Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the 275th episode of objectively Speaking. My name is Jennifer Grossman. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited to have Professor Wilfred Maclay with us to talk about his two books, Land of Hope and Invitation to the Great American Story. And his newest book, Jewish Roots of American Liberty. The impact of Hebraic ideas on the American story. Wilfred, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you, Jennifer.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: So our guests, our audience always likes to learn a little bit about our guest's origin story. If I understand correctly, you grew up aspiring to be an engineer.
What change your trajectory?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Not really.
My father was an engineer. My father would have loved it if I had had his talents in that area. But I didn't.
And you know, I was mostly a jock in high school. That was mainly. And at some point my intellectual interests were fired by a variety of sources. Actually, I hate to admit it now, but person who really got me going was Emerson reading Emerson and was the 10th or 11th grade when you do American literature and you know the virtue, the, the. His essay on self.
And I just, you know that that's got. That always has to click with adolescent. Adolescent. So you move to whoso would be a man must be a non performance and you know, to be great is to be misunderstood.
Unfortunately the reverse of that is not true. But anyway, all of that kind of rebellious, individualistic and ambitious kind of sense of the potential of one's own mind really turned me on and I was hopeless after that.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: So you.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: But it wasn't interested in history.
That took.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: So you moved to Hillsdale as the Victor Davis Hanson chair three years ago. I'm wondering, as an avid jazz piano player, have you found fellow musicians to jam with? Right.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: How do you know all these things about me?
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Because I read the books and I do my research.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Well, no, the answer is no. We. There's. I've been trying to assemble a group and just have. It's a long story version of story short.
Short version is no I haven't and I have it. However, I keep acquiring pianos. I was able to acquire a Fender Rhodes piano which those of your listeners know about these things now. That's a kind of nice item. They don't make them anymore. And, but.
And I have a Yamaha grand and a Yamaha Upright. So I have, I have plenty of instruments around me to keep me going. But I, yeah, I would like to find.
It's a little isolated place. So jazz.
There are no jazz. You have to go to Ann Arbor.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: Well, maybe this interview will help us ferret out some of the, the jazz players and we can.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: What we, what we need is a bass player.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Drummers are easy to find. A bass player like a good man is hard to find.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: All right, so now we. I realize that we probably should have done two interviews because this book, the Jewish Roots of Liberty, of American Liberty, is worth an interview in and of itself. But of course, American history is a vast, sprawling topic, so I'm going to spend at least the, the first 30 to 40 minutes talking about your book Land of Hope. And what was the inspiration? Gratitude. Here is a big theme at the Atlas Society, and you've said that you wanted to write a book that inspires gratitude rather than guilt. So what does gratitude mean in a civic or moral sense?
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Well, it's an appreciation of how extraordinary our culture is, our civilization, our way of life, and that it didn't come from nowhere, it didn't come from out of the imagination, solely of those living, although certainly be wrecked by those living if we don't do something with what inherited.
So. Yeah, but actually the impetus was something more specific.
It was when 2014, the people who do advanced placement testing in US history, the college Board, they changed the structure of the test in a way that was very oriented towards. For example, they didn't spend much time at all founding country on the Constitution. The debates over the Constitution, the ratification debates, Federalist Papers, even George Washington just kind of dropped away.
And instead there was this focus on the economic history of the early part of the country and especially on slavery and the sort of arguments that have been made in the last few years, I think they're starting to knock down, but that slavery was the basis of American wealth, basis of capitalism.
You know, I don't know whether you know Philip Magnus, but he's a wonderful economic historian who's taken all of this on the 1690s.
So it's, it's came out. My book came out the same year as the, the 2019, as the, as the 19 project of the New York Times came out. And so it wasn't a response to that, but it might as well have been in a way, because that, that was the sort of image of American history that I was.
And Howard Zinn's in People's History of the United States that I was pushing against.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: Although you wouldn't know it from reading the book.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: No, the book definitely needs, like a narrative and a textbook. And I was struck by your choice of art for the book's cover. Design. It depicts.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Oh, bless you.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: River, waterfall.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: I put so much effort into that because what I wanted, what I wanted was something and I really was, I focused very early on the New York skyline as viewed from the water, which, you know, if you've ever ridden the Staten Island Ferry or, you know, had the occasion to see that, it's, it's a great, great site, has been for over a hundred years a great site. And, and I thought such a, it's such a testimony to the dynamism and the majestic dynamism, if you will, of American life. And I wanted to find a picture that, that gave you the same feeling, the kind of feeling you get when you walk into a cathedral and you see there's this huge movement of space upward.
You're lifted up by it. I, I wanted to present the New York City skyline in the same way. Well, so it took forever to find, but I found the right piece and thank you for pointing it out.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Well, you know, it's, it struck me in particular, of course, Ayn Rand loved the New York skyline and she, you know, the COVID depicts the famous skyscrapers of Manhattan in the 1900s during the later years of the Gilded Age. And I think of Ayn Rand arriving in New York in 1926, then heading to Chicago, another city known for at the time for its feats of engineering and the stunning skyscrapers.
How do you think, how, how was that kind of, this was her first real introduction to, to America.
And what do you think that image expresses that's just uniquely American?
[00:08:56] Speaker B: Well, it's inventiveness, it's energy and capitalism, the power of capital, when it's put to use and is allowed to be deployed freely.
It, you know, just the energy of a free peep.
That's, that's what it conveys to me. But I also wanted, I didn't want so many surprise. So many of the COVID designs for textbooks are deal with these sort of Grant Wood images of agriculture and of rural life and small town life. And that's part of the story.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: I mean I live in a very small town right now and I actually love it.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: New York City. And right now I'm sort of briefing the election of a socialist as mayor of New York. But, and I don't think any good is going to come of it. But the, the, it's, it's arguably the greatest city in country in the world.
Maybe not anymore in the world, but has been for much of our history.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Well, Eric, in the financial center.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Yes, we will, we will see It's a New York's loss, but probably Florida's gain.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: So population. Yes, well, in capital.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Capital. That's actually what I was thinking of in particular.
Now, one of the recurring themes throughout the history you cover is the tension between fidelity to the Constitution and those who believed it was an outdated document unsuited to the needs of a modern nation. Now, we've spent some time in recent weeks focusing on the Civil War era, debates about the Constitution in Lincoln and Frederick Douglass's era in the 20th century. What politicians are movements do you think most challenged the relevance of our founding documents?
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Well, the progressive movement and even someone who in many respects I admire, Theodore Roosevelt, had very low opinion of the Constitution.
And his famous statement during the anthracite coal strike is that the hell with the Constitution when the people need coal.
And you know, I'm not on board with that rule of law.
But much, much, much worse than T.R. was Woodrow Wilson.
And Woodrow Wilson had maybe the most prominent professor in our political life. He's not the only.
I suppose Obama was a professor. That doesn't exactly expire confidence either. But he had formulated ideas long before he became president about ways that the Constitution being altered. And even in 1912 and 1913, when he comes into office, he's making the argument that we've outgrown the Constitution, that we need to look at government not as a Newtonian science. The science of government is a Darwinian science, so that institutions evolve the way organisms evolve. And this included a very low of the Declaration of Independence, of the idea that we have natural rights that are part of our endowment, part of our very nature to have these rights, and that government exists primarily to protect those rights.
That's the vision of the Founder, that's the vision of the Declaration, and that's been, I think, under fire.
That's what, in a way, a lot of it boils down to.
Do the individual.
Does the Constitution exist to protect those rights?
And if it does, you know, I think you tinker with it at our peril.
[00:13:18] Speaker A: Right.
So one of the lesser known tidbits of history that ended up playing a larger role in America's emergence as a great industrial power was the introduction of standard time zones, which we just had a change recently.
But, you know, like, this is the east coast time and this is the west coast time, and this is Central time.
So fans of Atlas Shrugged will be keen to learn how the introduction of standard time zones actually grew out of the needs of the railroads. Can you tell us a little?
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Yeah, they, they did the whole Thing it wasn't the government.
It was, you know, this, this is. So it goes into. Jennifer, the last thing we were talking about, which is the progressive movement and it's dangerous because progressives had the view that there was a science of administration and it could be compiled and passed on to a sort of battalion of experts, a sort of clericy, a ruling class that would be disinterested, never pursuing their interests, but would administer government on the basis of this disinterested knowledge and the idea of the profit motive of people striving to better their own condition. This was. If this was not part of the picture anymore. Well, so you might think that, well, standard time zone, something government would institute. No, it was the.
It was the. The titans of industry, the men operating the railroad. Who you think of a transcontinental railroad, if you don't have a way to coordinate trains, you don't have an infinite number of tracks. You have to coordinate the movement of traffic on a finite set of tracks over long periods of time.
Well, if you measure time, particularly by where the sun is at its zenith, wherever you happen to be, then you have no standard of the measurement of time, no basis for integrating a far flung net of transportation.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: But. But with the events of the telegraph, which is extremely important, it's like the nervous system.
And standard time zones were a necessity, but it wasn't. It was basically, it was an agreement among the otherwise fiercely competitive.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: Right.
Well, back to it was the Nat Taggerts and the founder of the Taggart Transcontinental.
One of the things that always annoyed me is how the great industrialists of that time, the same entrepreneurs that Ayn Rand lionized in Atlas Shrugged, are referred to pejoratively as robber barons.
Yeah, depiction come about. And in what ways was the criticism either justified or unjustified?
[00:16:31] Speaker B: I think it came about because some of the tactics that were. I mean, it's fiercely competitive time. You know, again, the railroads were built by people who are entrepreneurs.
They had to amass, marshal huge amounts of capital.
And that's true of all forms of big business in the Gilded Age and this is unprecedented levels of capital just to build and operate a steel mill, you made a single farthing off of it. And with Mailroads leading example of big business in this time, you have a lot of independent operators who, you know, build.
There was no standardization of gauge.
So that going from one line to another could be a very complicated business. You might have to hire all the cars in a train onto another train.
And that made expectations so to integrate all of that standard, these things. But it also meant that the Cornelius Vanderbilts and others who were the real dominant figures in that industry had to drive off the competition. So sometimes they would use tactics that they would be referred to as buccaneer capitalists. They would use tactics to eliminate the competition efficient and consolidate what needed consolidating in order for trains to be efficient. But I think the other part of the answer to your question is that vast fortunes were being made and we see this happening now.
I just saw that there's talk that Elon Musk may be the nation's first trillionaire.
And you know, most of us, I speak. I think I can speak for a lot of people.
I don't really have a problem with Elon Musk making a lot of money because he also does things that are tremendously beneficial to everybody else.
I don't mean that I have a completely and critically endorse everything and so on, but I think there's, there's a, there is in some a tendency towards envy. What can only be called envy. Yeah, it's envy.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: Well, you know, that's one of the reasons that I think that I particularly celebrate Elon Musk's and, and others who have accumulated great amounts of capital, as Elon said, that it's insane to take the job of capital allocation away from those who've demonstrated great skill in perfect, perfectly safe and giving it to an entity, the government, that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation. And it's why in Atlas Shrugged, the strikers, the people that are fleeing. Sorry, bit of a spoiler alert here. Call their refuge Galt's Gulch. But when you ask John Galt what he called it, he called it Mulligan's Valley. And that was because Mulligan was the great financier. And, and Ayn Rand herself has said that when people think about wealth, they tend to think that the rich are spending it on luxuries. But that doesn't happen to be the case.
That the investment, it is, it's the seed corn that drives all innovation.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: And it's what is for most, most of the very wealthy people I know, which are very few but not interested in.
I'll give you an example, a real life example. Jack Miller, who runs Jack Miller center, which is wonderful.
Absolutely educating young Americans about our institutions. Jack made a fortune.
I don't know if he's a billionaire, but he's close to it in the office supply industry. And then, you know, he. I made enough money, decided to retire at 70 or whatever. And ever since then, he, he has just been playing golf and buying mansions and, you know, cruise ships. He, he, he has been working it constantly. I know I'm on his board, so I'm not an objective observer here, but it, it's, this is a guy in his 90s now, and, and he is the hardest work and in, in the business, you know, and, and because he loves doing that, he loves creating, loves making things happen.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: Yes. All right, well, we could, we could spend the entire interview talking about Elon Musk and the pivotal role of capital investment and Jack Miller, who I'm a big fan and he's also a supporter of the Atlas Society. But we've got.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: Okay, glad you know.
[00:21:54] Speaker A: And we've also got some audience questions, so I'm going to dip into those right now.
Let's see the couple of similar ones. Alan Turner asks, have you gotten pushback against Land of hope by the 1619 Project and its support Borders? And then my Modern Gault also asks if you have any views about the 1776 project.
Okay.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Well, the first one, you know, I haven't really gotten that much pushback. I think that the strategy of the historical profession, which is sort of dominated by people who sympathize with the 1619 project, even though they know it's bad history.
And that's a whole other story. But I've accidentally only had one really thinker of a review, and that was in a socialist publication, so I think I can discount that.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: No, mostly wear that as a badge of honor.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Well, mostly by the Jacobin.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is that kind of a publication. Yes, but no, mostly they've ignored me, and I think that's a kind of strategy. But we're about to come out with a second edition that I hope your listeners and watchers will be on the lookout for. It's going to be expanded. It's going to be much better. We are going to try very hard get that book into public adoption by the state.
I think we already have a good line on that. There are things that they wanted in the book to make it a little bit easier for teachers to use it, and we've done those things. We've made those alterations.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: Thoughts on 1776 project.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sympathetic to it. You know, I'm at Hillsdale and people who did that are.
Not all of them are Hillsdale, but Matthew Spalding, Larry Arne, I think was involved in it. I know Matthew Spaulding and, you know, I, I didn't, but I, but I Actually did. The reason I didn't participate in it is that I'm on the national semi quincentennial commission. That's. That's Latin for 250, 250th anniversary of the country, which is coming up next year and which had been one of the more frustrating experiences of my life. Although we're getting rolling how it finally hardest and bakery died down. But I felt that and everybody agreed I would completely vitiate my credibility on that commission if I identified with the MT36 project. But I'm quite sympathetic to it. I think. I think 1776 was one of the great moments in human history.
The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution. It's the first time that you have a government come into being on planet Earth saying as a foundational principle that all men are created equal and that. That there's an aristocracy is not built into the nature of man, as Jefferson put it. Well, there's not some men.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And as you say, it's a story. Right. So that it's always able.
You can have this sort of presentism where we can critique things. But it was an evolution and certainly the. The evolution of Frederick Douglass's views on the. The Constitution institution is.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Yes. No, that's very, very. That's a very good example because he starts out he's a William Lloyd Garrison. You know, I mean he starts out as a slave and then he has this remarkable history of educating him, being some help, but basically educating himself and becoming one of the finest orators of the 19th century. And he and he affiliates at first with William Lloyd Garrison who. Who decries the Constitution as it's packed with the devil and it burns a copy of the Constitution.
But he came around and he came.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: To see the Constitution and he also has not views on Abraham Lincoln as well. So we're about halfway through. We still have a ton to get through on this book as well.
So I'm going to try.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: You have to shut me up, Jennifer.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: From time to time.
[00:26:42] Speaker B: I take instruction well, I'm not shy.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: I will, you know, interrupt you.
But there's a few things that I thought were really remarkable about your book. One was talking about the changing composition of immigrants to America around the turn of the century from Western and Northern Europe to. To more Eastern and Southern European as well as Asians. So I'm just wondering if there are any lessons that we can take from that time and apply to today's debates around immigration, particularly with regard to assimilation.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think we have to be Careful about the.
But, yes, there's a lot of lessons we can learn. One is this country, it has much more capacity for absorption and adaptation, both of those who come and those who are already here than we knew.
We done a remarkably good job up to the 1960s of the assimilation of immigrants who are. And I say this all the time, and it's students that I believe immigration renews the sense of America's promise because people come here. You mentioned Ayn Rand. There's thousands.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: Elon Musk.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Yeah, and Elon Musk. Yes, indeed. They come here and they kind of look at these skyscrapers and they think, wow, this is a place where anything is possible.
And so that sense of possibility, of course there's risk. Of course there's a lot of failures. You know, you can't succeed if there's no risk.
Can't do great things. Risk, failure, falling on face. But so that's. I think one of the lessons that way is that, you know, people who start out as peasants in Poland can.
Or as Andrew Carnegie was a bobbin.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: Boy.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: In a mill and had become great, great leaders of capital and also in this case, in society. So many great things at Carnegie.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: Right.
Well, if anybody hasn't seen it, I highly recommend the streaming series the Gilded Age. And I thought it was.
Did a wonderful job of capturing.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: You know, the grandeur of that time, the ambition, the hustle and, you know, the changing mores of society and. And social.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: We really ought to jump the name Gilded Age, though, because that implies to be gilded. It means to have fake. A fake.
They'll be fake gold.
They have the appearance of gold, but it's only gilding. It's only a surface veneer sort of thing. And that was when Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published that book and came up with that phrase. It was not as a compliment.
Golden Age might be better.
[00:30:04] Speaker A: Golden Age, okay, I'm for it. I hadn't, you know, I had not really thought of it from that perspective, but I always.
[00:30:11] Speaker B: One of my pet peeves.
[00:30:12] Speaker A: I think I agree with you. I have many, many pet peeves, and I'm going to adopt that into my collection.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: No extra charge.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: Talk a little bit about the tension in America historically between those wanting to avoid foreign entanglements, as expressed in Washington's farewell address warning against permanent alliances and the desire to take a moment more proactive approach in world affairs. To what extent was the shift towards the latter prompted by outside events like Pearl harbor or foreign dictators bent on empire?
[00:30:52] Speaker B: I think it's much More the latter than the former. I think that when we went into the Spanish American War, there was this sort of sense of outrage about what. What the Spanish were doing in Cuba.
And Cuba, by the way, I mean, you go all the way back to the party platforms of both parties in the 1860 election when Lincoln was, excuse me, was not in the Republican platform. But the Democrats splintered and all of their platforms included the acquisition of Cuba as part of the party platform, the Democratic Party.
The Republicans were not so inclined.
So there has been Theodore Roosevelt and his red to new John Hay, Henry Cabot.
These people did think, okay, it's time for us to be. To play with the big boys.
And the big boys have empires. We're going to have them.
So there's a kind of emulative.
To be a great nation, you had to have.
To be a great nation, you had to have a big navy, and the navy had to have coaling stations around the world. So you needed those territories, those islands.
And Alfred Thayer Mahan's influence of sea power on history. Big very important in all but that countercurrent of saying we should. We should stay here and stick to our last. You know, it's also been strong and the First World War, great reluctance to get involved in that. Wilson finally comes in with his rather pompous notion that he's going to take the world democracy.
The. The end result was that many Americans came out of the first feeling we had been snookered into.
And we did save the day. You know, it's not clear what would have happened, but it seemed as if the Allies were likely American intervention because the Russians had been pushed out of the war by the Revolution. So, I mean, it really looked bleak without us.
So we did. We did a good thing, a good thing preserving Western democracies.
But a lot of Americans felt that that money had been misspent. It was basically propping up the merchants of war, the arms manufacturers. So that under. Underwrote a lot of the reluctance in the 30s to do anything about Hitler.
And really we were fighting before Pearl Harbor. We were already fighting Atlantic, you know, protecting convoys to the British Isles.
And so it was. Interesting thing that happened is that Japan intact, then Germany declared war. Really, it didn't have to happen. But, but, but anyway, my point is that events. This is really getting back to your question. Events, I think, pushed us into playing a role, a role that in some ways we are not suited for to the extent that we try to be a republic in world affairs. And now I think the Cold War Kind of continued that.
And now I think we're at a juncture where we can start in thinking about, should we return to Washington to John Quincy Adams's great speech in 1821 where he says, america goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
We cheer for freedom elsewhere, but with the defender of our own alone.
I think that's a very powerful message. And it's. I, I'm not in, I'm not in favor of what's called isolationism, but I'm in favor of a much more, much diminished, you know, how many military bases do we have around the world? And it's, it's unbelievable.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: Well, that is going to get a solid connect with our audience here. But still War two for a moment. You know, there's been some controversy recently regarding Tucker Carlson's softball interview with figures such as Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes or amateur historian Daryl Cooper, who thinks Winston Churchill and not Adolf, Adolf Hitler was the chief villain of World War II. So if you're aware of Cooper's theories, what do you make of them in.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: Terms of, you know, I don't know that much about him.
I do think that the notion that Churchill is somehow a villain is just preposterous to me, and I don't know what his basis is for that. Well, I know there's a general view that we were on the wrong side. This is a sort of old right kind of position. We were on the wrong side and that we should have been supporting Germany and opposing Soviets instead of in Bolshevism. Instead of allying with the Soviets, align with Stalin.
It's interesting. This guy is, apparently, he loves Hitler and he loves Stalin. You know, I mean, it's incoherent. I, I don't take him, I don't take him seriously as a thinker. I take it seriously as a, as a kind of intellectual hooligan, you know, And I remember guys in high school used to take swastikas on their desks. They didn't even know what they were. They just knew it was taboo, so they did it.
This is the sort of feeling I get. I mean, I know about Tucker Carlson. I don't.
[00:37:16] Speaker A: Well, I guess the only thing I would say is if you're going to have somebody who is a Holocaust denier and an anti Semite on your show, you have a responsibility to push back and be a little bit more critical than I didn't account or maybe even a little higher than you hold a Ted Cruz. So, professor, in your epilogue, you write that quote it is in our nature to be belonging creatures and that we want to be a part of something that brings us together with others in the sense of creating unity. Of course, there's nothing more unifying than finding a scapegoat. And at the moment it seems that the scapegoat is Israel and also to an extent from the Nick folks, 20s of the world, the Jews. So I just would love to kind of hear a little bit from you historically.
Can you tell us, help us put this recent surge in antisemitism into American history, say Father Coughlin's popularity and how have such kind of fevers of bigotry abated in the past?
[00:38:34] Speaker B: Well, you know, this is like the Robert Baron question.
You know, the Jews are incredibly successful and success generates envy, suspicion, a desire to sort of besmirch or to sort of take down people. And may I just want to say something. There is a surge of anti Semitism. But if you look at the polling data about Americans approval of immigration, Israel, it's sky high.
So generality that there are these vocal elements that. And you know, and look, let me say this.
I think I can respect people having qualms about American involvement in the Middle east from, from a the perspective we were just talking about, that is the Adams America goes not abroad in search of that kind of thing. I think we need to move cautiously and responsibly in direction, not lurch in that direction. And so I have some sympathy for people who are nervous about our taking out the Iranian nuclear facility, which I personally celebrated. I even popped a cork of worrying about Iraq for a long time. But getting back to the reason that I wrote the book along with Stuart Halpern, is that this was all underway long for this recent purge of anti Semitic feeling which comes in the wake of 10-7-3, which is very odd.
The attacks by Hamas on Israel were unprovoked and they're unbelievably vicious.
I think the American people don't know.
There's footage that, some of which I've seen that horrify stuff that went on. I think most people have, have not seen that. It's kind of kept from them and.
But it was an unprovoked attack and then it produced almost instantly this anti Israel, as if Israel was blamed for what had been done in so but let me go back more to your question. I think one of the things we wanted to bring out and we're talking.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: Just to be clear now we're the epilogue was in Land of Hope. But yeah, now to Talk about Jewish roots of America.
Right.
[00:41:24] Speaker B: And what we were thinking about in that was trying to point out actually to Jewish Americans how much a part of American history they have been.
That was sort of the initial thought.
And the book actually started to take shape. We had in mind that it would have just a very limited audience in Jewish day schools. I'm not Jewish, by the way, but I'm interested in the subject.
But it kind of took on wings, you know.
And I want to give one example to your listeners that's really powerful.
If you look at, you know, after the United States became a country, you know, one of the first things they did was try to make a design for the Great Seal of the United States stamp that would be on official documents.
And they had a convening committee. Thomas Jefferson was on the committee, Benjamin Franklin, a few others.
And Jefferson and Franklin both wanted the image on that to be the image of the Exodus from the biblical book Exodus, the passage of the Jews from slavery in Egypt into freedom.
And, you know, Jefferson and Franklin, they both wanted this.
They are not the most religious people among the founders. Why did they do this? Well, Jefferson, he wrote about this in other places. He thought the Exodus was symbolically an expression of what America would be about, that it would be about freedom, be about liberty.
And so it's sort of connection of the whole religious past of the Western tradition to the modern phenomenon of America. And they didn't get their way, as we know.
We don't, you know, we don't see the Exodus, but it had a motto, their design. They proposed a model, and it is Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
And Jefferson, who's notoriously not orthodox, it's really just views, really a free thinker.
Jefferson liked this slogan so much, he used it as his personal motto on his own stationary.
This tells you something about the way in which this most profound of images from the Jewish tradition are shaped the consciousness of, of the American. Of American founders. Now, they didn't. They didn't adopt this, it's true. But Jefferson and Franklin both wanted.
[00:44:30] Speaker A: Yeah, and those.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: Isn't that amazing?
[00:44:33] Speaker A: Yeah, it's amazing. And it's not the only example. I was really taken aback by how much the founders studied the Old Testament and how it influenced them from. For example, I was surprised to learn that James Madison studied Hebrew to get a better understanding of characters from the Bible and that Abraham Lincoln cited the Old Testament approximately three times as often as the New Testament. So, yeah, a little bit about that.
[00:45:04] Speaker B: No, that's. That's right. That's right. I'm so glad you bring that up. I mean, I think that there has been even.
And, and Lincoln, of course, was not, he was not a churchgoer. He is, he kind of picked. Picked up his religion later. He was tended to be again, a kind of a free thinker and was actually one of his elections, he ran against a religious figure and beat him. But it really. He was drawn to the language of the Hebrew Bible by the experience of the war and by the sense that. How does this make any sense? How can all this slaughter, all this suffering, you know, is it for nothing? And you know, he nearly lost, he could have lost the election of 1864. I mean, we ran, we're a constitutional republic. We ran an election in the middle of a civil war.
And he was, he was behind. I mean, we didn't have polling or anything like that, but he was, he was convinced he was going to lose the election until Grant and Sherman gave him a couple of big victories that, that made people think, oh, this thing isn't going to go on forever. We are finally going to be done with.
But Lincoln, there's a profundity to his religious reflections that.
You're right, it's not New Testament, it's the Old Testament.
[00:46:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:46] Speaker B: It's the Jewish, the Jewish portion of the Bible.
[00:46:49] Speaker A: Right. Biblical heroes like David, Esther, Samson, Daniel appear throughout the American rhetoric from the Continental Congress to Martin Luther King Jr. So what makes these figures enduring symbols of the canon of the American imagination?
[00:47:09] Speaker B: Well, part of it is that we, you know, in the, in the early, all the way through the 19th century, you know, it's, it's, it's a religious country. It's a Protestant country and largely. And Protestants are great, you know, are supposed to be anyway, great readers of the Bible and relying on the Bible's authority. If you go back to Puritan, New England, Puritan, they were thoroughly imbued in the, the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and they saw themselves, they're leaving Europe for America, which they called the New Zion.
That was a replication of what had happened to the Jews in their, you see this in their sermons and this sense that the biblical stories are like a template explaining their condition. Now, that highly religious interpretation of things didn't, didn't last.
It lasted into the 19th century. But it also becomes transmuted into a kind of secular, secularized view of things. And the heroes of the Bible, the Davids and the Samsons and so on, as Stu Halford has these Wonderful little essays, each one of these, and how they.
They become a part of our common speech.
In the same way that, you know, Lincoln says, house divided against itself. And, you know, that's one of his few New Testament references. But he's not talking about the religious content. He's talking. This is a phrase everybody knows because everybody's gone to Sunday school and everybody's been brought up in the Bible. And the Bible is, you know, we have very high rates of literacy in early America because people are taught to read. Because they're taught to read the Bible. You know, again, a very Protestant thing. Catholics, not so much, you know, that they, they have their missile, they have their priests, they have the sacraments there and the whole structure of Krishna.
Protestants are. The Bible is the core of it. So.
So, yeah, there's a lot of biblical. What we would call biblical literacy.
And the stories last again, you know, the, the effect.
Now, we're not a Jewish country, but we have this Jewish infrastructure of our consciousness of the stories that we know. And really the stories that we know and share with one another are a big part of what makes a culture, what makes a culture tick.
And when you make reference to, oh, he wants to pull everything down on him, like Samson, you know, we may be entering a generation where people don't get that, but certainly my generation, your generation, we do.
We know what that refers to. Even if we're not, you know, practicing Jews or don't read the Bible as a sacred text.
It's.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: It's part of our.
[00:50:38] Speaker B: It's part of our heritage. Right.
[00:50:40] Speaker A: It's part of our.
So, you know, in light of the rising anti Semitism that we talked about earlier, what insights from your book. Book can help us better understand how to deal with this moment and how to lead with, you know, tolerance and not tribalism, but, you know, individualism.
[00:51:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm. I'm. I'm struggling with that question myself because I think a lot of.
A lot of.
[00:51:14] Speaker A: On one hand, it could be just a better understanding of.
Of history.
I guess I always ask myself how much of this is just a complete lack of grasping civic knowledge, our nation's history, and how much of it is just sort of anxiety and resentment and want an emotional kind of wanting to.
[00:51:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:51:39] Speaker A: Scapegoat. And lash out.
[00:51:42] Speaker B: Well, you know, and you use the word earlier in our conversation, the scapegoat. This is. The Jews are one of the great scapegoats of. It's interesting because the notion of the scapegoat is itself a part of Jewish heritage, you know, and the, the, the, the story of the Passover involves the slaughter of a.
Anyway, but it is, it is the Jews, because they're so accomplished and have habits drilled in. And it's a cultural thing of habits of study that have led to Jewish distinction in all sorts of fields, including sciences, including literature.
You name music. Oh, my goodness, you know.
Yes. Fiddler is on many roofs. Yeah, so it is, it's, it's.
They're, they're, they're tailor made for somehow blaming, you know, just one of my addictions. My sad prediction, election as mayor.
He'll have a bunch of terrible ideas. They won't succeed. They'll make things worse.
And then whose fault is it, of course? Well, he's already, he's going to be the fault of Hamas.
[00:53:20] Speaker A: Yes. He's already made it clear who, who he believes the, the blame it should be. And he's, he's a long line of.
[00:53:30] Speaker B: Individuals, including you mentioned, Father Coughlin, those. That's a very interesting thing for people to look at if they're not familiar with that history. You know, he was a radio priest from actually not far from where I'm sitting right now in Michigan.
And he felt a huge following during Depression. And he was in many respects, sort of to the left of Roosevelt. There were a lot of people who left the left of fdr. Huey Long, really ominous characters.
Father Coughlin, you know, he started out, you know, all right, and then he got on to these sort of the great malefactors of wealth, the International Bank.
They were the ones causing all this disruption of the economic system.
So it was, it became more and more. He gravitated towards a more and more openly anti Semitic pitch. And his audience was willing to believe it. You know, they wanted to know.
They want to have somebody to blame. People always want to have somebody to blame for events that are beyond their control.
So, So I worry about that. I worry. Look, if you look at what we've just experienced, this brutal attack, unprovoked attack on a music festival in Israel and slaughter, disfigurement, cutting off women's breasts. I mean, just. And videos of it sent home to mama and Papa. Look at, look at what I did.
There's your educational problem.
But we haven't really.
Except for those of us who are predisposed to hear the bad news, most people want to somehow think, well, you know, maybe the Israelis must have done worthy of this kind of treatment. And it's. When you have that kind of unwillingness on the part of the media, to present things as they are, to be honest about the history, to be honest about what it means, how meaningless the charge of settler colonialism is and applied to have our mass media be more willing to face the truth of the matter and thus communicated to the public.
[00:56:11] Speaker A: Right. No, I think. I think you're right. I think we need to have accurate information and objective news.
But I think it's more than just bad information. I think it's a question of bad values. And that is the job of philosophy. And that is what we do here at the Atlas Ass Society. You know, when you see success, do you resent it or do you admire and emulate it? Do you see yourself as having agency or do you look at a universe in which things are beyond your control? And I think that to close it up, since we are at the end of the hour, is why it is so important to pick up a copy of Land of Hope as well as Jewish Roots of American Liberty. Because in reading about some of these great giants, moral giants of history, like Lincoln, we are encouraged to turn to the better angels of our nature and away from the kind of thrill of breaking taboos, some of which are taboos for a good reason. So thank you very much, Professor. What's next for you and where can we follow your work?
[00:57:29] Speaker B: I want to do something. I'm working on the book about guilt because I think guilt manipulation.
[00:57:36] Speaker A: We're going to book you back because.
[00:57:39] Speaker B: Please do. I've enjoyed this so much.
I do lots of interviews. You are really superb. This is one of the best interviews I've ever had.
And so I just. I'm reluctant to go, but, yeah, I want to do something about how guilt has become. Become one of the principal forces moving history in the last hundred years and especially now, and what we can do about it. Because I've got, you know, we've got to do something about it.
The Western world is suffering from this, what I would call toxic guilt, and its ways of dealing with that have not been good.
[00:58:20] Speaker A: Yes, toxic guilt and toxic empathy. So, well, we will be. We will be breathlessly awaiting that and please keep us informed and we will have you back. So thank you, professor, thanks for joining.
Thanks, everyone, for joining today. Again, apologies. I kind of had two books to cover, so I couldn't get to all of your questions. But I hope you will join us next week week when author Daniel J. Flynn joins us to talk about his new book, the man who Invented the Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. We'll see you then.
