Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds. We are on vacation, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean we don't have a great show for you Today.
Speaker 1: The New Yorker's own John Cebrook stops by to talk
Speaker 1: about his new book, The Spinach King, The Rise and
Speaker 1: Fall of an American Dynasty. But first we have MSNBC's
Speaker 1: The Weekend anchor Jonathan k Part to talk about his
Speaker 1: new book, Yet Here I Am Lessons from a Black
Speaker 1: Man Search for Home. Welcome to Vast Politics, Jonathan cape.
Speaker 2: Part, Hey, Molly, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited to have you.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I'm a little horse.
Speaker 1: Let's start with this book. I want to know sort
Speaker 1: of how you decided to write this, what the way was,
Speaker 1: And I want to know for my own ratification, how
Speaker 1: scary it is to write about ourselves.
Speaker 2: You know, during the Trump years, the first years in
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen, as a way of escaping sort of the
Speaker 2: mayhem of the first Trump years, I decided, you know what,
Speaker 2: all these stories that I've had in my head about
Speaker 2: my summers as a kid at my grandparents A's in
Speaker 2: North Carolina. I need to write these down. They're very
Speaker 2: vivid memories, very formative in terms of how I see
Speaker 2: the world, how I see the country, how I view race,
Speaker 2: and so I just wrote them down. They became the
Speaker 2: shorthand was the down South chapter, all about going Jehovah's
Speaker 2: witnessing with my grandmother and the people and who we
Speaker 2: talked to and relatives, and I sent it around to friends.
Speaker 2: I sent it around to three specific people, April, Ryan,
Speaker 2: Tammeron Hall, and Joy Read, and I asked, what do
Speaker 2: you think of this? Each one individually said this is incredible.
Speaker 2: Keep going, And so I kept going. I didn't have
Speaker 2: a publisher or anything. I just wrote and would send
Speaker 2: them and other people like, yeah, here's another story, here's
Speaker 2: some more pages, and they just encourage me to keep going.
Speaker 2: And so when I got the book contract years later,
Speaker 2: I had two particular books in mind that formed how
Speaker 2: I would go about writing this very personal book. The
Speaker 2: first one was by Katherine Graham, her By Autobiography, personal history.
Speaker 2: If anyone listening hasn't read it, you should pick it
Speaker 2: up because it is raw, honest. Katherine Graham was the
Speaker 2: most powerful woman in journalism in her time, and one
Speaker 2: of the most powerful women in the country, and yet
Speaker 2: in her book she talks about her fraught relationship with
Speaker 2: her mother, She talks about her own insecurities being publisher
Speaker 2: of The Washington Post. It was really when I read
Speaker 2: it in the late nineties early two thousands, it was
Speaker 2: incredibly refreshing to read something so powerful and honest from
Speaker 2: someone so important. And then fast forward twenty years to
Speaker 2: Charles Blow's memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones and
Speaker 2: again raw, honest, candid, introspective, and it was wonderful to
Speaker 2: read because it put into perspective and context the passion
Speaker 2: that fueled Charles's columns in the New York Times. And
Speaker 2: so I thought, if I were to ever get a
Speaker 2: book contract, that's the way I will write my book.
Speaker 2: I will be raw, I will be honest about my
Speaker 2: successes but also my failures, absolutely honest about my failures
Speaker 2: and shortcomings. And when I got the contract, that's exactly
Speaker 2: what I did. Oh and our mutual friend Richie Jackson,
Speaker 2: when I really started writing, gave me the best piece
Speaker 2: of advice because he had just finished writing Gay Like Me,
Speaker 2: and he said, Jonathan, put yourself on every page, be
Speaker 2: sure to do that. That's what I did, so, with
Speaker 2: Katherine Graham on one side, Charles Blow on the other side,
Speaker 2: and Richie Jackson sitting on my head, I went about
Speaker 2: putting myself on every page so that when people read
Speaker 2: the book, yet here I am, they will understand that
Speaker 2: perhaps maybe the image they have of me all buttoned
Speaker 2: up and looking rather nice and everything. You know. My
Speaker 2: hope is that they will see that that's just their
Speaker 2: image of me. It's not fully who I am.
Speaker 1: We both have written these very personal memoirs, and I
Speaker 1: feel like one of the things that is sort of
Speaker 1: the hallmark of the Trump administration is that they kind
Speaker 1: of go after you for anything they can. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've seen that. I think of like Eugene, they were,
Speaker 1: you know, trolling him for just any number of things
Speaker 1: one of the things. And they've certainly told me endlessly.
Speaker 1: And I was always very careful about my public information
Speaker 1: because of my mother. She had a stalker, and so
Speaker 1: we were always very careful because we always knew that
Speaker 1: guy was coming for us. But I just wonder, here
Speaker 1: we are writing these very personal thinkes I am having
Speaker 1: the same experience in some ways for me, is very scary.
Speaker 2: I did not grow up in the way that you did,
Speaker 2: and so for you, safety and security is ever present.
Speaker 2: You know that wasn't my upbringing. So as you know
Speaker 2: I'm writing this, I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking
Speaker 2: about who am I going to help by being this honest?
Speaker 2: And by that I mean, yes, I'm an outgay black man,
Speaker 2: But there are pieces of my story and experience that
Speaker 2: are universal. And my hope is when people read this
Speaker 2: that they will see parts of themselves, pieces of themselves,
Speaker 2: or if they don't, an experience that I've got that
Speaker 2: I've written about that maybe they're going through now or
Speaker 2: they went through and it gets them to think about
Speaker 2: it in a different way. That has been my goal
Speaker 2: the other goal. One goal is here, get to know
Speaker 2: me better, and the other goal is, Hey, through these
Speaker 2: experiences I you will take to heart some of the
Speaker 2: lessons that are you know, sprinkled throughout the book.
Speaker 1: It's funny because it's like the experience of being able
Speaker 1: to be who you are in the world is pretty
Speaker 1: new phenomenon. I mean, one hundred years ago, it wasn't that.
Speaker 1: Why for example, I talk about being sober all the
Speaker 1: time because I want to destigmatize alcoholism. I want to say,
Speaker 1: you don't have to be ashamed. You can get sober,
Speaker 1: you can go to AI, nobody's judging you, and you
Speaker 1: can have this amazing life. So I do wonder how
Speaker 1: important it is for us just by the sheer facts
Speaker 1: of being an out gay man, being someone who's an
Speaker 1: alcoholic who got sober when they were teenager, Like, how
Speaker 1: important that just that is in the world.
Speaker 2: It's very important. I'll speak for myself, you know, I've
Speaker 2: always wanted to be a journalist. Becoming an opinion writer.
Speaker 2: An opinion columnist was not, you know, in the life plan.
Speaker 2: But when I realized that this platform that I'd been given,
Speaker 2: when my editor said, hey, you should write columns, and
Speaker 2: I started, you know, putting more and more of myself
Speaker 2: in the columns, is when I started hearing from people.
Speaker 2: When I started hearing you know, hey, I never thought
Speaker 2: of it that way, especially on matters of race. When
Speaker 2: I started realizing that my audience was you know, heavily
Speaker 2: African American, but it was also non people of color,
Speaker 2: and for many of them, I was their gateway. I
Speaker 2: was there entree to understanding stuff that was happening. So
Speaker 2: when Trayvon Martin was killed, and I wrote the column
Speaker 2: that talked about the talk and the rules that I
Speaker 2: was told, you know, don't run in public, definitely, don't
Speaker 2: run with anything in your hands in public. All the
Speaker 2: things that I do, the number of people I heard
Speaker 2: from who said I never knew this. I had one
Speaker 2: colleague at MSNBC come up to me in the weeks
Speaker 2: after tears in her eye and he said, she said,
Speaker 2: I never knew that those conversations were happening. She said
Speaker 2: her son's best friend was black, and that he was
Speaker 2: over their house all the time. She knew his parents
Speaker 2: and everything, but she never knew that when he left
Speaker 2: their home, the conversations that were happening. And so once
Speaker 2: you understand that, the responsibility that comes with that. I
Speaker 2: looked at that as Okay, I see people are looking
Speaker 2: to me to guide them, and it's not my responsibility personally,
Speaker 2: but professionally sure. And the more I hear from people
Speaker 2: who say, you know, you helped me, the more you realize, Wow,
Speaker 2: with this platform comes responsibility and so how am I
Speaker 2: going to use that? And so I've been using it,
Speaker 2: putting it in service of helping move the dialogue, help
Speaker 2: people I don't know, get beyond their pretty conceived notions
Speaker 2: or their hard fast beliefs because they trust me. That's
Speaker 2: the hope I.
Speaker 3: Have found for me.
Speaker 1: That it's been a very destabilizing time in American life.
Speaker 1: You know, we have gone from backlash to backlash to backlash.
Speaker 1: Have you found it destabilizing?
Speaker 2: Destabilizing in the sense that the world as we knew
Speaker 2: it has been completely.
Speaker 1: Upended again and again and again.
Speaker 2: Right, and so the shock and trauma of twenty seventeen
Speaker 2: now looks quaint compared to what we're going through. And
Speaker 2: so you know, with his reelection, I knew right away
Speaker 2: that I needed to protect my own inner piece, my
Speaker 2: own sanity, And so you know, I don't. I mean,
Speaker 2: I pay attention to the news and watch the news,
Speaker 2: but I make sure that I have breaks, and I'm
Speaker 2: make sure that by protecting my inner piece, I don't
Speaker 2: burn myself out. Because of what I was saying before,
Speaker 2: there are lots of people who are looking to me,
Speaker 2: looking to you, looking to many of our colleagues to
Speaker 2: help guide them through this really tough time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's right. When you're talking about this,
Speaker 1: I think so much about how we have I mean,
Speaker 1: there's so much disruption, such short intervals. And I think
Speaker 1: a lot about this interview I did with this tech
Speaker 1: billionaire who I was interviewing, and I was like mad
Speaker 1: at him because I think he's a bad guy pretending
Speaker 1: to be a good guy. He was saying that the
Speaker 1: level of disruption that has happened because of I mean,
Speaker 1: I didn't grow up with the phone. We didn't have
Speaker 1: phone that they're just this with, Like the world that
Speaker 1: I grew.
Speaker 3: Up in is gone. You know.
Speaker 1: I come from nineteen nineties magazine like everything that I
Speaker 1: was taught to believe. I mean, it's so funny for
Speaker 1: me to go back to writing a book because I
Speaker 1: come from writing books, so that you know, I've seen
Speaker 1: the magazine rule just appended in every different way. But
Speaker 1: books are, in its own way, the same terrible business
Speaker 1: that they've always been.
Speaker 2: I will, I will take your word for it, because
Speaker 2: this is my first book, and it has been an
Speaker 2: interesting process. Writing the book is actually what was fun.
Speaker 2: You know. I look at writing as you know, putting
Speaker 2: together a jigsaw puzzle. Writing the column is a five
Speaker 2: hundred piece puzzle. Writing this book was a ten thousand
Speaker 2: piece puzzle of blue sky, green trees and sand and
Speaker 2: trying to figure that out was fun. But then afterwards,
Speaker 2: no one told me that I had to read more
Speaker 2: than one you know, edited draft of the book. By
Speaker 2: the time I read the fourth you know, final pass through,
Speaker 2: I was like, God, damn it, I'm bored. So it's
Speaker 2: going to read this book and then have to do that.
Speaker 2: It's the whole build up to lunch, and then there's
Speaker 2: the lunch. I mean, you've been through this, not.
Speaker 1: For ten years, not for a long time, so I
Speaker 1: mean it's a little bit different than it used to be,
Speaker 1: and the fact that everything has changed, the fact that
Speaker 1: the entire world has changed. But I do think when
Speaker 1: you have to read, when you're reading the book again
Speaker 1: and again, what I find for me that's hard is
Speaker 1: and why I'm not a good editor of my own work,
Speaker 1: which is actually something that's important and it's good to
Speaker 1: be good at, is because when I read things too
Speaker 1: many times, I sort of fall in love with the
Speaker 1: worst parts of it. You know, I love very flowery writing.
Speaker 1: I'm obsessed with pros. I've gotten worse about that in
Speaker 1: my older age, so especially in the world of AI,
Speaker 1: I just am so delighted when things are beautiful and
Speaker 1: feel like Diddy and that even if they don't move
Speaker 1: this story along, I don't give a fuck, which you know,
Speaker 1: it's not actually what anyone wants. I wonder if we
Speaker 1: could talk for a minute about kind of staying sane
Speaker 1: in a crazy world. And during the election, I was
Speaker 1: on television at the very I was on for the
Speaker 1: coveted three am to six Am spot. When I went
Speaker 1: to go sit down at the desk, I saw Rachel
Speaker 1: Matta and I sat to her like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: how the fuck are we going to survive this? And
Speaker 1: she said, You're going to get up tomorrow morning. You're
Speaker 1: going to go on Morning Joe, and you're going to
Speaker 1: help these people because you know this idea that we're
Speaker 1: going to get up there and just tell people the
Speaker 1: news and help them get through it. Is that what
Speaker 1: drives you? And how do you do it?
Speaker 2: As you were asking that question, I was pulling out
Speaker 2: my book because I know I have the perfect answer.
Speaker 2: You know, during Trump one, I was just trying to
Speaker 2: cope with the torrent of news. I was reading David
Speaker 2: Blight's Mammoth biography of Frederick Douglas, and in the introduction
Speaker 2: there was this paragraph that was so sweeping in its
Speaker 2: scope that it gave me perspective, the perspective I needed
Speaker 2: to give me hope. I want to read it if
Speaker 2: you don't mind. This is from David Blite. He's writing
Speaker 2: about Frederick Douglas. He writes, the orator and writer lived
Speaker 2: to see an interpret black emancipation, to work actively for
Speaker 2: women's rights long before they were achieved, to realize the
Speaker 2: civil rights triumphs and tragedies of reconstruction, and to witness
Speaker 2: and contribute to America's economic and international expansion in the
Speaker 2: Gilded Age. He lived to the age of lynching and
Speaker 2: Jim Crow laws, when America collapsed into retreat from the
Speaker 2: very victories and revolutions in race relations he helped to win,
Speaker 2: and I go on to write. What gave me hope,
Speaker 2: in Blite's words, was the sweep of Douglas's life. A
Speaker 2: man who was born a slave and escaped, who was
Speaker 2: a celebrated orator against the sin of slavery and saw
Speaker 2: the end of that evil institution. Douglas played a part
Speaker 2: in the nation reaching toward its founding ideals during Reconstruction,
Speaker 2: and then the great man lived long enough to see
Speaker 2: all the gains he fought for the reverse by Congress,
Speaker 2: the courts, and the President during the terror of the
Speaker 2: Jim Crow era. My story is proof that Douglas's fight
Speaker 2: was not lost, that as bad as things are, they
Speaker 2: won't stay that way. I am a descendant of slaves
Speaker 2: whose parents were born and raised in the segregated Jim
Speaker 2: Crow South. My cousins and I are the first generation
Speaker 2: in our family who didn't have to pick cotton. My
Speaker 2: story is the story of an only child, mama's boy,
Speaker 2: who had dreams of being a journalist and no roadmap
Speaker 2: for how to achieve them. I'm a black man who
Speaker 2: writes for the Washington Post, anchors a show on MSNBC,
Speaker 2: and serves as a political analyst on PBS News Hour.
Speaker 2: And I'm an out gay man who was able to
Speaker 2: marry the man I love and have the ceremony officiated
Speaker 2: by the Attorney General of the United States, who made
Speaker 2: a key determination that made it possible. Think about that
Speaker 2: the sweep of Douglas's life. What that showed me was
Speaker 2: history happens in a cycle. We go in a cycle.
Speaker 2: History is not linear. It whins, and for every step forward,
Speaker 2: there might be three steps back. And so for me
Speaker 2: to read those words about Frederick Douglas in that year
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen, how could I not look at that and think, Wow,
Speaker 2: I should remain hopeful. It put for me everything into perspective.
Speaker 2: You know what I like in it too, what I
Speaker 2: tell people, think of it as being on a really bad,
Speaker 2: turbulent flight. It's uncomfortable, you hate it, You palms are sweaty,
Speaker 2: your heart's racing. You think you're gonna die, but you don't.
Speaker 2: You literally get through it. It is my hope that
Speaker 2: as bad as these times are, as turbulent as these
Speaker 2: times are, that we will get through it on the
Speaker 2: other side. But no one should fool themselves into thinking
Speaker 2: that it's not going to be rough. You know, it's
Speaker 2: sort of like the pilot has already come on and said,
Speaker 2: flight attendants and beverage service get back in your seats.
Speaker 2: We're going to go. We're going through some rough air,
Speaker 2: and the pilot doesn't tell you how long it's going
Speaker 2: to last.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 2: Jonathan Gabar, Thanks Molly.
Speaker 1: John Seabrook is a contributor to the New Yorker and
Speaker 1: the author of The Spinach King, The Rise and Fall
Speaker 1: of an American Dynasty. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 3: John Seabrook, thank you Molly for having me on your show.
Speaker 1: We both have memoirs that are about to come out
Speaker 1: and ergo, we must talk to each other.
Speaker 2: It is the law.
Speaker 1: And also we must talk about your book, which comes out.
Speaker 1: We have the exact same pub date. This it's kismett.
Speaker 1: You write for The New Yorker. I write for Baddy Fair.
Speaker 3: It's all the Conday thing.
Speaker 1: Yes, we both worked for the Conde Nast Empire. The
Speaker 1: book is called The Spinach King. It's funny because when
Speaker 1: we were talking about it, I said, what's your book called?
Speaker 1: And you said The Spanish King? And I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: it doesn't make any sense. The Spinach King, the Rise
Speaker 1: and Fall of an American Dynasty. It's funny because it's
Speaker 1: like my family writers, but also a lot of like
Speaker 1: herring merchants and people who didn't accumulate any wealth. Explain
Speaker 1: to us sort of your family story and how you
Speaker 1: got here.
Speaker 3: So yeah, the book is about my family who emigrated
Speaker 3: to America in eighteen fifty nine. My great great grandfather
Speaker 3: was that man. He was just a working class English guy.
Speaker 3: The Industrial Revolution kind of forced out. He arrived in
Speaker 3: New York in eighteen fifty nine with his two children
Speaker 3: and his wife, and he ended up down in the
Speaker 3: very southern part of New Jersey on a small farm.
Speaker 3: He didn't live that much longer, but his son, whose
Speaker 3: name is Arthur, with my great grandfather. He was apprenticed
Speaker 3: to a local farmer and learned the kind of high
Speaker 3: end vegetable growing business, which there used to be a
Speaker 3: lot of farms around New York that grew vegetables. People
Speaker 3: needed them. As the city developed, they got pushed further out,
Speaker 3: and by that time they were sort of you know,
Speaker 3: out in Connecticut or New Jersey, but they supplied the
Speaker 3: cities with you know, high end produce, kind of a
Speaker 3: farm to table operation. Really, he had a small farm,
Speaker 3: and my grandfather was born on that farm in eighteen
Speaker 3: eighty one, and so he kind of came of age
Speaker 3: in the Gilded Age, and his heroes were robber barons,
Speaker 3: you know, who did everything they could to make money
Speaker 3: and disregarded the law at almost every turn they could
Speaker 3: get away with. And he formed his idea of who
Speaker 3: he wanted to be during that era and from those men.
Speaker 3: And even though he was just a picky, you little
Speaker 3: farmer down in South Jersey. You know, he had these
Speaker 3: big ambitions and what he was going to do was
Speaker 3: industrialize the vegetable growing and packaging business, you know, because
Speaker 3: that was what he started with. Henry Ford was kind
Speaker 3: of his role model. So he wanted to create a
Speaker 3: factory that would produce vegetables on a very large scale,
Speaker 3: and he managed to do that and eventually created a
Speaker 3: frozen vegetable factory called Sebra Farms, which some of your
Speaker 3: listeners actually may know. It was quite a popular brand
Speaker 3: in the fifties and you can still find the frozen
Speaker 3: Queen spinach in some places, even though my family doesn't
Speaker 3: make anymore. So he became this kind of late Robber
Speaker 3: Baron style industrialist, and because it was an agricultural business,
Speaker 3: it required thousands of workers, and over the twentieth century,
Speaker 3: those workers were harder and harder to find because it
Speaker 3: was farm work, so he had to look further and
Speaker 3: further afield. So waves and waves of immigrants came down
Speaker 3: to South Jersey and lived in a town that he built.
Speaker 3: It was like a pullman town. It was actually called Seabrook,
Speaker 3: and he owned all the housing.
Speaker 1: So like Elon Musk.
Speaker 3: If you wanted to make America great again and say
Speaker 3: this is the America that we're thinking of, you couldn't
Speaker 3: do better than look at Seabrook Farms as a model
Speaker 3: for what that looks like.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 3: It was run entirely by white Protestant men. Women had
Speaker 3: no role in upper management, people of color were not
Speaker 3: treated the same way as white people. There was corruption throughout,
Speaker 3: and yet it was all sort of represented as this
Speaker 3: kind of bootstrapping American dream, rags to riches kind of
Speaker 3: story that became a big part of the brand, and
Speaker 3: the brand story really became kind of who we all were.
Speaker 3: You know, I was born in nineteen fifty nine, so
Speaker 3: the business was kind of declining by that point. But
Speaker 3: the brand and the story of how the Seabrooks became
Speaker 3: who they were was all sort of manipulated for commercial reasons.
Speaker 3: And I think if the family, if I said, one
Speaker 3: reason why it all fell apart is that the family
Speaker 3: and the brand became so confused that people didn't know
Speaker 3: what whether their value was as a family member or
Speaker 3: as kind of like a brand member. And it led
Speaker 3: to enormous conflict between my father and his father and
Speaker 3: Eventually it was a succession battle that brought the company
Speaker 3: down and my father was disowned and we moved away
Speaker 3: to another place. So it's the story of all of that.
Speaker 3: And I would say, my just to one the thing
Speaker 3: that I mean, many families maybe have a narrative somewhat
Speaker 3: like that. But it's interesting in this case because my
Speaker 3: father and my grandfather were born forty years apart. My
Speaker 3: grandfather was sort of, you know, born in the age
Speaker 3: of the Robber Bearents. My father came of age in
Speaker 3: the New Deal era, and so his attitude toward workers'
Speaker 3: rights and unionization and women in the workplace were formed
Speaker 3: during the sort of birth of the liberal tradition that
Speaker 3: we kind of grew up with, whereas my grandfather came
Speaker 3: out of this kind of make America Great McKinley tradition.
Speaker 3: So in their conflict, you see a conflict that our
Speaker 3: country has faced and continues to face, between a kind
Speaker 3: of liberal tradition and an illiberal tradition, if you want
Speaker 3: to call it, that represented by my father and my grandfather.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so interesting.
Speaker 1: So there's a generational divide here.
Speaker 3: There's a generational divide that's that also kind of frames
Speaker 3: a national divide in how we think of our country,
Speaker 3: how we go about creating corporations, and what we think
Speaker 3: of capitalism and how free a hand capitalists should have.
Speaker 3: And you know, I think the tech burrows of today
Speaker 3: were very much like a hand like my grandfather had
Speaker 3: in you know, nineteen twenty to do what he wanted.
Speaker 3: And maybe they're going.
Speaker 2: To get it.
Speaker 3: But you know, it's interesting to see how that played
Speaker 3: out and how corruption and lies and secrets and tests
Speaker 3: of loyalty until no one could really be loyal enough
Speaker 3: to my grandfather. How all that played out, and think
Speaker 3: about how other autocracies, authoritarian regimes have played out and
Speaker 3: find the common ground there. That's one way to read it,
Speaker 3: you know, as a kind of a parable of an
Speaker 3: autocracy and what brings them down.
Speaker 1: When you're in this sort of famelial struggle when it
Speaker 1: comes to familial wealth, is there a lot of bad
Speaker 1: blood still in the family? And also where does this
Speaker 1: book fall in that.
Speaker 3: When I started researching the book, I mean, so I
Speaker 3: grew up with you know, the brand story basically, and
Speaker 3: my image of my grandfather was a positive one, and
Speaker 3: it really wasn't until I started researching the book that
Speaker 3: I discovered all this sort of horrifying stuff that my
Speaker 3: family had done to preserve their power, particularly during the
Speaker 3: thirties when there was a massive strike at Seabrook Farms
Speaker 3: that led by African American workers, which was extraordinarily courageous
Speaker 3: at the time, and it was crushed with violence vigilantes.
Speaker 3: Even the KKK, the New Jersey KKK, which was actually
Speaker 3: kind of prevalent in those days, were brought in to
Speaker 3: put down this strike. You know, my image of my
Speaker 3: family changed as I, you know, discovered more and more
Speaker 3: of this stuff. And by the way, I I wouldn't
Speaker 3: have probably known this stuff, except that all these regional
Speaker 3: newspapers that used to exist that no longer exists ended
Speaker 3: up getting digitized and put on newspapers dot Com so
Speaker 3: you could search them, so I could find these kind
Speaker 3: of daily stories of what happened, and you know, on
Speaker 3: a particular day in nineteen thirty four that I never
Speaker 3: would have known anyway. So then I had all this
Speaker 3: information and it was like, Okay, I'm writing kind of
Speaker 3: an expost say of my family. Now I'm investigating my family.
Speaker 3: I'm taking my journalistic skills which I learned, you know,
Speaker 3: apart from my family working for The New Yorker, and
Speaker 3: now I'm actually bringing them to bear my family, and
Speaker 3: that actually was a very difficult thing to deal with.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think one of the unique things maybe
Speaker 3: about this book is you don't really read like insider
Speaker 3: expos days of wealthy families written by one of the
Speaker 3: family members who are willing to tell the truth and
Speaker 3: who have decided to tell the truth and are willing
Speaker 3: to risk alienating family members because the truth is more important.
Speaker 3: And in this case, because all these workers whose stories
Speaker 3: weren't really being told truly, who had contributed their lives
Speaker 3: to Seabrooke Farms and were treated badly by my grandfather
Speaker 3: and my uncles and maybe my father too, I felt
Speaker 3: I was kind of doing it for them, partly too,
Speaker 3: to sort of you know, there's a a social justice
Speaker 3: piece of this because of the nature of my family's
Speaker 3: agricultural work and the things they had done. So I
Speaker 3: did have a decision to make, you know, should I
Speaker 3: should I tell? Should I if this really is going
Speaker 3: to damage my family? Should I do this? I don't know.
Speaker 3: In the end, maybe I didn't really have a choice.
Speaker 3: I had to do it, you know, I had to do.
Speaker 2: It right because the truth is what matters. Right.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's you know, speaking to someone who in
Speaker 1: this book writes about my own family. I mean, doesn't
Speaker 1: it feel like there's just no other choices, Like why
Speaker 1: even bother going on if we're not going to tell
Speaker 1: the truth.
Speaker 3: And I think it helps us understand our families better.
Speaker 3: And in your case, your mother and your relationship with
Speaker 3: your mother. In my case, it was my father, although
Speaker 3: my mother is also in the book, But I had
Speaker 3: a difficult relationship with my father. And part of the
Speaker 3: reason I realized that was so was because he had
Speaker 3: a very difficult relationship with his father that I didn't
Speaker 3: really know the details of until I started researching this book.
Speaker 3: And then when I discovered all this shit that he
Speaker 3: had to deal with and what he put up with
Speaker 3: from his father and who'd really tried to destroy him,
Speaker 3: I felt like, oh, now I get it. This is
Speaker 3: why you had such difficulty as a father because you
Speaker 3: didn't have a role model for a father, and under
Speaker 3: in that context, you actually did really well. This was
Speaker 3: after he was gone, so it was it was, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of all reconcili after he was dead, But it
Speaker 3: actually meant a lot to me to come to that
Speaker 3: place through that work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that the big question is why it
Speaker 1: is sort of why write about your family and why
Speaker 1: and sort of what the lessons are there in the end,
Speaker 1: you know, we cannot be held responsible for the crimes
Speaker 1: of our parents, but we certainly can learn from them.
Speaker 3: The thing about this story is that there were thousands
Speaker 3: and thousands of immigrants whose life stories are immeshed with
Speaker 3: my story, with my family story, beginning with early twentieth
Speaker 3: century with Italian immigrants. And during the Second World War,
Speaker 3: two thousand Japanese internees came from the concentration camps to
Speaker 3: Seabrook farms and reinvented their lives there and many of
Speaker 3: them remained. And then after the war, hundreds of Estonian
Speaker 3: displaced persons came from the DP camps in Eastern Europe
Speaker 3: and they were sponsored my by grandfather, who who you know,
Speaker 3: was always looking for labor that he could control. But
Speaker 3: they see my grandfather as their savior, right wows as
Speaker 3: the person who like the American that reaffirmed their belief
Speaker 3: in America, particularly for the Japanese Americans after you know,
Speaker 3: the people that they thought were their protectors had actually
Speaker 3: rounded them up and thrown them into these camps. But
Speaker 3: of course with my grandfather, it was like an ideal
Speaker 3: employment situation. I think he got these people they had
Speaker 3: to stay, and there was no place for them to
Speaker 3: go anyway, And then they lived in houses that he
Speaker 3: rented to them. He was getting tenants who could easily
Speaker 3: be evicted if they didn't work or they didn't pay
Speaker 3: their rent or and their rents were taken out of
Speaker 3: their salaries. So and the housing was completely segregated by color.
Speaker 3: It was a bizarre situation that still resonates today and
Speaker 3: in those families and their children. You know, I'm going
Speaker 3: to present the book down there at the big reunion
Speaker 3: of the Japanese Americans who their descendants who came this summer.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm not really sure how it's going to
Speaker 3: go down because it's it's really challenging a lot of
Speaker 3: assumptions they made about my family as this kind of
Speaker 3: the good Americans. So it's not just me, you know,
Speaker 3: it's their stories too that intersect with my story. But
Speaker 3: I feel like the narrative has to be corrected. We
Speaker 3: can't live with the because the people who control the
Speaker 3: past control the present, right, And if we know this
Speaker 3: from our current day, and if the people, if the
Speaker 3: past is portrayed as this kind of wonderful, utopian, nostalgic,
Speaker 3: you know, crime free, stress free, you know, gender not
Speaker 3: free world, then that is going to be the world
Speaker 3: that politicians try to create for us today. But it's
Speaker 3: a lie. And in my case, certainly in our case,
Speaker 3: it's a lie. And I think in the MAGA case
Speaker 3: it's also a lie, but I know that it's a
Speaker 3: lie in my case.
Speaker 1: What is so meaningful about this story is that we
Speaker 1: can see how important it is to the MAGA to control,
Speaker 1: to try and control them, right, Like they're banning books.
Speaker 1: Our literacy rate is what, like before than thirty percent
Speaker 1: of Americans can't read at a fourth grade level. So
Speaker 1: these are people can't even read these books, but they're
Speaker 1: banning them. And there's a reason for that, and that's
Speaker 1: because they know that history is i mean, the whole
Speaker 1: endless discourse on the books about American history. That is
Speaker 1: because they know this is such a central data.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, you know, and when he talks about like making
Speaker 3: America great again, like what is this place where it
Speaker 3: was great?
Speaker 2: Always?
Speaker 3: Very sort of fuzzy and vague, and because it's fuzzy
Speaker 3: and vague, you think, oh, well, maybe that was kind
Speaker 3: of nice. But when you see an actual example of that,
Speaker 3: which is what Seabrook Farms was, and you know how
Speaker 3: it began, how it was sustained, and how it ended,
Speaker 3: it's very educational. This is one possible outcome of where
Speaker 3: we're going. If we don't change directions, and it ends
Speaker 3: very badly. It ends very badly. If they don't ban
Speaker 3: this book, maybe somebody will. We'll get that out of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so important and interesting in the question of whether
Speaker 1: or not you can ever kind of go back to
Speaker 1: your family's history and what that looks like. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Thank you, John.
Speaker 3: I haven't read your book yet, Molly, but I'm super
Speaker 3: excited to read your book.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
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