(upbeat music) - Welcome to "Forum 360."

It's a program that features various topics, a global outlook with a local view.

I'm your host Bill Steven Saus.

And today, our topic is going to be a little general, the study of history, which is a very global oriented topic.

But we're going to bring it home to the United States and Northern Ohio.

Our guest is historian Walter Hixson.

Dr. Hixson served as a distinguished professor of history at the University of Akron.

And he was also a past-president of the American Association of Professors for the University of Akron.

Dr. Hixson, it's a pleasure to have you on "Forum 360" today.

Thanks for coming.

- Well, thank you.

Glad to be here.

- Dr. Hixson, a little bit about your background and how you came to Northeast Ohio.

I understand you grew up in Kentucky.

Part of your education was in Kentucky, then your doctorate at the University of Colorado.

Give us a little bit of background as to how you got involved as a professor of history.

- Well, I grew up in Louisville, as you mentioned, and I was a journalist and a journalism major.

So for two years I worked for newspapers in Kentucky.

But my father, especially, had a strong intellectual drive.

I mean, my mother was quite engaged as well, but my father was particularly well-read and liked to have intellectual conversations.

And so I always grew up with that.

And I wanted to get a little deeper into matters than daily journalism did.

And so, history, I discovered late in my college career.

And then it was a matter of being a, kind of, typical young American who wanted to go west young man.

So I really looked for graduate programs in the west.

And it came down to Oregon and Colorado, and Oregon was just so far away from home.

So I went to Colorado and it worked out very well.

And ended up I got a position, after getting my PhD in the mid eighties, at Northwestern University.

Which is a very fine university, but it was a position that was non-tenure track.

And so professors aspire to get tenure where they can have job security and that was available at Akron.

So I took the position at the University of Akron in 1989 and held that until December of 2020, when I retired.

- Now just the fact that you've retired, you're still active, probably studying history still.

And keeping up with the current events.

One thing that I noticed, your passion was to keep history as a liberal arts subject, very important for colleges and universities.

And I recall in the last year, in the newspaper the "Akron Beacon Journal," you had an excellent column about history.

It was the titled "Current Crisis Rooted in the Ignorance of History."

And you talked about some of the things that were going on politically in the United States and around the world, and how we tend to not look at history properly.

We gain a lot of knowledge if we know what history teaches us.

And so, could you kind of develop how you talked about that?

Where you have political problems, we need to know history, and it's regrettable, as you pointed out, that the universities are cutting back on the teaching of history.

- Sure, well that when I wrote that piece I was in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, was really in high gear, in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

And it seemed to take a lot of people by surprise.

And I think a lot of people thought that racial progress in America was much further along than it actually is.

And that is what I was suggesting is rooted in ignorance of history, in that ignorance of history is unfortunately perpetuated by the way we value... Obviously those things are very important, but they've gained primacy in higher education.

And that's been at the expense of liberal arts.

And so universities like my own in Akron, and the board of trustees, politically appointed people, don't understand these matters.

And they value...

Many are successful in business and industry, and so they value STEM and don't understand history.

I mean a lot of times, people have even said to me, I think a lot of people have this attitude of, "Well, what do I care about history that already happened?

You know, what's that got to do with anything?"

Well, it has everything to do with everything.

- (indistinct) - You understand nothing without understanding its historical context.

And that's certainly true of race in America.

And I can elaborate on that if you'd like.

- Sure, I'd like you to talk a little bit about the interesting paragraph you wrote in the Akron Beacon Journal back in June of 2020. the quote was "Anyone who studies," and this is your words, "American history in any depth will readily understand the rage and frustration of brown and black, as well as red people, whose repression is deeply rooted in the white supremacist culture."

And you went on to say, since Europeans began this culture, many organizations were taking, I would think, a strong position for freedom of slaves.

Well for instance, Oberlin College and the northern states here were very active, history points out, in the Underground Railroad.

In trying to bring slaves, black and brown slaves, some freedom.

And you saw the different, history points to the different ways that we tried to improve.

But it didn't go far enough, apparently, right?

Is that your, one of your- - Yeah, I think it's just more deeply rooted than people realize.

And you know, by the way, Ohio is one thing I've always encouraged with students, and your listeners might be interested, there's plenty of history around us, too.

You can visit history.

And you mentioned Oberlin as a good example, and it's involvement in the Underground Railroad.

And that permeated Ohio.

And you go all the way down to the border with Kentucky you can see still the Ripley House and places on the river, where they, through signals with lanterns, let people who were running the Underground Railroad know when they could bring slaves over.

You go right down the road to Gnadenhutten, you can see where one of the most horrendous massacres of indigenous Americans occurred right here in our backyard.

And then, there's the Portage Path, and the Canal Project, has been great to bring history alive.

(indistinct) We have history all around us and I'll just throw that in, because you mentioned Oberlin, and just to encourage people to go out and pay attention to what is around them and what they can learn.

John Brown House, here in Akron.

There's all kinds of examples.

- You were talking about the disciplines that we sometimes forsake history, philosophy, and others are forsaken for science, technology, engineering, and math, the STEM disciplines.

Give us an example of how you are trying to bring to the attention of universities in the area, what we must do to get back on track.

Bring history back into the- - Well, I mean, we need to do all kinds of things as a society, we're in a lot of trouble in a number of areas.

But one of them is investing more in education, making education more affordable, understanding the value of the liberal arts, and not just dismissing them in favor of science, technology, engineering, and math.

I mean, just take the atomic bomb, for example.

It's an astonishing feat of engineering, of science, technology, engineering, and math.

But human beings have to control it.

And countries have to work together, countries have to understand each other, societies have to work with each other, conduct diplomacy.

That's all the stuff of history, and the liberal arts, and philosophy.

Climate change, you know, the science, technology, engineering, and math have produced an abundant energy, but it's of course undermining the global environment.

And that has to be handled by human beings working together.

That's the humanities.

And history is a big part, of course, of the humanities.

The view of history I was talking about there- - Right.

- And the understanding of the rage of the brown, black, and red people.

And maybe we can understand the Trump phenomenon, and the white supremacist uprising that's occurred in the United States better, as well.

I think one way to start with that is to just think more broadly about the timeline of American history.

The first mistake is to start in 1776.

You really have to start in 1492.

The day Columbus landed in the Bahamas, he was lost, of course, and named the people Los Indios because he thought he was in the Indies and Indians sorta stuck ever since.

Although our baseball team is finally ridding itself of it.

But he made the observation that very day, "These are strong people, but they're pretty ignorant.

They would make good slaves."

Columbus said that on day one and it went from there.

And long before African slavery.

So as you know, I think, and I'm sure many of your listeners will know, in 1619, the first slave ships arrived.

And the New York Times and others have made a actually long-overdue emphasis on we should really think about American history beginning in 1619, and not 1776.

But again, I think it begins in 1492.

And before the enslavement of Africans, was the mass destruction of indigenous populations and indigenous people.

Much of that from disease.

But there was also Indian slavery and Indian warfare.

People don't even know that Indians were enslaved.

And there were slave wars to enslave Indians.

These things went on for centuries.

So the ethnic cleansing of Indians, as well as African slavery, these events went on for centuries.

And whenever something goes on that long it has a deep imprint on culture.

And just because you write "All men are created equal", and eventually fight a Civil War, and do get rid of slavery, it doesn't take away deeply rooted white supremacy.

And as we can see, it's still with us today.

- Now, there was a direct link to the economy.

Obviously, the southern states were dependent upon tobacco and textiles and so forth, cotton.

And so they needed labor.

And obviously after the civil war the concept of trying to re-integrate the slaves that were brought here, and put them in, give them land.

The old concept in the south, kind of, isn't it the post-Civil War where they get would 40 acres, a mule.

I mean, these are kind of the old ways that they were trying to do reparations.

How do we look at reparations now?

Is it still ongoing?

- Well, we've never really done reparations, acknowledge the crime against humanity of slavery, and actually paid people compensation.

But really, African-Americans lapsed back into serfdom.

Slavery was over, okay?

Slavery definitely ended with the Civil War.

The Civil War achieved that.

- Right.

- But it didn't end the... You began this with the economic hardships of the deep marginalization of African-Americans were basically just sharecroppers and serfs in the South.

Before new opportunities did open up with the World Wars and the great migration into northern and western cities.

But basically, the second class citizenship, the marginalization of African-Americans, is endemic in American history.

There's been certainly progress.

The Civil Rights Movement brought progress under the law and ended segregation and gave, in theory, voting rights.

But the economic second-class citizenship , and the issues of police violence, which became, of course, so prominent with the Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matter movement, those things are still deeply entrenched.

And I think that's what shocked a lot of people.

Also, you know, the whole Trump phenomenon is, in part, a reaction to having a two-term Black man as president of the United States.

And I think it's probably, people aren't aware of how much that impacted traditional white supremacists.

- Reaction- - Right.

And a reflection of deep seated racism, yeah.

- Now we are talking to our distinguished professor of history, retired now, he is Walter Hixson.

Dr. Hixson has been with the University of Akron, retired.

And he was active also as the past-president of the American Association of University Professors here in Akron, in the Akron northeast Ohio area.

So give me a little bit of knowledge as to what some of your goals were for when you were with the AAUP, the university professors group.

- Well, it's... Like any union, we had basic, fundamental goals pertaining to wages and healthcare.

But of course the foundation, the AAUP, was rooted in the World War I era, in protection of free speech and academic freedom.

Which remains very important.

To not be punished or discriminated against for controversial views.

To having free speech and academic freedom.

So that's still a very important part of what any AAUP chapter pursues.

But there are also more fundamental things that teachers unions and workers unions would be familiar with.

You have an attorney, and you have negotiations, and there's a lot of nitty-gritty involved in that.

- Professor Hixson, one of the things that I noticed in your background, you, a year ago or so, predicted that liberalism is coming back.

You looked at Senator Sanders...

Independent Senator, by the way, from Vermont.

How he's kind of spearheading the, in government, liberal thinking returning to our government.

Could you elaborate a little bit about that?

That was kind of an interesting position you brought up.

- Yeah, it is interesting.

I think it's another thing that's underappreciated is we don't have a very viable left.

So not so much liberal.

We have liberals.

We have moderates.

Joe Biden is a liberal, a moderate.

But Sanders harkens back to the left, which was largely basically purged in the cold war.

- Right.

- Because the left was associated with communism and the United States was waging a global war with communism.

So in the 1930s, it wasn't unusual or remarkable to have socialists or communists.

But you see with Sanders, with AOC, and some other elected representatives, the rumblings of the rise of the left again.

Which I think would make the country more balanced in the sense of, if you start your politics in the center and go to the right, it limits the horizons.

Whereas if you have a left, it's a more full spectrum.

And so what we've seen is an imbalanced distribution of wealth in the country, where the very wealthy elite have gotten richer.

And part of that is that you don't have a viable left to... And look at the battle just to get a livable, minimum wage.

This primitive level of the minimum wage in this country that nobody can live on.

So, European countries had a more viable left and I think it's made their societies better balanced in these terms.

- We have a few minutes to discuss your future.

Now in retirement, you're obviously still going to be speaking and using your background in diplomatic history and working cultural history, working in other areas.

But being a Northeast Ohioan now for many decades, you represent our area when you go speak the National Press Club and so forth, I know you've had some interesting topics.

You wrote a book, interesting topic, Charles Lindbergh, St. Louis, Missourian.

You wrote a book in 2006, "Charles Lindbergh: Lone Eagle."

For instance, that's an interesting topic.

It's not necessarily diplomatic history, but how did you come up with that one?

Maybe people can- - Yeah, I branched out a little bit.

Well, actually did get into Lindbergh from the foreign policy angle because he was a prominent anti-interventionist before World War II.

- [Bill] Right.

- And it's a really fascinating story because it was later revealed that he had a German mistress and German children.

And so his desire not to go to war with Germany was partly motivated by he had loved ones there.

But he had a fascinating life.

He was actually a Minnesotan.

You were thinking of the Spirit of St. Louis, the name for the homemade aircraft.

An incredible achievement, the Lone Eagle of flying solo from New York to Paris in that homemade aircraft.

- 1927, I think.

- Yeah, in 1927.

And it was one of the first certified international media events because radio was really taking off at that time.

And then of course there was the...

I've always been interested in true crime and there was the famous kidnapping and death of the Lindbergh baby, this horrible incident that occurred to them.

So he had a fascinating life.

And that was a little book I wrote that was used in high schools and colleges for many years.

- I think it's interesting that you also studied quite extensively, wrote a book about diplomat, George Kennan, the cold war, again.

You talked about the cold war and how that started a lot of partisan factions in this country, with the red scare, World War I era coming back under the McCarthy, Senator Joe McCarthy reactionary era.

So you studied George Kennan, you wrote a book about that.

What are your plans for future books or future studies?

- Yeah, Kennan was just a tremendous engine of learning for me.

He was so brilliant and so learned.

I didn't agree with everything that he thought, or said, or wrote.

And he changed his own mind about many things.

But just an incredibly brilliant diplomat and legendary diplomat in American history.

That was my dissertation and first book.

So now I work on Israel-Palestine issues and specifically a lot of work on the Israel lobby which kind of polices American attitudes about Israel.

Which also has serious race issues in the marginalization of Palestinians.

And the proclamation of Israel as a Jewish state only has real implications for... A lot of people don't realize they're not just the occupied territories, but in Israel proper, 20% of the population are Palestinians.

And they're not all Muslims by the way, there are Palestinian Christians.

And so if you proclaim a Jewish state, this automatically marginalizes Muslims and Christians.

And this is why some people call Israel...

In fact, the human rights group B'Tselem in Israel has now acknowledged that it's an apartheid state.

So I work on the Israel-Palestine issue and specifically efforts in this country to keep the Congress to continue to fund Israel, which receives more congressional funding than any other country in all of American history, even though it's only a small country of 9 million people - Right, well now most of the... And we've had programs before about the post-Holocaust return to the Palestinian area which was once a part of the English colonization, I guess you could say, or protectorate.

- Yes.

- You had the various wars in the late forties, and '67, and so forth throughout the Middle East.

And it is a topic that's going to probably go on for many, many years until there is a resolution.

The United Nations, the United States is active in the United Nations, so do you see any diplomatic changes that might occur?

- Well, it's coming to a head in a lot of ways because there are forces working against each other that have to give at some point.

But, I always say, and I've told students this for years, you can study history, and learn a tremendous amount about the human condition, but the one thing you won't learn how to do is accurately predict the future.

- (chuckling) Right.

- So we're always perennially surprised.

If you think about this sudden collapse of the Soviet Union or the rights that had suddenly been won by gay, lesbian, transgender people.

These things sometimes happen faster than we expect.

And the timing of them, you can never really anticipate.

So I don't know what's going to happen in the Middle East, but there are sort of dialectical contradictions at play.

And something's got to give for sure in the coming years.

But nobody knows precisely when or precisely how it'll... - We hope to have you back on to discuss these things further, on "Forum 360."

Our guest, it was a pleasure to have Dr. Walter Hixson.

PhD in history and the retired now, distinguished professor of history from the University of Akron.

We really appreciate your coming to "Forum 360."

Hope to have you back.

- Okay.

Thanks so much.

I enjoyed it.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Forum 360" is brought to you by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Akron Community Foundation, Hudson Community Television, The Rubber City Radio Group, Shaw Jewish Community Center of Akron, Blue Green, Electric Impulse Communications, and Forum 360 supporters.