Professor Greg Jackson, Utah’s very own podcast superstar, has something to say about all the rancor, divisiveness, partisanship, arguing, debating, hating, lying, that’s-it-I’m-moving-to-Canada angst that’s currently de rigueur in the land of the purple mountain majesties:
We’ve seen worse.
Way worse.
If you haven’t heard of Greg Jackson, then you probably don’t listen to many podcasts, or at least not to podcasts about history. Because his podcast, “History That Doesn’t Suck,” is one of the most successful in that genre in the world. It currently ranks No. 4 on the Apple history charts (“World War II With Tom Hanks” is No. 1) with more than 30,000 downloads a day. Since its founding in 2017, “History that Doesn’t Suck” has been downloaded over 100 million times.
Besides the hit podcast, which is produced in the sound studio in the basement of the home he shares with his wife Sue and their family in Lehi, Greg wears many other hats. He is also a tenured professor at Utah Valley University. He’s the one man in his traveling one-man, two-act stage show, “The Unlikely Union,” that he has presented around the country and is streaming currently on most PBS stations. And if that’s not enough, there’s his new book, released in June by Simon & Schuster, titled “Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome.”
He wrote the book because, as he’s traveled the country doing his stage show and listened to comments from his podcast audience, he grew tired of hearing about what a mess America is these days. That we’re on the precipice. That it’s never been worse. That the end must be nigh.
To say he takes umbrage at such talk is more than a slight understatement.
To a man who has devoted his life to studying American history and believes fervently in the form of government laid out by the Founding Fathers — “My passion for American history and for this country comes from a deep belief in government by the people,” he says. “I know it might sound cheesy to some, but I really buy into our ideals” — the thought that this is America’s nadir is not just plain wrong but also downright laughable.
The whole point of his book is to say today’s challenges are neither new, nor, as a matter of fact, are they all that awful. They are obstacles “we’ve defeated in the past — and history contains the lessons on how to defeat them again.”
“Been There, Done That” focuses on three divisive disruptions that take turns rotating in the headlines of today: 1. Contested elections; 2. Fake news; 3. Political violence.
“I have looked into the ugliest parts of our history,” says the professor. “I have stared down political violence that makes anything happening today look tame; I have looked at contested elections that put 2020 to shame; I have read and found fake news that shows today’s authors of it as rank amateurs. We have defeated it all before with the better angels of our nature and I believe we will continue to do so.”
His book is filled with stories of people doing wrong things because they thought the ends justified the means, beginning with a tale of Benjamin Franklin printing an entire newspaper supplement full of falsehoods about British atrocities during the Revolutionary War. Yes, that Benjamin Franklin. He was a founding father of fake news.
There’s the enmity between Jefferson and Hamilton. There’s the hyperpartisan print war of the late 1700s that makes the New York Times and Epoch Times of today look almost like cousins. There’s the time Rep. Preston Brooks thrashed Sen. Charles Sumner on the Senate floor with his walking cane. There’s “The Most Corrupt Presidential Election Ever” of 1876. And on and on for 317 pages.
Jackson had so many stories that by the time he got to the year 1900 he stopped, having compiled more than enough material, as he writes in the introduction, “to prove that we are largely walking in our predecessors’ shoes — predecessors who have more to teach us about overcoming the seemingly impossible and keeping the American experiment alive than we often recognize.”
He hopes his fellow Americans will pay attention and stop with the end-of-the-world cynicism.
“We’re stronger than this moment, we’re smarter than this moment, we’re better than this moment,” says the professor. “I believe, as Lincoln said, that as a nation of free men it’s our destiny to live in perpetuity or to die by suicide, and I don’t believe we will choose suicide.”