‘He’s like an upside down iceberg’: historian Jon Meacham on Joe Biden
He has been described as Joe Biden’s “historical muse”, an occasional informal adviser to the US president and contributor to some of his major speeches including the inaugural address.
In March, Jon Meacham put together a meeting between Biden and a group of fellow historians at the White House that lasted more than two hours. What did he learn about the 46th president?
“He’s like an upside down iceberg,” the Pulitzer prize-winning historian says by phone. “You see most of it and that’s not spin: there’s just not a lot of mystery to Joe Biden. The last four or five minutes of his press conference in the East Room [on 25 March] when he talked about democracy and autocracy, that was pretty much it.”
Media reports of the meeting told how Biden took notes in a black book and at one point turned to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and said, “I’m no FDR, but …” Meacham does not recall that remark, a reference to former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and does not see Biden as self-aggrandizing.
“It was not about, how do I shape my legacy? It was how have previous presidents dealt with fundamental crises. FDR came up less because of the FDR legend but more in 1933 it was an open question about whether democracy would survive the 30s. So it was how do you articulate a case for democracy with all its inherent messiness?”
This existential struggle between democracy and autocracy, highlighted by Biden repeatedly during his first 100 days as he contemplates the rising threat of China, is the president’s own
formulation and predates his meeting with the historians, Meacham says.
But to go back to that upside down iceberg metaphor, the 51-year-old author, who gave a speech at last year’s Democratic national convention, suggests that what you see with Biden is what you get. Future biographers will struggle to uncover a “real Joe Biden” that we all missed at the time. (In that sense, perhaps, we have finally found something he shares with Donald Trump.)
“I suspect 90% of what I’ve heard Joe Biden say in private for years, he says in public, and the other 10%, it’s not like there’s some secret dark side of Biden,” Meacham says. “I’m puzzled by it, honestly. I think part of it is being 78, thinking that everything was done – he had no expectation [of becoming president] in 2017.
“So I think people should take him at his word. My experience with him – and we are friends – is that he’s very straightforward. There’s not a lot of machiavellian behind-the-scenes stuff going on. That might not have been true when he was 40 but he’s now almost 80 and it is true.”
Barack Obama also hosted Goodwin and other historians at the White
prowess as an athlete, but talking to him you have a sense of exactly the kind of player he might have been – high energy, quietly, irrepressibly determined, breaking through tacklers twice his size.
Looking back, he doesn’t disagree that both fortune and fortitude played equal roles in his story. I wonder, given the deeper history that his series addresses, if he has been moved to fill in more of the gaps in his own family’s backstory?
He says not; though he has toyed with the idea of pursuing genealogy or trying to get a DNA analysis, he is not sure how far it would get him. “My personal familial history is very complicated,” he says. “I have no idea who my ‘real’ father is. And my mom was, to some degree, a runaway. She had a very rough life as a child growing up in South Carolina, and then migrated down to Miami.” As he made the series he fully realised that such fracturing was a common thread in the lives of The Underground Railroad. “Going back,” he says, “it was very much systematically part of the process that if [an enslaved woman] gave birth to a child, the child will be taken away from her.”
I have never seen a portrayal of that history that brings home so forcefully the horrible truth that babies of enslaved women were considered the property of plantation owners from birth. That fact is set alongside other depictions of the full brutality of that system. The first episode of the series contains some of the most graphic punishment and torture, including a scene in which a man, Big Anthony, who attempts to escape the plantation, is hung up by his wrists and flayed and burned.
Jenkins was surprised, he says, of the extent to which the retelling of that history affected him. “There’s no blood, there’s no fire on set,” he says. “And yet, we were on an actual plantation in Georgia. And as we’re recreating some of these moments, this feeling seeps into your body that things like this happened here. And even worse things. There was an ethical component to filming those scenes that isn’t normally a part of the process.”
There was a full-time therapist on the set, on hand to help any member of cast or crew who found it hard to process the depicted trauma. “Quite a few people spoke to her,” Jenkins says. Before the most horrific scene, the actor who plays the psychopathic plantation owner Terrance Randall [name TK] paused, and he took out his phone. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I just call my kids in London and tuck them in? Before we start this?’ And the production assistant who’s sitting next to him is like, ‘Nope, sorry, sorry, but we have to get going.’ I went up and said, ‘Let him call his kids.’ So that he can reaffirm that he is a good person and is not this person.”
Often, he says, they would start out by asking what is the least voyeuristic version of the scene for the audience? He often recalled something that Jean-Luc Godard once said in depicting the Holocaust: that the true horror was brought home not by the gas chambers but by watching their operators go home afterwards and sit at the dining table and ask their children what kind of day they’d had. Jenkins made sure, for example, there’s not a single moment where you see a whip contacting flesh. “The sound is enough.” He captures some of the worst horrors in the faces of witnesses to the torture. Even so, after he called cut on the scene with Big Anthony, he says, “For the first time in my career, I just walked off set without telling anyone where I was going.” After a little while collecting his thoughts, he returned and they continued the work.
I wonder how much he was aware of the daily noise of Trump’s America invading the set?
“Because we were in the state of Georgia, which Trump won in the 2016 election, it was red caps all around, you know. It was hard to avoid. We had to shut down because of Covid on 12 March, then we didn’t go back for the last four days of production until late September. So much happened in the world between March and September. And going back to production for those last four days, going back to the state of Georgia, that was intense.”
Watching this series reminds you that Jenkins was not born when Alex Haley’s Rootswas published and televised, a moment that seemed to mark an important public reckoning with America’s buried history, drawing a TV audience of 130 million. Given that his series is appearing while the arguments of Black Lives Matter still feel very urgent, (not to mention, during the January riot, the appalling sight of confederate flags and a hangman’s noose at the Capitol building), does he believe that this series could have a comparable impact?
He says his grandma had an old VHS recorder and there were only two choices of cassette: Roots or The Color Purple. “Maybe,” he wonders, rhetorically, “because such a massive audience showed up for Roots, maybe it makes this show unnecessary?” He has a quick answer to that question. “You know, just the fact that Kanye West could go to TMZ in 2018, and say slavery was a choice, without adding context to that statement, kind of reaffirms to me that telling these stories is still necessary.”
The day on which we are speaking is the day after the verdict in the George Floyd murder trial that saw police officer Derek Chauvin convicted on all counts. Had that felt like a rare moment of optimism for Jenkins?
“You know,” he says, “in my 41 years, which is relatively young, I still feel like I’ve seen so many damn things. Maybe I could allow myself to have optimism. But, you know, literally, as that verdict was being read, another young teenager was shot by the police. It was like, just for a moment maybe there is hope, and five minutes later that was extinguished. Maybe we can alter or abolish the systems of policing that have become so ingrained, which have their roots in people like this character Ridgeway [the slave hunter in the series]. It’s hard to be optimistic. Though my show does have a happy ending – or at least I think it does.”
That balancing sentiment of hope is hard won over his 10 episodes. He perceives it, however, in the “way that Colson threads the idea of parenting through the book – there are children everywhere in it, and we have added some more.” At the heart of it is the almost Dickensian figure of Cora, who believes she was abandoned in infancy by her mother, before going on a journey that helps her understand the sacrifices her mother made. Along the way, as well as recurrent trauma, she experiences what Jenkins sees as one of “the greatest acts of collective parenting” in human history. “Everywhere they landed, these people protected them. Everything my ancestors did was in service of the child.”
I wonder, in telling that story, how conscious he was in drawing on some of the emotions of his own childhood?
“Well,” he says, “I also felt abandoned by my mother for maybe the first 24 years of my life. And part of that was because, just like Cora, I had an incomplete history of what my mother had been through.” It was only later that he discovered more of the story of how his mother had been sexually abused, and become pregnant as a teenager, but still went on to find work in nursing and to raise three older children before crack took hold of her. “I thought that I was born and my mom just abandoned me because she suffered through this horrible addiction,” he says. “I never blamed her for it. But if I’m being honest, it was hard to not feel the sense of abandonment. So when I’m reading this book, I love that Colson allows Cora to be bitter, to be angry, because that is how that feels.” His job, he says, as a film-maker, is to show the other sides of that story, the full picture.
When he is doing so, does he acknowledge that he is also explaining his own childhood to himself ?
He smiles. “I didn’t realise this show was about my mom until we were done,” he says. “I didn’t realise Moonlight was about my mom until we were done – I thought it was about Tarell’s mom. And I think that’s good because this stuff already takes a huge chunk of flesh out of you. It would take so much more if you knowingly went into it as ‘this is my personal therapy’. But I can’t deny that when I look across this work, you know, that’s what it is.”
As a film-maker Jenkins has a couple of times said there were always three stories he wanted to tell. One was to make a very personal story about where he grew up, that was Moonlight. Then he wanted to adapt James Baldwin, so he made If Beale Street Could Talk, and the third ambition was “to do something related to the condition of American slavery.” Does he have a sense of an ending now those three projects are complete?
“I certainly think I’m moving into a new phase of my work,” he says (future projects he has been attached to are as diverse as a biopic of the black choreographer Alvin Ailey and a prequel to Disney’s The Lion King). “But you know, if I drop dead tomorrow, I think I will be okay. I always felt like I had to use the privilege, the luck of stumbling into my calling, to tell these three stories.” He smiles. “If I never make anything else again, I will still feel like my journey was fulfilled.”
The Underground Railroad is available to watch on Amazon Prime from 14 May
sional football team removing “Redskins” from its name, almost 50 high schools in the US still use the “Redskins” mascot, according to an analysis of MascotDB.The years of work by Trujillo and other like-minded community members and students in Morris to get rid of the high school’s mascot and accompanying traditions, illustrate just how challenging making such a change can be.Trujillo, a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe in Maine, attended Morris Community high school in the mid-1980s and said he remembered seeing white students dressed up like Native Americans and his peers mocking Native dances. In a particularly disturbing incident, he said a school coach repeatedly referred to him as a “Redskin”.
The experiences, Trujillo said, resulted in him leaving the school in the 11th grade.In the ensuing decades, he has attended school board meetings, arguing for the removal of the mascot, called and sent numerous emails to school officials, and also distributed reports and studies on the issue.Within the past two years, he said he had noticed a positive shift. School athletic uniforms now tend to feature the letter “M” rather than the mascot and the football field turf doesn’t feature the word “Redskins”, he explained. And then last month when he drove out to the school, he said he was stunned to see the large “Welcome to Redskins country” sign gone.“I actually had to drive around the block because I couldn’t believe it,” he said.There has also been movement at the state level.
Trujillo has been working with the Illinois representative Maurice West, a Democrat, on legislation that would prohibit schools in Illinois from having a Native American logo or mascot unless it receives express approval from local tribes.
Taylor Raffe, who graduated from Morris 16 years ago, has Native ancestry and has also been working to change the mascot, said recently she had noticed overall more support for this effort from the community, including school board members.“There’s actually a good majority of the town that seems to be in support of changing it,” she said.
Over the summer they held a protest in front of the school and most cars that went by honked in support of getting rid of the mascot, according to Trujillo.Several weeks ago, the board of education launched a committee to examine the issue in part in response to Trujillo’s concerns. Raffe and Trujillo both serve on the committee and said at the second meeting a consensus was taken and the vast majority of members supported replacing the mascot.But just days later, and after the first home game of the season did not feature a student dressed in what was meant to be Native regalia, according to current students, it was a surprise for many involved in this effort when the then mayor-elect Chris Brown’s daughter appeared on the field (Brown, who has since been sworn into office, did not return a message seeking comment).
“I was under the impression that we weren’t going to do it any more,” said Alex Duffy, 18, Morris’s student body president who supports replacing the mascot. “I think that’s kind of because we assembled this committee, it’s being seriously looked at it, there’s legislation right now.”Trujillo said he was less surprised and more angry about the events at the game because he felt he had been lied to. He said despite the series of recent positive changes, he was left wondering how to get this work back on track after this latest blow.“It is very challenging, because you’re dealing with people who have been told their whole lives, by their fathers, their grandfathers, their coaches, their teacher, that it’s honoring, it’s honoring, it’s honoring,” he said. “So they tend to believe it.”