Keen On America

“All these groups from 1945 on said: we can resist any hate group in America, even the Ku Klux Klan, as long as we take them on one at a time. But our great fear is if these right-wing groups figure out a way to communicate with one another in a more instantaneous way — we are in big trouble.” — Steven J. Ross
 
It’s not just springtime for Hitler in America. It’s winter, summer and fall too. There is what the historian of American neo-Nazism, Steven J. Ross, defines as the “too many Führers Problem.” This, he says, is the central weakness of American neo-Nazism over eight decades. Every far-right leader from the 1940s onward demanded a united fascist movement — and every one of them insisted on being the Führer in charge of it. The result was the permanent fracture of the American far right. That is, until the latest wannabe Führer, Donald Trump, came along.
 
Last week, the Justice Department sided with the Ku Klux Klan. The Southern Poverty Law Center — the country’s main watchdog against antisemitism, racism, and far-right violence — was accused of running agents within radical right-wing organisations and using charitable funds for improper purposes. In his new book, The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, Ross says that this has all happened before.
 
The Secret War Against Hate tells the story of three undercover spy operations — run by the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League — that infiltrated every fascist, Nazi, and racist group in America from the 1940s through the 1970s. When government fails to protect its citizens, Ross suggests, it falls to citizens to protect themselves. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was obsessed with communists and mostly indifferent to antisemitism and racism. Rather than the solution, the G-Men were one more problem.
 
In May 1945, a few days before VE Day, the three spy chiefs — working in offices a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan — wrote the identical memo on the same day. If right-wing groups, fractured by the “too many Führers problem,” ever found a way to communicate instantaneously with one another, and if one of them ever peeled off into a mainstream political party, they warned, American democracy would be in big trouble. That was their “Too Many Führers Problem.” Springtime for an American Hitler. Today this problem is no longer a joke.
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Justice Department Sides with the KKK: The opening frame of the interview: last week, the Justice Department accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of running agents within radical right-wing groups and using charitable funds improperly. Ross’s argument: the same accusations were levelled at the undercover spy operations run by the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League from the 1940s onward. Those operations, which operated because government had abrogated its responsibility to protect minorities, foiled plot after plot. The FBI informants doing the same thing were never prosecuted. The pattern — government targeting the anti-hate watchdogs while ignoring actual hate — is not new.
 
•       J. Edgar Hoover: The Enemy Within: Hoover ran the FBI from the early 1920s until his death in 1972, and throughout that period he cared almost exclusively about communists. Correspondence with his Atlanta special agent-in-charge referred to the Anti-Defamation League as the “Anti-Deformation League.” Ross stops short of calling him an antisemite and racist — no burning gun — but says the correspondence smells like both. In 1940, the German-American Bund was operating freely in Los Angeles: the LA ports were open to Nazi spies, propaganda, and payoffs in ways that New York’s — under the watchful eye of Mayor La Guardia — were not. Because of Leon Lewis’s undercover spy network, every Nazi plot in Southern California was foiled.
 
•       Three Memos, One Day, Three Authors Who Didn’t Know Each Other: In May 1945, a few days before VE Day, the leaders of the three undercover operations — working in offices a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan, unknown to each other — each independently wrote the same memo. Their two shared fears: first, that if fractured right-wing groups ever found a way to communicate instantaneously with one another, the resistance would be overwhelmed. Second, that if any of them ever peeled off into a mainstream political party, bringing their antisemitic and racist views into the mainstream, the republic would be in real danger. Both predictions, Ross observes, have now come true.
 
•       The Too Many Führers Problem: Every right-wing leader from the 1940s onward called for a united fascist front — and every one of them wanted to be the Führer in charge of it. The result was permanent fracture: each group too small and too self-important to unify with the others. What changed with Trump, Ross argues, is that the far right said: here is our Führer. He is articulating what we say. After Charlottesville — “there are good people on both sides” — the deal was sealed. The internet gave them the ability to communicate instantaneously. Trump gave them the figurehead. The two conditions the 1945 memos feared most had arrived simultaneously.
 
•       Jefferson’s Long-Term Solution: Educate Everyone: Ross ends his book with Thomas Jefferson — the right wing’s own favourite founding father. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson warned that every so often a political huckster would come along and convince Americans that what was good for him was good for the country. Americans would believe it for a while. But a collectively educated citizenry, really studying the issues, would always come out on the side of democracy. Jefferson called for a constitutional amendment mandating universal education in perpetuity. Ross’s verdict: look at the voting patterns. Look at what is happening to the Department of Education. The attack on higher education is not incidental. An uneducated public is the most vulnerable public.
 
About the Guest
 
Steven J. Ross is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Southern California and the author of The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy (Simon & Schuster, April 2026) and Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America (Pulitzer Prize finalist). He lives in Los Angeles.
 
References:
 
•       The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy by Steven J. Ross (Simon & Schuster, April 2026).
 
•       Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross — Pulitzer Prize finalist; the companion volume.
 
•       Episode 2882: Peter Wehner on Trump’s Unholy War — the companion episode on the moral coll...

“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.” — Current Affairs editor, quoted by Brewster Kahle
 
The internet, we were promised, would remember everything. Rather than memory, however, it is now most distinguished by its digital forgetfulness. That’s the warning in Vanishing Culture, a new series of essays published by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive. In its concluding essay by Brewster Kahle — founder of the Internet Archive, member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and the closest thing the web has to an official librarian — he makes the case for preserving the online library system.
 
“Our evolving digital age can be our next Carnegie moment or it can be a Library of Alexandria moment. It is up to us.”
 
Today’s internet library system, Kahle argues, is worse than the analogue one he grew up with. It’s faster, he acknowledges, but shallower. The 1976 Copyright Act means that rather than buying digital books, libraries can only rent access in surveillance environments controlled by a handful of corporations. Sixty percent of news organisations now have paywalls. Academic publishing is controlled by three conglomerates. So an entire generation is growing up without access to the published works of the twentieth century.
 
“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free,” as the editor of Current Affairs put it. That is today’s internet. No laughter. Only forgetting.
Five Takeaways
 
•       Carnegie Moment or Alexandria Moment: The Internet Archive’s pamphlet Vanishing Culture opens with a choice. Andrew Carnegie invested in public libraries during the early twentieth century: every town in America got one, and by the time the US was thrust onto the world stage after World War II, an educated public was ready. The Library of Alexandria burned. Kahle’s argument: we are at the same fork in the road. The digital transition can be a Carnegie moment — everyone with access to all human knowledge — or it can be an Alexandria moment. Sixty percent of news organisations now have paywalls. Academic publishing is controlled by three conglomerates. The library system we have is worse, not better, than the one Kahle grew up with.
 
•       The 1976 Copyright Act as Original Sin: Copyright used to be opt-in: you had to put a ‘c’ on your work and register it. The 1976 Act made it opt-out: everything is copyrighted by default, forever, with terms that keep being extended. The consequences: Wikipedia had to be written from scratch because the encyclopedias already written couldn’t be shared openly. Academic papers are walled inside publisher systems, which is why arXiv exists. Libraries can no longer buy digital books — only rent access in surveillance environments. The bargain between publishers, libraries, authors, and the public that functioned for centuries has been dissolved by lobbyists writing copyright law.
 
•       The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Kahle’s most quotable line belongs to someone else — the editor of Current Affairs. But Kahle endorses it fully. An entire generation is now growing up without access to the published works of the twentieth century. People are genuinely confused about whether the Holocaust happened — not because the information doesn’t exist, but because it’s behind a paywall. What is free on the internet is what serves the interests of the platforms: viral, emotional, algorithmically optimised, frequently false. The deep, sourced, accurate record costs money to access. That inversion is not an accident. It is the business model.
 
•       Turnkey Tyranny: Kahle quotes Edward Snowden’s phrase for what surveillance capitalism has built: turnkey tyranny. All it needs is someone motivated to think tyrannically, and all the laws, policies, and technologies are already in place. The internet was built on a protocol: play by the rules and you’re in. That openness is gone. What replaced it is a small number of platforms with enormous centralised control of distribution, purchasing the upstream sources — Comcast buying movie studios, Amazon buying MGM. Whoever controls distribution, Lawrence Lessig’s maxim holds, will eventually control everything upstream from it.
 
•       AI Mass Larceny? The Real Loser Is People: Asked the binary question — is AI mass larceny, yes or no? — Kahle refuses it. His answer: the fight between publishers and AI companies is Coke versus Pepsi. The real dynamic is large corporations — whether you call them AI companies or publishing conglomerates — taking from people’s goodwill, their creative output, their authorship, and landing the value in very few hands. What Kahle wants is public AI: ClimateGPT, reading the Sri Lankan 1953 fish reports and seeing the patterns in them. AI that serves the public good, not the shareholders of one, two, or three gigantic players. The answer isn’t either Coke or Pepsi. It’s water.
 
About the Guest
 
Brewster Kahle is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and the author or editor of Vanishing Culture (Internet Archive, 2024). He was previously the founder of WAIS and Alexa Internet. He lives in San Francisco.
 
References:
 
•       Internet Archive — archive.org.
 
•       Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Disappearing Digital Heritage, ed. Brewster Kahle et al. (Internet Archive, 2024). Available free at archive.org.
 
•       arXiv (arxiv.org) — the open-access preprint server that routes around academic publishing.
 
•       Episode 2877: Keith Teare — Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous. The counterpoint to Kahle’s wariness about AI centralisation.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:30) - The internet’s librarian: forgetting vs. surveillance

(01:55) - Carnegie moment or Alexandria moment?

(03:20) - Andrew Carnegi...

“White men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all money managed by money managers. Is that because they’re smarter? Or is it because there is preference, inequality, and active bias in favor of white men?” — Steve Phillips
 
Are white men really smarter than other Americans? Some white men might think so, but few others are convinced. Especially the Stanford educated Steve Phillips whose new book, Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? is designed to “play offense” in the fight for American racial justice. The title of Phillips’s new book is, of course, a provocation. White men are 29 percent of the population, he tells us, but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all investment funds managed by money managers. Is that really because they’re smarter than everybody else? Or is it because the system is biased in favor of white dudes who graduated from Harvard, Princeton and Stanford.
 
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Phillips argues, there was, albeit all-too-briefly, broad agreement that systemic racism existed and needed to be addressed. Then came the 2024 election and the MAGA war against DEI. It’s time to fight back, Phillips says. Rather than defending affirmative action, Phillips says that the question is why, in the richest country in the world, white men hold 90 percent of the power when they are only 29 percent of the population. Until that mathematical inconsistency is explained, there’s no point in pretending that the arc of American history bends toward justice.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       29 Percent of the Population, 90 Percent of the Power: The book’s central data point. White men are 29 percent of the US population. They hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions. They receive 90 percent of venture capital funding. They manage 98 percent of all investment money in the country. Phillips’s argument: you don’t need to allege conscious racism to explain this. You just need to acknowledge that a system shaped by centuries of exclusion doesn’t self-correct. The question the title asks is the question nobody wants to answer: if the system is meritocratic, why do these numbers look like this? Either white men are smarter than everybody else, or the system is not meritocratic.
 
•       Playing Offense: The book began as a study of what happened to the post-George Floyd consensus. The broad agreement that systemic racism existed — widespread in June 2020 — dissolved within months. By 2024, the political momentum had reversed entirely. Phillips’s diagnosis: the left spent the intervening years playing defense — defending DEI, defending affirmative action, defending the language of equity. The result was a retreat. His prescription: stop defending programmes and start prosecuting the inequality. Make the other side explain the numbers. Reframe the question from “should we have DEI?” to “why do white men hold 90 percent of the power?”
 
•       The Biker Gang Analogy: To the objection — common from white Americans — that they personally didn’t create the racial wealth gap: Phillips offers the biker gang. A gang comes into someone’s house, takes all the resources, occupies the house, and passes it on to their children. The children can say: I didn’t do anything. But they inherited a structurally unequal situation. The GI Bill after World War II gave billions of dollars in wealth-building to white Americans while largely excluding people of color. The average white family has more than ten times the assets of the average black family. “I didn’t do it” is not the same as “I don’t benefit from it.”
 
•       The Confederates Never Stopped Fighting: Phillips’s underlying argument: the division in American politics is not left vs. right. It is an existential question that has never been resolved — is this a white country, or is this a multiracial democracy? The Confederates and their ideological heirs never conceded the answer. White fear and resentment at equality is the single most consistent driving force in Republican politics since 1965, the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act and no Democratic presidential candidate has won the majority of the white vote since.
 
•       America Can’t Pass a Bill to Study Reparations: The wealth of the United States was created by the labour of enslaved black people and on land taken from Native Americans. Banks and insurance companies trace their original capital to the bodies and labour of enslaved people. The racial wealth gap is the direct structural consequence of that history. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass a bill not to pay reparations, but merely to study the question. Not a single vote to begin the conversation. Until America can have that conversation, it hasn’t begun to confront what is owed.
 
About the Guest
 
Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and the author of Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?, How We Won the Civil War, and Brown Is the New White. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former San Francisco school board president.
 
References:
 
•       Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America by Steve Phillips.
 
•       Democracy in Color — Phillips’s organisation focused on race and politics.
 
•       Episode 2883: Melvin Patrick Ely on A Terrible Intimacy — the companion episode on interracial life in the slaveholding South that immediately precedes this one.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:30) - Introduction: from slavery to the present — has anything changed?

(01:11) - The short answer: no. And what it took to end slavery.

(02:03) - Why the racial wealth gap persists

(03:26) - The Confederates never stopped f...

“Sam Altman’s best case scenario is that abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his favorite outcome.” — Keith Teare
 
This week’s editorial from Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, is entitled “Adulting.” His verdict: this was the week the AI industry finally started behaving like grown-ups. The evidence: OpenAI launched ChatGPT 5.5 and Image 2.0, both outstanding, and then made a move Keith considers more significant than either — pivoting Codex from a programmer’s tool into the central interface for everything. The gravity has shifted from the model to the user interface. You shouldn’t be using ChatGPT anymore. You should be using Codex. Meanwhile, freemium is working: less tokens, much better output, a functional free tier, and the heaviest users paying for more.
 
Anthropic’s week was more complicated. The first four days were, in Keith’s word, awful: Opus 4.7 launched with a massive deterioration in performance, hallucinations back, service throttled, timeouts everywhere. Then Anthropic removed features from its paid product, got a furious backlash, and reinstated them within twenty-four hours — what Keith calls Dario’s adolescent-teenager moment. But Friday redeemed the week: Google committed up to $40 billion in infrastructure investment, Amazon added $5 billion. The money goes into data center capacity and chips — TPUs from Google, Trainium from Amazon, both competing with Nvidia. Two axes are emerging: OpenAI–Nvidia on one side, Anthropic–Google–Amazon on the other.
 
The bigger question: what does adulting actually require of AI? Keith’s reading of the week’s most interesting piece — on the future of work — is that the durable jobs in an AI economy will be in the relational sector: nurses, therapists, teachers, craft brewers, live performers, care workers. Human-to-human is the scarce resource. Reid Hoffman adds: technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own — it requires political will. And Altman himself, in his interview with Greg Brockman, described his best-case scenario as one in which abundance lifts everyone up but exacerbates inequality. Which is to say: even optimism, in Silicon Valley, ends in more inequality. Adulting, it turns out, has its limits.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Codex Is Now the Central App: The most significant move of OpenAI’s week wasn’t ChatGPT 5.5 or Image 2.0 — both outstanding — but the repositioning of Codex. What was a programmer’s tool has become the central interface: it does more things, has access to all the models, and represents a shift in where the gravity of the company sits. From the model to the user interface. Keith’s verdict: you shouldn’t be using ChatGPT anymore for any purpose. You should be using Codex. The freemium model is working because less tokens produce much better output, making the free tier genuinely functional — and the heaviest users still pay for more.
 
•       Dario’s Adolescent-Teenager Week: Anthropic’s first four days were, in Keith’s reading, a study in how not to adult. Opus 4.7 launched with massively deteriorated performance — hallucinations returned, the service was throttled, users got timeouts. The infrastructure was creaking under load. Then, to compound the problem, Anthropic removed features from its paid tier. The backlash was immediate and furious. They reinstated the features within twenty-four hours. Keith’s diagnosis: reactive, adolescent, exactly the opposite of what OpenAI was demonstrating that same week with deliberate, long-term thinking.
 
•       $45 Billion and Two Axes: Friday changed the Anthropic picture entirely. Google committed up to $40 billion in infrastructure investment — $10 billion initially. Amazon added an initial $5 billion. The money funds data center capacity and proprietary chips: TPUs from Google, Trainium from Amazon, both in competition with Nvidia. The implication: two separate technological axes are now forming. OpenAI and Nvidia on one side. Anthropic, Google, and Amazon on the other. Keith’s view: great for Google and Amazon; a long-term bet for Anthropic that they don’t need to be an Nvidia customer.
 
•       The Future of Work Is Human-to-Human: Keith’s most interesting read of the week: a piece on the future of work that argues the durable jobs in an AI economy will be in the relational sector — the jobs where the human element is the product itself. Nurses, therapists, teachers, craft brewers, live performers, care workers, spiritual guides. Not prompt engineering (transitional). Not monitoring AI systems (transitional). Human-to-human. Nursing is already the most popular university major. Keith’s extension: as work disappears, so does the social connection it provides — family, friends, colleagues. Which means religion probably makes a comeback.
 
•       Sam Altman’s Best Case: More Inequality: In his interview with Greg Brockman on the Core Memory podcast, Altman described three possible AI futures. His favourite: abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but also exacerbates inequality. That was the good outcome. The others were worse. Reid Hoffman adds a necessary corrective: technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own — it requires human agency and political will. Keith’s gloss, via Robert Heinlein’s For Us, The Living: the heritage check — a monthly dividend to all humans from the automated economy’s surplus. Money as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources becomes less meaningful when scarcity itself disappears.
 
About the Guest
 
Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter — a daily curation of the most important stories at the intersection of technology, business, and culture. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and a long-time interlocutor on Keen On America.
 
References:
 
•       That Was the Week newsletter by Keith Teare — this week’s editorial: “Adulting.”
 
•       Greg Brockman and Sam Altman on the Core Memory podcast — the OpenAI interview that anchors the week.
 
•       Reid Hoffman, “Faith in the Possible,” Substack — technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own.
 
•       Episode 2878: Victoria Hetherington on The Friend Machine — Keith weighs in on AI companionship and the loneliness question.
 
•       Episode 2877: Keith Teare — Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

“The burdens of slavery did crush some people. They elicited outright armed rebellion from others. And between those two extremes, there’s all manner of response. But black culture was what most historians say it was: rich, semiautonomous — and yet there is all kinds of cross-fertilization that goes on.” — Melvin Patrick Ely
 
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the republic, America is still struggling to come to terms with its original sin — slavery. With his new micro-history, A Terrible Intimacy, Melvin Patrick Ely takes all the abstractions, moral and otherwise, out of the story. The meticulous Ely has spent many years in the county records of Prince Edward County, Virginia, going through 75 cartons of nineteenth-century papers: court cases, lawsuits, plantation ledgers, testimony from black and white witnesses alike. The result is a history of six criminal trials which reveals the intimacy of life between whites and blacks in the slaveholding South.
 
In Prince Edward County, as on most small Southern farms — and contrary to our plantation mythology, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived on small properties of fewer than twenty people — black and white people knew each other personally. They drank together, worshipped together, spoke the same dialect, shared the same folk knowledge of weather, nature, and time. Ely tells the story of an enslaved man named Tom and his white overseer Richard Foster who consumed a quart of whiskey together in the morning, and then fought to the death that same afternoon over a surcingle strap. That was how blacks and whites lived and died. Such intimacy, Ely is careful to make clear, did not mitigate anything. Everyone knew the master who gouged a slave’s eyes with sticks and pulled sound teeth out with pliers. But he was the outlier. Life was mostly more tragically complex. That was the terribly terrible intimacy about America’s original sin.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Thirty Years in the County Records: Five or six entire summers, six days a week, eight hours a day, in the Library of Virginia — plus months of collating, plus years of writing. Seventy-five cartons of papers from Prince Edward County: court cases with witness testimony, plantation records, mercantile ledgers, letters, building contracts (including the bill from the carpenter who built the gallows on which one of the book’s central figures was hanged). Ely’s method: go through tens of thousands of documents looking for needles in a haystack — nuggets of revelatory information about how the society actually operated. Most historians process that research behind the scenes and deliver a smooth narrative. Ely does it in front of you, in conversation with the reader.
 
•       Tom and the Overseer: A Quart of Whiskey and a Fight to the Death: The book’s first chapter is built around one criminal trial. An enslaved man named Tom is on trial for killing his white overseer, Richard Foster, with the handle of a hoe. The testimony — from white witnesses including the dead man’s own sister, and from other enslaved people on the farm — reveals that in the morning of the day of the killing, the two men had sat down and drunk together as much as a quart of whiskey. Then, later in the day, a stupid verbal exchange about a missing strap escalates into a fight to the death. In a single day: drinking like buddies, then killing. That is the terrible intimacy — closeness and callousness, not as opposites, but as the same thing.
 
•       Half the Enslaved Lived on Small Farms: The plantation is the dominant image of American slavery — the sprawling estate, the hundreds of enslaved people, the distant master. But fully half of the enslaved people in the South lived on small properties of fewer than twenty people: farms where black and white people of every legal status — enslaved, free black, poor white, slaveholder — were in daily personal contact. They shared the same churches, the same dialects, the same understanding of nature and time. Black culture was rich and semiautonomous, but there was also constant cross-fertilization. The binary of master and slave does not capture what was actually happening in most of the South.
 
•       Nobody Said a Word While He Was Alive: One chapter centers on an enslaved man who killed his master — a man the testimony reveals had beaten him with sticks, broken sticks over his head, gouged his eyes, whipped him, chained him to the floor, and pulled sound teeth from his mouth with pliers. At the trial, white witnesses are called. Their testimony ranges from glossing over the abuse to calling it “barbarious.” But not one of them had spoken up while the master was alive. Not one ever said: beating a slave with a stick must never be done. The range of white feeling about permissible cruelty was finite — some drew the line at near-blindness, some did not. Nobody drew it at the start. That is the system.
 
•       Beyond Pride and Shame: Two hundred and fifty years on, the temptation is still to resolve slavery into a usable narrative — either the sentimental Southern white memory of paternalist kindness, or the equally schematic counter-narrative of unremitting oppression met by constant resistance. Ely resists both. Unremitting oppression does grind people down — but it also elicits armed rebellion, quiet subversion, rich cultural creation, and all manner of response in between. White Southerners were not all identical — but the range of their difference was constrained by a system that made economic gain dependent on the legal ownership of human beings. The book doesn’t offer resolution. It offers accuracy. Which, in the 250th anniversary year, is the harder and more necessary thing.
 
About the Guest
 
Melvin Patrick Ely is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at the College of William & Mary. He is the author of A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South (Henry Holt, April 14, 2026), Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Bancroft Prize), and The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
 
References:
 
•       A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely (Henry Holt, April 14, 2026).
 
•       Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War by Melvin Patrick Ely — Bancroft Prize winner; the companion volume to this book.
 
•       Episode 2871: Beverly Gage on This Land Is Your Land — the road trip through American history that opens Ely’s interview as a point of departure.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody ask...