Christopher McKnight Nichols taught history at Oregon State University for a decade and was also the director of its Center for the Humanities until 2022. He left that year for Ohio State University, where he is today the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security and a professor of history.
He is also the co-chair of the university’s America at 250 Initiative, a series of programs commemorating the 250th anniversary of our nation’s independence.
Nichols is returning to Oregon to give a free lecture tonight in Portland that will explore the political parallels between our nation’s present and its past and the role that we, as citizens, can play in shaping our democracy’s future.
The nonprofit Senior Advocates for Generational Equity is organizing the discussion that takes place less than three weeks before the general election and amid intense political polarization in the U.S.
Nichols joins us for a preview of his talk.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Christopher McKnight Nichols taught history at Oregon State University for a decade. Then in 2022, he went to another OSU, the Ohio State University, where he became the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security studies. He is back in Oregon this week and he’ll be giving a free lecture tonight in Portland. He’ll explore the parallels between seminal moments in our nation’s history and what we’re experiencing right now. He’ll also talk about ways to increase civic participation. The talk is tonight at 5:30 at Taborspace in Southeast Portland in partnership with the nonprofit SAGE. Christopher McKnight Nichols joins me now. It’s great to have you back on the show.
Christopher McKnight Nichols: It is such a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Miller: I wanna start with one of the things you’re gonna be doing tonight, focusing on these handful of historical eras in U.S. history and looking at ways they can maybe help us understand what’s happening right now. One of those eras is the Gilded Age. Why does that one come to mind for you?
Nichols: For sure. One of the things that we have heard a lot about is the question, is this a second Gilded Age? And usually that refers to the questions of inequality, but it also refers to political corruption. And one thing that I think it helps us to think with, historically, is that that’s the era that Mark Twain and Dudley Warner famously called the Gilded Age in a book in 1873, and it was really about the problematic ways in which a society that seemed affluent, gilded with gold, underneath it was rotting out.
And the latest polls that we’re seeing right now, a Fox poll that was just done this week, suggests that the number one concern for Americans has suddenly shifted. It’s not even a question of affordability. It is now government corruption, and that was absolutely true in the Gilded Age.
Miller: Was it bipartisan then? And do you think that’s bipartisan now, that sense?
Nichols: Well, what we’re just seeing in the latest polls, and I just saw this survey this morning, is that it is a bipartisan concern. It tilts to the political left, it is more of a concern for the political left, but right now, surprisingly, it’s a bipartisan issue, and it was in the 1870s and 1880s. In fact, political corruption was one of the signature problems of the era. And you can look at the roles of big railroads, for instance. In that era, they were spending $500,000 a year just on bribes that they budgeted out in the 1870s.
Miller: So if it was railroads then, is it tech companies now?
Nichols: Yep, and I think that’s one of the great illuminating things, too, the transition of new technologies then, the railroad, the telegraph and eventually electricity in the latter era of that period transformed lives. AI is changing things today. Electricity allowed industrial plants to run 24 hours a day. It animated the workers to try to come together to figure out new kinds of solidarity in the face of that. We haven’t seen that quite yet with AI, but it’s similar.
Miller: Is this too simplistic a historical read to say there was a Gilded Age and then the backlash was a progressive era that was more about a pushback against monopolies and corporate power. Is that too simplistic?
Nichols: No, I think the outlines of that are exactly right, that the corruption and the problems and the tumult of the Gilded Age required some kind of countervailing force, and it became the multiple strands of progressivism. Some of them were competing with each other, but they were about addressing the challenges of being a modern nation. And that’s why this is a good parallel to our current moment, because it was also about questions of the U.S.’s role on the world stage. This backlash was, OK, if the U.S. is now a world power, economic and military power, how should it act in the world? How could it act as a moral agent in the world? And of course, the fits and starts of that were not necessarily glorious.
Miller: Because that was also the start of the American Empire, right?
Nichols: Precisely right. Fitted together with the Spanish-American War of 1898, one of the rationales for that was humanitarian – to help Cubans who are suffering under Spanish oppression. The other element of that is raw expansionism and extractive industry, and they go hand in hand, but they feel eerily similar to our present moment, if you think about the intervention in Venezuela or some of the ways in which the war with Iran have moved forward, you’re saying the quiet part out loud.
Miller: Let’s turn to another period that you’ve written a lot about and we’ve talked about in the past, the 1920s. Why this era? Why do you turn to this to make sense of now?
Nichols: This one, I think, should give us both some hope and some real caution. Coming out of a pandemic with rising inflation, rising inequality, new transformations of technology also in this period, the radio is now being mass produced. There’s a mass consumer society in the 1920s. You wind up with a moment of immigration restriction, the rise of the Klan, a kind of insular politics. Literally “America first,” you can see it on both campaigns in 1916 and 1920. “America first” was the call of the era, and the challenge was what was rotting beneath or what was obscured was what gave rise to the depression, right?
That, in fact, what was obscured was the stagnant wages of working people, the lack of solidarity for unions in that period, and so the worry I think, if we’re using that as a lens to view our current moment, and again all of these are imperfect parallels, is it suggests what are we missing right now, and how could we get ahead of the curve if we have something cataclysmic on the horizon?
Miller: Years ago, we talked a lot about isolationism, a strain in American political life that you’ve written a lot about. That was, in our conversation, a lot in the context of the first Trump administration. Is there a historical parallel that has a similar shift from the “Let’s not get entangled in foreign wars” that we heard in 2016, 2017, 2018 to “Let’s start a war in Iran, let’s grab a ruler in Venezuela?”
Nichols: The short answer is no. If the 1920s are an era of very limited U.S. commitments abroad that could be characterized reasonably as a kind of unilateralist isolationism, it never dovetailed with, then, a kind of “wag the dog” version of interventions abroad, which is what I would argue we’ve seen lately, and in other eras, say in the late 19th century where the U.S. was less engaged with the world, again, there wasn’t a turn except perhaps what we were just referring to in 1898, but that was an outgrowth of patterns of political life and diplomacy that were already in view, not an abrupt shift.
So I think one of the things that’s challenged foreign policy analysts, national security people, scholars of diplomatic history is that this is both precedented and unprecedented, and historians have been asked to figure that out quite a bit. And I think you’re putting your finger on exactly the question: Does the Trump administration have a core philosophy? And if so, is it anything that looks like isolationism? I think it’s not isolationism. It’s more a kind of unilateralism, which helps us to understand the U.S. acting alone in its perceived best interests of those who are the chief policymakers or architects of policy, and often for very short-term ends. And I think that’s why we’ve seen very uncertain outcomes and pretty negative ones from Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere.
Miller: Another question you’ve asked, and it seems like we’re actually more or less so far going in order of chronological history, is can we think of this period now as a new Cold War? That one gets confusing to me, because it’s not clear. I guess China would be the classic new antagonist as opposed to the Soviet Union, certainly as opposed to Russia, to whom we are now granting diesel money it seems. But why is a new Cold War a helpful prism for you in 2026?
Nichols: I think in general I want to dispel the new Cold Wars.
Miller: You don’t think it’s helpful.
Nichols: I don’t think it’s that helpful. There’s one or two ways that I do think it is. But first, the antagonism with China does not resemble the Cold War in the sense of an existential likely military conflict. It’s a terrible parallel…
Miller: With actual proxy wars, hot wars going on almost every year of the Cold War.
Nichols: One scholar has called it the Cold War’s killing fields and it was not. Instead of a long peace, it was a long conflict. And I buy that, and I think that that works. So a new Cold War doesn’t quite fit, but one way that it does, and here we can go back to the AI reference, is that in the early years of the Cold War, one of the things that was developing were regimes for figuring out how to deal with new technologies, even amongst antagonists. And by 1957 you get the International Atomic Regulatory Agency, the IAEA, and you get several different bodies that help to manage nuclear proliferation questions. And I think that’s the kind of thing we can look to. If the Cold War has some things for us to consider and to try to apply in the current moment, regulating AI is one of the ways we could think about that.
Miller: All right, we’ve been going in order of chronology here, but now I want to go back to maybe the scariest historical period, just in terms of violence and potential rupture, which is the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, and I haven’t done a Google word search, but I feel like – and maybe this is just dumb vibes – that I heard more Americans talking about a civil war, a new civil war, say seven years ago, five years ago, than they have been in the last year or two, so I don’t know if that’s true or not, but what do you think is helpful in terms of looking at the 1840s or 1850s or early 1860s and looking at now?
Nichols: One of the things I think is helpful to calm down a bit, it’s been worse historically, and this is a scary parallel, and it doesn’t fit particularly well for our current moment. The single most important issue in American politics in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s was slavery, without a doubt. Every listener knows that. And one of the ways in which that animated every political decision thereafter was the reconsolidation of parties. There’s the rise of the Whigs in the 1830s, including Millard Fillmore, the president, Henry Clay, and the Whigs then fall apart over the slavery issue, and many of them side with Republicans.
One thing we’re not seeing is a fragmentation of politics. In fact, there’s no one issue that’s dividing people in that way. When you look at survey data, actually, Americans are pretty similar on a lot of issues. There’s a lot of common ground that should give us hope. It’s not like the intractable divide that results in a civil war. We did hear, you’re exactly right, and I’m with you on the vibes. I’m not sure. A few years ago, roughly late in the pandemic, we were hearing a lot about civil war. We can all imagine those moments of takeovers of state houses and attacks on sitting officials of all sorts.
Miller: January 6 itself.
Nichols: January 6 for sure, yes, and that heatedness in actual political violence isn’t happening. Another example of this that’s famous is the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Capitol after he gives a speech about the crimes of Bleeding Kansas. We’re not seeing that. Members of Congress are very antagonistic to each other. They’re not even showing up in the Capitol these days,
Miller: As you’re saying this, I was reminded of other historians saying, “Hey folks now, if you say, ‘Oh my gosh, life is so divisive now. There’s such partisanship. There are lies being printed, written online,’” historians say this has always been the case. And it’s not like the pre-republic days or early parts of our country were peaceful or quiet or easy. It’s always been like this.
So that all seems true, but it sometimes feels like cold comfort when I see the divisions and challenges that we are still experiencing. I guess I’m just wondering how you reconcile those two things. Yes, it’s been bad in the past, but there are serious issues now that it’s not clear that we are equipped as a body politic to handle. How do you deal with both those together?
Nichols: I mean, it’s incredibly hard. I don’t know that any of us can. Part of it is the collective project of trying to find and forge new connections that allow us to move beyond some of this. The signature difference now is polarization. It isn’t that a lot of Americans don’t believe roughly the same things on lots of issues. It isn’t that party politics are fundamentally much worse or the rise of a partisan press. I mean, here we are talking in largely nonpartisan ways about critical issues. It gives me hope for democracy. It gives me hope for citizen engagement. But the polarization is real.
There’s been some really, really important, recent data coming out from the Andrew Carnegie Corporation – and I was a Carnegie Fellow for a while – about how it’s now reaching local levels, for the first time in generations, local officials in small towns are feeling like national politics and polarization are infecting and inflecting everything from school board meetings, which we’ve heard about and you all have covered a lot, to just very regular nonpartisan things – reading of a kid’s book in a local library sort of thing. So that is worrisome.
But I do think that the connections are the way forward there. Now that’s a very simple way to talk about it. But if it is true that people have a lot of common ground, then finding ways to do that is essential. The challenge, therefore, isn’t that, as in the past, there was partisan press, it’s that we’ve been sorting and siloing so much. So trying to find ways to talk across differences and be in the same spaces, whether they’re virtual or real, feels critical to me. And it is a way that in the past larger groups of Americans have been able to come together to advance something of a shared center.
Again, that may be more nostalgia than real, and that’s part of why historians talk about … Arthur Schlesinger used to talk about a vital center, as if there was this vital center of people who really believed in compromise, but some of that had to be pushed by agitators and politicians and others, right? It isn’t as simple as just, we all come together, kumbaya. And the moments where we’ve had real progress have been around problems, and that’s why I’ve been citing this in those historical eras like the corruption of the Gilded Age or like the coming of the Depression, you need to find a center where people can gather and find a common shared ground across differences.
Miller: What do you mean practically then these days, when you talk about participation in democracy, setting aside voting?
Nichols: I love it that you set aside voting and I’m still gonna include voting.
Miller: I want to talk more about voting as well. Let me say the reason I set that aside is because I looked this morning at voter participation numbers for midterm elections going back 50 years, and voting is not the norm. Going back at least 50 years, there has not been a midterm election in which a majority of eligible voters actually cast ballots. This is for midterms. It’s obviously higher for presidential ones, but that’s why I set it aside because, even for voting, it’s not the norm for non-presidential elections in our country.
Nichols: True, absolutely. So, what does one mean by civic engagement and civic conversation? One thing that gives me hope for that, one thing that I think Oregon and the Pacific Northwest are particularly good at, and now that I live in Ohio, I see some limits in Ohio, frankly, is having lots of cultural spaces and types of events and activities that bring diverse populations together around shared interests. So, you can think literature and the arts, you can think music, you can think of history programming that I’m involved in, or even politics to some extent, and also museums. There’s some really tremendous ways in which larger groups are incentivized to come together around shared interests. And that’s one way to bridge some divides and cool the temperature of heated politics and partisanship.
Miller: Is there data to back that up? What you’re describing sounds lovely, and I want to believe it. That gathering together with other people with shared interests in non-political ways somehow knits a place together and makes it a more cohesive, more functional society. I’m sort of putting words a little bit in your mouth, but is that true?
Nichols: There is some social science data to back this up, not in the most altruistic and wonderful way, but in limiting the negatives, the downside. There’s some reason to think that people who get to know individuals of different racial or religious or sexual orientation backgrounds through shared community experiences then have less negative affect related to those kinds of groups. This comes from social psychology, it comes from sociology studies, there’s a handful of fields that have shown that, at least in tamping down the most negative aspects of the ways that human beings can think poorly of each other, that works.
Miller: That makes sense actually. I mean, if the more time you spend with people who are not quite like you, the more you realize the many ways in which they are just humans like you. You may not love them, but you realize that they’re human.
Nichols: And you’ve also seen this in books like “The Big Sort,” lots of bestsellers talking about this. The problem is that we’ve sorted so far now in American society that it’s really hard to ever meet those kinds of folks and just get a sense of them as human beings, no matter how, frankly, how high your education is, how much you think you are interacting with those people. If one really interrogates it – and I would say it’s a problem for me too – if you really interrogate it, how much do you interact with people across differences?
Miller: In going from Oregon State to Ohio, you went from a pretty blue Oregon to a very purple Ohio. What lens has that given you into American politics?
Nichols: That’s a long one. I have testified in the state house in Ohio more than I ever even visited the state house in Oregon. There have been a number of these attacks on higher education bills, attempts to have sweeping reform, from ones that are very anti-China to anti-DEI. I’ve had some meetings with Republican legislators, some of whom have been excellent and some of whom are absolutely culture warriors trying to pursue culture war wins at the expense of students, I would argue faculty, staff. So that’s been hard. Oregon could support public higher ed more, but it supports it rhetorically all the time.
Miller: Which is its own conversation. What do you want more, rhetorical support or actual financial support?
Nichols: I mean, I want both, but higher ed is funded in the state of Oregon, and the way that they’re tying it in Ohio to different kinds of outcomes that legislators want is one thing. Another thing I would just add is, I think Ohio is a good example of where there’s more common ground and also the problem of polarization. In very brief, it’s a more purple state, as you note, in terms of expressed opinions and survey data. And yet, when push comes to shove, when people go into the voting booths, they vote tribally.
Miller: Chris, it’s great to have you back on the show. Thank you.
Nichols: Thanks for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here.
Miller: Christopher McKnight Nichols is now the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security studies and a professor of history at Ohio State University. For 10 years, though, before 2022, he was a professor of history at Oregon State University.
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