WEBVTT - Hitler’s Olympics, Part 8: “Vater, It is to be Fayetteville” 0:00:06.680 --> 0:00:17.400 Bushkin. Yeah. Yeah, now's about you're the best thing to 0:00:17.440 --> 0:00:24.239 think about the guy Krieger who goes from Germany to Arkansas. Yes, 0:00:24.280 --> 0:00:28.880 he does, to Fayetteville. Yes, I'm talking to a professor 0:00:28.920 --> 0:00:32.360 at Yale Law School, James Q. Whitman, about an all 0:00:32.400 --> 0:00:37.400 but forgotten figure named Heinrich Krieger. In the early nineteen thirties. 0:00:37.520 --> 0:00:41.560 Krieger was a student in Dusseldorf, an intellectual who set 0:00:41.600 --> 0:00:45.440 out for a semester abroad. We have no pictures of him, 0:00:45.640 --> 0:00:49.040 so we'll have to use our imaginations. A proper upper 0:00:49.080 --> 0:00:53.960 class European waistcoat, little round glasses, bouler hat in his 0:00:54.040 --> 0:00:57.800 briefcase about her copy of NIETZSCHEZ Beyond Good and Evil. 0:00:58.480 --> 0:01:01.360 I'm guessing he's never been to America before. He takes 0:01:01.360 --> 0:01:05.039 a steamship from Hamburg to New Orleans the SS Westmoreland, 0:01:05.520 --> 0:01:10.000 his heart beating furiously with a mixture of apprehension and excitement, 0:01:11.040 --> 0:01:14.640 he disembarks, takes a train north and west, and arrives 0:01:15.080 --> 0:01:18.240 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Rents a room in the house of 0:01:18.240 --> 0:01:21.959 a German professor named of Gustav on Maple Street, right 0:01:22.080 --> 0:01:26.120 by the University of Arkansas. The School of Law. The 0:01:26.200 --> 0:01:28.920 law school was only ten years old. Classes were held 0:01:29.120 --> 0:01:32.440 in the old chemistry building on campus. Today, Fayetteville has 0:01:32.440 --> 0:01:36.160 one hundred thousand people. Back then it's just over seven thousand. 0:01:36.600 --> 0:01:41.160 A dusty little place, a whole world away from dusudarf. 0:01:42.520 --> 0:01:44.880 Did the University of Arkansas Law School get a lot 0:01:44.920 --> 0:01:49.880 of overseas students in the nineteen thirties, I don't think so. 0:01:49.920 --> 0:01:53.000 This is this is almost a comic notion that someone's 0:01:53.040 --> 0:01:56.160 coming from this, from the cradle of European civilization to 0:01:56.160 --> 0:01:59.280 Faytteville in the early nineteen thirties. I mean, it's like 0:01:59.800 --> 0:02:01.280 the culture shock that poor man. 0:02:01.680 --> 0:02:03.880 I don't know how he ended up there, I truly don't. 0:02:04.080 --> 0:02:06.240 Yeah. Yeah, and he goes there. How much time is 0:02:06.280 --> 0:02:07.480 he spend in just a year? 0:02:07.800 --> 0:02:08.080 A year? 0:02:08.120 --> 0:02:09.720 He was an exchange student for a year, and. 0:02:09.639 --> 0:02:13.240 He ends up writing. And you've read this book, he writes, Oh. 0:02:13.240 --> 0:02:15.239 Yes, yeah, and it's quite a good book if you 0:02:15.360 --> 0:02:18.320 accept this basic starting premise, that's well done, you know. 0:02:18.680 --> 0:02:21.320 So describe to us what he produces in his time 0:02:21.320 --> 0:02:23.679 in favor. But he produced a book called Race Law 0:02:23.720 --> 0:02:28.160 in America. Oh, I really forgot to mention Herr Krieger 0:02:28.800 --> 0:02:37.680 is a Nazi, a serious one. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. 0:02:37.800 --> 0:02:40.160 You're listening to Hitler's Olympics are a series of the 0:02:40.240 --> 0:02:46.359 nineteen thirty six Berlin Games. Dorothy Thompson, Charles Cheryl, Avery Brandage, 0:02:46.440 --> 0:02:49.799 Jesse Owens the main subjects of our series so far. 0:02:50.080 --> 0:02:53.240 We're all Americans trying to make sense of what was 0:02:53.280 --> 0:02:56.560 happening in Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime. 0:02:57.480 --> 0:03:01.120 The Olympics forced us to look at them, but the 0:03:01.200 --> 0:03:09.640 Germans were looking at us too. The bronze medalist in 0:03:09.680 --> 0:03:12.480 the men's foundred meters in Berlin was an American named 0:03:12.520 --> 0:03:15.160 Jimmy Luvall. He went on to become a chemist at 0:03:15.200 --> 0:03:18.400 Stanford University. I happened to be somewhat obsessed with Jimmy 0:03:18.440 --> 0:03:21.040 LaVall for a whole series of reasons that have nothing 0:03:21.080 --> 0:03:23.640 to do with his running career, but that's for another time. 0:03:24.840 --> 0:03:27.880 In nineteen eighty eight, LaVall sits for a long interview 0:03:27.880 --> 0:03:30.760 about his experiences at the Olympics, and at one point 0:03:30.960 --> 0:03:34.120 he describes what happened when the team first got to Germany. 0:03:34.920 --> 0:03:39.680 We arrived eventually in the Hamburg disembarked. They took us 0:03:39.720 --> 0:03:44.440 up to the Roth house and served us so each 0:03:44.480 --> 0:03:47.360 of us had a small glass of twenty five year 0:03:47.400 --> 0:03:50.840 old port. Well up to that time, I'd never realized 0:03:50.920 --> 0:03:55.240 how delightful a good wine could taste. This was excellent wine. 0:03:56.240 --> 0:03:59.080 The Germans saw all these Americans coming from across the 0:03:59.080 --> 0:04:01.800 ocean and welcomed them with open arms. 0:04:02.440 --> 0:04:04.680 I mean, you heard all this regular all about Hitler, 0:04:04.720 --> 0:04:07.560 But certainly the German people or as nice as they 0:04:07.600 --> 0:04:12.240 could be. I had a Jena and colonel invite me 0:04:12.280 --> 0:04:17.559 out to his home for dinner one night, and dinner 0:04:17.600 --> 0:04:20.280 with he and his children, his two daughters, and his wife, 0:04:21.000 --> 0:04:24.280 very pleasant. Two or three of us went along. We 0:04:24.360 --> 0:04:26.760 saw no sign of any intolerance of any. 0:04:26.600 --> 0:04:33.080 Type, no sign of any intolerance. Jimmy Navau was black. 0:04:33.560 --> 0:04:36.440 He was from Los Angeles, which in the nineteen thirties 0:04:36.760 --> 0:04:40.920 was functionally as segregated as Birmingham. In Los Angeles, white 0:04:40.960 --> 0:04:43.080 people did not invite him to their houses for dinner 0:04:43.520 --> 0:04:46.000 or give him a glass of twenty five year old port. 0:04:47.040 --> 0:04:50.080 The runner who took gold in the fornded meters Archie Williams, 0:04:50.440 --> 0:04:53.320 was also African American, also from California. 0:04:54.120 --> 0:04:57.560 He took us outter this beautiful looked like a country 0:04:57.600 --> 0:05:01.440 club where the Olympic village where they had was landscape 0:05:01.440 --> 0:05:04.839 with beauty and all the buildings were brand new. In fact, 0:05:04.920 --> 0:05:09.760 uh it later be was to become what a monitor 0:05:09.839 --> 0:05:12.680 or military academy, and it was set up with the 0:05:12.720 --> 0:05:16.760 cottage type barracks and they had uh all every country 0:05:16.760 --> 0:05:20.240 had its own dining hall. And since we had one 0:05:20.240 --> 0:05:23.400 of the largest teams and we had all the goodies, 0:05:23.520 --> 0:05:27.040 all the foreign athletes wanted to be our friends immediately. 0:05:27.279 --> 0:05:28.840 And in addition to that, we had some kind of 0:05:28.880 --> 0:05:32.919 a car which allowed us to ride any transportation anywhere 0:05:33.800 --> 0:05:36.520 in in Berlin free of charge. All you had to 0:05:36.560 --> 0:05:38.400 do was just show it to the conductor and sit out, 0:05:38.440 --> 0:05:39.800 and you could go wherever you wanted to. 0:05:40.400 --> 0:05:43.279 Sit down and go anywhere you wanted to. If you 0:05:43.279 --> 0:05:45.839 were black in Los Angeles in the nineteen thirties, you 0:05:45.839 --> 0:05:47.040 couldn't even go to the beach. 0:05:47.520 --> 0:05:49.599 We got on the train to go to Berlin. We 0:05:49.680 --> 0:05:52.000 arrived in Berlin and there was this mob of uh 0:05:52.120 --> 0:05:56.040 young people with a lot of girls. Bois Jesse, Bois Jesse, 0:05:56.200 --> 0:05:59.920 Bois Jesse. Oh yeah, uh remember that Jesse had scept 0:06:00.080 --> 0:06:02.640 four world records here in the United States that year, 0:06:02.960 --> 0:06:04.880 so they wanted to see him. Well, Jesse got off 0:06:04.880 --> 0:06:06.880 the train and these little girls had scissors and I 0:06:06.960 --> 0:06:11.799 started slipping off his clothes. I'm not kidding. It was wonderful. 0:06:12.520 --> 0:06:13.960 How did Jesse respond able? 0:06:14.440 --> 0:06:16.840 Jesse got back on the train as fast as he cut. 0:06:19.480 --> 0:06:23.480 The Germans were fascinated with the black athletes. The Nazis 0:06:23.480 --> 0:06:26.520 were probably as obsessed with the way white Americans treated 0:06:26.560 --> 0:06:30.200 black people as Americans were with the way Nazis treated 0:06:30.200 --> 0:06:33.520 the Jews, because America had mastered a problem that the 0:06:33.600 --> 0:06:39.719 Nazis were desperately trying to solve for themselves. Remember Putsy 0:06:40.120 --> 0:06:43.920 Hitler's Harvard educated piano playing pr guy. He set up 0:06:43.960 --> 0:06:47.279 Dorothy Thompson's nineteen thirty one interview with Hitler, where she 0:06:47.440 --> 0:06:51.479 concludes that Hitler's eyes have the peculiar shine which often 0:06:51.520 --> 0:06:59.760 distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics. After Thompson's article, Hitler refused 0:06:59.800 --> 0:07:02.440 all all interviews with foreign journalists for about a year, 0:07:03.000 --> 0:07:06.479 but finally Putsy convinced Hitler to sit down with Putsy's 0:07:06.480 --> 0:07:12.280 best friend from Harvard, a radio commentator from Wisconsin named H. V. Caltenborn. 0:07:14.880 --> 0:07:18.520 Putsy and Kaltenborn did theater together in college. Putsy has 0:07:18.520 --> 0:07:21.200 his friend come to Hitler's chalet in the Bavarian Alps. 0:07:21.600 --> 0:07:25.679 It's August. The views are gorgeous. Hitler's laundry is flapping 0:07:25.680 --> 0:07:28.680 on the clothesline in the backyard. Putsy takes a picture 0:07:28.680 --> 0:07:31.480 of Hitler and his Harvard body standing next to each 0:07:31.480 --> 0:07:35.080 other on the porch. Hitler's all in black, looking very stern. 0:07:35.680 --> 0:07:40.600 Kaltenborne will later write he dislikes talking to strangers. Instead 0:07:40.640 --> 0:07:44.960 of answering an interviewer's questions, he makes excited speeches, thus 0:07:45.000 --> 0:07:48.560 seeking to create for himself the atmosphere of the public 0:07:48.640 --> 0:07:53.160 meeting in which he is at home. Kaltenborn asks Hitler 0:07:53.600 --> 0:07:57.080 about the Jews. For a moment, he bored into me 0:07:57.400 --> 0:08:00.880 with his clear blue eyes, which are his most attractive feature. 0:08:01.440 --> 0:08:04.680 People were always fixated on Hitler's eyes. You have a 0:08:04.760 --> 0:08:08.280 Monroe doctrine for America, he wrote at me. We believe 0:08:08.320 --> 0:08:11.760 in a Monroe doctrine for Germany. You exclude and he 0:08:11.800 --> 0:08:14.160 would be immigrants you do not care to admit. You 0:08:14.240 --> 0:08:16.600 regulate their number, You demand that they come up to 0:08:16.640 --> 0:08:19.880 a certain physical standard, you insist that they bring in 0:08:19.880 --> 0:08:22.440 a certain amount of money, You examine them as to 0:08:22.480 --> 0:08:27.560 their political opinions. We demand the same right. We are 0:08:27.600 --> 0:08:31.840 concerned about any anti German elements in our own country, 0:08:32.360 --> 0:08:34.800 and we demand the right to deal with them as 0:08:34.840 --> 0:08:41.520 we see fit. Hitler has never visited America. He doesn't 0:08:41.520 --> 0:08:44.480 even speak English, but here he is holding forth on 0:08:44.520 --> 0:08:48.120 the fine points of US immigration law and foreign policy. 0:08:48.640 --> 0:08:52.480 As first articulated by James Monroe in his seventh Annual 0:08:52.520 --> 0:08:56.720 Message to Congress in December eighteen twenty three, there's a 0:08:56.760 --> 0:09:02.240 project going on within Germany in the thirties to kind 0:09:02.280 --> 0:09:05.840 of find a legal basis for what they want to 0:09:05.880 --> 0:09:10.200 do with the Jews. Right, an incredibly naive question would 0:09:10.240 --> 0:09:12.520 be why would they bother to find legal basis. 0:09:13.280 --> 0:09:15.440 It's not a naive question, it's a crucial Well, it 0:09:15.480 --> 0:09:17.760 may be naive, but it's a question crucial for understanding 0:09:17.760 --> 0:09:18.320 what went on. 0:09:18.840 --> 0:09:22.559 Our Yale law professor James Q. Whitman. Again, part of. 0:09:22.520 --> 0:09:25.760 The answer has to do with German culture. Much more broadly, 0:09:26.360 --> 0:09:33.359 Germans do tend to insist that things be properly legally codified, 0:09:33.520 --> 0:09:35.680 and that was even true of the Nazis. 0:09:36.000 --> 0:09:39.280 In nineteen thirty two when Caltenborn and Hitler meat. The 0:09:39.360 --> 0:09:42.080 Nazis aren't yet at the stage where they've settled on 0:09:42.120 --> 0:09:45.160 mass murderer as a solution to their Jewish problem. That's 0:09:45.240 --> 0:09:48.440 years away. They're still trying to figure out how to 0:09:48.520 --> 0:09:52.160 marginalize the Jews in a way that seems acceptable. 0:09:52.720 --> 0:09:54.760 The Nazis, it is important to remember, especially in the 0:09:54.800 --> 0:09:57.520 early years, had to run a state which was not 0:09:57.760 --> 0:10:03.040 entirely managed Nazis. They had to have the German bureaucracy 0:10:03.160 --> 0:10:06.200 on their side. They had to do things that would 0:10:06.200 --> 0:10:06.920 appeal to. 0:10:09.000 --> 0:10:09.360 People. 0:10:09.480 --> 0:10:11.680 Most of them were trained in law and would expect 0:10:12.440 --> 0:10:14.480 law to be to govern. 0:10:14.200 --> 0:10:18.199 What was done by through the Nazi program. So they 0:10:18.200 --> 0:10:21.920 looked to the US, where the Constitution promised its citizens 0:10:22.000 --> 0:10:24.960 equal protection under the laws, but with the laws made 0:10:24.960 --> 0:10:29.679 black people second class citizens. The US systematically oppressed a 0:10:29.760 --> 0:10:33.440 racial class, but the country was still respected around the world. 0:10:34.720 --> 0:10:39.440 So how exactly was the US doing it? If you 0:10:39.480 --> 0:10:42.160 were a Nazi in Germany, this seemed like a really 0:10:42.240 --> 0:10:45.280 important question. It's like if you were a kid doing 0:10:45.360 --> 0:10:47.880 card tricks in your bedroom and your parents take you 0:10:47.920 --> 0:10:50.200 to a full on magic show in Las Vegas, and 0:10:50.240 --> 0:10:52.640 you watch the lady get cut in half, and you 0:10:52.720 --> 0:10:58.240 turn to your dad and you say, wait what, Which 0:10:58.280 --> 0:11:02.840 brings us back to hairc Our eager law student from Dusseldorf, 0:11:03.000 --> 0:11:06.960 with his waistcoat and his little round glasses put yourself 0:11:07.000 --> 0:11:10.440 for a moment in his elegant hand made brogues. You're 0:11:10.480 --> 0:11:13.640 young and idealistic. You are really interested in helping out 0:11:13.720 --> 0:11:17.000 this grand national project to do the Jewish thing right? 0:11:17.880 --> 0:11:21.000 So where do you go for inspiration? Well, you don't 0:11:21.040 --> 0:11:23.719 spend a year at Harvard Law School. The Germans knew 0:11:23.720 --> 0:11:26.480 all about Harvard. Putsey went to Harvard. What could you 0:11:26.600 --> 0:11:30.440 learn from the brightest legal minds of Massachusetts? Not so much. 0:11:31.440 --> 0:11:34.480 You need to go somewhere where Americans had spent years 0:11:34.520 --> 0:11:36.839 working through the nitty gritty of how to get away 0:11:36.840 --> 0:11:40.839 with marginalizing people. You need to go to the American South. 0:11:41.760 --> 0:11:46.040 Did Herkrieger consider the University of Alabama Law School, possibly 0:11:46.600 --> 0:11:49.920 a logical choice given his agenda, or maybe all miss 0:11:50.400 --> 0:11:53.720 in Oxford, Mississippi. They knew a thing or two, definitely 0:11:53.720 --> 0:11:56.360 on the short list. He must have spent many long 0:11:56.440 --> 0:11:59.079 hours going over the pros and cons of each possible 0:11:59.120 --> 0:12:03.080 destination until one day, over schnapps in the Krieger family's 0:12:03.120 --> 0:12:07.400 elegant townhouse on Radhas for strassa right on the Rhine Promenade. 0:12:07.960 --> 0:12:13.600 Young Kreeger turns to Papa Krieger and says, vatter it 0:12:13.640 --> 0:12:20.280 is to be Fairdville, Arkansas, and so it was in Fatdeville. 0:12:20.679 --> 0:12:24.080 He learns from local politicians. He has long conversations with 0:12:24.160 --> 0:12:27.400 his law professors. After a year, he says, here is 0:12:27.440 --> 0:12:30.320 too much to master. I must stay longer. In the 0:12:30.400 --> 0:12:33.840 United States of America. He moves to d C so 0:12:33.880 --> 0:12:36.440 he can do more research. At the Library of Congress, 0:12:36.840 --> 0:12:40.360 Krieger writes up everything he's learned just in time. 0:12:40.800 --> 0:12:44.240 He came back to Germany, and it seems that the 0:12:44.360 --> 0:12:46.640 Justice ministry in Berlin was looking for somebody who knew 0:12:46.640 --> 0:12:48.840 about American law, and somebody said, gee, I know this 0:12:48.920 --> 0:12:49.880 kid Kreeger. 0:12:50.600 --> 0:12:54.200 And he was enlisted. Yeah. But what they couldn't figure 0:12:54.200 --> 0:12:58.319 out is so the German legal establishment, as it sort 0:12:58.360 --> 0:13:04.439 of searches for waste to think about their their version 0:13:04.440 --> 0:13:08.079 of a race problem. They must be kind of they 0:13:08.080 --> 0:13:10.280 are generally aware of what's going on, obviously and going 0:13:10.280 --> 0:13:12.520 on in the United States. But what Kreeger is doing 0:13:12.559 --> 0:13:17.240 is he is giving them what he's giving He's giving 0:13:17.240 --> 0:13:20.120 them a concrete picture of the range and diversity of 0:13:20.160 --> 0:13:22.360 strategies and legal strategies that Americans use. 0:13:22.400 --> 0:13:25.600 Absolutely and done in a very sensitive way, concrete and 0:13:26.160 --> 0:13:29.800 extensive picture of what's going on. I mean, I say, so, 0:13:29.840 --> 0:13:31.520 you're perfectly right. There have been plenty of interests in 0:13:31.520 --> 0:13:33.920 American race law before that, but the knowledge was kind 0:13:33.920 --> 0:13:37.840 of scattershot. This was a much much more systematic treatment. 0:13:38.320 --> 0:13:40.160 I mean, I hate to say it's not a fine book, 0:13:40.200 --> 0:13:41.760 but it's quite a well known book. 0:13:42.320 --> 0:13:46.480 And what is Kreeger's conclusion? There is much much more 0:13:46.520 --> 0:13:50.200 to American race law than anyone back home in Dusseldorff 0:13:50.400 --> 0:14:02.000 has realized. So imagine that there is this guy from 0:14:02.000 --> 0:14:04.640 Germany who comes over and what itever it is thirty 0:14:04.640 --> 0:14:10.120 three or thirty four. What is that man learning about South? 0:14:11.160 --> 0:14:16.760 I think if he went to small towns and small communities, 0:14:16.880 --> 0:14:21.880 what he would find would be very, very complex, unexpected 0:14:22.040 --> 0:14:26.880 relationships that crossed racial lines, also cross gender lines. 0:14:27.760 --> 0:14:30.840 Lisa Lindquist Dor is a historian at the University of 0:14:30.880 --> 0:14:34.600 Alabama and an expert on Jim Crow. I called Dor 0:14:34.720 --> 0:14:36.840 because of a fascinating bit of research she did a 0:14:36.840 --> 0:14:40.200 couple of years ago. She collected every example she could 0:14:40.240 --> 0:14:43.760 find of accusations of black on white rape in the 0:14:43.800 --> 0:14:48.240 state of Virginia between nineteen hundred and nineteen sixty. She 0:14:48.360 --> 0:14:51.080 was interested in what happened to a black man during 0:14:51.080 --> 0:14:54.240 the high water years of segregation if he was alleged 0:14:54.320 --> 0:14:59.120 to have sexually assaulted a white woman. Now, if you 0:14:59.240 --> 0:15:02.720 remember to kill a mockingbird, you'd assume that any black 0:15:02.760 --> 0:15:04.760 man accused of raping a white woman in the South 0:15:05.160 --> 0:15:09.920 ended up dead. But that's not what Lisa Linquistor finds. 0:15:10.400 --> 0:15:13.840 She looks at two hundred and eighty eight cases. Seventeen 0:15:13.880 --> 0:15:17.640 of the accused are killed through extra legal violence. They're lynched, 0:15:18.400 --> 0:15:22.560 fifty are executed by the state. Forty eight people get 0:15:22.640 --> 0:15:26.640 sentence of the maximum prison sentence, fifty two get five 0:15:26.720 --> 0:15:30.720 years or less. But one hundred and twenty one forty 0:15:30.800 --> 0:15:36.160 two percent, the largest of all categories, are either acquitted, pardoned, 0:15:36.520 --> 0:15:40.280 or paroled. Take for example, a nineteen thirty one case 0:15:40.360 --> 0:15:44.280 involving a black man in Norfolk, Virginia named William Harper. 0:15:44.840 --> 0:15:47.880 A woman named Dorothy Skaggs, who is married to a 0:15:47.920 --> 0:15:50.920 sailor left her home to go to a guitar lesson, 0:15:51.320 --> 0:15:53.760 and she later testified in court that while walking along 0:15:53.760 --> 0:15:56.040 the street, who was struck on the head dragged into 0:15:56.080 --> 0:15:59.480 an allien rigged by a black man. William Harper was arrested, 0:15:59.480 --> 0:16:02.560 he was identi. His trial was very predictable, and he 0:16:02.600 --> 0:16:05.720 was sentenced to death, and then the defense revealed new 0:16:05.720 --> 0:16:09.200 evidence and he was given a new trial. And at 0:16:09.200 --> 0:16:12.880 the second trial, Harper produced six white witnesses who testified 0:16:13.160 --> 0:16:15.680 that on the night in question, Dorothy Skaggs was not 0:16:15.760 --> 0:16:18.040 on her way to a guitar lesson, but was at 0:16:18.040 --> 0:16:21.360 a roadhouse across state lines in North Carolina, drinking and 0:16:21.440 --> 0:16:24.280 dancing with a man who was not her husband. Harper 0:16:24.320 --> 0:16:27.360 was quickly acquitted, but the case was not over. Dorothy 0:16:27.400 --> 0:16:30.000 Skaggs and a white woman who corroborated her story of 0:16:30.080 --> 0:16:33.120 rape were brought to trial on charges of perjury. Both 0:16:33.160 --> 0:16:35.720 were initially convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, 0:16:36.080 --> 0:16:39.360 but both eventually were granted new tiles and subsequently acquitted. 0:16:39.640 --> 0:16:43.240 So you almost met it's like a mess. It is 0:16:43.440 --> 0:16:48.000 right for the white men of Virginia. Clearly, there are 0:16:48.120 --> 0:16:52.720 three separate considerations here. First, there's a black man who 0:16:52.760 --> 0:16:55.200 might have raped one of our own. That makes us 0:16:55.200 --> 0:16:59.360 really unhappy. Well, wait, she also cheated on her husband. 0:17:00.000 --> 0:17:03.600 That also makes us unhappy. And then hold on, should 0:17:03.680 --> 0:17:05.760 we really make a practice of just out and now 0:17:05.920 --> 0:17:09.000 believing a woman who says she's been raped, Because once 0:17:09.040 --> 0:17:11.400 you start going down that road, I mean, god knows 0:17:11.400 --> 0:17:16.159 where that ends. If segregation was, if the foundation of 0:17:16.200 --> 0:17:21.440 it was simply white supremacy, it gives white men one 0:17:21.520 --> 0:17:25.040 card to play. But what you're describing is they have 0:17:25.080 --> 0:17:27.040 two cards they can play, and they can choose when 0:17:27.040 --> 0:17:30.080 they play them, and if it suits their interests, they 0:17:30.080 --> 0:17:32.800 can either use the male card or the white card. 0:17:33.400 --> 0:17:37.240 Right right, And not only that, they always have the 0:17:37.280 --> 0:17:41.879 two cards. Then, even women who they claim an assault 0:17:42.119 --> 0:17:44.080 and they're believed in court and the guy goes to 0:17:44.080 --> 0:17:48.600 prison if they do anything, even subsequently, men can continue 0:17:48.640 --> 0:17:52.359 to play that men card and say, now we don't 0:17:52.359 --> 0:17:55.360 believe her anymore. Look what she has done. She has 0:17:55.400 --> 0:17:56.280 behaved poorly. 0:17:57.119 --> 0:18:00.399 The point is that Jim Crow isn't really systematic, not 0:18:00.520 --> 0:18:03.480 in Virginia or Arkansas or anywhere else. It's not some 0:18:03.640 --> 0:18:07.480 rigid set of rules. It's a Jerry built contraption with 0:18:07.600 --> 0:18:11.159 a million different exceptions and contradictions, which allows you to 0:18:11.280 --> 0:18:13.240 lynch the black guy when you want, or go to 0:18:13.240 --> 0:18:16.720 the formal legal route and have him executed, or if 0:18:16.760 --> 0:18:20.200 the whole thing feels a little too complicated, just blame 0:18:20.240 --> 0:18:20.840 your accuser. 0:18:21.920 --> 0:18:30.680 It is not so rigid and brutal that every instance 0:18:30.720 --> 0:18:32.920 of misbehavior causes a crackdown. 0:18:33.000 --> 0:18:36.520 And that's in your mind. That's why it survives as 0:18:36.560 --> 0:18:38.160 long as it does right. 0:18:38.200 --> 0:18:42.119 It's flexible, and it can incorporate all kinds of relationships 0:18:42.640 --> 0:18:46.320 across racial, gender class lines that might otherwise seem to 0:18:46.359 --> 0:18:47.280 violate the rules. 0:18:47.480 --> 0:18:53.920 What is it that allows the South to construct this 0:18:54.119 --> 0:19:00.560 kind of flexible, resilient I mean, you know, I'm thinking 0:19:00.600 --> 0:19:03.280 back to our German who comes over to the South. 0:19:03.520 --> 0:19:07.280 When our German goes home, much of what he reports 0:19:07.560 --> 0:19:10.880 the Nazis find shocking. And the thing they find shocking 0:19:10.920 --> 0:19:13.399 is the very thing you're describing. That They think what 0:19:13.480 --> 0:19:17.399 they need to have is a very clear, consistent rule 0:19:17.720 --> 0:19:20.520 which they follow to the letter. And what they can't 0:19:20.520 --> 0:19:24.760 get over is this idea that it's just kind of discretionary. 0:19:25.840 --> 0:19:27.360 It appalls their legal minds. 0:19:27.560 --> 0:19:30.960 Oh sure, So I'm just curious why how did they 0:19:31.000 --> 0:19:35.240 get there? Is it because their world was so messy 0:19:35.880 --> 0:19:38.000 that they had to accommodate that messiness. 0:19:38.440 --> 0:19:42.600 I suspect so because whites don't want to lose all 0:19:42.640 --> 0:19:46.199 the benefits they get from African Americans, whether it's buying 0:19:46.200 --> 0:19:48.399 their stuff or having them work in their houses or 0:19:48.440 --> 0:19:52.720 on their farms. White Southerners very much want to be 0:19:52.720 --> 0:19:57.080 able to benefit from and profit from a system based 0:19:57.119 --> 0:19:59.680 on white supremacy, and yet to do that, it's going 0:19:59.720 --> 0:20:03.200 to corporate all sorts of interactions all the time in 0:20:03.240 --> 0:20:08.720 their daily lives that are often incidental, very difficult to police. 0:20:10.160 --> 0:20:12.960 This is what Heinrich Krieger reads about in the law 0:20:13.040 --> 0:20:16.040 library at the University of Arkansas and then later at 0:20:16.040 --> 0:20:20.359 the Library of Congress. He reads court cases, state constitutions, 0:20:20.400 --> 0:20:23.199 and criminal codes. He may well have read about that 0:20:23.240 --> 0:20:26.760 William Harper case. It was all over the newspapers. What's 0:20:26.800 --> 0:20:29.840 the right word to describe the way he makes sense 0:20:29.880 --> 0:20:33.480 of what he finds in that year in Fayetteville. Is 0:20:33.520 --> 0:20:37.560 it surprise? Is it shock? 0:20:37.920 --> 0:20:39.960 Yeah, that's a great question. It's very hard to read 0:20:40.040 --> 0:20:42.439 him because, on the one hand, he shows a certain 0:20:42.520 --> 0:20:45.679 level of admiration and support for what he sees in 0:20:45.680 --> 0:20:48.600 the United States, that is to say, a racial awareness 0:20:48.600 --> 0:20:50.280 that he did texts in the South, like, you know, 0:20:50.359 --> 0:20:53.959 people know, we know we are white, we know that 0:20:53.960 --> 0:20:56.359 there are racial others. We have to deal with it. 0:20:56.440 --> 0:21:01.080 But he's also strangely disgusted with the way the United 0:21:01.119 --> 0:21:02.040 States handles it. 0:21:02.440 --> 0:21:05.440 I'm talking to the historian Jonathan Wisen, another of the 0:21:05.480 --> 0:21:08.639 scholars fascinated by Heinrich Grieger's time in the South. 0:21:08.960 --> 0:21:11.720 On the one hand, he's approving and on the other hand, 0:21:11.760 --> 0:21:13.600 he's surprised by the violence. 0:21:14.119 --> 0:21:17.520 Kreeger is appalled by lynch bobs, but he's a Nazi. 0:21:18.000 --> 0:21:20.800 It's not the racial violence that bothers him. The thing 0:21:20.800 --> 0:21:23.040 about lynching that he can't take is it is so 0:21:23.200 --> 0:21:25.720 messy and disorganized. What are the rules. 0:21:26.680 --> 0:21:29.439 It's hard to pin him down because he has a 0:21:29.440 --> 0:21:32.520 whole range of emotions that I think capture the general 0:21:32.560 --> 0:21:35.520 German view. You know, the Americans are so violent, how 0:21:35.520 --> 0:21:38.120 could they be doing this? So he's really intrigued by 0:21:38.119 --> 0:21:44.879 this disconnect between how close Americans are to kind of 0:21:45.320 --> 0:21:48.520 acting on their racial impulses, but how badly they are 0:21:48.560 --> 0:21:53.199 doing it. And so it's a strange mixture of discussed surpride, 0:21:53.600 --> 0:21:57.560 support dismissal. It's a fascinating and puzzling read in that regard. 0:21:57.880 --> 0:22:03.240 Yeah, he agrees with America in theory, but disagrees in practice. 0:22:03.560 --> 0:22:04.200 Absolutely. 0:22:04.920 --> 0:22:07.320 Kreeger actually writes an article on that for the George 0:22:07.440 --> 0:22:10.719 Washington University Law Review about the way the US handles 0:22:10.800 --> 0:22:13.760 Native Americans. And if you ask Krieger to sum up 0:22:13.880 --> 0:22:16.879 what he concluded in that article, he would have said, 0:22:17.520 --> 0:22:21.200 lost money, ENFUNO. Don't get me started. 0:22:24.200 --> 0:22:27.119 The Olympics are this chance, like this moment where the 0:22:27.119 --> 0:22:29.720 whole world is put into dialogue in some way with 0:22:29.840 --> 0:22:33.200 Nazi Germany before it's just painfully obvious what they're going 0:22:33.240 --> 0:22:33.520 to be. 0:22:33.920 --> 0:22:36.520 I'm talking to Ben A. Daph Haffrey, my partner in 0:22:36.520 --> 0:22:40.040 this series on Hitler's Olympics. Midway through Ben and I 0:22:40.080 --> 0:22:43.040 realized that we weren't all that interested in what happened 0:22:43.119 --> 0:22:45.760 at the Olympic Games, who won, what, and all that 0:22:46.480 --> 0:22:49.800 we were interested in what was going on around the 0:22:49.840 --> 0:22:53.440 Olympic Games, the contortions the Americans had to go through 0:22:53.720 --> 0:22:57.480 to justify going to Berlin at all. And Krieger's time 0:22:57.520 --> 0:22:59.879 in Arkansas is just a flip side of what we 0:23:00.200 --> 0:23:03.800 exploring all along, every almost every episode we have is 0:23:03.800 --> 0:23:09.280 about an encounter between a German and an American and 0:23:10.040 --> 0:23:13.480 the and the kind of complicated, tangled ways in which 0:23:13.880 --> 0:23:16.600 each party strives to make sense of what happened or 0:23:16.640 --> 0:23:20.000 makes sense of the other. And it's a it's a 0:23:20.080 --> 0:23:23.119 kind of it's a hugely important moment for the US 0:23:23.119 --> 0:23:26.680 in Germany, because the US is the ascended power in 0:23:26.760 --> 0:23:29.200 the world, and Germany is at a moment in its 0:23:29.240 --> 0:23:31.920 history when it desperately wants to be the other, right, 0:23:32.240 --> 0:23:35.400 the other great superpower. And I think that's what we're 0:23:35.400 --> 0:23:36.120 describing here. 0:23:37.000 --> 0:23:39.280 Yeah, I think that's true. And I also and I 0:23:39.280 --> 0:23:42.639 think that the the broader significance of that, to me 0:23:43.680 --> 0:23:46.480 is the sort of implication of the Dorothy Thompson who 0:23:46.560 --> 0:23:51.600 goes Nazi question, which is that the wrong understanding and 0:23:51.640 --> 0:23:56.760 the popular understanding of World War two is that the 0:23:56.840 --> 0:23:59.480 Nazis kind of am out of nowhere and are the 0:23:59.560 --> 0:24:03.320 singular evil who then must be defeated and then good 0:24:03.359 --> 0:24:07.480 triumphs and that's that, And of course it's not the case. 0:24:07.520 --> 0:24:11.160 I mean, they are profoundly evil, but they're not actually 0:24:11.480 --> 0:24:15.200