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A
Welcome to the daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice and wisdom into the real world. Today, the United States celebrates Juneteenth, the commemoration of the emancipation of slaves in America. Two years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and nearly 90 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. army troops deployed to Texas, the only state of the Confederacy still with institutional slavery. The people of Texas are informed, ordered a Union general, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States. All slaves are free. There's no question that that military order deserves celebration. It asserted absolute equality and began the liberation of hundreds of thousands of human beings. And Marcus Aurelius would write in meditations that his Stoic role models taught him to conceive of a society of equal laws governed by equality of statute and speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. It's as beautiful a sentence as any written by Thomas Jefferson, but of course, a long way from Epictetus personal experience. This kind of freedom that Marcus was talking about would have been something inconceivable to the early Stoics, who themselves lived in a slave society and tragically did very little to stop it. Like Jefferson's writings, Marcus Aurelius passage was just that, an idea, not a reality. In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt would remind his fellow citizens of the critical distinction between words and deeds in name. We had the Declaration of independence in 1776, he said, but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of independence until 1865. And he said, words count for nothing except insofar as they represent acts. This is true everywhere. Or as the Latin expression goes, acta non verba, deeds not words. It's wonderful to celebrate these principles from the Stoics and the Founders. It's wonderful to note the moments of historical progress like Juneteenth. But we have to remember that beautiful language pales in comparison to beautiful acts. We have to turn these words, these ideas into deeds. Can't just talk about them. We have to be about them and not living up to them or doing something about them, as was the case with slavery in Rome. In America is ugly. Marcus knew this, but fell short, damning himself with his own words and meditations. That you can commit an injustice by doing nothing. Also, we must make sure today that we are not guilty of the same. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to the second half of this episode. That was our Juneteenth inspired daily Stoic email. I didn't really know about Juneteenth until I moved to Texas. I mean, I'd heard of it, but I moved to East Austin about 15 years ago, and my house was right near this park that a bunch of black citizens of Austin had purchased. Originally, Juneteenth was celebrated in another part of Austin. And then when the city was segregated it in the late 1800s after reconstruction, they weren't allowed to celebrate there anymore. And so this group of people decided they wanted to buy land. They wanted to be able to celebrate Juneteenth on black owned property. And that became what was known as Emancipation Park. And I remember I came out of town, I came back one day, and it was just like bedlam in East Austin. I was like, what is happening? What is this? It was the Juneteenth celebration. And that was right around the time I started studying the Civil War. And I was reading all these books. I was just blown away by it. It's a beautiful, like, inspiring thing. But in honor of this incredible holiday and this incredible day, I wanted to do a little deep dive into it and how it ties into stoicism. And it's funny, actually, we talked about Juneteenth when Chet Garner from the Day Tripper, who's a great Texas historian and travel guide, he was on the podcast, he and I talked about it.
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We would have tons of Civil War sites in Texas that we don't have because of this. And it could have ended the war a lot faster because then the whole thing would have gone. It's like there's so many little turning points in history like this. This would have rewritten the whole thing. Yeah. Got to travel to see them.
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A
Well, yeah. And then. And then you go, oh, hey, everyone's talking about Juneteenth. Well, Texas is why we have. Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right.
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B
I went to that spot in Galveston.
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A
Yeah. Recently. Well, I mean, I was just driving. When we drove to Lockhart, I passed. There was like a Juneteenth grounds. And you're like, oh. Because all these little cities had these little parades and moments celebrating this thing. Because it was basically a foreign country. They just didn't get the news. It took a while to come over.
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B
That's right.
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A
I was on Morning Joe this morning recommending some Juneteenth inspired books. One of the books I recommended is Clint Smith's incredible book how the Word is Passed, which is an interesting thing about Juneteenth because it's literally a holiday about the word not being passed because the isolated nature of Texas and how far away. It was two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Word doesn't get out. And then it's not till two months after the war ends that on Juneteenth, it was announced like, you are free. But in that book, he not only goes to Galveston and stands there and explores what that announcement means and what this holiday means, but he has this great line in the book about the difference between memory and nostalgia. And that's also the theme of one of my favorite modern historians writing John General Ty Sedgeli's books, which I've been raving about over the years. His book, Robert Ely and Me, is beautiful and moving. And his latest one, A promise delivered to 10American heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation's Military Bases. Every time he comes on, I like to nerd out about history and America. He came out and we talked about a bunch of things, but I thought today would be a good day to bring you that episode. He's been helpful to me in this campaign I've been on to try to remove this Confederate statue from the courthouse that we live in. We walked over, I showed it to him, and he said, I got to take a picture. I thought he was going to just take a picture of it. And he wanted to take a picture of him flipping it off, which I thought was hilarious. But here on Juneteenth, I thought it would be a good idea to explore what some of these ideas mean. Right. The difference between history, celebration and commemoration, monuments and celebration. How we can study the past Civil War honestly, without memorializing or celebrating things that shouldn't be celebrated. How we. How we learn from the worst parts of the past to bring about a better future. And I think on Juneteenth, that distinction is really important. Right? Like, freedom was delayed, fought for, announced, resisted, and it had to be made real. And it still has to be made real. But it's also a reminder. And I think this is. This is the theme of his book, A Promise Delivered. American history is full of people worth looking up to, people who expanded the promise of the country rather than trying to destroy it. So that's what the general and I are talking about, talking about memory and monuments and heroes and what it means to love a country enough to tell the truth about it. Thanks for listening, and I hope you have a great Juneteenth. Do you think that's something about history? Like, you know, history can be depressing, History can be uncomfortable. But one of the things I find, and this is why I hate this argument, that, like, if we. We tell all this stuff, our kids are going to hate themselves. When I study history and these complicated periods, I go, oh, there were good guys. Right? There were good guys. And the idea that that's instinctively who I identify with. Right. I don't. I don't. I don't go, oh, that. That shitty person looks like me. So I. I don't think about what they look like or where they're from as far as my identification. I identify with the people that I aspire to be like. And there's an unlimited amount of those people.
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B
Unlimited. Two examples. The first is that's why I don't say the Union army in the Civil War. I say the U.S. army.
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A
I noticed you did that earlier.
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Blue uniform that I do. I love that idea. The other one is one of the things that changed was the USS Chancellorsville. And that was a guided missile cruiser that was named after Chancellorsville. And it had pictures of Lee and Jackson, who were the heroes of that, for the Confederate army in the wardroom. And they had gray in their thing. So we said, you should change it. The Secretary of the Navy at the time, Carlos Totoro, changed it to Robert Smalls.
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Okay.
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I don't know if, you know, Robert Smalls is a guy. Is an enslaved.
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See the guy that steals the boat?
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Yes.
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Okay. Yes.
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Yes.
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I love this story.
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He steals his boat, this Confederate boat, gets all these enslaved people on it, takes it to friendly US Navy lines, and then eventually commands the boat himself as a Navy captain. Later serves five terms as a South Carolina congressman. And so now it is the USS Robert Smalls.
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Yes.
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There's your hero.
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Yes. That's America right there.
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That's America right there. And every time you think that that's. Why don't look for Confederate heroes. You look for people like another one that we named after Mary Walker, who was the only surgeon employed by the US army during the Civil War. Yeah. Only she's a woman. The second woman to graduate from medical school at Syracuse. And she just keeps going down, says, you need to use me. You need to use me. Event goes into the Tennessee campaign. Is a contract surgeon. Eventually is captured behind enemy lines where she was. Not only was she doing surgery stuff, which she totally was doing. Little light spying on the side, too. Sent to a prison in Richmond. Eventually she's paroled from there and is famous the rest of her life for putting on pants. Like, I'm telling you, I'm gonna wear pants. And she is arrested multiple times for wearing pants. But she then receives from Sherman and Grant and Thomas the Medal of Honor. She's the only woman to have ever received the Medal of Honor. And it was taken away from her right at the end of her life and then given back to it posthumously. So we named a post after Mary Walker, because here's someone again, a hero. There's so many in American history. I love this country. I love my country. I was serving in uniform for 36 years. And we have plenty of people that we could and should honor. It doesn't mean we can't do both of these. I'm comfortable saying slavery bad. And, yes, we should know what that caused and the Jim Crow that came with it and the lynching and other things. Redlining. But we also have these great heroes.
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A
So people have trouble with the idea of removing names, and they have trouble with statues coming down. And I don't totally understand it, but it does seem to be a block for people. Right. And I think there's something about it that it feels modern to them. Like this is like something. They didn't do this in the past, which isn't true. I wanted to read this passage to you. I thought, okay, this is where our work overlaps. All right. This is from the Historia Augusta, about the life of Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, the murderer. Commodus was dug up and buried and then his body dragged in the dust. This is how bad of an emperor he was. And then it says, I give it as my opinion that his statue should be overthrown because this man who lived but for the destruction of his fellow citizens and for his own shame, forced us to decree them in his honor. And wherever they are, they should be cast down. That's 2,000 years ago.
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B
Years ago, remember, George III had a statue of Manhattan that was taken down 1770.
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Turned it into bullets.
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B
Turned it into bullets. We also at West Point, we had Fort Arnold, named after Benedict Arnold. And when he chose treason to give away the plans, we changed to Fort Clinton. Yeah, so. And by the way, the other one is sometimes we just want to change things. So have you ever flown through idle wild Air? Right. That's now JFK Airport on Long island or Midway Airport? Midway Airport national airport in D.C. so we change things. And why shouldn't we if it no longer reflects the values? Remember, commemoration is about inspiration. It's about your values. And if commemoration doesn't do that, it's not history. Yes, we're going to teach the Battle of Gettysburg every year at West Point. And every year, Pickett's going to charge and Lee's going To lose. That's not changing.
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Yeah.
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A
A museum is not commemoration. Right. A museum is about investigation and study and recording what happened. The statues outside a museum or outside a public building, it's a very different context. And so, yeah, maybe the difference between what they did in the ancient world is they would tear down your statue and grind it into dust or use it as something else, ironically. Not what anyone is saying we should do here. We should. They're saying, put it in a museum or reinterpreted in some other form of cemetery. Yes.
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B
That's another possibility.
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A
What.
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B
You know what Hungary did after the fall, the wall fell down, they took all of those statues of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Stalin, and they moved them all to one park. So outside Budapest, there's a park that has all of them there. But the idea that they were put there for a nefarious purpose, our Confederate monuments. So if they're outside a courthouse, it's because when they were put up, it's to set, to recognize that the white people are back in the saddle after Reconstruction. And for a black man to go into the courthouse, there were ways you could do that. Custodian or defendant.
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A
Yeah.
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And so the idea that these ones outside courthouses, they are. They're pernicious. They have a pernicious purpose to enforce power for one group at the expense of another.
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Yeah. I forget what country did it, but one country took all their communist statues and put them like in a lake and you can dive and turn it into a diving park also. Love that idea.
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Love that idea.
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Yes. The reinterpretation becomes something makes its own statement.
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Absolutely. And there's a show at MOCA Gethen in LA where they took the Samuel Jackson statue that was in Charlottesville and sort of did a Sid in Toy Story version of it, which is. Recreated it. I love it. And so now that's another recreation of that. But this issue is not. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's gonna be a politics of Civil War memory in America. And so we're still. I was just an expert witness on a case for Stonewall Jackson High School in Shenandoah, Virginia.
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Ye.
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It was Shenandoah. It was Stonewall Jackson, 1959, a reaction to integration. 2020, it goes to Mountain View, 2024, back to Stonewall Jackson. So these things are still coming, but we should always remember that Confederates tried to destroy this country. We love to create a slave republic. And it's a bad, bad thing.
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You know, this county is one of the only counties in Texas that didn't vote for succession.
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B
Really?
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Yeah, I could.
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I could feel the vibe. I could feel the vibe. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
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