding Era” which contains texts – most previously unpublished – by more than 120 Black Americans.Readings in this episode were performed by Chelsi Campbell and Darius Jackson. Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith.

Forty years ago, a twinkly-eyed incumbent president ran for re-election despite concerns about his age. He did so by running a campaign steeped in the idea that America was the last, best hope of earth. Ronald Reagan was no Joe Biden, and no one today expects a landslide victory. Yet there are echoes in today's divided politics in the 1984 election, especially within the Democratic Party, which, back then, just as now, was struggling to keep together its warring constituencies. And might there be lessons for today's fractious politics from Reagan's famous campaign ad, "It’s morning again in America"? Adam talks to Bruce Schulman, William E. Huntington Professor at Boston University who was the Harmsworth Professor of American history at Oxford last year and the author of many books on twentieth-century America including a forthcoming volume of the Oxford History of the United States – and Dan Rowe, lecturer in American history at the Rothermere American Institute and the author of the forthcoming, State of Development: Preserving the American Economic Century in an Era of Anxious Capitalism to be published by Columbia University Press.