Jonathan Capehart & John Seabrook

Man Search for Home. Welcome to Vast Politics, Jonathan cape.

and so I just wrote them down. They became the shorthand was the down South chapter, all about going Jehovah's witnessing with my grandmother and the people and who we talked to and relatives, and I sent it around to friends. I sent it around to three specific people, April, Ryan, Tammeron Hall, and Joy Read, and I asked, what do you think of this? Each one individually said this is incredible. Keep going, And so I kept going. I didn't have

a publisher or anything. I just wrote and would send them and other people like, yeah, here's another story, here's some more pages, and they just encourage me to keep going. And so when I got the book contract years later, I had two particular books in mind that formed how I would go about writing this very personal book. The first one was by Katherine Graham, her By Autobiography, personal history. If anyone listening hasn't read it, you should pick it

up because it is raw, honest. Katherine Graham was the most powerful woman in journalism in her time, and one of the most powerful women in the country, and yet in her book she talks about her fraught relationship with her mother, She talks about her own insecurities being publisher of The Washington Post. It was really when I read it in the late nineties early two thousands, it was incredibly refreshing to read something so powerful and honest from

someone so important. And then fast forward twenty years to Charles Blow's memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones and again raw, honest, candid, introspective, and it was wonderful to read because it put into perspective and context the passion that fueled Charles's columns in the New York Times. And so I thought, if I were to ever get a book contract, that's the way I will write my book. I will be raw, I will be honest about my successes but also my failures, absolutely honest about my failures

and shortcomings. And when I got the contract, that's exactly what I did. Oh and our mutual friend Richie Jackson, when I really started writing, gave me the best piece of advice because he had just finished writing Gay Like Me, and he said, Jonathan, put yourself on every page, be

sure to do that. That's what I did, so, with Katherine Graham on one side, Charles Blow on the other side, and Richie Jackson sitting on my head, I went about putting myself on every page so that when people read the book, yet here I am, they will understand that perhaps maybe the image they have of me all buttoned up and looking rather nice and everything. You know. My hope is that they will see that that's just their image of me. It's not fully who I am.

because of my mother. She had a stalker, and so we were always very careful because we always knew that guy was coming for us. But I just wonder, here we are writing these very personal thinkes I am having the same experience in some ways for me, is very scary.

are universal. And my hope is when people read this that they will see parts of themselves, pieces of themselves, or if they don't, an experience that I've got that I've written about that maybe they're going through now or they went through and it gets them to think about it in a different way. That has been my goal

the other goal. One goal is here, get to know me better, and the other goal is, Hey, through these experiences I you will take to heart some of the lessons that are you know, sprinkled throughout the book.

can have this amazing life. So I do wonder how important it is for us just by the sheer facts of being an out gay man, being someone who's an alcoholic who got sober when they were teenager, Like, how important that just that is in the world.

of it that way, especially on matters of race. When I started realizing that my audience was you know, heavily African American, but it was also non people of color, and for many of them, I was their gateway. I was there entree to understanding stuff that was happening. So when Trayvon Martin was killed, and I wrote the column that talked about the talk and the rules that I was told, you know, don't run in public, definitely, don't

run with anything in your hands in public. All the things that I do, the number of people I heard from who said I never knew this. I had one colleague at MSNBC come up to me in the weeks after tears in her eye and he said, she said, I never knew that those conversations were happening. She said her son's best friend was black, and that he was over their house all the time. She knew his parents and everything, but she never knew that when he left

their home, the conversations that were happening. And so once you understand that, the responsibility that comes with that. I looked at that as Okay, I see people are looking to me to guide them, and it's not my responsibility personally, but professionally sure. And the more I hear from people who say, you know, you helped me, the more you realize, Wow, with this platform comes responsibility and so how am I

going to use that? And so I've been using it, putting it in service of helping move the dialogue, help people I don't know, get beyond their pretty conceived notions or their hard fast beliefs because they trust me. That's the hope I.

burn myself out. Because of what I was saying before, there are lots of people who are looking to me, looking to you, looking to many of our colleagues to help guide them through this really tough time.

I didn't grow up with the phone. We didn't have phone that they're just this with, Like the world that I grew.

than one you know, edited draft of the book. By the time I read the fourth you know, final pass through, I was like, God, damn it, I'm bored. So it's going to read this book and then have to do that. It's the whole build up to lunch, and then there's the lunch. I mean, you've been through this, not.

worst parts of it. You know, I love very flowery writing. I'm obsessed with pros. I've gotten worse about that in my older age, so especially in the world of AI, I just am so delighted when things are beautiful and feel like Diddy and that even if they don't move this story along, I don't give a fuck, which you know, it's not actually what anyone wants. I wonder if we could talk for a minute about kind of staying sane

in a crazy world. And during the election, I was on television at the very I was on for the coveted three am to six Am spot. When I went to go sit down at the desk, I saw Rachel Matta and I sat to her like, oh my god, how the fuck are we going to survive this? And she said, You're going to get up tomorrow morning. You're going to go on Morning Joe, and you're going to help these people because you know this idea that we're going to get up there and just tell people the

news and help them get through it. Is that what drives you? And how do you do it?

about Frederick Douglas. He writes, the orator and writer lived to see an interpret black emancipation, to work actively for women's rights long before they were achieved, to realize the civil rights triumphs and tragedies of reconstruction, and to witness and contribute to America's economic and international expansion in the

Gilded Age. He lived to the age of lynching and Jim Crow laws, when America collapsed into retreat from the very victories and revolutions in race relations he helped to win, and I go on to write. What gave me hope, in Blite's words, was the sweep of Douglas's life. A man who was born a slave and escaped, who was a celebrated orator against the sin of slavery and saw

the end of that evil institution. Douglas played a part in the nation reaching toward its founding ideals during Reconstruction, and then the great man lived long enough to see all the gains he fought for the reverse by Congress, the courts, and the President during the terror of the Jim Crow era. My story is proof that Douglas's fight was not lost, that as bad as things are, they won't stay that way. I am a descendant of slaves whose parents were born and raised in the segregated Jim

Crow South. My cousins and I are the first generation in our family who didn't have to pick cotton. My story is the story of an only child, mama's boy, who had dreams of being a journalist and no roadmap for how to achieve them. I'm a black man who writes for the Washington Post, anchors a show on MSNBC, and serves as a political analyst on PBS News Hour.

And I'm an out gay man who was able to marry the man I love and have the ceremony officiated by the Attorney General of the United States, who made a key determination that made it possible. Think about that the sweep of Douglas's life. What that showed me was history happens in a cycle. We go in a cycle. History is not linear. It whins, and for every step forward,

there might be three steps back. And so for me to read those words about Frederick Douglas in that year twenty seventeen, how could I not look at that and think, Wow, I should remain hopeful. It put for me everything into perspective. You know what I like in it too, what I tell people, think of it as being on a really bad, turbulent flight. It's uncomfortable, you hate it, You palms are sweaty, your heart's racing. You think you're gonna die, but you don't.

You literally get through it. It is my hope that as bad as these times are, as turbulent as these times are, that we will get through it on the other side. But no one should fool themselves into thinking that it's not going to be rough. You know, it's sort of like the pilot has already come on and said, flight attendants and beverage service get back in your seats. We're going to go. We're going through some rough air, and the pilot doesn't tell you how long it's going to last.

name is Arthur, with my great grandfather. He was apprenticed to a local farmer and learned the kind of high end vegetable growing business, which there used to be a lot of farms around New York that grew vegetables. People needed them. As the city developed, they got pushed further out, and by that time they were sort of you know, out in Connecticut or New Jersey, but they supplied the cities with you know, high end produce, kind of a

farm to table operation. Really, he had a small farm, and my grandfather was born on that farm in eighteen eighty one, and so he kind of came of age in the Gilded Age, and his heroes were robber barons, you know, who did everything they could to make money and disregarded the law at almost every turn they could get away with. And he formed his idea of who he wanted to be during that era and from those men. And even though he was just a picky, you little

farmer down in South Jersey. You know, he had these big ambitions and what he was going to do was industrialize the vegetable growing and packaging business, you know, because that was what he started with. Henry Ford was kind of his role model. So he wanted to create a factory that would produce vegetables on a very large scale, and he managed to do that and eventually created a frozen vegetable factory called Sebra Farms, which some of your

listeners actually may know. It was quite a popular brand in the fifties and you can still find the frozen Queen spinach in some places, even though my family doesn't make anymore. So he became this kind of late Robber Baron style industrialist, and because it was an agricultural business, it required thousands of workers, and over the twentieth century, those workers were harder and harder to find because it was farm work, so he had to look further and

further afield. So waves and waves of immigrants came down to South Jersey and lived in a town that he built. It was like a pullman town. It was actually called Seabrook, and he owned all the housing.

the business was kind of declining by that point. But the brand and the story of how the Seabrooks became who they were was all sort of manipulated for commercial reasons. And I think if the family, if I said, one reason why it all fell apart is that the family and the brand became so confused that people didn't know what whether their value was as a family member or

as kind of like a brand member. And it led to enormous conflict between my father and his father and Eventually it was a succession battle that brought the company down and my father was disowned and we moved away to another place. So it's the story of all of that. And I would say, my just to one the thing that I mean, many families maybe have a narrative somewhat like that. But it's interesting in this case because my

father and my grandfather were born forty years apart. My grandfather was sort of, you know, born in the age of the Robber Bearents. My father came of age in the New Deal era, and so his attitude toward workers' rights and unionization and women in the workplace were formed during the sort of birth of the liberal tradition that we kind of grew up with, whereas my grandfather came out of this kind of make America Great McKinley tradition.

So in their conflict, you see a conflict that our country has faced and continues to face, between a kind of liberal tradition and an illiberal tradition, if you want to call it, that represented by my father and my grandfather.

at the time, and it was crushed with violence vigilantes. Even the KKK, the New Jersey KKK, which was actually kind of prevalent in those days, were brought in to put down this strike. You know, my image of my family changed as I, you know, discovered more and more

of this stuff. And by the way, I I wouldn't have probably known this stuff, except that all these regional newspapers that used to exist that no longer exists ended up getting digitized and put on newspapers dot Com so you could search them, so I could find these kind of daily stories of what happened, and you know, on a particular day in nineteen thirty four that I never would have known anyway. So then I had all this information and it was like, Okay, I'm writing kind of

an expost say of my family. Now I'm investigating my family. I'm taking my journalistic skills which I learned, you know, apart from my family working for The New Yorker, and now I'm actually bringing them to bear my family, and that actually was a very difficult thing to deal with.

I mean, I think one of the unique things maybe about this book is you don't really read like insider expos days of wealthy families written by one of the family members who are willing to tell the truth and who have decided to tell the truth and are willing to risk alienating family members because the truth is more important.

And in this case, because all these workers whose stories weren't really being told truly, who had contributed their lives to Seabrooke Farms and were treated badly by my grandfather and my uncles and maybe my father too, I felt I was kind of doing it for them, partly too, to sort of you know, there's a a social justice piece of this because of the nature of my family's agricultural work and the things they had done. So I did have a decision to make, you know, should I

should I tell? Should I if this really is going to damage my family? Should I do this? I don't know. In the end, maybe I didn't really have a choice. I had to do it, you know, I had to do.

And then when I discovered all this shit that he had to deal with and what he put up with from his father and who'd really tried to destroy him, I felt like, oh, now I get it. This is why you had such difficulty as a father because you didn't have a role model for a father, and under

in that context, you actually did really well. This was after he was gone, so it was it was, you know, sort of all reconcili after he was dead, But it actually meant a lot to me to come to that place through that work.

them remained. And then after the war, hundreds of Estonian displaced persons came from the DP camps in Eastern Europe and they were sponsored my by grandfather, who who you know, was always looking for labor that he could control. But they see my grandfather as their savior, right wows as the person who like the American that reaffirmed their belief in America, particularly for the Japanese Americans after you know, the people that they thought were their protectors had actually

rounded them up and thrown them into these camps. But of course with my grandfather, it was like an ideal employment situation. I think he got these people they had to stay, and there was no place for them to go anyway, And then they lived in houses that he rented to them. He was getting tenants who could easily be evicted if they didn't work or they didn't pay their rent or and their rents were taken out of their salaries. So and the housing was completely segregated by color.

It was a bizarre situation that still resonates today and in those families and their children. You know, I'm going to present the book down there at the big reunion of the Japanese Americans who their descendants who came this summer. You know, I'm not really sure how it's going to go down because it's it's really challenging a lot of assumptions they made about my family as this kind of the good Americans. So it's not just me, you know, it's their stories too that intersect with my story. But

I feel like the narrative has to be corrected. We can't live with the because the people who control the past control the present, right, And if we know this from our current day, and if the people, if the past is portrayed as this kind of wonderful, utopian, nostalgic, you know, crime free, stress free, you know, gender not free world, then that is going to be the world that politicians try to create for us today. But it's a lie. And in my case, certainly in our case,

it's a lie. And I think in the MAGA case it's also a lie, but I know that it's a lie in my case.

endless discourse on the books about American history. That is because they know this is such a central data.