Former congressman David Price ’61 joined Catalyze with scholar co-hosts Benny Klein ’24 and Elias Guedira ’26 in December 2022 during the politician’s final month in office. Price, who retired this January, represented North Carolina’s fourth district, including Orange County, Chapel Hill.

The alumnus visited the Foundation to share about his lifetime career of public service and his over three decades serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. Price also spoke about his involvement as a scholar in the civil rights movement at UNC–Chapel Hill, some of his proudest political accomplishments, and his post-retirement plans.

Listen to the episode.

Price released the fourth edition of his book, The Congressional Experience, in 2020. He revised the book to cover the Obama and Trump administrations.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree at Carolina, he pursued graduate studies at Yale University to earn a theology degree (1964) and a PhD in political science (1969). Price is a professor of political science at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

Music credits

The intro music is by Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.

How to listen

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Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.

Episode Transcription

(Benny)

Congressman Price, thank you so much for joining Catalyze with me and co-host, Elias. I appreciate you being here.

(David)

Glad to be here.

(Benny)

You and I had the chance to chat a few weeks ago at a panel event with Rabbi Greyber in Durham. I’m glad it could work out that you could be with us here today. How does it feel to have less than a month now left in Congress?

(David)

I hardly have time to think about it. I am in the middle of a lame-duck session, which I hope will take most of the month; when I say I hope it will, not because I want to sit up there and wait for votes, necessarily, but I do want us to finish our budget for fiscal year 2023. So if we’re there till Christmas Eve or whenever it is, that will be a sign that that’s getting done. So I’m ready for that. But January 3 is the date. That’s when my term ends and when the new Congress comes in.

(Elias)

How are you splitting your time between Chapel Hill and Washington, D.C., for this last month? I’m
guessing that you don’t like to take the train to D.C. like President Biden, so what does your typical journey look like?

(David)

Well, this last month is fairly atypical because I’m in Washington so much. I mean, we are in session every week trying to get this lame-duck session through. It’s the main thing is the budget for next year, but also an important defense authorization and the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed this past week, and so on, lots of things. But normally, I divide my time about half and half. Our schedule is three weeks on, one week off, so to speak, and then a longer recess in the summer. But I’m home every weekend. We never set up housekeeping in Washington. My wife used to say that we still live like graduate students up there after 30 years. I have a small efficiency apartment, but that’s the way I like it. I’m on that plane back here after every vote, and the whole job is defined by that division. I often say that to people. It’s like nothing else I know of, where you have a district job and you have a D.C. job. And, of course, you try to relate the two in constructive ways, but if you tilt in one direction or the other, you’re probably in trouble. If you go Washington and don’t remember the home district, or if you become totally parochial and don’t think about trying to make a mark in Washington, neither of those is a good thing. You need to keep that district orientation and your D.C. focus in some kind of balance.

(Elias)

It’s so good that you’re able to spend time back in Chapel Hill and enjoying North Carolina weather and seeing your family.

(Benny)

Sure, and you started your college career at Mars Hill College in North Carolina. What was the process like, transferring to North Carolina and becoming a Morehead-Cain Scholar?

(David)

Well, I feel very fortunate that there was a process in the first place, and that when I think about my interview, I rode a bus. My first visit to Chapel Hill was riding a bus eight hours from Mars Hill to Chapel Hill and then sitting the next day for an interview. And I think back about that interview; I wonder, how in the world did I ever get this fellowship? But I did, and that changed my life. I mean, it was a very, very important occasion in my life. I was headed probably . . . I’m a Tennessee native. I’d come 30 miles across the mountain to Mars Hill to college. I was going to transfer somewhere. It was a junior college in those years, probably University of Tennessee, but the Morehead scholarship changed all that. And I came in this direction, and I came in this direction at a very momentous time. The Civil Rights Movement was sweeping through our region. There was great excitement on and off campus here. Those were two very exciting and very formative years. And in my case, I came from a very small town. Those two years at Mars Hill were important, kind of nurturing, maturing years. But I was really to take full advantage of UNC as a junior. And back then, they gave Morehead scholarships to transferring juniors. Each junior college was able to nominate two people, and fortunately, Mars Hill nominated me.

(Benny)

That’s great.

(Elias)

You talk about the Morehead scholarship being a life-changing experience and being able to benefit fully from college. Do you have a favorite summer enrichment story or memory that has involvement with Morehead-Cain that really sticks with you?

(David)

Well, there were no summer enrichment components to the program back then, and I’m not sure what I did that the summers would have qualified, but they nonetheless were important experiences for me. One summer, I drove a dry cleaning truck. I also had a summer working in a warehouse at a nuclear fuels plant. I, all through college, had a list of clients. I mowed their yards every week. So these weren’t Morehead-type experiences, but they were nonetheless very formative experiences. A couple of things I did were more in the Morehead line, I guess. As a Carolina student leader, I was able to go to the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine and have two weeks of just incredible experiences with what we then called T groups. It’s kind of a technique that Jerry Bell, here in the business school, has refined, techniques in leadership and in seeing yourself as others see you.

Also, because I was going to be president of the Baptist Student Union—I was not a Baptist, but I nonetheless was going to be president of the Baptist Student Union—I had a semester at Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest, which was then a progressive Baptist seminary that also was formative. So many, many summer experiences. I think the enrichment programs, of course, for Morehead-Cain are an important addition to the program, but I was kind of on my own in figuring out what I did each summer.

(Benny)

Yes, sir. I think during your time at Carolina, you were integral. You mentioned the civil rights movement and things that were going on at that time. You mentioned helping to integrate campus restaurants. Was that part of your early politicization?

(David)

Yes, absolutely. It was probably the most important part. When people ask me how did I get to Congress, I would tend to go back to those years, not to my first campaign, really, because I came from a perfectly good, nurturing, small-town background. But there was a lot that was going on in this country that I didn’t know about, even at Mars Hill, I didn’t. But it hit me here on this campus and in this community. My kids grew up here, and they have a hard time believing that Chapel Hill was as insular and as conservative a community as it was in those years. But there was one restaurant in the entire town that served people on an equal basis. That was the Rathskeller, the famous Rathskeller, but the others didn’t. The theaters were segregated and so on. So it was an interesting interfaith experience. I did have a Mars Hill cabal that got me elected president of the Baptist Student Union, and it was the religious groups on campus that took the lead in picketing the theaters and the restaurants. And so did Hillel and so did The Newman Center. So it was my first interfaith experience, as well as a kind of test of the values I had grown up with.

We were figuring out in those times that, yes, the Hebrew prophets are in the Bible, and they do have something to say to modern times. And the faith that we profess is not just about individual morality. It’s about the kind of society that we want to live in and that we value. And so there is that social gospel that we need to come to terms with. So my religious views were certainly shaped by this. So were my political views. I had grown up a fairly conventional Republican in East Tennessee, just not thinking much about it. My social views, I look back to that period as a time when in the classroom and outside the classroom, I did a lot of thinking, a lot of maturing, and I came out of it with some convictions about politics and about government. I don’t think after that I was ever going to be taking cheap shots at government. I mean, I knew government could do badly or well, but I also knew that the kind of social change that this country needed and that we were working for required politics and government, and I never forgot that.

(Benny)

And I know you attended Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I had a Dream” speech on the National Mall, and you witnessed the passing of the Civil Rights Act from the Senate gallery. So keeping in that same vein of early social action and change, could you talk a little bit about those moments?

(David)

Well, I went from Carolina to Yale Divinity School for what at first was called a trial year. It’s a subsidized indecision. I had a year to consider the ministry. I decided I would not be in the ministry, but I also decided I was getting a very good liberal arts education. So I stayed at Yale Divinity School for the three-year degree, and then I went into the PhD program in political science. All through that period, I did have a summer deal. I kind of walked in and was hired off the street by a senator from Alaska named Bob Bartlett. And that was in the summer of ’63. And so I went back to that office every summer for five years. I was basically a legislative aide who would come in in the summer and relieve other people and sometimes go to Alaska. And it was the second of those summers, summer of ’64, when the Civil Rights Act of ’64 was passed. And it was also the first of those summers, ’63, when The March on Washington occurred. I was a peripheral participant in that. I was totally sympathetic, but I was a staff member on my lunch hour, essentially, and my friends and I went as close as we could get into the crowd there and took great inspiration from it.

That passage of The Civil Rights Act in ’64, and mind you, this was three years, three years after we were picketing the Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill. And how often do things happen that fast? It really was a movement that swept the country, and it pricked our conscience collectively, and that showed how politics and government could work. So I was crowded into that Senate gallery to see the key vote on The Civil Rights Bill, and I remember a senator who was near death being brought in on a stretcher to cast that vote. It was just a very, very memorable scene.

(Elias)

Thank you so much for sharing that memory with us. What other advice do you have for scholars who are interested in working in politics, and what have been truths that you have depended on to get through the hard times?

(David)

Well, I guess my advice does stem from the story I just told in the sense that the basic question is not: are you going to have this or that political career? The basic question is: what are you going to do as a citizen, and how do you view your citizenship? Citizenship in a democracy requires active engagement. Not everybody needs to run for Congress, but everybody needs to be informed. I mean, Thomas Jefferson said this a long time ago about democracy. People need to be informed. They need to be conversant with the issues of the day. They need to be conversant with each other and with the sentiments in the community, and need to participate in the democratic mechanisms for translating needs and wants and interests and values—translating those things into advocacy and into public policy. So, at some level, it is important to be involved. In my case, I did have in the back of my mind, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be in Congress someday? I guess the way I was brought up, public service was about the best there was.

But when I came down here for that Morehead interview, or even when I came here then some years later to take the job over across the way at Duke University, my first teaching job, if you said, “In twelve years, you’re going to represent this district in Congress,” I would have thought that was preposterous.

But that is what happened, and it’s, of course, a dream come true for me. But the foundations were really laid here on this campus and in this community in the early ’60s, when I figured out that for rest of my life, I had better be attentive to politics. And so, after that, I did find ways to get involved at the precinct level in various ways, and I served on various staffs in the Senate and in campaigns, and one thing led to another, and ’84 came along. That was the race of the century, as far as we were concerned. I was recruited to come and chair the State Democratic Party full-time. I took a leave of absence from Duke to do that at Jim Hunt’s request. This was the Hunt versus Helm Senate race. It was a blockbuster. It was totally, totally devastating to lose that race and to lose the governorship, to lose three Congressional seats at the same time. We picked ourselves up collectively, and I decided, jeez, maybe I can do about as well as some of these folks I’ve been trying to help. So I ran myself and managed to win that Congressional seat a mere two years later.

And by the way, Terry Sanford got elected to the Senate two years later. Every sense in our pep talks we give, we always talk about that. Two years after the most devastating defeat you could imagine, we had this comeback. And that’s, of course, the way politics sometimes is.

(Benny)

I want to ask about the role of media and the changing role of media in your career. I’ve heard you speak before, and I hope you’ll allow me to paraphrase about one of your early races where you thought that in-person interviews and conversations were going to be the difference maker in the vote, and instead, it was big TV ads, once you finally had the budget to be able to do those. Now things are changed a little bit, and you have Congressmen with millions of followers on TikTok. Can you talk about that change a little bit?

(David)

That certainly is a change, and it wasn’t in my case, it wasn’t big TV ads. It was little TV ads. It was home movies almost. My media guy would hate to hear me say this, but I’d campaigned in the traditional style, every church supper, every gathering I could find. I was at it for a year, and I’d been State Party Chairman, for goodness sake. Who knew? It turned out my name recognition after a year of that kind of campaigning was around 10 percent. So we did scrape enough money together to run some very modest TV ads, me, straight into the camera—this was after Hunt-Helms, so it was a resonant theme—“We’ve got to clean up politics in this state. We got to do better.” In two weeks’ time, my name recognition tripled, and I managed to win the primary. That was hard, though. That was really difficult. We also were talking about the changes in media and the difference that made because we were in this transition period. Jesse Helms, for better or for worse, had pioneered the use of these fire-breathing TV ads, and they were usually negative, and they often just tapped into pretty base sentiments, but they did work.

And so we all had to figure out how to compete in that environment, and we did. I wrote all this up in my book. I talk about how that environment got more and more toxic, and the antidotes that we would use. The kind of counter ads that we would run had to get more and more pointed in order to do the job because it was—you could just see how the atmosphere was—becoming much more difficult, in terms of conventional campaigning where you present yourself and your platform. That didn’t do it anymore.

Of course, social media is a whole new realm, and I’m sort of innocent of the techniques of social media personally, but my office is not. I mean, we’re out there every day with press releases, but also with postings on Twitter and Facebook and all the social media platforms, and we go back and forth on that. We try to do it in a decent and respectful way, but there’s no question that you got to be there. It’s also no question that there are some huge problems here. I’ll just mention two.

One is the disinformation and the defamatory stuff. It becomes very hard to control. Or the question is, should you try to control it? Should there be some kind of regulatory framework for controlling this? Because it is virulent and it is very pervasive.

The second thing is that it has become increasingly tempting, I think, to come into Congress or to come into other public institutions as almost a creature of social media. I write in my book about what a change it was from the politics of campaigning to the politics of finding a niche in Congress and trying to become a policymaker. I think a lot of people don’t even experience that transition now. They come into Congress, and they’re still mainly focused on social media. That doesn’t make for a very effective legislator. Legislation is the realm of learning from other people, figuring out the ropes in the institution, learning what your institutional responsibilities are, not just your personal media following, but how do you function in an institutional environment. I’m not saying it’s not responsible. It is responsible. I think it is actually an aspect of morality, of the morality of public service, is to make an institution work, not just to maintain your purity in the eyes of your constituents.

That’s a big problem because we have way too many people in Congress right now who never have successfully focused internally on making the institution work. And you can see it at a time like this lame-duck session. Why are we up there? Why are we up there three months into the fiscal year, messing around, hoping we can get a budget? Well, we don’t have quite the team play that we should have.

(Benny)

I’ve always been really curious about—as we talk about polarization and the lack of civic discourse in America that I think is hurt by—social media and the extremes that it helps promote. For me personally, as a Jewish American who just came back from Israel, seeing Kanye West and others get brought up to a massive platform to spread hate, that’s the sentiment that I feel, and it makes me nervous. So from your position, what are those conversations like in Congress? Does that hate inspire what we see on social media from maybe some of the more fringe candidates? Is it civil? What are your conversations like across the aisle?

(David)

Well, so far, I’ve not seen overt antisemitism on the floor of the House of Representatives. I’m not saying with some of these characters that it couldn’t occur. But there is a kind of constraint that most people observe, and more cordiality among individual members than you might think, judging from what you see on C-SPAN or see on social media. Having said that, there are these currents of hate and bigotry abroad in our country, and they were given, I think, some legitimacy. Worldwide, these are trends that we see, political extremism, which often has just . . . do people have no idea of the history of antisemitism and the kind of last century that we endured? I mean, it’s just incredible, the kind of ignorance and bigotry that goes into this, and the kind of, sometimes, our inability in our democracy to deal with this effectively. You have to assume that the majority of the people, at some point, will understand the limits and will bring us back toward a more modern and more mainstream way of operating.

I’m rambling because there isn’t an easy answer to this, but it’s something you observe in our country and around the world. I’ve been working with democracies through our House Democracy Partnership. That’s probably the last half of my congressional career. That’s been my main contribution, is to set up a bipartisan commission that works with emerging democracies. I’m not going to tell you what the scorecard is right now because the scorecard is not good. Democracy and the kind of rules of the game that we respect in democracy. The declines are more conspicuous right now than the advances, although there, fortunately, are some advances.

(Elias)

Congressman Price, I’ve noticed how we’ve been talking recently about changes in U.S. Congress, specifically how we’ve witnessed a massive change in politicians being elected to their platforms. You speak about a time when individuals first became congressmen, and then occupying a niche in Congress, shifting to a time when congressmen and other politicians are kind of forced to uphold a social media image and maintain a powerful presence on social media. In your fourth edition of the book, The Congressional Experience, you put a historical context on the events witnessed over the past two administrations. You did this specifically by drawing comparisons between major events observed during the Clinton and Bush administrations. What is one notable comparison that you touched on in this book and would you like to elaborate on it?

(David)

The main change in terms of the atmospherics of American politics, just to rephrase your question a bit, probably did have to do with the advent of Trump and the legitimation of, I would say, anti-constitutional ways of operating and certainly outside the norms of politics ways of operating that he brought with him. I didn’t include the Insurrection. The book was finished in mid-2020, so I had no idea how much worse it could get. But I do think I had Trump pretty well figured out, and I revised a lot of what I had said.

This earlier thing about this earlier matter we were discussing about how do you view yourself as a part of an institution. I did revise those earlier discussions to say, that needs to include, by the way, defense of the U.S. Constitution. It needs to include defense of the basic freedoms that we enjoy and the kind of respect that we expect for each other. And these are things that I didn’t earlier think I needed to say, I guess. We’re not out of the woods yet as a democracy. This Supreme Court case that North Carolina brought, making the state legislatures supreme. Goodness, that was a fringe theory. Now they’re actually considering it. We’re not out of the woods in matters of democratic, but I do think we’re more self-aware, and we’re more aware of the vulnerabilities that we as a country ourselves, we’re exposed in ways that we didn’t think possible.

(Benny)

Congressman, some of your recent successes include the $40 million Choice Neighborhoods Grant for Durham, the passing of the Joint Consolidation Loan Separation Act, which I know you’re really proud of. What are some of the other things that, as you wrap up the Congressional career, are on your mind for the future?

(David)

Well, I don’t think we’ll ever top the nine-year effort to build the Environmental Protection Agency Lab out in the Research Triangle Park. That was a major, major effort. Along the lines of more recent awards, we’re on our way now, I think, to having a southeast rail corridor that you talked about, how I wouldn’t take the train to Washington. Well, I think in another decade, my successor might take the train to Washington because we have great Raleigh to Charlotte train service. Nobody ought to drive to Charlotte these days. No reason. Connecting that next corridor, Raleigh to Richmond, is the key to having a southeast corridor that works. And one of my signature issues as Transportation and Housing Appropriations Chairman has been to get money in that account for developing passenger rail. Fortunately, North Carolina and Virginia have benefited big time from that, so I’m proud of those things.

I am also proud and protective of the democracy promotion work that we’ve done through the House Democracy Partnership. These are developing countries that have many, many courageous people that we just have to admire, but we also have to support, as they attempt to establish parliamentary democracies. And I don’t know, if we don’t do it, I’m not sure who will. I think many of these countries are fragile, and so the parliamentary support we give them is critically important.

(Elias)

Congressman Price, you’ve had a political career spanning close to 60 years, covering seven administrations, from serving as an aide after college to serving throughout seven presidential administrations in U.S. Congress. As you have served in political office for the majority of your life, many of your constituents may be asking, “What’s next?” What can we expect from this next chapter of your life?

(David)

Well, I have been there a while, and it is time to go. At this point, I go with some reluctance. It’s a big change. But I’m going to return to the Public Policy School at Duke University, which I helped start some number of years ago. I’m going to do a lecture here on the Carolina campus, the Lambeth Lecture, in early February. So stay involved.

(Benny)

Sounds like we need to get on the waitlist for that.

(David)

Well, I’m looking forward to that and looking forward to being involved with the Morehead-Cain program and other ways that I will be here more and able more to pitch in. And I will do, I’m sure, some guest appearances here and there. And I hope also to keep involved internationally with, say, the National Democratic Institute, in some of this parliamentary work. So I’m not quite sure how it’s going to sort out, but I have been invited to take a fellowship at the Sanford School, and so that’s what I’ll be doing.

(Elias)

Wonderful. Thank you so much for spending time with us today.

(Benny)

Yes, thank you, Congressman. We really appreciate it.

(David)

Great to talk to both of you.