Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hey, Dream listeners, if you like this podcast, you're gonna
Speaker 2: love the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I wrote a book.
Speaker 2: It's called Selling the Dream and it's coming out March twelfth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, on Atria. It's about all of your
Speaker 2: favorite characters from MLMs and some that you've never even
Speaker 2: heard of. I hope check it out previously on the Dream.
Speaker 5: Let me say it through one person I think I
Speaker 5: call her Diane. Sits at the back of the thing
Speaker 5: with me. Used to work at Dell, got laid off twice,
Speaker 5: two or three times, maybe early fifties. And I get
Speaker 5: to know her. She's, you know, looking for a job,
Speaker 5: trying to figure it out, and totally normal like everyone
Speaker 5: else they talk to. And then I go back the
Speaker 5: next week and she looks a little bit more dressed
Speaker 5: up and she's wearing a blazer mm hmm. And instead
Speaker 5: of sitting down next to me, she walks to the
Speaker 5: front of the room and she's this week's guest speaker,
Speaker 5: and she introduces herself as a life coach and expert
Speaker 5: motivational guru. And then all of a sudden, she's at
Speaker 5: the front of the room. It's like she put on a
Speaker 5: blazer and all of a sudden, she's an expert.
Speaker 2: Have you ever heard the Legend of John Henry? Before
Speaker 2: I did the interview you're about to hear. The best
Speaker 2: recollection I had of the story came from a Disney
Speaker 2: short I saw like twenty years ago. In that cartoon
Speaker 2: version for kids. It's a story about the ultimate can
Speaker 2: do man, a man with supernatural grit and determination. His
Speaker 2: story was first shared as a folk tale among African
Speaker 2: Americans in the late eighteen hundreds, and then it became
Speaker 2: a song performed by black folks and then white folk
Speaker 2: singers about the magnificence of the steel driving man that's
Speaker 2: the human precursor to a jackhammer or pneumatic drill. For
Speaker 2: over a century, it's been upheld as a story emblematic
Speaker 2: of the America. Can dream work hard enough and you
Speaker 2: shall overcome. Have the right mindset and the rest will
Speaker 2: fall into place. Except that's not what happens in the
Speaker 2: end of the Legend of John Henry, not even close.
Speaker 2: John Henry's life doesn't get better. No, the ending of
Speaker 2: the Legend of John Henry is totally perplexing, so much
Speaker 2: so that scholars have argued about its meaning for almost
Speaker 2: one hundred years. One of those scholars, a retired Southern
Speaker 2: Black professor, doctor Sherman James, use the story to come
Speaker 2: up with a hypothesis about why putting your mind to
Speaker 2: something and trying your very very hardest isn't necessarily a
Speaker 2: good thing for any of us, any of us, not
Speaker 2: just the person driving the deal. Here's how doctor Sherman
Speaker 2: James tells the story of John Henry.
Speaker 4: According to this legend, sometime in the early eighteen seventies,
Speaker 4: John Henry, and uneducated African American, was working as part
Speaker 4: of a a work gang, probably a group of convict laborers.
Speaker 4: And so one day John Henry, who was computed to
Speaker 4: be you know, the best steel driver the world I'd
Speaker 4: ever known, was challenged by his work boss to compete
Speaker 4: against a newly invented machine, mechanical steam drill. And he
Speaker 4: rose to the challenge, arguing that a man was nothing
Speaker 4: but a man, but a man was certainly better than
Speaker 4: a machine. And so this epic battle man and against
Speaker 4: machine ensued, and after a long, long confrontation with the machine,
Speaker 4: John Henry won, but he dropped dead after his victory
Speaker 4: from complete mental and physical exhaustion.
Speaker 2: And what was that legend meant to teach us at
Speaker 2: that or when it was created.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's a great question. It's probably debatable as
Speaker 4: to what the legend actually signifies. The earliest work on
Speaker 4: the meaning of the legend was by an anthropologist by
Speaker 4: the name of Guy Johnson, who actually went to the
Speaker 4: area where this legendary contests suppose I have taken place,
Speaker 4: near Talcott, West Virginia, And so he interviewed a number
Speaker 4: of black folks and he came away with the idea
Speaker 4: that John Henry may not have actually been a real person,
Speaker 4: but that really didn't matter. Here's what he wrote in
Speaker 4: his book John Henry, Tracking Down a Negro Legend, first
Speaker 4: published in nineteen twenty nine. The question of whether the
Speaker 4: John Henry legend rests on a factual basis is, after all,
Speaker 4: not of much significance. No matter which way it is answered,
Speaker 4: there remains the fact that the legend itself is a reality,
Speaker 4: a living, functioning theme in the folk life of.
Speaker 1: The Negro.
Speaker 4: Legend had this large meaning in the lives of working
Speaker 4: class African Americans, who felt that it sort of signified
Speaker 4: the triumph of the spirit of black people. So it
Speaker 4: was standing up to power and refusing to back down
Speaker 4: and winning even at a very high cost. Now, in
Speaker 4: two thousand and six, historian Scott Nelson wrote this really
Speaker 4: interesting book, Still Driving Man, The Untold Story of John Henry,
Speaker 4: and it's a wonderful piece of historical research. Scott Nelson concluded,
Speaker 4: after extensive archival research that John Henry was probably a
Speaker 4: real person and not necessarily a freed slave. Maybe he
Speaker 4: was born in New Jersey and he worked his way
Speaker 4: south shortly after the Civil War looking for job opportunities,
Speaker 4: and he got caught up in the black Codes. He
Speaker 4: but actually was accused of petty larceny and was tried
Speaker 4: and convicted and thrown into into jail a very long
Speaker 4: prison term, and wanda working as part of a work
Speaker 4: gang on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and then was
Speaker 4: exposed to you know, all of the toxic dusts that
Speaker 4: men who carved out tunnels and mountains were exposed to,
Speaker 4: and and he probably died of you know, what we
Speaker 4: might call coal miners disease. So that since then he
Speaker 4: was a you know, the legendary John Henry was a
Speaker 4: was a victim of sort of the first the first
Speaker 4: wave of mass incarceration of black people. So Scott Nelson
Speaker 4: concluded that the meaning of the story for for everyday
Speaker 4: black folks, it was like a cautionary tail, don't let
Speaker 4: this happen to you. Run away as fast as you can,
Speaker 4: don't get caught up in this system. So we have these,
Speaker 4: I'm going to say, competing versions of what the what
Speaker 4: the legend means for For me, I sort of lean
Speaker 4: more toward the former, because I think it really taps more,
Speaker 4: It taps more, more more deeply, more authentically into the
Speaker 4: into the spirit you know, of of Black Americans, to
Speaker 4: confront adversity, to not give up on their dreams to succeed,
Speaker 4: you know, against the odds. So it's more of a
Speaker 4: of a fight, if you will, kind of response than
Speaker 4: a flight kind of response. And then, of course I
Speaker 4: think that there are both rewards and costs associated with
Speaker 4: engaging in that kind of fight response.
Speaker 2: So with the story in the back of his mind,
Speaker 2: doctor James headed off to college and became a professor
Speaker 2: of epidemiology at UNC Chapel Hill. He studied diseases and
Speaker 2: their causes, and he decided to look at the problem
Speaker 2: of high blood pressure in black men in eastern North Carolina.
Speaker 2: He said he chose this population because they were unlikely
Speaker 2: to regularly go to the doctor and very likely to
Speaker 2: die of heart attack and stroke, the end result of
Speaker 2: a life with high blood pressure or hypertension.
Speaker 4: And so a physician colleague of mine gave me the
Speaker 4: names of six of his blackmail patients whom I could interview.
Speaker 4: So I drove about fifty five miles north of Chaprio
Speaker 4: to a farm in Aliments County to speak to a
Speaker 4: man by the name of mister John Martin. And he
Speaker 4: was retired. He was seventy one years of age at
Speaker 4: the time. He was waiting for me in his back.
Speaker 4: It was mid July, very hot, so I welcomed me warmly,
Speaker 4: inviting me to sit next to him and chair on
Speaker 4: the big tree, and we just started talking and he
Speaker 4: began to tell me his life story. It was a
Speaker 4: phenomenal story, going into a sharecropper family in nineteen oh seven.
Speaker 4: His father was, of course uneducated and could never get
Speaker 4: out of debt because the sharecropper system was designed to
Speaker 4: keep particularly black sharecroppers perpetually in debt. And so when
Speaker 4: John Martin sid John Martin was oh probably an early lesson,
Speaker 4: and he saw, you know how his father just fretted
Speaker 4: and hardy worked and he could just never get ahead.
Speaker 4: He vowed that that would not be his fate under
Speaker 4: new circumstances, would he he be caught up in that
Speaker 4: kind of explotative system. So some years later, when he
Speaker 4: became a young man, got married, and he was a
Speaker 4: cropper himself, because he had the drop out of school
Speaker 4: in the second grade in order to help out on
Speaker 4: the farm. His wife's brother was a was a landowner,
Speaker 4: an independent landowner, and his wife also came from a
Speaker 4: family that owned their own land. And so both of them,
Speaker 4: his wife and his brother in law, prevailed upon him
Speaker 4: to take the risk and go to the bank and
Speaker 4: get alone and buy his own property. So, with some
Speaker 4: considerable reluctance, he did, and he got a mortgage, a
Speaker 4: forty year mortgage to purchase seventy five acres of fertile
Speaker 4: North Carolina farmland. And he always had this sort of
Speaker 4: deep sense of vulnerability to you know, powerful forces, because
Speaker 4: because he saw what had happened to his his father,
Speaker 4: And by working literally night and day for you know,
Speaker 4: six days a week, he with a lot of help
Speaker 4: from his wife, managed to pay it off in five years,
Speaker 4: a huge accomplishment. And so then he turned to me
Speaker 4: and he said, I think that's the reason why my
Speaker 4: legs a whole lot of whack. I pushed myself too
Speaker 4: hard in the fields. Now I knew that he had
Speaker 4: high blood pressure, and he had two keynes that were
Speaker 4: leaning against the chair in which he was sitting. So
Speaker 4: he was suffering from a very severe case of ostio arthritis.
Speaker 4: And in the course of telling me about his life story,
Speaker 4: he also told me that in his mid fifties or so,
Speaker 4: he had to go to the hospital and have forty
Speaker 4: percent of his stomach removed because he had a very
Speaker 4: serious case of peptic ulcers.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So he had these three major diseases that had
Speaker 4: a huge stress.
Speaker 2: Opponent stress component, meaning these diseases that can be caused
Speaker 2: or triggered by stress.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the stress plays a role. So he'd been talking
Speaker 4: for maybe a couple of hours, and his wife came
Speaker 4: to the in to the door and she uh said,
Speaker 4: John Henry, it's time for lunch and uh and and
Speaker 4: bring your guests with you. So I looked at him
Speaker 4: and I said, your name is John Henry, And he said, yeah,
Speaker 4: John Henry Martin, and I thought, just like the legendary
Speaker 4: John Henry, went up against the machine, and in the
Speaker 4: case of John y Ney Martin, the machine was the sharecropper.
Speaker 6: System, which he beat.
Speaker 4: He won his struggle against the machine, the economic machine
Speaker 4: that was the sharecropper system, but he paid a price.
Speaker 4: I began to think, well, maybe there's something here, you know,
Speaker 4: maybe there's something here because his story reminded me. Johnny
Speaker 4: Martin's story reminded me a lot of the story of
Speaker 4: my parents, the story of my grandparents. My grandfathers on
Speaker 4: both my mother's side and my father's side were share robbers.
Speaker 4: So I could identify with what John Hind Martin was
Speaker 4: telling me, and I thought, his story is.
Speaker 7: Not just his story, this is really the story of
Speaker 7: black people, black people in America having to go up
Speaker 7: against these very powerful political and economic forces, these systems,
Speaker 7: these institutions that are in place to keep black people
Speaker 7: subjugated and forcing them to have to work extremely hard
Speaker 7: in order to make ends meet and in order to
Speaker 7: try to move ahead.
Speaker 4: So that really led them for the John Henderson hypothesis
Speaker 4: that maybe that's the explanation of why we see so
Speaker 4: much high blood pressure and strokes and heart attacks that
Speaker 4: affect African Americans, particularly working class African Americans, fairly early
Speaker 4: in adult life. And then, of course the challenge became,
Speaker 4: how do I test this? And so I came up
Speaker 4: with twelve questions that constitute the John Hendrism Scale for
Speaker 4: active coping or high effort coping. And I can give you,
Speaker 4: if you wish, a couple of sample questions. Yes, so's
Speaker 4: the first question. When things don't go the way I
Speaker 4: want them to, that just makes me work even harder.
Speaker 4: Now the response options are strongly agree, some would agree,
Speaker 4: don't know, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree. So here's the second question.
Speaker 4: Once I make up my mind to do something, I
Speaker 4: stay with it until the job is completely done. So
Speaker 4: you know, the remaining questions continue to work this theme
Speaker 4: of tenacity, persistence, not giving up. So that's the John
Speaker 4: Henderson Scale.
Speaker 2: And guess what his hunch was right? He found a
Speaker 2: very strong correlation between scoring high on the John Henryism
Speaker 2: scale and having hypertension and all of its attendant problems
Speaker 2: like stroke and heart attack. The more these men strived
Speaker 2: for excellence, the sicker they became, and the shorter they lived,
Speaker 2: and contrary to what doctor James and his colleagues speculated,
Speaker 2: the link was there even for those who had already
Speaker 2: moved up the socioeconomic louder, who had achieved success in
Speaker 2: stability and were aiming to achieve even more. As we
Speaker 2: all do.
Speaker 4: This is this was very surprising to us. I can't
Speaker 4: emphasize that enough. So this is the late nineteen eighties
Speaker 4: when at the time there had been very little epidemiological
Speaker 4: research on the health of middle class black people, and
Speaker 4: we sort of expected to see that, oh, they will
Speaker 4: be doing so much better than they're working class counterparts. Right,
Speaker 4: we're talking about the you know, post civil rights movement.
Speaker 4: You know, you know, folks who came of age in
Speaker 4: the nineteen sixties, who benefited from the nineteen sixty four
Speaker 4: Civil Rights Act, nineteen sixty five, the civil rights legislation,
Speaker 4: and now they were moving into these white spaces from
Speaker 4: which you know, black folks had for the most part
Speaker 4: been excluded. There may be a lot of physiological wear
Speaker 4: and tear that attends, you know, growing up our gangs,
Speaker 4: taking on these intrinsic shape shifting institutional constraints against upward
Speaker 4: social mobility.
Speaker 2: That's wild I mean, I understand it, I understand.
Speaker 4: It, but yeah, I mean obviously very disturbing, right, a
Speaker 4: very disturbing finding. So what the data are telling us?
Speaker 4: What these data are telling us? And again I want
Speaker 4: to emphasize that this is not just one study, but
Speaker 4: there are multiple studies that have shown this effect. What
Speaker 4: this is telling us is that successful upward mobility in
Speaker 4: America for people of color, not just Black Americans, but
Speaker 4: for people of color comes with the price. Just like
Speaker 4: we saw in the story of John Henry Martin, he
Speaker 4: achieved there was upward social mobility. He became a landowner,
Speaker 4: he became an independent farmer. He had some wealth, but
Speaker 4: he paid a price.
Speaker 2: I kept wondering how doctor James's findings extended to women.
Speaker 2: At the end of one popular version of the John
Speaker 2: Henry Song, the story goes on to talk about his widow,
Speaker 2: Polly Anne, who just picked up John Henry's hammer and
Speaker 2: went right on driving steel in his place. So I
Speaker 2: spoke to a professor at the University of Michigan's School
Speaker 2: of Public Health, doctor Arlene Geronimus.
Speaker 3: My area of study is health inequity.
Speaker 2: Okay, tell me more about that. I think that's something
Speaker 2: we all want to know a lot about right now.
Speaker 3: Which is interesting to me because thirty years ago people
Speaker 3: weren't that interested.
Speaker 2: But doctor Geronymus began her research into health inequity back
Speaker 2: in the seventies in a school for pregnant teen moms.
Speaker 2: She had a hunch about teen pregnancy and the way
Speaker 2: we thought about it that it wasn't the very worst
Speaker 2: thing to ever happen to someone, and it wasn't nearly
Speaker 2: as negatively impactful on people's lives as other larger forces
Speaker 2: in society. It wasn't the root of all evil. But
Speaker 2: in observing the poorer moms or the moms of color,
Speaker 2: she did notice that they often had health problems that
Speaker 2: usually don't appear until much later in life, problems that
Speaker 2: had nothing to do with being pregnant. What was going on?
Speaker 3: Well, I came to this theory I now pursued for
Speaker 3: all these decades, which I called weathering, which was the
Speaker 3: idea that if you're part of a denigrated group, you're
Speaker 3: both exposed to more assaults that wear down your health
Speaker 3: at earlier ages, and so that's weathering, as in a
Speaker 3: rock being you know, weathered by wind and rain over centuries,
Speaker 3: but you're also in this you know, this is what
Speaker 3: I had seen initially in the School for Pregnant Moms.
Speaker 3: You're also weathering in the sense that you're having to
Speaker 3: and this actually relates a lot to some of the
Speaker 3: concepts in Sherman James's work, having to expend so much
Speaker 3: effort and coping with all the things you're exposed to
Speaker 3: because you're still trying to withstand the storm. You're trying
Speaker 3: to survive it. You're trying to even overcome it or
Speaker 3: help overcome it for the next generation. If we're talking
Speaker 3: about racism and poverty that keeps you chronically stressed even
Speaker 3: while you're sleeping. It's not something you can just say,
Speaker 3: let me meditate, or let me try to reframe the situation,
Speaker 3: let me smile and put on my high heels and
Speaker 3: pretty dress. Feel positive. These are things that are happening
Speaker 3: day in and day out, and they're they're happening to you,
Speaker 3: and they're happening as you, as I said, work very
Speaker 3: positively and assertively and proactively to survive them, withstand them.
Speaker 3: And I've come to believe, you know, some of them
Speaker 3: is just objective things in your environment. You know, meditating
Speaker 3: isn't going to help you deal with environmental toxicity. Meditating
Speaker 3: isn't going to help you deal with the fact in
Speaker 3: order to feed your children. Given that you know the
Speaker 3: value of real wages, which was never very high in
Speaker 3: the lower rungs, has gotten even less. Means you have
Speaker 3: to do two or three jobs, or take night shift
Speaker 3: jobs that impen on your sleep, or that you don't
Speaker 3: have a car, so you're relying on really bad public
Speaker 3: transportation to try and get to your various jobs. You're
Speaker 3: also juggling how do you get to your kids to school?
Speaker 3: How do you have them taking care of when they're home.
Speaker 3: At the same time, you don't have any control over
Speaker 3: the hours you work, So there's just this endless coping
Speaker 3: that is kind of psycho I might call it psychosocial.
Speaker 3: And what I've come to understand and what I think
Speaker 3: goes beyond a lot of how people think about stress.
Speaker 3: Besides it, it's not just this individual thing you can
Speaker 3: manage or control. Is that a very big part of
Speaker 3: what sets off all those stress reactions in your body?
Speaker 3: The cort is all and all of that is that
Speaker 3: we all as human beings, need to have a sense
Speaker 3: of how safe we are in any particular situation, and
Speaker 3: safe can mean literally life or death safe, or it
Speaker 3: can mean are we somewhere where we can be authentic,
Speaker 3: where we will be treated fairly. So it can mean
Speaker 3: things short of that life or death, or could mean
Speaker 3: you know, the interception of them, such as if you're
Speaker 3: a black person stopped by a police officer, that's both
Speaker 3: something that you worry is unsafe and it could be
Speaker 3: life threatening also, So we set off these stress reactions
Speaker 3: that people kind of vernacul really know is fight or flight.
Speaker 3: But if you think about what happens when you set
Speaker 3: them off, you start to see how your your health
Speaker 3: wears down early along the very things that cause the
Speaker 3: health and equities by race and class in the United States.
Speaker 2: I think when you were talking about the like you know,
Speaker 2: having so many jobs and not sleeping and taking public
Speaker 2: transportation and all of that, I feel like for a
Speaker 2: large part of our society in America anyway, those are
Speaker 2: the actually the answers, those are the solves, right, Like
Speaker 2: get another work harder if you don't have a car,
Speaker 2: take the bus. It's like, just change your attitude, you know,
Speaker 2: be more positive, like be optimistic and have a better mindset.
Speaker 3: What I've seen is in the very same populations who
Speaker 3: weather I've never seen more resilient people who keep going
Speaker 3: on in the face of adversity, and who can be
Speaker 3: very optimistic, and who have all these sayings and support
Speaker 3: from you know, the people there in networks with their
Speaker 3: loved ones about you know, take one foot forward or
Speaker 3: you know, keep on keeping on. But given that I've
Speaker 3: seen how optimistic and what a good attitude by you know,
Speaker 3: by some measures people in these communities have, and they
Speaker 3: still get so sick, it certainly doesn't seem to me
Speaker 3: that that's much good evidence that that being optimistic or
Speaker 3: you know, having grit, or being resilient or making the
Speaker 3: best of bad situations is what's going to make you healthy.
Speaker 3: It certainly hasn't worked in these circumstances. You know, you'd
Speaker 3: have people would have to they'd have to accept how
Speaker 3: inequitably structured our world is, and that they didn't really
Speaker 3: earn their right to have vacations and time off for
Speaker 3: yoga and me time. We're going to get your me
Speaker 3: time when you're raising kids and working night shifts and
Speaker 3: then working another shift in the day, and then trying
Speaker 3: to figure out do you pay your electricity bill or not.
Speaker 3: Do you fight with your landlord that he hasn't fixed
Speaker 3: the heater in your building? And you have to make
Speaker 3: these decisions all the time, And then you're also being
Speaker 3: told you don't work hard, you don't have future orientation,
Speaker 3: you're not a good person, you had your children too young,
Speaker 3: which just proves you aren't a good person. If you
Speaker 3: just really you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, you
Speaker 3: get all the same things we got. Those are stressful
Speaker 3: things to work against.
Speaker 6: Two.
Speaker 2: I wish I could say that these findings shocked me,
Speaker 2: but instead they affirmed a feeling I've been having about
Speaker 2: the self improvement woo woo coachy world. There's just something
Speaker 2: really privileged and tone deaf about the idea of picking
Speaker 2: yourself up by your bootstraps, an idea we've heaped upon
Speaker 2: people of color in this country, I think, to absolve
Speaker 2: white people of having to do any hard work to
Speaker 2: help their fellow man. An idea that we've gifted white people,
Speaker 2: convincing us we've earned everything we have, An idea designed
Speaker 2: to keep those in power and power while blaming people
Speaker 2: we oppress for their powerlessness. The mindset stuff from Napoleon Hill,
Speaker 2: the individual responsibility of the unemployed folks in Texas, Ray
Speaker 2: Higden's insistence that you just need to defy your negative
Speaker 2: feelings to overcome adversity. These are all just distractions from
Speaker 2: the larger forces that make it harder for song many
Speaker 2: people to rise in this country, things like racism and
Speaker 2: sexism and all the isms I'm constantly banging on about.
Speaker 2: Despite what these pitchmen might say, you cannot think yourself
Speaker 2: out of being the only woman in a business meeting.
Speaker 2: Believe me, I've tried. There are people, groups of people
Speaker 2: for whom this think and grow rich stuff is just
Speaker 2: plainly detrimental, and that it's bad for society on the whole.
Speaker 2: When entire enormous communities suffer in an effort to not suffer,
Speaker 2: we all suffer. I want to put you in a
Speaker 2: room with Tony Robbins while he's like screaming about how
Speaker 2: you know this like rugged individualism and you know your
Speaker 2: mindset just needs to overcome stuff, And no, it's more complicated.
Speaker 4: It's more complicated. These motivational speakers have figured something out right,
Speaker 4: you know, how to speak to the aspirations of people
Speaker 4: and how to connect their stick with the American dream.
Speaker 4: And and you know, we Americans, you know how mind
Speaker 4: is conditioned right to think about our country as a
Speaker 4: place where hard work pays off. I mean, we all
Speaker 4: of us have internalized to some degree that notion, that aspiration.
Speaker 4: They have been sold the American dream. A lot of
Speaker 4: us have been sold the American dream. This is where
Speaker 4: I want to give them some grace. Let me put
Speaker 4: it that way. What they don't know is the kind
Speaker 4: of thing that you and I have been talking about.
Speaker 4: They don't they really don't know the physiological costs associated
Speaker 4: with this not the question for me. The question becomes
Speaker 4: what would they say if they knew? How would it
Speaker 4: change their their message? How would it change what they
Speaker 4: say to people if they knew? But they don't know.
Speaker 4: And of course it's a very powerful dream, isn't it.
Speaker 4: I mean, I mean, what a wonderful idea the American
Speaker 4: dream is. I mean, it's a powerful idea. It attracts,
Speaker 4: It has attracted people from all over the world, you know,
Speaker 4: in search of opportunities to be freer than you know.
Speaker 4: They're able to be free in their in their home
Speaker 4: countries too, to realize their potential to to be safe
Speaker 4: from harm, to be successful economically, to gain wealth, to
Speaker 4: pass something on to the next generation, to make it
Speaker 4: easier for the next generation to live their lives, and
Speaker 4: have been the case for them. There's nothing wrong with
Speaker 4: the dream, but it's a dream. The problem is. The
Speaker 4: problem is, and you mentioned this, you know earlier, the
Speaker 4: you know, the record of individualism that is such a
Speaker 4: a core attribute of American culture, the notion that that America,
Speaker 4: that the United States is a meritocracy.
Speaker 2: I was just gonna say, yeah, the meritocracy thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that you deserve what you get and you
Speaker 4: get what you deserve, right and and that yeah, in
Speaker 4: the end is really up to you. So don't ask me,
Speaker 4: you know, to pay higher taxes so that, you know, opportunity,
Speaker 4: so the opportunity structure can be expanded, and we can
Speaker 4: have some social safety nets that will make your striving
Speaker 4: to be successful less costly. And other countries have in
Speaker 4: place much stronger social safety nets such that the kind
Speaker 4: of other mobility striving, the kind of desire you know,
Speaker 4: for self realization, to realize your potential, you know, to
Speaker 4: live a life that is meaningful and satisfying, does not
Speaker 4: come with it the pursuit of it of that kind
Speaker 4: of life does not come with a unnecessary cost to
Speaker 4: your health, and that is one of the things that
Speaker 4: distinguishes our country from other rich countries in the world.
Speaker 4: Right one could argue that that is the most distinguishing
Speaker 4: factor that distinguishes the United States of America from our
Speaker 4: peer countries elsewhere elsewhere in the world. It's very sobering,
Speaker 4: but it's important to know that this phenomenon exists. And
Speaker 4: now that we know it, and we have to keep
Speaker 4: you know, I have to keep talking about it. We
Speaker 4: have to engage in educating the public. Of course, there'll
Speaker 4: be the skeptics, you know, but we have to We
Speaker 4: have to do our best, certainly to educate policymakers and advocate,
Speaker 4: you know, for social and economic policies that made abble
Speaker 4: mobility striving, and that's costly.
Speaker 2: We're gonna leave you today with a version of John
Speaker 2: Henry sung by the civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who
Speaker 2: died this year.
Speaker 4: Enjoy John Henry.
Speaker 8: He could hammer, he could whistle, he could sing.
Speaker 6: Went to the.
Speaker 9: Mountain early in the morning just to hear his hammer ring,
Speaker 9: Lord Law, just to hear his hammer ring, and just
Speaker 9: to hear his hammer ring, Lord Law, just to hear
Speaker 9: his hammer ring.
Speaker 8: But John Henry was a little baby sitting on us,
Speaker 8: that is me, picked up.
Speaker 9: A hammer and a little piece of steel, said, hamm
Speaker 9: will be the death of me, Lord God, yes, hammill
Speaker 9: be the death his hand will be the death of me,
Speaker 9: Lord Lord, Yes, hamm will.
Speaker 6: Be the death me.
Speaker 8: Well, John Harry's family needed money, said he didn't have
Speaker 8: but a dime. If you wait till the rise of
Speaker 8: sun goes down, I'll get it from the man in
Speaker 8: the mind.
Speaker 1: Lord Lord, I'll get it from the man in the mind.
Speaker 1: I'll get it from the man in the mind.
Speaker 9: Lord Lord, I'll get it from the man in the mind.
Speaker 8: Well, the captain said to John Henry, Don Harry, what
Speaker 8: can you do?
Speaker 6: I canroister check, I can lay a track.
Speaker 9: I can pick and shovel to Lord God, I can
Speaker 9: pick and shovel too. I can pick and shovel to
Speaker 9: Lord a Lord, I can pick and shovel too.
Speaker 8: Well, to Harry said to the captain, a man ain't
Speaker 8: nothing but a man.
Speaker 6: But let your Steve tre beat me down.
Speaker 9: Well, I'll die with the hammer in my hand, Lord God,
Speaker 9: I'll die with the hammer in my hand. I'll die
Speaker 9: with the hammer in my hand. Lord, Lord, I'll die
Speaker 9: with the hammer in my hand.
Speaker 8: Well, the captain said to John Henry, I gotta bring
Speaker 8: me a steam drill.
Speaker 6: Round, hon, bring me a steam drill out on the job.
Speaker 1: Gone, wha that steel on down?
Speaker 6: Lord?
Speaker 1: Lord? Go wha that's steel on down? How go hoop
Speaker 1: that steel on down?
Speaker 4: Lord?
Speaker 1: And lordig hook that steel on down?
Speaker 8: Well, John Henry said to his shaker, shade, go out.
Speaker 6: Don't you sing? Thrown fifteen pounds from my hips down?
Speaker 9: Listen to the col steel ring, Lord, Lord, Yes, listen
Speaker 9: to the cold steel ring.
Speaker 1: Oh, listen to the col steel ring. Lord, O Lord,
Speaker 1: I won't you listen to the cold steal ring.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 8: The man who invented the steam drill hard, he was
Speaker 8: mighty fine.
Speaker 6: John Henry drove this fifteen feet and the steam.
Speaker 9: Drill lonely made nine, Lord, Lord, steam drill lonely made nine. Yes,
Speaker 9: the steam drill lonely made nine, Lord Lord, the steam
Speaker 9: drill lonely made nine. Well, the captain said to John Henry,
Speaker 9: how are you mountain sinking in?
Speaker 6: John Henry said.
Speaker 9: To the captain, on mine, nothing but my hamm a
Speaker 9: sucking win Lord, Lord, nothing but my hamm a sucking win. Hey,
Speaker 9: nothing but my hamm a sucking win Lord, and Laurie
Speaker 9: ain't nothing but my hamm a sucking wind.
Speaker 8: Well, John Henry said to the captain, Look, Bell, know
Speaker 8: what I see?
Speaker 6: Hold an choke? You drill done broke?
Speaker 9: And you can't drive steel like me? Lord, Lord, can't
Speaker 9: drive steel like me? Oh, you can't drive steel like me. No, No,
Speaker 9: you can't drive steal like me.
Speaker 6: Well, John Harry drove into the mountain.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 2: The Dream has written, hosted, and executive produced by me
Speaker 2: Jane Marie. Our producer is Mike Richter, with help from
Speaker 2: Nancy Golumbiski and Joy Sandford. Our editor is Peter Clowney.
Speaker 2: The Dream is a co production of Little Everywhere in
Speaker 2: Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Miss Hammerin and Died Well.
Speaker 8: John Henry had a little woman hand the name of
Speaker 8: Polly Anne.
Speaker 6: She walked down the truck, never looked back.
Speaker 9: Pollanne Roste like a man, Lord Pollyann ro Steel like
Speaker 9: a man. Polly Anne Roste like a man, Lord, Lord
Speaker 9: Polyandro Steel like a man.
Speaker 8: By the people to turn Henry to the White House,
Speaker 8: have they buried him in the sun?
Speaker 6: Heavy Loco mode of cameroaring by.
Speaker 9: Says their loves to you, Driving Man, Lord Lord, just
Speaker 9: their lives is to you. Driving Man, has there loves
Speaker 9: to you, Driving Man? Who he there loveses to You're
Speaker 9: driving man, has there lives to you, Driving Man, Lord
Speaker 9: lordes their lives to you Driving.
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