Campbell Conversations

*/ ?>

Latest Episodes:

Kailee Buller on the Campbell Conversations Jun 27, 2026

Show notes

Kailee BullerProgram transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Last week I interviewed Congressman John Mannion, the Democrat who represents New York's 22nd Congressional District. Today, I'm talking with the Republican who wants to replace him after the November elections, Kailee Buller. Miss Buller has a background in the food industry and has served in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, most recently as a chief of staff, which is a top government leadership position. The 22nd district contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland, and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica, and Auburn. Miss Buller, welcome to the program.Kailee Buller: Grant, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here, and I really appreciate that you're, you know, giving John and I both an opportunity to talk to your listeners.GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time, that's for sure. So let me start with a basic question that I know you could talk about the whole half an hour, but if you could just be brief to get us going and then we'll get into some more details as we go. But if you could just briefly make the case that Congressman Mannion should not be returned to office. That's the, you know, that's a standard challenger question.KB: Yeah, I have a lot of views on that. But I really want to introduce myself to your listeners a little bit of background about me before we start kind of hitting on him, if that's okay.GR: Fine. Go ahead.KB: Yeah. I mean, for my perspective, I'm Kailee Buller. I grew up in Auburn and I was born and raised, my dad, corrections officer, retired after 41 years, my mom's a nurse. And I, you know, as a high achiever, went away to Syracuse University for a year. And like many people my age, I'm 37, couldn't afford to stay there and get more loans so I transferred to state school and graduated in 2011. And there were not a lot of jobs in the area. And I made the decision, the hard decision to move away from my family and go find a place where there were more jobs and more opportunities. So, I moved away to DC and I made a really good career for myself and met my husband, had three kids who are five, three and two. So I'm a mom and a wife, and I've worked really hard. And you talked a little bit about where I was, but I started, had no connections in DC, started as a tax and fiscal policy expert, or analyst really, right out of college and worked on bipartisan issues for the grocery industry, for the corn and soy industry, and served in both administrations for the Department of Agriculture, and really capped off my career as the chief of staff of USDA, where we are now. I resigned that position to run in this race. And so, I have been in DC for a number of years where I've gotten a lot of experience working across the aisle and seeing the inner workings of Congress, of two administrations and of private sector. So, I have a really good background, a really good experience, and really what I want to do, I have my loans paid off three years ago, my debt is paid off and I want to come back to this district and deliver in a way that is not happening right now. Central New York is being left behind. New York State has the highest tax in the whole nation, worst housing situation, sixth highest energy costs. And so we can get into Mannion’s record and why I want to do this, but part of why I want to do this is because I have a unique skill set that can deliver for the people that I grew up with, and I'm seeing them being left behind every single time I'm here. The poor are getting poorer, the tax are getting higher. People are leaving New York State in droves, 500,000. Nearly 25 billion in gross, you know, revenue has left the state since 2020 and central New York is really feeling that.GR: Okay, thank you, and congratulations on the loans, that's always a big moment. Just one, quick follow up, factual thing. You've mentioned a couple times that you worked in two administrations. I just want to make clear those were the first Trump administration and then the current Trump administration, correct?KB: Yes, sir. I worked in both Trump administrations. And between those times, I did a lot of work with the Obama and the Biden administrations on the outside.GR: Got it. Okay, thank you. Well, so, you mentioned several things that you're concerned about, this particular area, some of them related to New York State, others more general. Just if you could then, as a brief thing, what are the kinds of things that you think Congressman Mannion in particular has done that have contributed to that problem or, you know, not, at least not helped? Can you be more specific about him?KB: Absolutely. So, this district is one of the more moderate districts in the entire country. There's only about 36-ish of them, and this is one of them. It's a Democrat plus four district. We've had a lot of incredible statesmen who have represented this district from Katko to Hanna, Anne Marie Buerkle, etc.. He has been very different than them in the fact that he has really party line voted and not voted with the district. And I'll give you a few examples for that.GR: Okay.KB: No tax on tips, he voted no. This is a very, you know, blue collar, a lot of people work in restaurant and food and bar, he voted no on that. Kathy Hochul supports no tax on tips. I would say he's to the left of Kathy Hochul on that topic. He voted no on no tax on Social Security. The median average age of this district is 52 to 54. Social security is really near and dear to many of our constituents’ hearts. So voting no on no tax and Social Security is in the can really help. You know, our average median income is below 70k. So we're on the poorer side on districts as well, and so these things can really help. He voted no on the childcare tax credit. As a mom of three kids, that's a really helpful tax credit. And given we just talked about the average median age of the district, you know, there's not a lot of people having kids, or they’re at least keeping and raising their kids here. He voted no on the Farm Bill when it came up for a vote in the House. This is a really heavy farm and agriculture district, not Onondaga, but Madison, Cayuga, Cortland, Oneida. We have, we're producing so much dairy up here, we have a lot of specialty crop farms, a lot of apple farms. I mean, the Farm Bill, I mean, that would have been a sure yes vote for me and a yes vote for the district. So, when I say he's not thinking for the district, he's thinking with the left and what the left want him to vote and he's in a hard position. I absolutely acknowledge that. I'm sure in those roles he is being pulled to the left. But you can't forget where you came from. And for me, a lot of people, I'm out on the campaign trail there say, don't forget where you came from. I'm like, listen, I left this place for 14 years and I'm volunteering to come back to serve because I know how to serve this district. I know what they want, and that means that I can't be a party line voter. Even though I worked for President Trump, I'm not going to vote for everything that he wants and everything that he says. And unfortunately, John Mannion in his first term has done exactly that.GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Kailee Buller, the Republican who's running for Congress in New York's 22nd district. So, on that point, let me just pick up where you left off. If you can, again, just maybe pick 2 or 3 of the most important things, but what would be some of the major new initiatives you'd like to work on if you were elected?KB: So for me, affordability is the number one, two and three things that we hear about every day all the time. And I have a record of working on affordability issues and actually delivering. And so that has to be the number one, two and three issues that we work on when I'm elected. So, as I go around talking, we have the highest energy bills, almost in the nation, and a lot of that is because of the green energy deal that John Mannion has been supportive of and Kathy Hochul pushed. We have doubled down on, you know, mandates for solar and wind and then we have blocked out other energy sources such as natural gas extraction. Pennsylvania, a state over from us, Democrat governor, Democrat House, they're selling 20% of the energy for the whole U.S., New York is buying from them. We could be doing that ourselves here, obviously safely we want…GR: Could I interrupt you, briefly, if I could?KB: Sure.GR: Yeah, I'm sorry to do that, but I just, before, those things that you mentioned, if I'm hearing them correctly, are more things that the state of New York has done. And so, I guess what I'm asking is here, how, as a member of Congress, are you going to leverage those things? It almost sounds like what you just said, there almost sounds like something I might hear from a candidate for state Senate for example. So, tell me the connection, because I want to make sure I'm following you.KB: No, that's a really great observation and I think it's a fair one. So, this is the issue, when I'm elected, I'll do everything I can to basically override New York's broken policies in the event that Kathy Hochul and the Albany folks don't shape up. I mean, there's a bill that would do exactly that, the Energy Choice Act sponsored by Nick Langworthy, HR 3699. And essentially what it would do is it would prohibit state and local governments from banning and limiting and restricting access to things like natural gas. So, I will be a lead co-sponsor and do everything I can to get that passed when I'm a federal elected official. That's one example as how I'll use my federal position to help the state, because there again, New York ranks dead last in many issues, and it's not because of things the federal government is doing. And we can talk about another one. I mean, I worked on helping repeal the wind and solar mandates when I was the chief of staff at USDA. That's not to say that you can't use wind and solar, it's to say we're not going to mandate them. New York has done exactly that. They've mandated solar and wind, and that's actually raising our energy bills, because we've gone so far so quick and we haven't looked at all of the above energy. So I mean, I've done a lot of these things federally. We've done a lot of things at the federal level when I worked in the Trump administration to make housing more affordable. New York isn't reaping the benefits of that because we have broken local and state issues, and I will do everything I can if New York doesn't shape up from an Albany perspective and from a local perspective, to call these things out and work to fight federally, to give our residents the rights that they need to have lower bills.GR: I see, no, I'm glad I asked you that. Now, I wanted to come back to your experience in the Department of Agriculture and working for the federal government. Because that's a, you know, that gives you a particular perspective and set of experiences you might draw on and I wanted to ask you about that. What's the most important thing that you learned about how the federal government works from your experience being inside it?KB: The most shocking thing is it doesn't. It doesn't work very well, I'll say that. The federal government is way more broken than I ever could have imagined being an outsider looking in. I started my career being in advocacy and tax advocacy and working by states. And then I started working for the grocery industry and passing federal legislation. The first bill that I really worked hard on was a 2013 Farm Bill, that I helped to get a bipartisan amendment pass, healthy food financing initiatives. I've, you know, worked with both Democrats and Republicans to get that done. But I did not realize how broken the federal government was until I got into it and actually saw it firsthand. And it's not intentional. I think it's over time that we just layer more and more people on top of more and more problems and become more and more silo. I look at the Department of Agriculture, for instance, and it's a very diversified agency. When people think about the Department of Agriculture, they're like, oh yeah, farmers. But it administers the food stamp program, which I know you probably have questions about. It manages forest fires, so it has, you know, it has that. It manages trade exports, so making our amazing American goods and exporting them and finding new markets for them, because our farmers are growing more than we need here in a lot of instances. And then we have RD (USDA Rural Development), which is one of the biggest banks in America, lending, right? So there's a lot of, there's also a lot of tribal things that the USDA does. And here's where it gets duplicative. So, there are four different agencies that do some level of economic research at USDA. And then each of the eight mission areas have their own economic researchers. And so sometimes when I'll say, hey, what are we doing on, such as the screwworm, when I was the chief of staff, we have screwworm in the U.S. now, I don't know if you pay attention to that, but it's basically a flesh eating parasite that impacts cattle. So, I would say, research agencies, what do you have? And they're like, well, we're doing this. And then I'd go to the marketing regulatory programs like, well, we're doing this and I'm like, you two internally aren't even talking. So over time, people have become more siloed and it's actually impacting taxpayer revenue. The other thing I'll say is, the government hasn't done enough to make sure that those who need these benefits are getting them, and those that don't are weeded out of the program. And I have a lot of different examples of that. An example in the food stamp program, our food stamp recipients, there are people who really need these benefits and I'm a big supporter of the food stamp program, the SNAP program. In fact, I led a lot of the changes and restricting what people can eat on the SNAP program, we can talk more about that. But for example, the US government, it's a federally funded program, right, and then it gives the money for SNAP to the states. New York State, for example, decides it’s a locally administered program, but some states just administer the program. 29 states have shared their data back with the federal government, and we found 200,000 dead people, 500,000 people getting benefits in multiple states. And that's just 29 states and that's mostly the red states. And some of that is intentional fraud and some of that is they're just overwhelmed at the state and local level, and they don't have time to figure out the paperwork. And so, the feds have helped them kind of fix and make their operations more efficient and they've identified problems that have been lingering for years. New York State, for example, won't share that data. I don't know why. I'm not sure what they're hiding, but it's a way for, you know, us to make sure that those who need the benefits are getting what they have, and maybe more, and getting people who don't need the benefits and are committing fraud or there's particular waste, or there's just not enough people to kind of go through all the day to day paperwork. And so,…

Full show notes at the publisher

John Mannion on the Campbell Conversations Jun 22, 2026

Show notes

(Ciara Feltham / Mannion for NY)Program transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Congressman John Mannion, who represents New York's 22nd Congressional district, which contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica and Auburn. Congressman Mannion, welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you again.John Mannion: Great to see you, Grant. And it's always an honor to be on here. Thank you so much for having me again.GR: Well, that's nice of you to say, and we really appreciate you making the time. So let me start right in. I heard you talking recently about the Farm Bill, and it was passed by the house at the end of April, it's now with the Senate I believe, hasn't been moved out of there yet, but, I just would, I think our listeners would want to know why is that bill so important to central New York, and what are some of the provisions in the bill that are most relevant to us up here, and any that you might have worked on as it was working its way through?JM: Well, thank you for bringing that up. I'm a proud member of the Agriculture Committee and when I was in the state Senate, I was not in in my first term. And I asked to be on it because I felt like we needed that voice an upstate voice and I've got great relationship with our local farmers and the Farm Bureau. We are the number one producer of yogurt in the country, in New York State, and the number one producer of cottage cheese. And it's not all about the dairy industry, but it is, those are important pieces to our economy. So, a few things about the Farm Bill. First of all, I will say that there's important grant programs in there, and access to loans that we have to make sure that those programs are funded, that they're rebuilt, and, that we have these farm’s service agency offices in every county in New York state, and we want to make sure that those are properly staffed and funded. And there's a piece of the Farm Bill that does that. A lot of what was supposed to happen in the Farm Bill, and it's more and more challenging to get one of these passed because of the polarized political climate that exists, was what happened in the Reconciliation Bill or what the president would call the Big Beautiful Bill, which took care of some of the provisions of what would typically be in the Farm Bill, and that includes nutrition assistance programs. So, the SNAP cuts that happened within that, you know, Reconciliation Bill, which I opposed, we wanted to restore some of those cuts. So, there's, you know, two big sides here of the Farm Bill and the Agriculture Committee, which is the nutrition side, and then really the agriculture and the farming side. We wanted to reverse some of those cuts while, of course, still maintaining the critical programs related to access to loans for farmers, environmental grants that are out there. Also, you know, insurance that's a critical piece of farming when we just had, you know, recently an early frost in which could really affect some of our farmers. We're hoping that the data will come in that things are better than what it could have been. But, you know, there's disaster relief, provisions within the department of Ag, all those things make it important. I did oppose it because I was hoping the biggest thing, and there's a few others in there that we restored some of those cuts to nutrition assistance. I did get an amendment into the bill. It has to do with immersive technology, and that is using virtual reality and other technologies in relation to precision farming. And we want to be good stewards of our environment and farmers certainly are, but in making sure that there is a proper amount of fertilizer or fungicide put on and not an unnecessary load being delivered. Immersive technologies and precision farming are a piece of that. So even though I opposed it, I did, I am proud to have contributed to the Farm Bill and look forward to working with, you know, both sides moving forward to support our ag communities.GR: Well, that's interesting. So, you successfully got an amendment in there, but in the end , you opposed the bill as a whole, right?JM: I did. And, you know, I can get, and certainly that is, there's room for political action there against me, right? But this is very common. And sometimes, you know, the legislative process can be complex. Sometimes the bills bounce back and forth between the houses or they change coming out of committee. Ultimately, getting one good provision in there, and honestly, Grant, to be truthful, a few words, right, just a few words in a massive bill that has multiple elements to it was simply not enough. I mean, we've got veterans families who are on SNAP assistance, as you probably know, part of it was frozen for a period of time during the government shutdown. And also what we might see is some of the offloading of these responsibilities away from, like, state employees and on to other for-profit or not for profit agencies to administer the SNAP programs. There was a lot of great amendments that were rejected, there were a lot that were accepted. I'm glad one was accepted, but ultimately the cuts to SNAP and other things were just too much for me. And I do believe, reflective of how the majority of central New Yorkers would have wanted me to vote.GR: One of the things in the, you mentioned the Big Beautiful Bill, that struck me as, well, I guess I'm making an editorial comment here, but kind of strange in its logic was, but I've lost track of where it is and I would like you to remind me and our listeners of it, that the SNAP provisions, what we used to call food stamps, were now going to be tied to work requirements. And, that to me, I'm not quite sure what the logic is for that, but is that still the case now? Is that what we have as our system, or where are we with that?JM: It's what we had and what we will honestly, always have. So, there are certain provisions that qualify individuals for SNAP. If you are not disabled, you're an able-bodied adult, there can be, you know, you're, the idea is that you should not be receiving SNAP benefits, you should be working, and there's a minimum number of work hours. But there's also other provisions as related to some adults are not working because they have to care for a member of their family that's disabled or, you know, one of their children. They also may be dedicated to volunteering, and they have a number of volunteer hours. It's really a lot of red tape which was being added here to make it more challenging for individuals to qualify for SNAP and have to apply more frequently. In a bipartisan way there were requests and actually amendments that were rejected to delay the implementation of these cuts and these work requirements, but those did not go through. An additional piece to this is that there is going to be greater cost sharing. So, there's going to be a shifting on to the states of greater administrative costs and the costs of the program. And those are based on error rates. Now, every state does not pitch a perfect game when it comes to distributing SNAP benefits, including New York State. This is a way from the administration and the majority standpoint to make things better. And you hear the phrase, fraud, waste and abuse, we have inspectors and investigators, we want to catch all of that. Sometimes it's an overpayment, sometimes it's an underpayment, but those error rates, Alaska has the highest, and you can probably imagine why, is being used to push the costs on to the states. And what we're concerned about is that some states can't handle that cost. I don't think that's New York, but other states can't handle it. And as a result, they just may end their SNAP benefit programs entirely, because they can't absorb that. That's the kind of thing that, you know, for $6 a day, and that's what we're looking at from a maximum SNAP benefit, I think we can, in the wealthiest country in the world, support those folks. And still make sure that the program is administered with prudence.GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Congressman John Mannion from New York's 22nd Congressional district. Well, in the last six months since I spoke to you before, what other major issues or policy initiatives have you been prioritizing? And if you could be relatively brief here because I've got so many other questions for you.JM: Sure, yes, I'll try to be brief. You know, there's one piece of legislation related to veterans, and I'm on the education committee, that their transcripts not be withheld if they've got, you know, a parking fee, coming out of, you know, money that may have been tied to the GI Bill, whether they're at a four year institution, two year, or they're in, you know, a work training program, we don't want their transcripts held up. We don't want to prevent them from moving on. I also supported a piece of legislation that's mine called the Match Act. The Match Act is trying to make sure that our technology here as it relates to semiconductor chip manufacturing, doesn't get into the hands of bad actors like China. And, finally, just newly announced, related to mental health in K-12 and higher education. Two of my pieces of legislation I just announced making sure that our school districts have every resource necessary to meet the demanding needs of mental health therapies in our school districts. And, you know, the other piece of legislation is tied to best practices in colleges and making sure that they have programs in place to assist those with mental health challenges in that setting, including suicide prevention. And there's great consensus and bipartisanship around, really all three or all four of those pieces of legislation. So, we're trying to build consensus and get them over the line.GR: There's a lot of research recently that the rates of all of those things have been going up for this generation of students. And so, yeah, it's good to hear.JM: Yes, Grant, before you ask, you know, before, I was in the classroom, I taught before faster cellphones and I would say to my students and my colleagues, we're going through the largest experiment in the history of human beings by handing the world to an 11 year old in a handheld device, and to expect it to go just fine was not realistic.GR: Yeah. Well, I'm going to, I think, have a policy about this in my classes coming up in the fall. So, one of the previous times that we spoke, I asked you if you would support new impeachment proceedings against the president if the Democrats took control of the House. And at that time, you indicated that you would. I wanted to come back to that question now because it really is looking more and more like the Democrats are going to retake the House. I mean, as a political scientist, I would say that's almost a lock now based on the polling and the surveys that I've seen. The Senate is a question mark, but the House less so. Have your thoughts on that changed at all?JM: They have not. I want to say a few things, and I'll try to be brief. Number one, I want to make sure that this election upcoming is protected. And we know, in 2024 and 2020, our elections are well-run, they're professional, they're run on a bipartisan basis, and widespread voter fraud simply doesn't exist. So, the president perpetuating that is very dangerous. And I hope that does not impact our elections coming up in November here. Articles of impeachment have been brought to the House floor three times already in the second Trump administration. And, you know, every Republican has voted to table them. I do believe that the president has committed impeachable offenses and has lied to, you know, Congress and lied about various serious things, including war. He's violated, you know, war powers provisions and not met deadlines. And there's a reason why many of these items were enshrined into the Constitution and other documents to make sure that our authority in Congress is within, you know, appropriated dollars and trade and war powers because we're the closest connection to the people. The president's self-benefitting, the creation of his own meme coin and crypto coin and then since then providing elevated access to those and commuting sentences and ending restitution. Some individuals, due to fraud, have been, you know, had their life savings taken from them. And if you cozy up to the president and support not just his campaign, but support family businesses and family meme coins personally, that restitution is wiped away. And every day Americans who have been defrauded are in our in a bad situation. So, you know, I will say this impeachment is very serious and also very unpopular. Very unpopular, even after January 6th of 2021, when the president is on his way out the door. Not a huge majority, but the majority of people that I represent, polling in this area in central New York, in the Mohawk Valley, showed that still, people were rejecting that. So, it's serious business. It's going to require subpoenas, investigations, testimony, prior to any move forward towards impeachment. And we will have serious business to conduct outside of that. And it does consume a massive amount of time, so. But I do support it.GR: I want to come back after the break and ask you just the exact point that you just brought up. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Congressman John Mannion, who represents New York's 22nd district. Well, as I mentioned, I wanted to ask you another question about this. What do you do with the concerns that if the Democrats go down this path, as you say, it's going to take up a lot of oxygen, and it will probably distract from getting things passed to the degree that's possible in the split government that we have, especially since, really the futility of actually removing him from office because you're not going to get two thirds of the Senate to go along, unless something just comes up that you and I can't almost even imagine at this point. So how, I mean, how do you weigh that? How well does it serve sort of the long-term strategy here?JM: There are many that would argue grant, that impeachment was put into place exactly for this purpose, in this moment. And people are looking for accountability for this president. I hear it every single day, and I and I hear it from Republicans who will tell me that they never voted for me or they always voted for Trump. They don't like, people, Americans care about their Constitution, they care about the branches of government and the balance of power and checks and balances and I hear that every single day. I do think that the president has kind of stepped back a little bit, as I think I saw in the first Trump administration as well, get a little closer to the general election date and things seem to be just like, you know, his, what is being agreed to in Iran and hopefully the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. He sees that that is unpopular. But I say I'm on a team, and that team is not necessarily the Democratic Party team. It is a team of the House of Representatives and the role that we have to play in the good of this country and what has really been a big part of the success of this country, and what makes us unique is that the judicial, the legislative and the executive branch being a che…

Full show notes at the publisher

Debate: Bill Magnarelli and Maurice Brown on the Campbell Conversations Jun 11, 2026

Show notes

Bill Magnarelli / Maurice BrownProgram transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Party primaries across the state of New York are Tuesday, June 23rd. And one of the races in this region that is garnering attention is the Democratic primary for the state's 129th Assembly district, the seat currently held by Assemblyman Bill Magnarelli, who chairs the Transportation Committee. He’s being challenged by Onondaga County Legislator Maurice, or Moe, Brown, who currently represents the 15th district in that chamber and he chairs that chamber's Ways and Means Committee. The two of them join me today on the program. The 129th Assembly District includes the North Side, West Side, Eastwood, Strathmore and Valley areas of the city of Syracuse, as well as the towns of Geddes and Van Buren. Assemblyman Magnarelli, Legislator Brown, welcome back to the program.Bill Magnarelli: Nice to be here.Maurice Brown: Thanks for having us, Grant, appreciate you.GR: Well, I appreciate both of you making the time. So, Legislator Brown, as the challenger, I'll ask you this first question. Bill Magnarelli has been representing this district for, I believe, 27 years, and in his previous campaigns he's often pointed to the state money and state projects that he has secured for the district, due in large part to his seniority. So, I wanted to ask you briefly, I know you could speak for a long time on this, but briefly make the case that he should not have another two year term.MB: Yes, sir. Thanks for having me, Grant. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Outer Comstock and the university neighborhood also being in this district, they would beat me up. But fundamentally, I think that, you know, it's time for fresh voices. It's time for a fresh perspective. Insanity is doing the same thing the same times, expecting different results. And I feel like we've peaked, I feel like we can do better. I don't take anything away from my Assemblymembers’ experience, I think he's done a great job for central New York. I'm posing the question of, can we do better? I believe we can. We've seen a lot of movement around the state, around the country towards these bigger, more bolder ideas. And this is a time for a, you know, more bold elected official. And that's why I'm running, because I think central New York deserves that.GR: Okay. And you mentioned bigger, bolder ideas and I know that you've had some endorsements that have been from I think, you know, what most people would agree would be more the left wing of the party. Is it fair to say that you are challenging Assemblyman Magnarelli from the left? Is that a fair statement?MB: Yeah, I think from the left is fair, but what more I think resembles it is from the bottom. Just working people haven't felt, you know, acknowledged. The conversation, one of the big ideas that I want to bring is around housing. It's probably the area that Bill and I disagree the most, but I want to do, you know, big investments in housing and the state is the vehicle that's best to do that. I wanted to pursue it at the county level. The county doesn't really have the bankroll that the state have, and the federal government is too in flux. It goes back and forth every four years. So, I want to pursue really large-scale housing, affordable housing, and I think the state's the best vehicle to do it. And we need housing that's going to, you know, support senior housing, low-income housing, affordable housing. And that's why I'm running.GR: Okay, all right, thank you. So, Assemblyman Magnarelli, I want to give you a chance to sort of make, you know, some opening remarks here in a similar vein. Could you just briefly make the case that you deserve another two years?BM: I think my record shows that explicitly. What I've been doing for central New York is well known, and I think the things that my opponent talks about are just a lot of talking points with not a lot backing him up. When you asked, you know, are you running from the left of the party? He's not running from the left of the party, he's running from outside the party. He himself calls himself a democratic socialist. He's a Working Families Party activist. He is not what I call a Democrat, but he's looking for the Democratic Party's imprimatur, so to speak, and I think people hopefully will look through that. I think my record speaks for itself. What I've done for education, what I've done for health care, not just bringing money home for specific organizations, but across the board in our budgets, advocating for things in our budgets. My opponent talks about housing. There has been no bigger proponent of housing and good housing in central New York and in Syracuse. There has been no bigger proponent of taking care of tenants and their rights than Bill Magnarelli, and I have the record to show for it. I have the legislation that has been passed that does it, and I don't think my opponent can say the same thing.GR: Okay. Let me ask you a couple follow ups too.BM: Sure.GR: How do you respond to the argument, and I think Legislator Brown was intimating at this, how do you respond to the argument that 27 years in office is a long time? I mean, it's longer than some of the voters that are going to be voting in this race have been alive.MB: Longer than my campaign manager has been alive.GR: (laughter)BM: I don't want to ask my opponent how old he was when I got in.MB: I won’t answer.BM: We’re not going to go there, okay?GR: We are not going to go into Ronald Reagan territory. But let me ask you this though, you know, how do you respond to the argument that, hey, that's a long time, it might be time to give somebody else a shot, you know?BM: Well, look, it's not something that I haven't thought of, okay? But I do feel that I'm kind of at my prime, so to speak, and being able to get things done in Albany. I know the people there, not just my colleagues who I get along with very well on both sides of the aisle, I talk to everybody, but also the people in the governor's cabinet. I know the secretaries, I know the Division of Budget, these are people that worked in the Assembly. Blake Washington, for example, to use a name, head of the budget department, he was in the Assembly when I got in the Assembly, and he worked his way up through everything to be our finance person. And then he went over to the dark side, so to speak, the governor's side. These are people I know that when I pick up the phone, they don't say Assemblyman, they go, Bill, what can we do for you? That type of thing. If I want to go into their office, I knock on the door and the secretaries know what I'm going to go, and I don't take up a lot of their time. I know how to get things done, how to pose the questions, how to get it done.GR: I want to come back to Legislator Brown in just a second, but I have another follow up question for you. You said that Legislator Brown was outside the Democratic Party, and I wanted to get a clear sense what you mean by that. Where is the line for you in terms of policy or particular proposals that separates, say, a progressive Democrat from somebody outside the party? I'm trying to figure out what Legislator Brown is on the other side of that makes you say he's not a Democrat.BM: Well, first of all, I want to make something very clear. I've always been a progressive, and I'm not going to let this opponent or any other opponent tell me that I'm not progressive. When you look at women's rights, when you look at LGBTQ rights, when you look at what I've done for education and health care, I'm a progressive. Always was, always will be. My opponent calls himself a democratic socialist. A socialist is something different. That is not a Democrat, that's a socialist. That means someone who is looking for government to take over parts of the infrastructure of our state.GR: So, let me interject something here, if I can.BM: Sure, go right ahead.GR: Okay, so that's what he calls himself, but is there a policy that he is calling for at the state level that you say, that's too far, that is no longer in the Democratic Party, that is something else. I'm trying to get a sense other than what he calls himself, what the boundary is.BM: No, I think it's everything that he talks about and the way he talks about it and how he wants to implement it is not within the Democratic Party as I know it. Now, there’s a difference of opinion, okay, he is what he is and believes what he believes, and I believe something different. I'm a Democrat, somebody might say an old school Democrat, but don't call me non-progressive. I'm a progressive Democrat, always have been.GR: Okay, Legislator Brown, I wanted to give you a chance to get in on this.MB: Thank you.GR: So tell us why you are a Democrat that Democrats voting in the primary should not feel uncomfortable with? I guess from an ideological standpoint, I think that's what the assemblyman is intimating here.MB: Yes, sir, thank you. So, I'm of the belief that the Democratic Party is a big tent party. I don't believe that, you know, this subjugation, this division that my opponent is spewing that we're seeing in politics, that you're in this box, I can't support you or you're in that box. I support my assemblyman, I support Democrats. Yes, I am a Democratic socialist. I believe the bill my Assemblymember is probably referring to is the New York Health Act, which he supports, but that is the government taking over, not taking over, but the government inserting itself in the health care conversation. I want the government to do that in the health care conversation, but as well as the education conversation and the housing conversation. I think that if you want to sell insulin, if you want to sell, you know, tickets to the Knicks game, if you want to sell cars, you can let the market decide to profit. But if you want to sell insulin, if you want to sell housing, if you want to sell these things that people need to live, I think the government has a right to step in. And in fact, I think the government has a duty. And to me, that's where my democratic socialism steps in, where, you know, you can't just let the market drive the price of insulin because we need it to live.BM: And we don’t.GR: So you mentioned housing before…MB: We do need insulin.BM: I mean, that’s the thing, we don’t, we do come in, we do step in. We do all the things that he's saying, he's not saying anything new, okay?MB: Then where am I on the line?BM: Because I think you go farther than that.GR: Let me ask Legislator Brown. So on the housing, what are the things that you want the state to do in housing that are different from what the kinds of things that the Assemblyman has been working on, as he said he's been working on, to advance the cause of affordable housing? What's different?MB: So, I'm in favor of Assemblymember Gallagher's social housing plan. Pretty much it allows, it puts a big amount of money, and the government, the state in this entity, I've tried to do it at the county as well and we're moving forward with Invest Syracuse. But pretty much when you're trying to build housing, if you're a developer, you have a profit incentive. When the public becomes the developer, the model is called public developer, it removes that profit incentive. We're not trying to make profit as the State of New York, we're trying to build and develop affordable housing. So, I'm in favor of her bill, I believe, you know, Mr. Magnarelli, my opponent would call that outside of the party socialism, but Assemblymember Gallagher is a Democrat. There are several Democratic sponsors, and I'm looking forward to working with them. But these are things we can do, we just need the political will to push for them.GR: On that particular issue, and then Assemblyman I'll get you back in on this one, on that particular issue, just so that we all understand it, this proposal, is this going to be across the board in the state of New York? Are they going to target certain areas and certain cities for this public development effort?MB: So, right now it's in discussion. So, the upstate cities was a delineation, and we actually did receive $10 million from the state. And that's going to go towards Invest Syracuse. I would like to see it statewide, but I'm happy that the city of Syracuse is prioritized. If you look in our inner cities, especially upstate, a lot of people who look like me struggle with housing, and that's why I'm fighting so much for it, so heavily.GR: Okay. Assemblyman Magnarelli, this housing proposal by Gallagher, is that something you're in favor of or not?BM: Well, I'm in favor of anything that puts more investment into our housing. At this point in time, we need housing, we need to build out every unit we can possibly do. And that would be, especially here in Syracuse because of Micron and what's coming in north of Syracuse. One thing I want to correct a little bit here, is Assemblymember Gallagher is a democratic socialist. So, when he says he's with Democrats, he's going to be voting with democratic socialists. And I want to make sure that everybody understands that.MB: She's a Democrat, though, right? She's registered as a Democrat, just like me.BM: You’re a registered Democrat too but you call yourself a democratic socialist.BM: You call yourself a progressive. Like, those labels.MB: Okay, well, okay, fine.GR: All right, so we’ve got it, self-identified progressive.MB: We're all Democrats.GR: Self-Identified.MB: This notion that (unintelligible) is more Democrat…we’re all Democrats.BM: No.MB: No? All right.BM: I disagree with you on that. The bottom line here on housing, though. Let's get back to housing.MB: Yes, sir.BM: Okay. Housing is something that we have to invest in. There's numbers of different ways to do it, I'm for all of those ways, anything that gets housing built. Because the answer to our problems, answers to our tenant problems has always been more units. The more units we build, the more we get to the point where we have enough, then we won't have some of the problems that we have on the tenant side.GR: All right, and before we take our break,MB: Can I interject, though?GR: Let me ask the Assemblyman this question, then Legislator Brown, I'll get you on the back end.MB: Thank you.GR: Do you have a concern though, Assemblyman, that this proposal that Legislator Brown is talking about is going to make fewer units of housing available? Is that what you're suggesting, that somehow it would make…BM: No, not at all. I’m not saying that it’s going to make fewer, I’m just not, I'm not sure that that proposal is going to be the most economic one. In terms of building housing through the state is usually more expensive than allowing private developers to develop, maybe with some incentives from the state, which we've done all along, okay? And I think it's going to be absolutely necessary in our neck of the woods in the coming years. But I think that doing public housing, doing state run housing, I don't know anybody who likes living in that. So, you know, the bottom line is, where are we going to get good housing for the tenants to live in? And that's what I've always been for.MB: Can I interject, Grant, or the time? No?GR: I'll get you on the backside. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with the two candidates in the Demo…

Full show notes at the publisher

Richard Epstein on the Campbell Conversations Jun 06, 2026

Show notes

Richard EpsteinProgram transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Perhaps no policy change put forward by the Trump administration has generated more controversy, and perhaps more anger than the effort to eliminate birthright citizenship as set forward by the 14th Amendment. My guest today has written a new book that argues that the meaning of that amendment has been widely misinterpreted, and that the right of citizenship involves more than mere location of birth. Richard Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor at New York University and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His new book is titled, "The Myth of Birthright Citizenship: What the 14th Amendment Really Says." Professor Epstein, welcome to the program.Richard Epstein: Oh, it's very nice to be here. Thank you for having me.GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So, I'm going to start the same way that you started your book, and that's by stating the relevant part of the 14th amendment that we're going to be discussing. It goes like this, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside”. And as you say right there at the beginning, the words seem simple enough, but we're going to find out they're a lot more complicated, I guess. So, first thing I wanted to ask you is, just remind our listeners briefly of the context for that 14th amendment.RE: Well, the basic inspiration for it was the understanding that we had just passed in 1865, the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. And then the question was, was it going to be sufficient authorization for the civil rights acts that were planned for 1866? They passed the Civil Rights Act, mainly doing not with political issues, but with the question about the right to contract, make will, sue and be sued and so forth. And then they had a collective angst. And what they said is, we're not sure that the 13th amendment does it. So they said, let's do the 14th amendment, and you have to divide it into two parts. One of those things which were indisputable, and the first of those is that any black person in the United States who was covered by the Dred Scott Amendment, or decision, was, in fact, now a citizen of the United States with full rights of citizenship, whatever those turn out to be. But that's the easy part. And the harder questions are, to what extent that we mean this to interfere with relationships that did not involve the Dred Scott situation? Mainly the question, what do we mean by naturalization and what do we mean by subject to the jurisdiction thereof? Naturalization was absolutely stunning to me. I had not read it carefully, but it begins from 1790 with the words, any free white person may apply for citizenship. So there was a racial bias built in at the front end. The , subject to the jurisdiction thereof, did not mean within the jurisdiction, subject to the jurisdiction thereof meant that you were a subject, British sense, of the United States government and citizen therefore had to be defined, and it was defined solely in terms of the protection that the government would give you and in terms of the loyalty that you owe to the government. Key point to remember about this, is voting was no part of citizenship. Women were never citizens of the United States early on, they were not made citizens by the 14th amendment. And if you go back to the English tradition, it was exactly the same way. And so, if you do this, somebody who just simply lands on the soil of the United States, or is a birthright tourist and doesn't meet the subject to the jurisdiction thereof, they’re just within the country. What that meant is they were given certain kinds of privileges, i.e. to conduct business in the ordinary fashion and to obey the laws. But once they left, there was no further contact between the visitor on the one hand, and the government on the other.GR: Okay, you kind of anticipated my second question, which was to give a summary of why you think it doesn't apply in the way that a lot of people today think it does, and you just did that. Let me ask you this question then, so the amendment is passed, it's there, and as you say, you know, there's this question then of how it's going to be applied after it's applied to former slaves. Were there significant moments in our history after the amendment, perhaps involving certain groups of people, when the meaning of this becomes contest, when we discuss this as a nation before the current moment that we're in?RE: Yes. It turns out that the basic plan of the amendment was, in fact, one which is not quite understood. It was to leave all voting issues to the States. So, there was no voting component to the 14th amendment. Indeed, it would not have passed if you had given the franchise to black individuals at the time. Remember, this was a very conservative bunch. It also had nothing to do with Indian relationships because they were kind of quasi tribes. And in effect, it was not meant to have anything to do with foreign affairs, which was governed not by the 14th amendment, but by all sorts of diplomatic immunities and privileges which had been in effect from Roman times forward. So, it was exclusively directed to that. And the early decisions on it, were a couple, and they were in some sense quite disastrous. The first of these decisions, a case called Slaughterhouse, which came down in 1872. And what it did is it eviscerated the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. As I mentioned, that act had to do with the ability to enter to certain kinds of civil transactions on the same conditions as white people. And this was a very strong move forward in what had happened. But the Supreme Court, when it got it, was worried about a perpetual censorship by the federal government over the states. And so it restricted the 14th amendment to only two things, the right to petition government on the one hand, and the right to sell ships along navigable waters on the other, which means that everything that was listed in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was not covered. Second disastrous (unintelligible) was one of the provisions of the statute was to make sure that violence would not be launched against black citizens, and newly created by making sure that the federal government had the power to enforce the Civil Rights Act, and those statutes would pass in just those terms. In the case called Cruickshank there was a massacre that took place in Louisiana, and large numbers of black soldiers were killed by white racists. And the question is, could the federal government intervene to get rid of this kind of situation? And the Supreme Court, at one of its most reprehensible decision(s), said, well, we look at this stuff and we think everything on these issues is meant to be left to the States, none of it to the federal government. And this is absolutely wrong in terms of history. Most people do not read closely the causes after the one that you read. But the cause on privileges or immunities applies only to citizen, the clause on due process and equal protection applies to all person. And so, the federal government was designed to do was to make sure that basic acts of terror would be subject to it to enforce. And what Cruickshank did is it removed all of that protection in one of the most sloppy opinions I've ever read in my life, which meant that southern justice was now put into the hands of the very guys who'd committed the wrongs in question. And this structural failure lasted for a very long time. So those are the two disastrous opinion. The third decision from 1874, a case called Minor and Happersett. And it involved the woman who claimed that she was a citizen of the United States entitled to vote because of the privileges and immunities clause. And what happened is the court unanimously said no, this clause only created citizenship and the reciprocal arrangement, all the voting arrangements were left to the states. And there was a well-known decision called Corfield and Coryell from the 1820s. And what that held is that amongst the privileges and immunities you have under the original Constitution, not the 14th amendment, was the right to vote in accordance with the usages of the local community, which meant, in effect, that the states were in charge of this. This was not a huge surprise, because in the original design it was pretty clear that voting was in fact a state issue, not a natural issue. This is one of the problems that you have or benefits you have, take it whichever way you want, when it turns out that you give enumerated powers to the federal government. And if one had to give a real criticism of the original constitutional convention, it's not a trivial one, but they under-powered the federal government with respect to many of the things that it turned out to do. And when do you think they found this out? They figured it out by 1789, when they had the first Congress. Because the Judiciary Act tries very hard to expand the power of federal jurisdiction, because they realize if you follow the method that was designed by the original founders, the Constitution is indeed the supreme law of the land and all the statutes pursuant to it. But nobody can forget the second clause, which says in the judges in every state shall enforce it. Can you imagine having a federal Constitution enforced by the first 13, 15, 20 judges, each having different interpretation and no unified way to figure out what's going on? It's a disaster. And so, what happened is in the Judiciary Act, and I think in section 25, they passed this section which said any adverse decision made by a state Supreme Court can be reviewed in the Supreme Court of the United States. There's no appellate jurisdiction of that sort anywhere in the particular amendment. And what justice story did is what my daddy called a long time ago, he said, son, sometimes you have to learn to rise above principle. And what he meant was, you read this thing accurately and there's no United States. You cheat a little bit, the country now has a fighting chance to live, and all sorts of things in the Constitution have that kind of characteristic, they under-powered the federal court. For example, there was no mandatory jurisdiction to create lower courts. And if you didn't do it, where's all the federal business going to go, to state courts? And how is that going to work, and what are you going to do with the District of Columbia, which doesn't have a state court? There were all sorts of major problems with that. And what the guys did is they started to fiddle. And the thing to understand about a Constitution, is we're all originalists about the clauses we like, and we're all ignoring the problem about the clauses that we don't like, including that. And so, you keep going. I mean, just another point, the word citizen. Well, what does it mean in the 14th amendment? Well, you say to yourself, is a corporation a citizen? And then you start to think about, that's absolutely bizarre, right? Dred Scott applies to corporations and to slaves? No. What they did is they gave jurisdiction over citizen disputes between citizens and different states. And then you realize there's no ability to have a federal court to deal with the problem created for a corporation in one state that's incorporated and wants to do business in others, and you can't get into federal court. That lasted about 110 years, and then all of a sudden, a citizen became a corporation, and it was a citizen of the state in which it had its charter and a citizen of the state in which was its primary course of business. You look at the text, it's just absolute fiction. Now I'm going to ask you, do you really want to go back and say, you know, they got it wrong? So every decision involving every corporation for the last 200 odd years is null and void, because there was no jurisdiction. We don't do things that way. We just basically ride with our errors. And that's part of the problem in the culture with respect to the 14th amendment. What do we do when we get this funny discontinuity? So, at the time, you then start to look at and say, well, what were they trying to do? And one of the things they were trying to do was to make sure that blacks had right to enter into the commercial society, and the courts managed to destroy that. Then it was supposed to give people protection against crime, and the courts supported that. But that middle class of cases between private contract rights and government enforcement is the distribution of public benefits, right? And there's nothing in the 14th amendment that talks about that. And so, if the state wants to give 40 acres and a mule, can it give it only to former slaves, or does it have to give it to everybody? And the answer at the time is you could give it to whomever you want. Why is that? Because the 14th amendment and its equal protection and due process clauses only apply to criminal matters, and whenever divvying something away is it's not a crime. And so go through the whole situation and that's what you end up seeing, this huge area of massive public discretion. And there's no question, however unpleasant it may be, that these guys contemplated a system of state segregated schools. How do you like that? Bad news. That's what they did.GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Richard Epstein. He's the Laurence A. Tisch professor at New York University and the author of a new book titled, "The Myth of Birthright Citizenship: What the 14th Amendment Really Says." And as you can tell from our conversation before the break, it's very complicated. Let me follow up on something, professor. I've seen that you said that has struck me over the years, and you summarized it very well in terms of when people want to look at the context for something and when they don't want to look at the context for something that is in different amendments and in the Constitution. The one that struck me was to compare the folks that want to not look at the context here, but just look at the words very, kind of narrowly interpreted are oftentimes the same folks when it comes to the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, keep and bear arms, want to talk about the context. This was about having a militia, we don't have the same needs anymore, this right shouldn't be applied in the same way. That's what I've seen over the years, is it's exactly as you say. When you want to get to a certain outcome you might say, we have to look at the context. You want to get to a different outcome? No, we're just looking at the text here. And so, this kind of selective originalism, maybe it was one I'll put on this that you're talking about.RE: That’s the Citizenship case.GR: So, let's sort of take it in that regard then. What do you make of the argument that I have heard made that the understanding of birthright citizenship, for lack of a better word, I'm going to say the more liberal interpretation or the more literal interpretation, you're born here, you're a citizen, that's an important part of America's brand in the world. It's become sort of part of America's essential promise.RE: Well, first of all, it's not the literal meaning. The literal meaning takes the words, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, and puts it in contrast within the jurisdiction.GR: All right, I misspoke then.RE: Okay, okay. But on the branding question, it's extremely importa…

Full show notes at the publisher

Ben Walsh on the Campbell Conversations May 30, 2026

Show notes

Ben WalshProgram transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Six months ago, I conducted an exit interview with outgoing Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh. In February, he was appointed to be the Executive Director of the New York State Canal Corporation at Governor Kathy Hochul’s recommendation. We thought we'd check in with the new director and see what that work is about and how it's going so far. Director Walsh, welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you again and I'm glad we still get the chance to speak.Ben Walsh: Great to be back on with you, Grant. Yeah, it's a different role, but I’m still a public servant and still excited to talk with you and your listeners.GR: Oh, fantastic. So, I think it would help by starting us off with just a brief description of what the Canal Corporation does and what it's responsible for.BW: Yeah, so the New York State Canal Corporation oversees the 524-mile New York State Canal system. Most folks are familiar with one of the four canals within our system, of course, the Erie Canal. But we also have the Champlain Canal, the Cayuga-Seneca Canal and the Oswego Canal. So, again, 524 miles of navigable waterways, that has been the case for 200 years now, so we're in our third century of operation. And so, as you can imagine, we have a lot of old infrastructure to manage, whether it be our 57 locks or our 13 movable dams or our lift bridges. But increasingly, it's also about making the canal system not just about, certainly not about commercial shipping navigation, although we still do do some of that, and not even just about, you know, recreational boat navigation, but we have the Erie Canalway Trail and the Empire State Trail. We are increasingly viewing ourselves as a linear park and really a world class destination where we want people, whether it's in your backyard or, you know, it's, you know, across the ocean, we want people to come here, to visit the canal system and importantly, visit the 200 canal communities that that align it. So, it's infrastructure management, it's overseeing a staff of over 500 people. It's, you know, it's executive leadership, which is what I had been doing for the past eight years.GR: Yeah. I wanted to dive into a couple of those things that you just mentioned there. But let me just ask you this second basic question, how's the work going so far?BW: I'm having a blast. I know your listeners can't see me, you can, hopefully my shoulders look a little bit lighter to you.GR: (laughter)BW: It's a big responsibility, no doubt about it. But I have a great team and it is very different than being mayor. Certainly some similarities, but, you know, the texts and calls in the middle of the night, you know, having to show up to crime scenes, you know, that stuff, as important as it was, when I did it, you know, not having to do that as much has been a relief. And so, I'm having a lot of fun. And I tell my wife, I feel like I'm going on field trips every day out to, you know, visit different parts of the system, so I'm outdoors a lot. I'm wearing a suit a lot less and having a lot of fun.GR: Well, yeah, I wanted to pick up on that. So, what is a typical day like for you?BW: I think that's why I love the job, just as I did when I was mayor, because every day is different. So ,I'm sitting in my office here today out in Mattydale, it's about, you know, 15 minute drive from my house in the city. And, certainly have my fair share of meetings and, you know, try to keep up on emails like everyone else. But, you know, the timing in which I came in was interesting. So, we just opened up our navigation season on May 15th, so this past Friday. And navigation season runs from May 15th to October 14th, so it's really two different seasons. It's navigation season and then it's what we call winter work. So, I came in at the beginning of February, and a lot of my time was spent going out to locks throughout the system, overseeing what are called lock pumpouts where we drain the water out. Our workers get in there, they repair the gates, the valves and all of the other infrastructure, and this past winter, as everyone can appreciate, under really difficult conditions. So, I spent the first few months really getting to know the system. And I was out in Waterford, New York on Friday the 15th for the opening of navigation season and there were boats lined up ready to go. So yeah, plenty of time spent out in the field, but like most other jobs, you know, plenty of time behind the desk as well.GR: So, have you had a chance to begin to think about, as director, what your priorities are going to be in the coming years? Or are you just kind of, at this point, been learning the ropes and making sure that day to day stuff is going all right?BW: Yeah, it's been both. Certainly, you know, I feel it's important for me to understand the work that we do in order to, you know, to have authority, when working with the team and to guide direction of the Canal Corporation. You know, we are lucky to have a great partner in the New York Power Authority. The Canal Corporation is now and has been since 2017, a subsidiary of the Power Authority. So, I'm also not only getting to know the world of canals, but also the world of the power authority. We share a board. A local board member that many of your listeners will be familiar with is Bea González, who spent time, of course, on the Syracuse Common Council as council president and also at Syracuse University. So, I get to interact with my friend Bea a lot. But, you know, it's understanding what the board's priorities are, of course, what the governor's priorities are. And the great thing about Governor Hochul is she is a canaler, that's a term that we use here in Canal Corporation. She's on the canal regularly with her husband, Bill. And they know the system well, they value it. And the governor has for the past few budgets and hopefully, with this one as well, it's currently in there, has allocated an additional $50 million which the legislature has supported for the canal. We're really at an exciting time. We just celebrated our bicentennial last year, again, as I said, we're in our third year of operation. We've got a big supporter in Governor Hochul and NYPA board and the state legislature as well, so it's an exciting time to be to be here.GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Ben Walsh, the Executive Director of the New York State Canal Corporation and the former mayor of the city of Syracuse. So, you mentioned the Canalway Trail when you were speaking earlier. And that's something I think that's probably of interest to a lot of our listeners, and they've been on it. I think probably at least half of them probably walked on that parts of that trail, it's widely accessible in central New York. I just wanted to give you a chance to talk about that aspect of the canal, it's probably the way most of us have interacted with it, and to ask you whether there are any major upgrades or changes planned for that. I don't know whether to try to, like, integrate it into something that people might try to do the whole thing in the same way they do the Appalachian Trail or, I don't know, just to see what your thoughts were about that.BW: I'm glad you asked. You know, two things. One, I didn't fully answer your previous question about priorities, but, you know, you mentioned the term accessible, and that's absolutely a priority of the Canal Corporation, making our system more accessible to people. And to your point, the trail is actually the way in which the vast majority of people experience the system. We see over 4 million users of the trail system every year. And so ensuring that both the trail and the canal are accessible to people of all different abilities, we're doing a lot more accessible canoe and kayak launches along the canal, making sure that, you know, that the trail system is accessible is a priority again, as is developing our workforce. A term I've been using to describe the work that our team does is canal craft, because it really is unique to the canal system that the things that the projects that they work on and the tools that they use, you don't learn that in any school. And so, we really want to build a, you know, kind of a curriculum around canal craft and make sure that we're building the workforce of the future. But as it relates to the trail, I think what's important for people to know for the Canalway and the Empire State Trail, it's really managed by three primary parties. We at the Canal Corporation manage about a third of it. Local municipalities is kind of a another party, obviously multiple that manage about a third of it. So, in the case of the city of Syracuse, as the Empire State Trail goes through the city, the city manages that park. And the New York State Parks Department manages about a third of it. So, it's a shared responsibility, it’s something that we work very closely with them on. But to your point, I think, you know, the Empire State Trail is largely completed. There are some areas where we're, you know, that may have been gravel that we're paving now to make them more accessible. But I think it's about connecting them, connecting the trail to other trail ways, to just make it that much more accessible and user friendly to those that use it.GR: And then, this question comes from a curiosity of mine, a personal curiosity. But I also have to tell you up front, complete ignorance, so feel free to correct the question after I ask it. But I wonder whether something or something more, if that's more accurate, could be done with the canal at the state fair. I mean, that seems like a really good place to me to, you know, generate a lot of public interest in it and appreciation for it and, you know, awareness of what kinds of opportunities are there, whether it's boating or biking or, you know, whatever. I don't know how the canal interacts with the state fair, but maybe you thought about that.BW: Yeah, certainly. So, you know, the state fair is an important partner. We have an exhibit every year at the fair. At the exhibit I encourage people to come find us, we have a model lock, so it actually is a lock that our team made that has water in it and kind of shows people how it works, because it really is fascinating if you haven't seen how it works before. I actually got to open the lock at Lock E-2, so that’s Erie Canal 2, on opening day myself, which was really cool and a little nerve racking, but, so we have the exhibit at the fair. I was out at the fair a couple months ago for a boat show, interacting with boaters. And, you know, it's also important to note that the fair is right next to Onondaga Lake, which is part of the current modern day barge canal system. So, it's very much proximate to the canal, and an important partner for us. And, to your point, you know, it's a great way to raise people's awareness of the canal because, you talked about ignorance. I was, as much as I thought I knew about the canal system, I was very ignorant when I started. And I think a lot of us, even though we grew up with it literally or figuratively in our backyard, it gets confusing between you see old parts of the canal, like in Camillus or, you know, Chittenango or Canastota, and you can't quite connect the dots. Well, that's because, you know, you had Clinton’s Ditch, the original canal, then you had the enlarged canal, and then you have the modern day barge canal, which, you know, does include a big portion of the Erie Canal, but also, the term is, we canalized to a lot of existing waterways. So, the Mohawk River, when you drive on the Thruway is part of the canal system, and we have movable dams that flood it to make it navigable to go through. Oneida Lake is part of that canal system. So it's something that as much as we all learn about it in fourth grade and usually in eighth grade, but beyond that, unless you use it, you really don't understand it.GR: Yeah. I saw an interesting documentary, a couple of years ago on, the other thing is there are these sort of spider legs that come off the canal, and this one was about the Black River and the canal there and the logging and how important that was at that time in the late 19th century. It was very, very interesting.BW: Absolutely, yeah. You know, one of the things that blew my mind, I mentioned some of the assets that we have, we own over 100 dams, and the reason is because back when the canal was created, virtually any body of water or waterway within upstate New York was tapped in some way to feed water into the canal. So we own, you know, what we describe as legacy dams, you know, up in the Adirondacks as well as to the South that are our responsibility and we maintain them, but really offer no current value to the modern day canal system. So, you know, it gets into one of the challenges that we have, you know, with all of this, we have billions of dollars of capital needs and the project that we're undertaking this year, the biggest project is over $100 million. We're repairing Madison Dam, which is, folks might be familiar with Lake Moraine, but it's over by the village of Hamilton. And if Madison Dam failed, it would flood out the village and Colgate University. And so obviously it's critical that we have a good safe dam there, and we're going to have that at the end of this significant investment, but it isn't really going to benefit the canal system in any way. So, there's all sorts of, you know, 200 years is a long time. There's a lot of assets and things that, you know, we're responsible for that, you know, may not be critical today, but for the canal system, but are certainly critical for the communities around them.GR: You're listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Ben Walsh. He's the Executive Director of the New York State Canal Corporation. And he served as the mayor of the city of Syracuse for eight years up until last January. The transition from being an elected executive, and I don't mean this as an insult, but a bureaucratic executive. You said, you know, you said you're still in an executive position. You have a large number of employees that work under you, but it's a different kind of deal being elected executive and bureaucratic executive. What's been the most challenging things about that transition in your way that you think about the job and the experiences that you have in it, sort of day to day?BW: Yeah. So, as I said at the beginning, I think the most important thing for me is I look to what I wanted to do next was I wanted to continue to serve, I wanted to be a public servant, and I have the privilege of continuing to do that. But it is different, you know, admittedly, and I've said this to my team, you know, I went from being, you know, the executive, and of course, I had important stakeholders, the Common Council, the voters. But, you know, more often than not, the buck stopped with me and I got to make the final call. Here, while I'm the director of the Canal Corporation, as I mentioned, we're a subsidiary of the New York Power Authority, so I have, you know, Justin Driscoll is the president and CEO of NYPA, I have weekly meetings with him, and we have a board. And so, you know, the buck doesn't necessarily stop with me, and so I've had to adjust to at times when, you know, I nor…

Full show notes at the publisher

Beverly Gage on the Campbell Conversations May 23, 2026

Show notes

Beverly Gage (Mara Lavitt)Program transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Beverly Gage. Professor Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale University. She's recently published a new book blending history and travelogue, titled, "This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History." Professor Gage appeared previously on this program to discuss an earlier book titled "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century." Demonstrating the impeccable taste of WRVO, the book won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of months later, it also won the Bancroft Prize. Professor Gage, welcome back to the program, and congratulations on those big awards.Beverly Gage: Thanks. It's great to be here.GR: Well, it's wonderful to have you back. So, let's talk about this new book, "This Land is Your Land." How did you get the idea to write this book?BG: It's a very different book than the J. Edgar Hoover biography, but they are linked in the sense that I worked on the Hoover biography for about a dozen years, and when that was done, I wanted to do something really different, something that would not take 12 years. So, there was a little bit of a personal impulse, but this was late 2022, early 2023, and I was already looking ahead to where we are now, which is 2026, the 250th birthday of the United States, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And I wanted to find a way to participate in what I thought might be a sort of troubled public conversation about that history, give people a way to grapple with the country's history, all 250 years of it. And so that was really the impulse of the book.GR: I think the idea that we've been having troubled conversations about where we are and where we've been might be an understatement. But yes, I think that certainly I can understand that timing. So, as you mentioned, this is a different kind of book for you. Were there any previous works or writers that you had in mind or were trying to follow in some way, or maybe, on the other hand, trying to separate yourself from, I mean, I know at one point in the book you invoke John Steinbeck, for instance, and saying, you know, you weren't trying to do necessarily what Steinbeck was doing. But were there other folks that you had in mind?BG: Well, the road trip book is, of course, a venerable American tradition. And so, I very much had that in mind. Whether we're talking about, you know, Alexis de Tocqueville or John Steinbeck, that great tradition. That is, in general, quite a masculine tradition. And so I was very aware of doing this as a woman and kind of going out on the road, so it has a different vibe for many reasons. But there are also historians who have done this in one way or another. Some recent books, like Clint Smith's book about sights devoted to slavery or one of my earlier inspirations, Tony Horowitz, who wrote many great travelogues about American history. Those are often journalists, not academic historians. And so I think that's also a bit of a different sensibility. I was coming in kind of with my toolset as a historian and I think it helped me kind of weave together a lot of what I was seeing in a different way.GR: Yeah, I want to come back to that because you anticipated very specifically to the specific author, one of the questions that I wanted to ask you later on, so I will come back to that. But, let me ask you this first, you know, you have different places you go to, and those form the basis of the chapters as well as those moments in American history that they reflect. How'd you go about choosing them? Obviously, you know, there are many others you could have chosen. How did you go about choosing the ones you chose?BG: The book is structured with 13 chapters, and each one is both a place and a moment in time. And since I'm a historian, it's really structured chronologically rather than geographically. So, you might not want to do these trips in exactly the order in which they appear in the book, because it would mean you would make it all the way to Texas, and then you'd have to go back to upstate New York and then down to South Carolina and then to Chicago. So, that's the historian sensibility there. And I was really looking for places that captured the central national dilemmas of their particular historical moment, whatever that might be. So, it begins in Philadelphia with the American Revolution, pretty obvious place to start. But then it moves around and tries to find places that, number one, in this historical moment, came to stand in for the nation at large. So, for instance, Chicago is my chapter on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the late 19th and early 20th century, when not only Americans, but the whole world was looking to Chicago and saying, you know, this is the essence, this is going to be the future of America, the future of American urban life. So that was one criteria. And then the other was they had to be places where that history was being actively contended with. So, places with good museums and sites and tchotchke shops and battlefields, whatever it might be. Because that's really the basis of the road trip. I'm not just traveling, I'm going specifically to the historic sites in these places.GR: So, bigger picture about this book. What are you hoping that people reading this are going to take away from it?BG: Well, first, I hope it's a little bit of an inspiration for people to turn off the screens, get away from their desks. That was the impulse for me, certainly. And get out and really see the country and engage with it, engage with their fellow citizens, maybe, but at least engage with these historic sites where the national story is being contended with and fought about and represented. So, I guess that's one piece. The other, and this is really the conceptual premise of the book, is that in a moment like 2026, a moment of commemoration and celebration and reckoning all at the same time, I really wanted to find a way to look at the deepest and most difficult parts of American history and reconcile that with being able to love the country in this very difficult moment. And so, the way I frame it in the book is that it's about knowing your history and still loving your country. And that's sort of the tension at the heart of this book.GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Yale historian Beverly Gage, and we're discussing her new book titled, "This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History." I wanted to pick up on exactly that last point that you made about coming to full reckoning with the history, but still loving the country. One of the main themes and findings that I got from reading through it was that, exactly what you said, that in important respects the nation is struggling with these big challenges right now and these difficult conversations, as you said earlier. And the fact that, you know, the facts of our history are the facts of our history, and, you know, like all other countries, there are things there that we might not wish that that were part of our story, but that we're still strong. You know, we're still ultimately a great country. And I have to say, first of all, I guess you've already answered, I wanted to make sure that I was not projecting onto your book, because that's my sense. I mean, that's my own personal sense about where we are. And I've had some of my own difficult conversations with some of my colleagues about, you know, what do we make of the current moment we're in and what does it mean for us? So, it sounds like I have your message right. I was wondering if you could just elaborate a little bit more on that then. How do you get to that place that you just described?BG: Well, I think our historical discourse, at least our public historical discourse has, like many things in this country, fallen into two big camps at the moment. One is that if you are a patriot, it means you only say great things, you ignore the most difficult parts of the past, and sometimes, even in this moment, try to erase them. And as a historian, I find that wildly objectionable and also not true to history as it actually happened. I think we have a counterweight to that which says that the only things that have mattered in the American past are the worst things that the country has done. And that to me also seems not actually true to the history, but it does seem to be one of the things that's really driving what I see this year, which is a real ambivalence about the idea of celebrating anything in the American story or in the American past in a moment like 2026. I think that that's a little bit of a dereliction of duty. I think that a moment like this is about really trying to put the pieces together, doing a little bit of soul searching nationally and maybe personally about what these strains are in American history that might be worth honoring or thinking about in a moment like this. And a lot of this book is about Americans in the past who had to contend with exactly these questions. There's a chapter on upstate New York in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, a place you might know something about. And what's interesting there is that so many of the characters who populated the Erie Canal corridor in those days were dealing with exactly this question, right? Frederick Douglass there in Rochester is saying, you know, how can I be an American? How do I think about the 4th of July in a country where I was once enslaved, that still enslaves millions of people? And so, these are not new tensions and new dilemmas. And, to think that we are so special in this moment, I think is also not entirely true to our history.GR: Not to put you on the spot as an expert on upstate New York history, because that's not necessarily what you've studied, but I did want to ask you about that. One of the things that struck me when I first got up here and started learning more about upstate New York history, I had, you know, known about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and some of the other figures. But there were all these different movements that all, like, were within a couple decades of each other that had really deep roots here that, you know, from the Oneida perfection community, utopian communities to the anti-slavery to even Mormonism. I mean, it's just, it had this nickname of the burnt-over district. And I don't know if you have any thoughts as a historian of the nation, like, what was going on in upstate New York that was in the water that created all this?BG: Right, well, I think the water is a good word to use because the first thing that was going on was that the Erie Canal opened. And, so, we tend to think of the Erie Canal as this economic engine, this economic driver, and it was that. But it also meant that lots of people could move and settle in this region and many of them were full of these energies, right? They were seekers and travelers and some of them visionaries. And I think what's really interesting about upstate New York as a region during that period is that they're often in these little tiny towns and cities, so they are neighbors with each other, they're sharing ideas, and so there's a way in which that spirit and that ambition really built on itself. I should also note that one of the characters I got very interested in was a man named Garrett Smith who lived in Peterboro, the tiny little hamlet of Peterboro. And I think Garrett Smith is part of the answer to that too, because he was one of the richest men in the country in his day. He was willing to fund a lot of these reform movements, temperance, women's rights, abolition. And so, when you have one rich guy who's willing to support your cause, a lot of people also go in that direction. So, I think he's not very well known, but a very important factor in all of this.GR: Yeah, his name comes up among local historians all the time. And you're right to bring up Seneca Falls, the women's movement and the center there and what happened there. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Beverly Gage. The Yale University history professor is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning, "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century." She's talking with me today about her newest book, it's titled, "This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History." I wanted to ask you about the book's title, because on the one hand, you know, the Woody Guthrie song has become an informal national anthem over the years. But I think it's also fair to say it's somewhat of an anthem for the left. And so, I was just wondering if there was any significance in the choice of that?BG: There was. One of the things that I really like about that song, that moment, a figure like Woody Guthrie, but "This Land Is Your Land" in particular, is that it was both a celebration and a protest at the same time. So often today, it comes down to preschool children who are learning to sing it, and this sort of nice, innocuous song about the country. But in its day, it was both celebratory and a form of protest. It came out in the early 1940s in the wake of the Great Depression, as World War Two is getting underway and it's an incredibly troubling moment, like many moments in history. And Woody Guthrie is contending with all of those things together. It's also a little bit of a call to readers to claim this land as their land, to get out, to see it, to engage it, to not retreat from its history and its complications, but instead to be in it together.GR: It's got a little bit of a double meaning there, maybe even a triple meaning. So, I'm going to come back to the writer that you invoked earlier, Tony Horowitz, one of my favorites too. In reading through this book, I was reminded of him, you know, he blends history with reportage travelogue. The difference though, that I thought of immediately you already kind of alluded to it is, he was a journalist who then became a historian of sorts. You're a very serious historian who became a journalist of sorts. And so, what did you find the most difficult in making that transition in terms of the way that you approach this book and the way that you wrote it?BG: Well, I loved Tony Horowitz's books, and his most famous book, "Confederates in the Attic," came out in the 90s or so when I was just graduating from school, entering graduate school and learning to become a historian. And I remember driving around with the audiobook of that book. And so it was, in some sense, my introduction to this way of thinking about history. I do myself have a background for a few years before I went to graduate school as a journalist, and so there was a little bit of that sensibility as well. But I would say that the main difference is that I think my background as a historian kind of gave me the knowledge and maybe the confidence that I needed to try to take on 250 years all at once and to really just be selective. This book is all about making choices, where to go, what to include. It is not an encyclopedic overview of American history. And I think that came from my training as a historian. I think I also organized the book, as I said earlier, chronologically rather than geographically. And so, it's really about me as a historical observer going around and doing this sort of thing. The last thing I would say is this is not an interview driven book. I talked with lots of people as I went around, tour guides, people who round sites, fellow tourists…

Full show notes at the publisher

Eric Jay Dolin on the Campbell Conversations May 09, 2026

Show notes

Eric Jay DolinAuthor Eric Jay Dolin talks about his forthcoming book, "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail."Program transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. The coming of summer invites a good tale involving the ocean, and my guest today, who has been called the leading maritime historian of his generation, has supplied the perfect voyage for us. Eric Jay Dolin is the author of previous bestsellers such as "Black Flags Blue Waters," and he's written a new book titled "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail." Mr. Dolin, welcome to the program.Eric Jay Dolin: Thanks for having me.GR: We really appreciate you making the time. Now, let me just start with a question about how you got into this particular line of writing. I mean, your beat as a writer isn't exclusively about maritime history, but obviously that is your principal theme. The Washington Post has called you “the expert literary steersman of our time.” How did you originally fall into that current, so to speak?EJD: When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and be Jacques Cousteau. I was really into marine biology. I was a very serious shell collector, and I went off, and I wanted to be a malacologist. I wanted to be a professional seashell scientist, so I went off to college. I started going towards that path. I discovered I wasn't very good at science, so I shifted gears. I went into environmental policy. I thought I'd be a professor of environmental policy, and I got a master's and a PhD in that, and then I didn't apply for a single teaching job. I started working. If you looked at my resume, you'd think I couldn't keep a job. I've had so many different jobs in environmental policy, public policy, but through it all, I just loved writing. And because my early introduction to marine biology and my early love of marine biology, I think I naturally gravitated towards stories of the marine environment, and as I said, I'm not exclusively focused on that. But I do live in Marblehead, Massachusetts, which is, and I'm just about a quarter of a mile from the harbor, and I grew up in Long Island in Connecticut, very close to Long Island Sound. So I've always been near the ocean. I've always been fascinated by stories of the ocean, and when I decided I wanted to try this crazy career of being a writer, I, what interests me, and a lot of the things that interested me initially were revolved around the ocean. And once you start writing a couple of books that involve maritime tales, you often find other tales while you're working on those books, and you also, to be honest, you get a little bit pigeonholed. So it, you know, publishers like you to keep writing in the same vein because you can build your audience there. But I love maritime stories. I don't know if my next book will be on a maritime topic. It might be or it might not. It's really the story that compels me to write about it. But because I have this interest in the ocean, that's often where I look first.GR: Well, I don't want to sound cynical or cheeky, but, as someone that went down the academic path, I think you did just fine. I think you made a good choice here. You've got a nice body of work. So, we will dive deeper into the different parts of this particular story in this book as we go, but just to sort of start us off and give us a context, could you just give our listeners the bare facts about the story of the Mentor and the men on it?EJD: Sure. The Mentor was a whale ship out of New Bedford. It left in the summer or actually late spring of 1831, on a voyage to go kill whales in the Atlantic Ocean, and there were 22 men on board, Captain Edward Bernard. And they weren't having much luck in the Atlantic, so they went into the Indian Ocean and then finally decided to sail all the way to the Pacific Ocean, which was teeming with sperm whales, the most valuable whale of all. On the way there, some bad weather came. He lost his bearings, and he crashed into a reef in the archipelago of Palau. And it's sort of a complicated story, a lot of moving parts, as we talked about before. But what happens first is they're attacked by natives, viciously. They get away from those natives who attacked them. Then they land on an island, one of the islands in Palau, and the village of Ngerechelong, and there they are drawn into a historical dynamic that goes back decades to when a British ship crashed in the neighboring village of Koror. And in exchange for help in building a ship, the British gave the Kororese guns and ammunition and fought with them against their neighbors, including the Ngerechelong. So here comes the Mentor, only 11 men left, 11 men had died after the crash. Here comes the Mentor and the village of Ngerechelong, who is lorded over by Koror. They say, they're Westerners, they're Americans. We could get guns from them, and we could become powerful. So they strike a deal. “We will help you build a ship and to get away and go back home, and you will send us guns in return.” So they try to build a ship, they fail miserably, and they finally build them a canoe. And, the men patch up their whale boat, and they leave. During this whole time, Koror has been trying to lure them away because the Americans were looked like as pawns because if you controlled the Americans, you would get guns and ammunition as your reward. Well, the Americans finally leave Ngerechelong. They're hoping to go to the Spice Islands. But after a very dramatic voyage in the whale boat where they lose the canoe, they end up on another island called Tobi, which is part of Palau today, but was not back then. And they get a very different reception. And I need to add one other thing. When they left Ngerechelong, they left three of their men behind as hostages so that they would return with guns at a later date. Well, on Tobi, they're treated horrifically, and, over time, two of the men escape on a passing ship. Another two men escape on a passing ship, and this is after many years where they're near starvation. There are men that are killed on Tobi. There are men that die, and, then finally, President Andrew Jackson sends a rescue mission, a naval ship to the Pacific to pick up the remaining men in Palau. They think there are more of them than there are, but a number of them have died in the intervening years, and they successfully rescue the last of the Americans who are held in Palau. That's just the bare bones of the story. It spans over four years. Some of the men spent four years essentially in captivity, some of it fairly pleasant, some of it quite horrific. But it's an amazing story, and luckily, a few of the participants wrote down what happened to them when they returned to America. And that's how I was able to tell the story.GR: Wow. What a lot of twists and turns there. So, obviously, I was going to ask you, you know, one of the things I was going to ask you about, I'm not even going to ask any more now that you've told that story, was, you know, there's lots of shipwrecks out there. What is it about this one? But obviously this one's really, really interesting. How did you come upon it? I mean, what, you know, it seems like it's a story that we probably should have had a book 100 years ago about. How’d this thing stay until Dolin, that’s now, revealed it to all of us?EJD: Well, I'm glad there wasn't a book on it recently because then I couldn’t have written it, but the way that it happened is I wrote a book many years ago in, about 2007, it was published called "Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America,” which was a book that spanned four centuries and many, many stories. While researching that book, I came upon the story of the Mentor because it involves a whale ship, but it didn't make it into the narrative of "Leviathan," but it stuck in the back of my head. You fast forward to 2024 or 2023, when I wrote a book called "Left for Dead," which is about five men who are intentionally marooned on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812. And when I wrote that book, I immediately started thinking about the Mentor again, because it has some similarities. There's a shipwreck involved, there's a duress, a long span of time that people are on another island away from home, and that got me rekindled my interest in the Mentor. And then I had to decide, is there enough here to write an entire book? And I dove into the research, and I decided the answer was definitively yes.GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Eric Jay Dolin, the bestselling maritime historian. He's got a new book coming out in early June, and it's titled "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail."So as you dug into this, you decided, okay, I'm going to make this my book. Did you come across new information that you weren't aware of before that allowed you to go even deeper and tell the story in more detail?EJD: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, when I wrote "Leviathan," my understanding of the wreck of the Mentor probably spanned a page worth of material. I just sort of read a little bit about it in bits and pieces. When I started to actually write this book, not only did I read the memoir of, one of the men on board the Mentor and the captain of the Mentor, but I also read every single newspaper article that came out at the time and accounts, oral histories from Palau, accounts that came out in later years about the shipwreck and the subsequent events. So I think that I dug up almost everything that's been written on the wreck of the Mentor and what transpired thereafter. And then the job was to synthesize it in a manner that was easily digestible, because when I started reading this story, I said, man, there are a lot of twists and turns and moving parts, and there are historical stories that I have to pull into it, like a wreck of a British ship years before. And then I have to talk about what happens in Palau after the wreck of the Mentor, and it was fascinating, at times vexing, but ultimately very satisfying to me to tell this complicated story in what I think is an easy-to-read manner.GR: Well, one of the things that struck me in your book was how young the crew was.EJD: Yes.GR: The oldest member is, 32 years old. The captain of the ship is 31. I infer from that that whaling must have been an incredibly hard and treacherous occupation.EJD: Yes. It was an incredibly hard and treacherous occupation. And this was a time at which the United States was the leading whaling nation in the world, and they were expanding by leaps and bounds every year, so more and more men were needed. So, it was getting more difficult to crew your ships. So they were basically where it used to be, a very specialized profession, they, at this point, they were starting to take on a lot of green hands, people who were unfamiliar, but as for the age, that's not so unusual. Keep in mind that in the 1830s, the average life expectancy was much, much less than what it is today. And if you reach 32, you are not an old man. But you were getting up there in your 40s and 50s. People didn't often make their 60s, 70s, and 80s, but also maritime professions historically, even before this, have always been a young man's job because of the difficulty, the danger, the risk, having to leave your family behind. So it was not at all unusual the age profile on the Mentor, and as you mentioned, a number of the people on board were under 20, so very young. Some of them had never been to sea before, inexperienced, and here they were going on this voyage halfway around the world, and everybody hoped that the voyage would end in success. But there was always lurking in their minds the fear that there would be a tragic failure, and they may not come back at all.GR: Well, and very quickly, where exactly are the Palau Islands in the Pacific?EJD: They're in Micronesia, which means small islands. And, it's basically 500 or 600 miles to the west, to the east of the Philippines, and about 500, 600 miles southwest of Guam. So it's sort of in that area, the Philippines, Australia, Guam, New Guinea, that area.GR: Okay. We'll get into some of the details of their experiences. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Eric Jay Dolin, the maritime historian has a new book coming out in June titled "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail," and we've been discussing his book.So I wanted to ask you about what happened in the actual moments or the immediate aftermath of when that ship wrecked on the reef. My understanding is, you know, they didn't all continue to follow the captain. Right? There was dissension there.EJD: Right. Well, not so much dissension, the rules of the road and maritime law or practice at the time was that the captain was the ultimate authority on board the ship while it was sailing. But once a wreck took place and you were stranded someplace, the captain's authority essentially vanished. And it wasn't really every man for himself, but they liked Bernard. They thought he was a good captain. However, right after they crashed on this reef, and keep in mind, this was a total shock. He thought, based on his calculations, even though it was very stormy and he couldn't use celestial navigation, he thought he was about 150 miles out, you know, in the open ocean on his way to Guam, and was not going to have any problem, and then all of a sudden they wreck on this reef, and it was a pretty bad wreck, and they were listed over quite a bit and the waves were very high. So the men had to decide what to do. How did they save themselves? And, the first mate decided that the best option was to take one of the whale boats and leave, and hopefully find an island or some land nearby, and ten other men or nine other men threw in their lot with him. They got in the whale boat went down. They probably made it a few hundred yards, maybe a few thousand yards. And what the other men found out later, the following day is that the whale boat overturned, and those men were never seen again. The captain of the ship, Edward Bernard, also decided that his best bet was to leave. So he got another whale boat ready to go. Two other men decided to go with him, but as they were lowering the whale boat from the davits, which was holding the whale boat up, a wave crashed the whale boat against the side of the wrecked Mentor and smashed it to pieces. One of the men was flung into the ocean and he just drowned. Another guy managed to scamper up and get back into the boat there. There were actually four of them, and Edward Bernard, he was sort of smart. He had a rope around his waist, that he put on before he got in the whale boat with the notion that if they encountered trouble, the remaining men on the Mentor would haul him back in. Well, there he was in the water, being swept away by the waves. Probably about 100 yards away, and the men on board were able to pull the old man, as they called him, 32 old man onto the Mentor. So now we have 11 men still on the Mentor. 11 have died. They wait till the next day and, they spy land in the distance and they get into the remaining whale boat, which is already beat up, and they make it over to this small cay or small island, which is only about 250ft long by 50ft wide. And there they encounter the natives for the first time the following day. And that's where the story…

Full show notes at the publisher

Scott Levy on the Campbell Conversations May 02, 2026

Show notes

Scott LevyProgram transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. These days, if you want to find the most white-hot politics, you might look to your local school board. My guest today is the former chairman of Blythedale Children's Hospital in Westchester County, New York, and he's a former investment banker and he's currently a partner at an investment management firm. And he decided several years ago that he'd seek a seat on his local public school board. And he has something to say, not only about the experience, but about school boards more generally. Scott Levy recently published, "Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming the Heart of American Education and Democracy." Mr. Levy, welcome to the program.Scott Levy: Well, Grant, it's great to be with you today.GR: I really appreciate you making the time. Let me just start with the book's title, "Why School Boards Matter," I think in at least one way, I think it's obvious to a lot of us in recent years that school boards do matter, they have mattered. And let me just give you and our listeners a quick story to illustrate this. At Syracuse University, I help run a course for military veterans who are interested in pursuing elective office for the first time. And as a way to get started down that path, what we used to suggest to them is that they look at school boards, among other local offices. It's a common first step. Now we're cautioning them to tread very carefully there, because this terrain has become so politically fraught with divisive cultural debates. I mean, it's a way for, it seems to me, for someone to get labeled and sucked into a polarized debate right out of the gate in their public service. And just to sort of put an exclamation point on this point I'm making, one of the folks that teaches on our program is a former National Party campaign chair, and he starts out his presentation saying, you know, one thing I want to tell you, don't run for school board.Scott Levy: (laughter)GR: So, my question is, what has happened? Have school boards, do you think, just been drawn into this black hole of political polarization right now along with everything else, or is something more distinctive going on? What happened?SL: So, you're getting to the heart of one of the reasons why I decided to write the book. Because when I first became a school board member in 2015, it's a local district outside of New York City, in Westchester County, I remember school boards being thought of as relatively boring, and I remember when I won the election and I was walking in my town, somebody had stopped me in the street and they said, oh, Scott, congratulations on winning the race, and I said to them, oh, I really appreciate it, and they said, yeah, we're going to see you on video because all the school board meetings are videoed and anybody can watch them. That's one of the things about school boards that's so important, the transparency. And I remember thinking at the time, wow, somebody actually watches this because this is 2015 and not a lot of attention was being paid to it.GR: (laughter)SL: And he responds by saying, yeah, I watch it. I watch it because I've been having trouble falling asleep lately, and it's very helpful, especially when you're doing the budget or you're doing policy language. And that was really, I think, the way so many people thought about school boards in 2015. And then you fast forward to 2020, 21 and 22, in the heart of Covid and afterwards, and we see everything explode. And what my message would be is, on the one hand, school boards have always been a place throughout American history where these battles have taken place. And I did a lot of research looking back at the 1800s and early 1900s, finding examples where you could almost find the same language that people used for the smallpox vaccine, as they did for the Covid vaccine when there was talk of vaccination requirements in the early 1900s on smallpox and obviously around, you know, in the middle of the pandemic. This battle between parental rights and government control or curriculum versus indoctrination, and the fact that we as Americans approached these questions with slightly different ideas, I think gets to the heart of what happens in boardrooms. Now, there are a bunch of things that have changed as well that I'm happy to get into it with you.GR: Yeah, well, you actually anticipated something I want to ask you about. You do get into the history of this, and you take a look at the past regarding school board politics. So, you went back to the 1800s, and that example was smallpox. But, you know, I'm old enough to remember really epic battles over school desegregation. I can't remember how many of those happened at the school board level, but I know it was a big issue at the state level and certainly the national level. Thinking about maybe after World War two, have there been other times when school boards occupied a similarly volatile political space? Or again, are we now in this combination of, you mentioned indoctrination versus education, the battles over curriculum and what books people are going to read, battles over bathrooms and battles over gender identity, the Covid battles, which were huge. I mean, is it new, do you think, or is it just a blip on our continuum?SL: I think it's a blip on the continuum in the sense that there are always issues that permeate boardrooms, and obviously they change from time to time, teaching evolution versus creationism, the way in which religion comes into schools in different ways, even today, we see that, but we've seen that throughout American history. In the early 1800s in Philadelphia, there was literally a riot that happened over what Bible was going to be taught in public schools in Philadelphia. And then you look at the way that lines are drawn between different schools within a district. That's a very controversial issue. Whether a school is potentially going to be closed, that's, it's not a cultural issue, but it's an incredibly important issue for the community that tends to bring out a lot of different factions and some real battles that happen in boardrooms. So, there's just so many different reasons why things can heat up, and you never quite know what's around the corner. But I think that these places are just manifestations of what's happening in broader society and/or in that community.GR: I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Scott Levy. He's a former investment banker and a member of the board of education in Westchester County, New York, and the author of, "Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming the Heart of American Education and Democracy." So, we've been talking about the real headline, you know, political battles that that are deeply divisive and that have been located in school boards, but your book is about a lot more than that. And, you know, you want to emphasize how important school boards are in American democracy and in education policy. So, I just want to give you some space to talk about that. What are the other reasons why school boards are so important?SL: So, the reason that I decided to run for school board is really after I had seen what happened with the rollout of Race to the Top in New York State, which happened around the time of 2013, 2014. I was the chair of an organization that was raising money for public schools to try to fund innovative projects, projects that couldn't be done in the regular way - school budget. And this organization had been around for 20 years, there had been a steady stream of ideas that had always flowed from teachers, from administrators to the organization, for, you know, funding opportunities. And all of a sudden, those ideas stopped. And I remember thinking at the time, why all of a sudden, I become chair of this organization do the ideas stop? And the reason was that Race to the Top as it was executed by New York State in a very aggressive manner, really did upend the way that everybody thought about schools, the way teachers were teaching, the role of tests tied to teacher evaluations, there were a lot of elements of this, and it garnered all the attention. And I remember thinking at the beginning, well, maybe this is just affecting my district and not affecting the districts more broadly. And I went to this forum that I'll never forget where there were schools across our region, there were schools that were high needs, schools that were low needs, schools on all different, you know, economic ends of the spectrum, all different demographics. And really across the board there was an amazing amount of energy focused on how this initiative was really upending schools in a very negative way. And so that got me to doing a lot of policy research and work and thinking about the fact that, if you're on a school board and you sit within the district as the governance body, there are a lot of things that you can do that even the state and federal government, as well-meaning as they may be, can't do. And that is really the, you know, heart of a lot of what I talk about in my book, ways that school boards can improve districts in just a very different manner than can be done at a centralized level. The thing that I found by the time I finished writing the book was that, perhaps maybe the most important takeaway, is the role of school boards in our democracy more broadly, and how I really do think that despite the fact that we see a lot of infighting in school board meetings and polarization that happens in local communities, we really do have an opportunity through this mechanism of public school boards to bring communities together and to ultimately try to repair our country and reduce polarization broadly. They're an incredibly important piece of democracy. So, there's those two angles, there's how it can improve schools and then how we can use it to strengthen our democracy.GR: So, we're going to get into both of those things, particularly in the second half. But let me ask you this question now, you probably already answered it really, but if you want to say anything additionally about it. There is this argument out there, and you just engaged it, that the politics of school boards have gotten so nasty and dysfunctional and also that the challenges of education have become so big and cut across local districts that it's actually better to let larger entities, such as state government and federal government, really sort of drive the bus, as opposed to local school boards. But you have a different view on that, obviously.SL: I believe that the state has an important accountability role to play. The state is funding a good portion of education in New York State and in states around the country. And so, it certainly makes sense that the state plays an active role in overall policy and governance. But I think what we've seen is a tremendous shift over the course of several decades from power that used to reside at the local level to now power at the state level, and to a lesser extent, though still significant, at the federal level. And I think what's interesting about this is that this is not about red or blue, because if you look at a state like New York that's blue at the state level, and if you look at a state like like Tennessee or Florida, that may be red at the state level, you see the same pattern of legislation that is quite specific around the way in which schools operate, including curriculum that you wouldn't have seen 50 years ago or 100 years ago or 150 years ago. So, day to day, it doesn't seem like much changes, but when you look at it across, you know, decades, there's been a dramatic shift. And it's so interesting because there are a lot of people in blue states that are blue that say, yay, this is great, this stuff is great. And a lot of people in red states that look at their red state legislative bodies and governors and say, yeah, this is great. But when you really step back and think about some of the legislation that's happening in red or blue states, to me, I view it from a political science perspective as quite similar. You know, if you're going to ban something at the state level, you may be banning or you may be mandating something at the state level, but at the end of the day, you're taking an action that's going to affect a lot of different districts. And it goes back to what I was saying before, our system is complex. There used to be room for nuance, and there used to be room for this governing body at the local level to really try to perform certain tasks that just can't be done on a centralized basis. And that's why I think school boards, you know, can be very good at.GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Scott Levy, the former investment banker serves on his local school board in Westchester County, New York, and is the author of, "Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming the Heart of American Education and Democracy." So, can you speak a little bit more about how the ways you see school boards can make things better, the unique contributions that they can have?SL: For sure. Because they sit within the district, they're really best suited to try to tackle the issues that that particular district faces. And when you think about it, if we look across New York State, if we look across the country, every district is different. Some districts have a challenge with academic proficiency, others may have a challenge with declining enrollment or maybe stress and anxiety in the high school in that crazy race, the college. There are all different kinds of issues that districts face, and depending on the issue, what you really want to do is you want to set up a set of initiatives that try to tackle the issue, and then you want to try to measure your progress against that issue. If that's done at a centralized level, it's very difficult to be specific around some of these issues because not everybody has the same issue. And so, really what the board can do incredibly well is do some soul searching that says, well, what are the issues that we want to try to improve in our district? And then set up some key performance indicators to say, okay, I'm going to try to measure my progress against them. That's one big thing. Another thing at the end of the day, is the fact that the heart of a district is all about its people and relationships. And if you think about what's broken in education in America, we look at our students and there's a tremendous amount of mental health issues and anxiety and stress and disconnection that we, of course, want to try to improve. We look at our teaching force and we know that teacher attrition is at very high levels, and it's just very, and teacher satisfaction is at a very low level, and so we want to reverse that. And then we look at superintendents and the average length of a superintendency these days, tenure is very short. In many places it's as short as three years. And so, we want more longevity for administrators. And when you think about all of this, it ties back to the district climate and what it feels like to work in that district, or to be a student in that district, and how can we make sure it's a place where we're getting great engagement, student engagement and professional engagement from the people that work there? And that's something that the school board has a lot of, kind of control over, because the school board sets the tone, the school board sets the example of what happens, and that…

Full show notes at the publisher

Agustina Paglayan on the Campbell Conversations Apr 25, 2026

Show notes

Agustina PaglayanProgram transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Public education always seems to be under stress. Students spend the school day lost in their phones, we hear that they're horribly behaved, they are crippled by social and other anxieties. My guest today has an interesting take on public education's main origins and its goals, and it casts those problems in a provocative light. Agustina Paglayan is a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, and she's the author of a recent book titled, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education". Professor Paglayan, welcome to the program.Agustina Paglayan: Hi, Grant. Thank you for having me.GR: It's a pleasure and we really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with a very basic question that takes us back to the beginning, because, you know, your book tells a story about history in many respects. When and where did mass public education first really take root in the United States and really get going.AP: In the United States, well, it's an interesting question, because the United States was not the precursor in providing access to primary or elementary education. So, within the U.S., I would say Massachusetts was the first state to pass state law to require local areas to fund public schools, which were called common schools at the time. But the precursor was actually Prussia, in Europe, which was an absolutist regime, so, happy to talk more about that. And the U.S. model very heavily emulated the Prussian model. And the Prussian model, so the Massachusetts state law that I was referring to goes back to the very end of the 18th century. I don't remember the exact date, I think it was 1790 or 1789, but it was soon after Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts, whereas, in the Prussian context, the first compulsory primary school year dates to 1763, so a few decades earlier than that.GR: Well, you argue in your book, and you already mentioned when you said Shays' Rebellion, sort of, it sounds like there's going to be a relationship there that you're going to want to draw, but, you argue in the book that the main purpose of public education was to indoctrinate and, I'm going to use a pretty provocative word here, control the unvarnished masses of people to make the public more obedient and well behaved. What is the evidence that you found in doing your research that supports that? What kind of things leapt out to you?AP: There's lots of different types of evidence that I, probably, you don't want me to summarize within the short span of time. But I'll, let me clarify a couple things, because you mentioned the word indoctrination. That's a charged word. I think people think of, ah, indoctrination, it's what communists do, it's what fascists do. We don't do indoctrination in the United States. So, let me clarify it first, how I use the term indoctrination. And if you look at the dictionary definition, indoctrination refers, according to the dictionary, to the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. It doesn't make indoctrination dependent on what's the content of those beliefs. Indoctrination occurs whether you're teaching someone that communism is wonderful or fascism is wonderful, or also that democracy is the best form of government. As long as you're teaching these beliefs in a way that doesn't allow for questioning or for students to ask, oh, but why are you saying that? For them to think critically and keep an open mind about what they're being taught when that is not taking place, that's what would be consistent with the dictionary definition of indoctrination, and that's the way that I use it. When I make the claim that when mass education systems emerged around the world, particularly in the Western world, the primary goal was to instill in students, future citizens, essentially, the idea that they needed to respect the government's authority on the government's laws, that it was the right thing to do from a moral standpoint. And that if they behaved in ways that challenged the state's authority, or they behaved in ways that deviated or didn't comply with existing laws and rules that the government was setting, that that was going to bring them to be rejected by their peers, or go to hell, or whatever the basis of morality was, it could be secular, it could be religious, but that it was morally reprehensible to challenge the authority of the state. So, it was essentially, project that states advanced as a way to legitimate their authority and consolidate their power. So, very different from the ideas we have today about what education means.GR: No, I appreciate that, thank you. So, in uncovering that, did you find evidence of this in like, what people at the time were writing about what they were doing? Was it like, correspondence with other leaders, diaries? I'm just trying to figure out sort of where you'd go back and sort of say, ah, you know, I see. One thing you do do, I understand is, you know, you have this association between efforts to do this and perceived threats. I mean, you mentioned Shays' Rebellion there. And so just tell us a little bit about, sort of, what things you're pulling out of the historical records that convinced you about this.AP: Right, because I didn't even speak about the evidence before, which is what you wanted me to talk about. So, the first, I started with this, this was not the idea that I started with. The argument that I shared with you was not, it wasn't kind of where I was a priority. I grew up hearing that agitation spread around the world because of democracy, that it was driven by democratic ideals. So first I started by investigating the truth to that conventional wisdom and looking at, okay, did this education systems, mass primary education systems, did they emerge before the spread of democracy or after the spread of democracy? Well, it turns out they spread well before the spread of democracy, on average, six decades before our country first transitioned to democracy. And then, okay, could it have been that it was driven by prejudice to industrialize on the economic needs to have a skilled workforce in order to sustain industrialization? So again, I looked at, okay, let's compare the timing of when these systems emerge and when they reach a critical access level, versus when industrialization takes place. And again, not a strong relationship there between those two, and in particular, I was mentioning Prussia before as the pioneer of mass primary schooling. Well, it did in 1763, a time when Prussia was an agrarian country, and England on the other hand, an industrial power and leader, was the last country in Europe to introduce compulsory primary education though, or to start legislating primary education. So again, not a relationship there. Another possibility, people said, oh, what about interstate wars and threats from abroad that lead governments to want to teach everyone that patriotism? Could that be something that that led to education expansion? Again, looked at the evidence, no, not actually. It turns out that wars did not spur the expansion of primary school. And through this, as I was doing all of this, which was quantitative statistical analysis, I also was reading about the evidence that politicians at the time, when they were setting up these primary education systems regulated by states, what were they arguing? What was the point they were making? And in those, I mean, you were wondering were they letters they were writing? Some of them were letters, some of them were, like, debates during parliamentary debates. You know, some of these were special reports that they were writing about, the status of education and why it was necessary to expand it. So, there's all different types of evidence. But one thing that became very clear from that was that what they were worried about was the masses being a threat to the state's authority, especially if the masses became organized, and mobilized in violent ways. And so through that, then, back to the Shays' Rebellion and the other evidence that I uncovered, I developed this idea, hypotheses, that perhaps one of the things that spurred the government's fear of mass rebellion was precisely the occurrence of mass violence against the state, and that if it was indeed the case that those kinds of episodes of mass violence against the state, where things that activated or heightened the government's fear of the masses, then we should observe that after those episodes, there should be more efforts to regulate and expand primary education. So, then what I did was look at civil wars as one example of a type of mass violence against the state, and focusing specifically on those types of civil war study involve mass violence against the state. And then I looked again, quantitatively, at the expansion of primary education after episodes of civil war cross-nationally in Europe and Latin America, and found, indeed, that civil wars led to a big expansion of access to primary education. I can keep talking about the evidence because then, but I'm sure you have follow up questions for me on this.GR: Yes, I do. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Agustina Paglayan. She's a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of a recent book on education and its history titled, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education." No, I appreciate that, I’ve a much better sense now of where this is all coming from and how you, the patterns that you saw around the world. I have heard sometimes in conversations about the history of public education in the United States, that one of the main purposes of it was to teach children to read so that they could read the Bible. You know, there was a concern that they need to be able to read the Bible because we want to make sure they can get to heaven, etc.. Did you find any evidence about that in what you were looking at?AP: Not very strong, I would say not so strong in the United States. There were some other countries where mass education was religious. But, you know, in the United States, there was always this big debate about whether mass education should be religious or secular, and they ended up on the side of, well, it should be secular because they wanted freedom of religion. That's part of what led many people to migrate to the U.S., was the search of a freedom of religion. And so, I think that there was in Protestant countries in particular, in continental Europe, Prussia being one of those cases, there was a desire, among other things, to teach children the Bible. I wouldn't necessarily say, so, I think that the issue is that sometimes people then make the extrapolation that if you were learning to read the Bible, you were also learning to read other things. And as people, when you look at how people were learning how to read the Bible, there was a lot of rote memorization of the Bible that was taking place. That doesn't necessarily mean you could actually extrapolate your memorization of the Bible to be able to read and understand, comprehend other texts, scientific texts or anything like that. But I do think like, there's like either, and there's evidence that other people have produced of like Protestantism being relevant for the expansion of primary education in places where Protestantism was very strong, but also places where the state was strongly fused with the Protestant church, because there were some places where that wasn't the case. By the way, I’ll also note there are like, there are some countries where Catholicism is the primary religion, like France didn't have a strong influence of Protestantism and they still expanded primary education. So, sometimes what the state was doing was to expand education to contest the authority of the church, again, to consolidate the secular authority of the state, because historically it was a church, like, regardless of whether you were thinking Protestantism, Catholicism, historically it was churches that were in charge of the moral education of children, and parents also of course. And so, as I was saying earlier, the goal of the state was to say, no, we're going to be the ones teaching you what's morally right and what's morally wrong, and as part of that project we're going to teach you that it's morally wrong to challenge the authority of the state. And so there was, in some cases, they did it in conjunction with the church because they were a kind of, of the same mind. But there were other cases where this project entailed delegitimizing the moral authority of the church. And that was an example in France and in many countries in Latin America also, where it was a project of expansion that was antagonistic to the church's interests.GR: You're listening to "The Campbell Conversations" on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Agustina Paglayan. She's a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of a recent book titled, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education" and we've been talking about some of the issues that her book raises and some of the content of it. I wanted to ask you, you were describing how these public education efforts arose and what was driving them, the patterns that you saw there, in looking across the Western world. If we can come back to the United States in particular, but if this is something that's shared, we can talk about that too, but, were there certain techniques early on that were emphasized? I mean, I've got Catholic friends that went to Catholic school, and they almost all have stories about nuns hitting them on the hands with rulers, you know? I mean, what kinds of methods were used to try to achieve this obedience?AP: So, actually, the hitting children, which is what you're describing, wasn't the main technique that people had in mind when they were thinking, how do we instill obedience? Because remember, we were talking about how the goal was to make people not rebel against the state, and what they thought was the problem with, like why people were rebelling against the state, from the mindset of elites, is because they were violent masses and like barbarian savages and that's why they needed to kind of be civilized in schools. And so, there were a lot of intellectuals who thought, like, if we were to use violence in schools, that would actually not be, like, role modeling the idea that you shouldn't be violent, we should be leading by example, and we should be selecting teachers, so as to select those who are morally, like, worthy of holding this position so that they can, kind of model the values of nonviolence that we want kids to internalize. And so there were, again, the teaching, the training of teachers very heavily emphasized their moralization. The recruitment also, like when you were hiring teachers, like every Western country or almost every Western country, you needed to demonstrate you were, had the right moral character to become a teacher. And that was actually, a more common requirement than demonstrating that you were intellectually qualified to teach. And then within the classroom, a lot of what was done was just thinking of the setup of the classroom, like the teacher stands in front and there are rows of students sitting in desks, facing the teacher, head down. And the idea of the teacher standing in front already sets up this hierarchy of the teacher represents essentia…

Full show notes at the publisher

Gavin Newsham on the Campbell Conversations Apr 18, 2026

Show notes

Gavin NewshamProgram transcript:Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Fans of golf were recently treated to another exciting finish at the Masters tournament, and one of the Masters greatest past players, Tiger Woods has also been in the news recently. He crashed his car, he was charged with driving under the influence again and now he's checked himself into a rehab facility in Switzerland. My guest today is Gavin Newsham. He's a veteran golf writer and co-founder of "Golf Punk Magazine," and he's written a new biography of Tiger Woods’ early years leading up to when he turned professional. It's titled, "Project Tiger: The Birth of Genius and the Price of Greatness." Mr. Newsham, welcome to the program.Gavin Newsham: Thanks for having me, Grant, really appreciate it.GR: We appreciate you taking the time. So, let me start with, you know, your book is a lot about Tiger's father, Earl, and their relationship and I just wanted to ask you this question right out of the gate. He's got kind of a, Earl had a had a founding story, if you will, an origin story for how he decided to devote all this time to developing Tiger's golf talent. He said, you know, the kid was, I think he was, he wasn't even a year old and he demonstrated that he could swing a golf club, looked like he knew what he was doing. And so that sort of turned the light on for him and then he said, okay, I'm going to nurture and groom this. Do you think that's actually exactly true, or did his father sort of have this idea that he was going to create a golf genius from the very beginning?GN: I think there's certainly elements of truth in it, Grant. I mean, Earl Woods, incredibly complex man, really. But he was prone to hyperbole and embellishment and exaggeration a lot. So, a lot of the stories he told about Tiger's childhood were kind of changed as the years went on, you know, because he told them so many times, but they seem to get more and more hyperbolic as it were, so he was prone to that. But all this stuff about him, you know, from everything that I've heard, everything I've spoken to, yeah, all this stuff about him, sort of getting a club in Tiger's hands when he was like ten months old is all true. But, I think it also stems from the fact that Earl had three kids from his first marriage, and he was never there for them. So, I think there's some residual guilt there also into the amount of time he plowed into Tiger and his development, certainly as a golfer, but maybe not so much as a person as, you know, as time has gone on, I think.GR: Yeah. Well, that's actually that's an interesting juxtaposition of the children from the first marriage. That's a common, I think, pattern for fathers. Well, I know you could talk about this for the entire program because your book is really a lot about this, but just in sort of brief fashion, how did Earl approach the development of Tiger's golf talent? How would you characterize the way he went about that?GN: I think there were several stages to it, to be honest. I mean, from the early stage that we talked about when he was ten months old and through his, you know, early years into sort of elementary school, he was a pretty happy go lucky kid, by all accounts, you know, loved playing his golf. And, you know, the golf was a fun thing to do, it wasn't something that was expected of him so much, you know, he wasn't needed to be on the golf course every single day, you know, he had a pretty normal childhood. But I think once that talent became so, so, so apparent, you know, and so clear to anybody that cared to see him, whether that be somebody at the golf club. He had a coach from the age of four, you know, and straight away the coach said, I don't want pay because it's a pleasure to teach this kid. You know, I know what this kid is going to do is going to be great for my resumé at the end of the day, you know? And that happened with all Tiger’s coaches. Never, you know, not once did a dollar change hands between Tiger's parents and his coaches because he's that good. I think when he gets to high school and he's become a name, you know, he's known not just in California but beyond there, is like the best junior golfer in the country, it's then I think that you can see in Earl, there's like a shift in Earl's mindset where I'm thinking, right, okay, so my son's really good at golf, I know he's really good at golf. And they struggled financially, the Woods, taking Tiger around the country to all the tournaments coast to coast, flying here, there and everywhere. Earl didn’t make a lot of money, you know, he didn't have a great pension when he did retire. And so, I think the idea that Tiger could turn pro and make a significant amount of money suddenly became more of a driver in Earl's mindset, I think. As it, you know, inevitably would do I think, you know, and so from that stage on, Tiger's childhood really wasn't his own from sort of 10, 11 onwards, I don't think. His parents wouldn't let him play other sports, for instance, you know, not allowed, loved playing football, loved basketball, not allowed to do it just in case he might injure himself or jeopardize his golf career, you know? So, it's interesting how it changes, but also kind of understandable, you know, irrespective of what you think about the actual parenting style. I mean, you can see they're going to nurture and develop a talent, but, at what cost? That is the question.GR: Yeah. Well, on that note, can you give me like, your single best example of Earl putting a lot of pressure on Tiger or being overbearing? Is there one, as you went through and researched this, is there like one greatest hit?GN: One, there's several examples, I mean, especially when he was at college. There was a lot of trouble with the NCAA about Tiger's amateur status, you know, because Tiger was getting offers from left, right and center. And Earl was certainly getting offers as well, you know. I spoke to his, one of the assistant pros that used to be at Tiger's club when he's up to about 16, 17. And he said, that his dad that used to play there, he was a member, he used to turn up every single week with, like, hundreds of new golf balls in the trunk of his car, you know, and start handing them out. And you’re thinking, well, where did they come from? You know, and these are all people are going to Earl and saying, your son's really good, you know, maybe you want to come and chat with our guys, you know, and we can maybe sort of sort something out. And so, I think it's that point where you think, this has changed now, this has changed from being a kid who's good at golf to actually, you know, a meal ticket even, you know? So, I think it's an interesting but understandable way that Earl went, I think, given his financial issues as well, I think.GR: Well, one of the reviews of your book called it a ‘searing indictment of Tiger Woods’ father.’ Did you write that book with that approach? Is that how you went into it?GN: No, not at all. No, I mean, I, like many people. I mean, there's been, you know, thousands of books on Tiger, right? It's not like, you know, you have to go far to find one. But most of them have a similar thing about Earl being the overbearing parent, you know, the, the guy that pushed Tiger and pushed Tiger and pushed Tiger, and he did. You know, let's not get that wrong in any way. But the more you read about it and the more you see the change in his mindset as Tiger gets older, and also how, I mean, a lot's not been said about his mother. You know, his mother's role in this as well was equally important, you know, because everybody thinks he was Earl driving Tiger forward, but his mother was just as disciplined and just as focused on making Tiger as good as he could possibly be, especially on the academic side, because he was a bright kid, right, so, he went to Stanford. So yeah, between the two of them, a formidable backroom team. But, in terms of developing and nurturing this rare talent, they found themselves in possession of, you know, but, in terms of parenting, again, another question.GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Gavin Newsham. He's the author of a new book about Tiger Woods. It's titled, "Project Tiger: The Birth of Genius and the Price of Greatness." So, let's go into Tiger's adolescence. You mentioned that once he got to be about 10 or 11, and then after that. Give us an idea of just the degree to which he differed from other child prodigies. You know, there's a lot of child prodigies out there in different sports, but from your book you get the sense that, like, he's a whole other level of this. Can you give us an idea of just what the distance was?GN: Yeah, I think it’s earlier than age of 10, you know, 9-10 it because even if you look at the kind of golf he was playing, I'm not sure how much you know about sort of standards in golf, Grant, but okay, you know, he was six years old when he shot 48 over nine holes. I mean, I don't shoot that now, you know? First hole in one at 6, broke 70 at 12, scratch by the time he was 13.GR: And these are on real golf courses, not like little kiddie golf courses, right?GN: No, not little pitch and putts, right? These are like, proper adult courses, you know. And so, you know, you've got this kid that is known throughout California and beyond from an early age. And he's winning trophy after trophy after trophy after trophy. Each week he's coming home with, you know, a clutch of trophies in the whole house that he lived at in Cyprus, it's just like a 1500 square foot trophy cabinet, right? It's nothing else in the house. So, that's, you know, his mom made him give all the trophies away, so out there there's loads of people that have got Tiger Woods’ trophies from when he was a kid, now probably don't even realize that they picked them up in a junk shop or something, you know, it's incredible that he was so successful. But again, I think a lot of people I spoke to that went to school with him and knew him as a youngster and also as a teenager, said on the golf course, really happy go lucky guy, loved nothing better than being out on the golf course when nobody can get to him, right? So, he's in complete control on the golf course, in control of his game, in control of what he says, what he does, you know, even his parents can't get to him at that point. Maybe afterwards they would if they weren't happy with something that he did or didn't do. But the fact that he spent so much time as a child playing golf was one of the reasons, I think, that he didn't really have a childhood in any normal sense of the word, because he didn't have that time to invest in other people, invest in kids in relationships and all that, and make all the mistakes that the kids make and learn from, you know? So, I think it had a massive impact on him I think going forward, especially in like, his dealings with the media, because he's always been so super guarded and even more so since all the scandals in 2009 and everything, you know. There's just been a big barrier there, constantly. That's ever since probably went to college, the way he started becoming even more guarded I think, because that's when his celebrity reached a new level, becoming the U.S. amateur champion, you know, and also becoming the best collegiate golfer of his generation too.GR: So, there's an endless debate over whether great talent is born, whether it's innate or whether it is created, it's made. I imagine the reality may be a mix of both, but I was wondering whether your research on Tiger's early life gave you any insights on that big question?GN: I think, yes, you need natural talent, but obviously it goes without saying that you need to be, have a flair for what you're good at. But I think that combination of having a Svengali-like figure, like Earl Woods, who came from his military background, you know, he's so focused, driven, you know, prepared to do absolutely whatever it took to make Tiger as good as he could possibly be. I think he wanted to make him a, he said, a cold-blooded golf assassin was what his aim was to make his son. And sure enough, he did that. I mean, and then some right? I think that combination, that intersection of the two is when true greatness can be made, but it can also go the other way. Like you said, you've seen it so many times, you know, child stars, not just in sport, you know, but in entertainment, in acting, you know, in music, Michael Jackson, you know. It's just so many people fall by the wayside and it's, you know, it looks to be happening to Tiger as well, I think.GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Gavin Newsham. The veteran golf writer has written a new book about the early years of Tiger Woods, it's titled "Project Tiger: The Birth of Genius and the Price of Greatness," and we've been discussing his book. So, you may have kind of intimated this when you were talking about Tiger being so focused on golf that he didn't have a chance to develop like a lot, like other human beings do, at least if things are going well for them. Not all the other golfers liked the young Tiger Woods when he was a professional. I mean, I can remember, I think it was Phil Mickelson who used to sort of snark about him. What was it that these folks didn't like? Was it the arrogance, was it something else?GN: I think there's, I think so, yeah. I mean, I think the last chapter of the book is all about when he turns pro in August ‘96 in Milwaukee. And it's really interesting, I maybe spoke to like 10 players that were there that week with him. And while everybody, without fail said, that guy's the future of golf, you know, we can't deny that. He's hitting the ball further than them, he’s fitter than them, you know, he's got more creativity, but also he's got that that mental aspect of his game, he's got it all up there, and he's 20 at the time, right? So, there's a lot of resentment on the tour. You know, this kid can turn up, turn pro and have $60 million in his bank from Nike and Titleist, four times what the world number one was getting at the time, Greg Norman. You know, and he's 20 just dropped out of college, you know, yes, there's going to be resentment, right, you know? But I think in time that changes because in time, Tiger becomes the biggest sport star in the world, and you know, in turn all the purses in pro golf go up, you know, all the prizes go up and everything and everybody’s ship rises right at the same time. So, everybody's earning more, everybody's doing better at the end. It's kind of the way, I think, why Tiger has been forgiven so many times, I think, for all his many indiscretions off the golf course. And it's nobody's really held any grudges in that respect, at least not in the game. And that’s likely because, A, they know that their livelihoods are down to Tiger Woods and what he did in terms of changing the face of professional golf. But B, there's probably a lot of other players that are at it as well, right? So, I think it's like a very close shot when it comes to, you know, what goes on on tour, stays on tour, right?GR: Well, that's interesting, the idea that he was kind of the, you know, built the industry that way. Something that I think I remember and you w…

Full show notes at the publisher

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected