Not in a Celebratory Mood? America Has Overcome Hard Times Before, and These 5 Historical Facts Prove It
It’s all over the news: The president stands accused of raiding federal funds for personal projects. Members of Congress are caught paying and accepting bribes. Rival parties divide voters, then submit multiple conflicting sets of election results from the same state. Florida, predictably, is at the center of the mess. There are riots. The whole dispute ultimately gets handed to a special commission to sort out, and the country doesn’t have a new president for months after the election.
Sound familiar? This tale of electoral chaos isn’t from 2020. Brace yourself: We’re talking about 1876.
“It is unquestionably the most corrupt presidential election we have ever had,” says historian Greg Jackson, an associate history professor at Utah Valley University and the host of the wildly popular podcast History That Doesn’t Suck. “And by a margin that makes everything else pale.”
Jackson would know. He spent three years deep-diving into American history for his new book, Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome, published just in time for America’s 250th birthday—a milestone that, let’s be honest, a good portion of the country isn’t exactly throwing confetti about.
Why cynicism about our country is on the rise
The same day I interviewed Jackson, I interviewed a woman who is 101 years old. When I asked what she’d say to people who are nervous about these times, I expected her to say something reassuring. Instead, she told me this was “hands down the worst this country has ever been” and that people were right to be scared. This is a woman who lived through World War II, the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement.
When I told Jackson about my conversation with the woman, he didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, Thomas Jefferson said the same thing,” he said. In the years after the hyperpartisan print wars of the 1790s—wars Jefferson himself helped ignite, by the way—he dramatically lamented that men in Congress used to disagree on policy and then still go to dinner together. Now, he wrote, they crossed the street to avoid each other. “Why are people so cruel? Why is society so uncivil? Whyyyy?” he cried. (I’m paraphrasing.)
“It’s both hilarious and reassuring,” Jackson says, “that even Thomas Jefferson—primarily the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most brilliant minds in human history—fell into that same human habit of romanticizing the past while feeling, very viscerally, all the pains and woes of the present.”
But this cynicism, while understandable, may be misplaced. In fact, that is the whole premise of Jackson’s book: Nothing happening today is unprecedented, and not only have we been through worse, but we’ve actually come through it stronger and better. That’s the message Jackson has been carrying to audiences across 30 states with his live show and podcast, which has been downloaded tens of millions of times. At every stop, he hears echoes of my centenarian friend: People are despondent. They feel like things have never been worse.
So if you, too, aren’t feeling great about the state of things in America today, it’s not just you. And historically speaking, it never was.
But there were many reasons to be optimistic then, and there are just as many, if not more, reasons to be optimistic about our country now. To prove that to you, I asked Jackson to walk us through five stories in American history that parallel what is happening today. Read on to put the current political climate into perspective and better understand where we can go from here.
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Misinformation started with the Founding Fathers
If you’ve seen Hamilton, then you know that the Founding Fathers didn’t need social media to get into a battle of diss tracks. Before social media, before cable news, before algorithms, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson tried to destroy each other in public, often underhanded ways. “I can regale you with tales of this happening in the 1790s,” Jackson says, “with Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson doing their best to kill each other in the press—under pseudonyms, basically like someone taking social media today and using bots or fake handles to cover the tracks of what they’re saying.”
The print war Jackson chronicles in Chapter 1 of his book wasn’t just about partisan spin. Benjamin Franklin himself—Founding Father, statesman, flier of kites in lightning storms—printed an elaborate, completely fabricated horror story to gain leverage in negotiations with Britain. He forged an entire fake edition of a real Boston newspaper, complete with invented accounts of Native Americans scalping hundreds of women, children and infants—gruesome enough, he hoped, to shock the British public into supporting American demands for reparations. “The story was horrific, and it was pure fiction,” Jackson says. “It was a blunder, and Ben Franklin knew it. He felt it in his soul the moment he let go of the paper.”
The lesson isn’t that our Founders were hypocrites (though maybe a little). It’s that misinformation isn’t a product of the internet age. It’s a product of being human. “We’ve had fake news constantly,” Jackson says, noting that we are equipped to deal with it. “It is incumbent upon citizens and the republic to think, to learn, to study. You don’t get government by the people without the people doing a lot of work.”
Violence has always been a part of our politics, and things were really bad in the 1800s
If January 6th made you feel like political violence in America was something new and out of control, consider 1856. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a fiery speech denouncing slavery and mocked a South Carolina senator by name. Two days later, that senator’s cousin, Representative Preston Brooks, walked onto the Senate floor and beat Sumner so savagely with a metal-tipped cane that Sumner couldn’t return to work for three years.
The South celebrated Brooks as a hero. Admirers sent him commemorative canes. The North was horrified. The country felt like it was being torn apart.
Sound familiar? Jackson thinks it should. Political violence—including the kind that happens inside the halls of government itself—has been a recurring feature of American life, not an aberration. What changed wasn’t human nature. What changed, eventually, was enough Americans refusing to accept it.
Contested elections are as American as apple pie
The Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 is a particularly important chapter, according to Jackson. “By the time you get through this election, the investigation of the challenged results produced evidence of—and think about this—somewhere in at least the low hundreds, Black Americans being killed.” At the time, White supremacist paramilitary groups were murdering Black voters to suppress the Republican vote, and it worked. In South Carolina alone, an estimated 150 Black Republicans were killed. Had there not been voter suppression in the South, Hayes likely would have won.
And then there was the documented bribery. “We have the receipts, to use the 21st-century phrase on a 19th-century election,” Jackson says. Elected officials were offered cash to change their votes. Members of Congress literally carried money to contested Southern states, hoping to pay out bribes in person. Four states submitted multiple conflicting sets of electoral returns. Florida alone sent three. Congress ultimately punted the whole mess to a special 15-person commission, which voted along strict party lines. The winner was decided in February, four months after Election Day.
“In 2020, we had some questioning of the returns,” Jackson says. “But it’s so much uglier when Congress is facing more than one set of returns. This isn’t even a yes-or-no, are we going to count the state? It’s which set are we going to count from this state?”
History doesn’t repeat itself, Jackson likes to say, quoting Mark Twain. But it often rhymes.
We have abandoned our ideals before—and then reclaimed them
One of the most painful stories in Jackson’s book isn’t about an election or a riot. It’s about what almost happened … and then didn’t. After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, Black Americans briefly gained access to the ballot, to office, to the promises of America. Then, in a moment Jackson calls one of the most consequential failures in U.S. history, the country abandoned them to the Jim Crow laws, starting in the 1870s.
“This is not a happy story by any means,” Jackson acknowledges. “We came so close to truly bringing Black Americans into the promises of the American experiment, and then ultimately we abandoned them to this half measure. Better than slavery, but only just. And we walked away for nearly a century.”
But even here, Jackson insists on the fuller picture. Because embedded in Reconstruction—and in its ugly dismantling, which included real armed insurrections to overthrow elected governments in the South—are the heroes. The people who showed up. Voters who exercised their rights, despite violence and intimidation. Legislators who held the line as long as they could. Ordinary citizens who refused to simply comply.
“You don’t have heroes without the lows,” he says. “Even as we go into these dark moments, I’m pointing out where Americans can choose to engage.”
New tech has always disrupted democracy, and we’ve always adapted
If AI feels like an unprecedented threat to truth and democracy, Jackson has some useful historical context. In the 1890s, the introduction of the steam-powered printing press—which could crank out thousands of papers per hour instead of hundreds per day—created a media environment that felt just as chaotic and dangerous to people at the time.
Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst used the new technology to pioneer what became known as yellow journalism: sensationalized, often fabricated stories designed to inflame readers and sell papers. Some historians even believe their coverage helped push the country into the Spanish-American War.
“This is an absolute revolution, no question,” Jackson says of AI today. “But what we often forget about our previous revolutions is that those disruptions are always followed by an adjustment. The public figures it out. We learn how to operate with this new level of access to information.”
In other words: The printing press felt apocalyptic in the 1890s. Radio felt apocalyptic in the 1930s. Television felt apocalyptic in the 1960s. Each time, Americans eventually adapted.
“We’ve gone from writing with a quill to swiping with our thumbs,” Jackson says, “and we’ve managed every disruption, every massive industrial revolution, every technological revolution, you name it. I feel like we’re gonna do that again.”
Is anything actually unprecedented right now?
This is the question I pushed Jackson on the hardest, and his answer was nuanced. His instinct, as a historian, is to find the rhyme. He mentions reading a recent article about the current administration allegedly redirecting National Park Service funds for White House improvements—and immediately connects it to Chapter 3 of his book, where John Quincy Adams was accused of using public money to turn the White House into a “gambling den.” (His sin? Buying a chess board and a pool table. The outrage was roughly equivalent to what you might see on Twitter today.)
“I’m not absolving the accusation,” Jackson is careful to say. “But the American people thinking, questioning, wondering, doubting whether the president is taking privileges? It’s history rhyming.”
Are there things happening today that have genuinely never happened before? Certainly, but his concern isn’t really about whether any given action is unprecedented. It’s about whether Americans care enough to respond.
“The real question is less about whether it’s truly unprecedented and more about how much Americans care—are we going to actually push back, or are we going to shrug?” Jackson says. “Because if we shrug, we are basically ringing the dinner bell to all corrupt politicians. We are signaling to our public servants what they can get away with.”
He pauses, then adds: “There is no greater threat to this nation than cynicism.”
What to do with this info
Jackson doesn’t want you just to feel better. He wants you to do something. In his book’s conclusion, he leans heavily on the Founders’ concept of “public virtue”—the idea that a democracy requires active, engaged citizens to survive. Here’s how he says to practice it.
1. Become a perpetual learner—but pick your lane. Learn about the issues that concern you. “Don’t get intimidated and feel like you have to know everything,” Jackson says. “Pick a thing you’re into. Get a decent grasp of two or three issues, and those become your litmus test. When a politician starts sounding off on whatever it might be—are tariffs really taxes, or aren’t they?—you’ll know. And then you’ll know whether you can trust them.”
2. Show up beyond Election Day. “Voting in November is like getting a gym membership in January,” Jackson says. “You feel good, you’ve got your membership card, you can convince yourself you go to the gym even though it’s been months. But if you want better candidates, you have to be in the vetting process—the caucuses, the primaries, the local races. That’s where we actually pick who’s on the ballot. That’s how we stop ending up in November going, ‘How did we end up with a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledumb?'”
3. Curate your own information diet. “People saying the internet is only full of fake news is like saying ‘There are so many fast-food joints, how can I eat healthy?’ Well, you drive past them. You go to the grocery store. No one is forcing you to get french fries and shakes for every meal. People are terrified of algorithms, and I understand that. But at the end of the day, we decide what we consume,” he says. “You have never had more ready access to better information. Stop using doomscrolling for your news. Curate your own. Follow reputable sources, including ones you disagree with.”
His own reading list: Foreign Affairs for national-security context, the Washington Post and New York Times for left-leaning reputable coverage, and the Wall Street Journal for the right. Plus, his local newspaper—which he subscribes to and considers essential. “That’s what checks corruption,” he says. “When the mayor knows everyone in a county of 600 will hear what happened, it keeps that mayor on his or her toes.”
Meet William Barney, the most underrated hero in American history
But perhaps the best way to strengthen public virtue is to look at all of the small heroes throughout our history and decide to be like them. When I asked Jackson for his favorite character in the book, he didn’t hesitate: William Barney, a militia commander during the Baltimore Riots of 1812.
Baltimore in 1812 was a powder keg. A mob of Jeffersonian Republicans (not the modern GOP—the party of Jefferson and Madison) was turning on Federalist opponents with terrifying violence. The mob had gotten its hands on a cannon.
William Barney was a Republican. The Federalists were his political enemies. But when the mob moved toward the cannon to fire it into the crowd of Federalists, Barney walked forward and pressed his chest against it. He stood between the cannon and its target, willing to die to stop his own side from killing people he disagreed with.
“He doesn’t move,” Jackson recounts. “The man with the match is moving toward the cannon, it’s clear they are going to light it—and it is barely avoided. But here’s a man who’s ready to die not just for his fellow partisans but for his fellow Americans with whom he disagrees, who are being threatened by those with whom he does agree.”
Jackson pauses.
“If they existed then, those people still exist now. We can find them. We can be them.”
Be the change you want to see
There are many ways you can participate in the political process, especially at the local level, and Jackson points out that is where you can have the biggest effect. He himself volunteers helping in local elections.
At the end of a book-tour stop in Nashville, someone asked Jackson if he’d ever consider running for president. “That made me laugh heartily,” he says. “I’m mildly embarrassed to even admit it, and it definitely caught me most off guard.”
But would he consider running for office? (After spending the better part of an hour chatting with him, I would vote for him. He’s that smart.) “I think that’s a question of where someone is most useful,” Jackson demurs. “I can’t fathom that I would be doing more good for the country holding office right now than having written this book over the last few years.”
For a country that could use a little more faith in itself right now, that might be exactly right.
“I’ve stared into the deepest darkness of our history,” Jackson says. “I’ve looked at our absolute lowest moments. And it has done nothing but show me the resilience of this nation, of this people. And I believe that resilience is still here today.”
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Source:
- Greg Jackson, associate professor of history at Utah Valley University, senior fellow in the Center for National Security Studies, host of History That Doesn’t Suck and author of Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome; interviewed, June 26, 2026
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