Welcome back to the new thinkery. I'm David Barb with me as always serving two close friends. Alex and Greg, how are you both? Very well.
I mean, Hermanos. Yeah, right, Hermanos. You know, I wanted to... Is this our first episode since you had a child?
Yes. Congratulations. Congratulations. You guys treated...
Oh, you didn't... It wasn't play those laws as the meanos that you did with Tom Cleveland. Oh, yeah. Who you threatened to replace me with, but that's okay.
That's still a threat. Yeah, and I'm still groggy since the child is only three weeks old. So I'll have paid. Not sleeping through the night yet.
No, not yet. And who you here? Where is that? What was that Alex?
Where is that? It's a professor, Michael Zukert's voice. How are you, professor? Good to have you.
I'm good. Good to be here. Congratulations, also, on your newborn. Thank you.
Thank you. It's my third. Alex has one, and he's trying for two. And Greg, who is still barren.
80 years old, is still barren. But that's why we burn an offering to Zeus for him every year. We'll see you in a second. Yeah, he's not working.
He tries something else. Yeah, exactly. We'll have to go deity shopping. So we're here to talk about a book that's in the works of yours on Lincoln and his speeches.
But before that, one thing that the new thinkery tries to do, we enjoy doing, is capturing a kind of oral history of professors whom we admire, especially an older generation whose stories aren't always captured. So for instance, we had Charles Butterworth on. He was my professor in Greggs. And he's close with Alex and Michael Davis.
And we always ask them, how did you come to the study of philosophy? Can you talk to us about memorable times in graduate school with Strauss or classmates that stand out and things along the road? So before we talk about your book and we're to discuss things you can share about how you came to philosophy and then graduate school, anything that comes to mind. So we should first introduce him.
Sorry, my mind is fuzzy because of the lack of sleep. Professor Zukert is emeritus. Nancy Reeves drew Professor of Political Science from Notre Dame. He's written a number of books that we've all studied in graduate school, Natural Rights and the New Republic.
The Natural Rights Republic, Launching Liberalism was excellent. And the truth about Leo Strauss and Leo Strauss and the problem of political philosophy. One of those books he co-authored with his wife, Catherine, who we hope to have on the show too. And just a number of articles and things that I'm doubtless forgetting.
No doubt. Well, thank you for that intro. So my intellectual biography, well, I thought of starting with starting here. And I can remember in maybe his third or fourth grade, I don't remember which exactly I had a great interest in Grasshoppers.
And that's one of my earliest intellectual memories. But maybe I shouldn't really go back quite that far. Say a little bit about maybe starting when I started college. My background's a little different.
Maybe from a lot of people, I would say what I'd like to call a split-knit baby that is, I came of age. I was in high school when the Soviet Union launched a satellite. And there was this amazing fear that America was falling woefully behind the Soviets on missiles and other things. Shumtikom was the 1960 election with a great missile gap fear.
And so I started my college education at Cornell University in engineering. And it took me exactly one semester to transfer out of engineering. And actually your query about my interest in philosophy was relevant to that. Because one of the reasons I transferred out was because I had developed in high school, we had a group of friends.
And we used to read philosophy. At least talk about philosophy. I mean, there's a lot of it was BS. I could now see in retrospect.
And probably would be even now. But I was interested in literature. I was interested in philosophy. And I just seemed to me that engineering had no room for that sort of thing.
And I was not going to be able to spend time doing this reading. I remember my first semester, I was attempting to read the Brothers Karamazov. And I just couldn't find time for it. I had four laboratory courses.
And these laboratory courses just didn't leave time for the Brothers K. So the question I faced at the end of my first semester was, is it the Brothers Karamazov? Or is it engineering drawing? And given that choice, it just wasn't all that hard.
So I transferred into the College of Liberal Arts at Cornell, which at that time was a wonderful place that I looked back at the fantastic faculty that I managed to just run into. I mean, I had no prior knowledge of any of them. But so I studied my first year second semester or studied with Paul de Man who was not only at famous at that time, but became very famous afterward. I took a course with Meyer Abrams, who was a great scholar of romantic poetry taught a course in Britlet.
My TA for that course was Helen Venler. If you know Helen Venler, she's kind of the leading expert on poetry in America now, and has taught at Harvard for many years. And even then, I could tell that she was fantastic. It was going to be great.
And people like Ted Lowey, but most important, I ran into water balloons and Ellen Bloom. And these guys kind of reactivated were played into what was already an interest that I had in philosophy. And if it hadn't been for them, especially for Ellen Bloom, I probably would have ended up going to law school. But he deflected my course.
And I ended up going to Chicago, where I studied, I mean, I went to study with Strauss, which I did. But I also worked with Joseph Cropsy quite a lot and Herbert Storing, who in a way I was probably individually closest to the batch of them. I do remember in my first quarter there, Strauss was teaching a course on Grosius, who we used to call D for Roshius Grosius. And I didn't take that course.
I thought at the time I had come to graduate school to study more prominent philosophers, more important people than Grosius. So instead of taking that course, I took a course with Storing on the American founding and Cropsy on Aristotle. And I don't regret not taking those courses. I mean, I don't regret those courses in all those great courses.
But it turned out that of one of the things Strauss ever taught that I took from him, Grosius is the only one I really spent a lot of time with subsequently. I regret it. It's not having taken that course. So there were many, though many, many memorable courses there.
I should say, intellectual bag of tea, I also remit Catherine. She and I had first come to know each other. And not really, that's too strong. I had come to know of her.
And she had not noticed me at all in freshman English, our first year at Cornell. Oh, well, that's crazy. That was nice. So she, sorry, go on, go on, go on.
Yeah, yeah, no. So we were shared misery of the beginning of graduate school. So we were drawn together. And one thing led to another.
We were married at the end of that year. And I mentioned that in this context of intellectual bag of tea because I had to say, I've learned over the years, really, a lot of things from her. So I would put her among those great teachers that I've had in my time. But how was it that she ended up at Chicago also?
Did you guys start courting at Cornell? No, we'd be able to know each other. I mean, the freshman English story goes like this. There were a Cornell at that time, especially had a great disproportionate of men to women.
It had, in the freshman English class, there were, let's say, 25 total students, four of them were women. I was poor when the four women were obviously much noticed. But all of us men, she had no time to notice me. And I used to sit in, I was at that time still, I'm an engineer.
So I'd be coming from calculus and I'd come to the back of the room and sort of twiddle my thumbs most of the time. So she had a very vague recollection of me by the time. So that was one of the big intellectual and other kind of events in my life. We left Chicago after four years.
We only spent four years. And I think probably that was the shortest time with any graduate student in the history of the University of Chicago, a political science department. There was only one catch. I had not written one word on my dissertation when I left Chicago.
And when I told that to students today, they're just astonished because they have to not really have finished their dissertation. But I've written three books before they can even think about getting the job. But I got a job at a very good place, Carleton College in Minnesota. There was a bit of a flute, but nonetheless, I got a job at Carleton College, which was a great job.
We stayed there for roughly 30 years. And then moved on to Notre Dame, where we stayed another 20 years or so. And now, you didn't mention this earlier, but Katherine and I are, we go to Arizona State, every now winter semester. And we're teaching a course a semester, one course, that semester each of us, when we're down there, we're getting the pleasures of Arizona in the winter.
Two, one second. Is that what Adam Seagrave? Is that his? Adam, yes, that's where he is.
Is that the program that he set up or? He set it up. He's the Assistant Director of that program. The actual person who set it up is Paul Caris.
OK. And Adam, I mean, Adam's had an important part of it. Adam is a former student of mine. So that's one of my, that's one of my, one of the objectives for us being his Adam's presence, along with actually several other Notre Dame PhD students.
It's a great source of jobs for our students for some strange reason. So that's very nice. So over my intellectual career is shaped a lot by the fact that I taught in a liberal arts college at the beginning of my career for a long time. And teaching a liberal arts college and teaching in a major university are really different kinds of experiences.
I think it was a wonderful career path, at least for me. But one of the consequences was that I was required to teach across the whole range of philosophy and also constitutional law and also the American political tradition, which the work we're going to talk about today is related to. So my scholarship was basically following the trajectory of my teaching, as I discovered in my time at Carleton, the only hope you have to combine a scholarly career with a career teaching in a liberal arts college is basically to make your teaching and your research overlap as much as possible. And that was very possible for me there.
But obviously, I've done more writing since then, since I left Carleton than I had before. So the work I've done is mainly been in those areas, early modern political philosophy, constitutional law in the American political tradition. And I would say more specifically, even there are three topics that I've written a fair amount on, the American founding in various sizes, Locke, John Locke, I've spent a lot of time with Locke, and Leo Strauss, who Catherine and I have co-written two books on Strauss and numerous articles, even beyond those. So that's where my intellectual, I should say, trajectory.
I would say the arc, if I were to talk about the arc of my intellectual life, it's been, I left graduate school, I would say, a pretty standard issue of Straussian. I mean, what Straussian's mostly believed, I believed. Over time, I think I've moved away from that a bit. I've become more friendly to modern philosophy and more friendly to liberal tradition, politically, than maybe standard order Straussian's would be.
But I still, I think I have a lot in common with Straussian tradition still. So that's, I mean, roughly, I'm not sure what I've done. And so you can see, we should make clear the audience. This is our Independence Day episode.
I think we'll release it just before the Fourth of July. And so you can see why we invited Professor Sookert on. And so your latest book or the one that's not out yet, but it's in the process of the birthing process is on Lincoln, right? Do you want to give us an oatmeal?
Maybe of what this book is about, and then we'll jump into the specific speech. OK. So yeah, I want to talk today about, well, basically, that's the chapter of my book, which is devoted to a certain speech. If I look at that in a minute, the book as a whole is called A Nation So Conceived, Colin Abraham Lincoln and Democratic sovereignty.
The main title of the nation So Conceived, as you may recognize, is a quotation from the Gettysburg Address. The book is an attempt to give a comprehensive account of Lincoln's political thought, ideal with, I'd say, certainly all of his major statements and several minor statements. I attempt in the book, and I think this distinguishes it a bit from a lot of similar books that I've seen. I tend to identify what I see to be the major or central concern of his thought, what sort of is the son that all around which all the other pieces are of it, and to bring out those central concerns and themes of his work overall, and to provide some kind of assessment of Lincoln as a political thinker.
And you only have to spend a whole lot of time with Lincoln to come to admire him as a thinker and a very, very sensible person. It's a very sensible person, I'm only a very subtle person. And, oh, yeah, I'll leave it at that. Now, the original aim of my book was to deal with his political thought.
That's what I set out to write was a book on his political thought. But yes, I worked on it. I came to realize that his political thought and his action as a political man were really inseparable. So I've got a lot on his political action.
I spend a fair amount. I have a lot of discussions with the political situation that he was facing, what his political strategies at various points were. So more than a lot of books, it's a kind of combination, then, of looking at Lincoln as a statesman and political actor on the one hand, and looking at Lincoln as a political thinker, on the other hand. A lot of books that are on Lincoln are one or the other, to be people to talk about his thought.
But who will not necessarily deal much with the political stuff that he was doing, and the historians and the Bagger version, so on who talked about the other side of it. But don't pay that much attention to his political thought, or don't go into it certainly in the kind of detail and the depth, or I hope depth, that I try to do in my book. The chapter we read just to give a second, you know, readers of India, the chapter we read on the Uoji on Henry Clay. It was, I thought what you did very well was not only give a reading of the speech as a sort of independent thought piece in a way on state crap, but also very clearly fitting it within a kind of historical trajectory, as well as the sort of issues at the time that he's dealing with.
And so it stands out as sort of unique, as I think you're trying to make the case, as a piece of concern with, you could say, his thought in just sort of general sense, but really looking at his thought through how it molded or even sort of set out a vision, you could say, or what he was going to do. So I'm glad you're here to say that, because that's just what I was trying to do. So you did it very well. And my question is your book structured, is your book structured linearly at the time, or is it a theme?
No, it's structured linearly. I do, partly because, well, of two reasons. One, because I see Lincoln's thought developing over time, and I'm interested in sort of tracing the act as a particular one speech that we're talking about today is, I think, an important moment in his development of his agenda, if you will. And second, because of the way in which I see his speechifying as related to the political situation, and so, therefore, that just suggested itself as a natural way to proceed, I do have a concluding chapter in which I, in fact, I'd be in my saying, well, I proceeded chronologically so far for these and these kind of reasons.
Now I'm going to try to pull together the themes that have been somewhat scattered, although not too much, because one of the things I've argued in the book is that there's a central core to Lincoln's thought, and all the other themes that come up are actually related pretty closely to that central theme. So, but I do try in the conclusion. If you can read that fire into the book, you know, if you hold the whole tour at that one, I do get more thematic. Can I have a couple questions?
One, I think you may have just said this by a clarify, so that the book, though, consists primarily of chapters about individual speeches that Lincoln gave over time. Is that right? Well, it's part, yes, I'd say that's primarily true, but I have also things I call transitions. That is, I have little, sometimes little, sometimes little, they're longer than the regular chapters in which I talk about what Lincoln, personally, and what the political situation is, say, between speeches.
I see. And so I do talk very thingatically, and there's some of those things where I won't talk about what he's what he's speechifying about. Really, but I'll talk about this political situation. So it's a little bit of both.
And I think in the chapters, even more so than in the chapter that you read, I talk about the political situation, fair amount. I mean, again, if you have something like the Lincoln Douglas debates, where this is in the middle of a political campaign, it's hard not to take account of the situation or his very famous speech, the House Divided Speech. You can't understand the House Divided Speech without understanding what the political situation was in which he was giving a speech. And so I talk a lot about that, or the Peoria speech, where he's talking about the Kansas and Branska Act.
And so I talk a little bit about, you know, why did Douglas, why did Stephen Douglas attempt to repeal the Missouri Compromise? And so I'm going to talk about the community politics of that. So I know you do the perpetuation speech because we also read that. And I say, what are the major speeches that he's looking at in the book?
Everybody goes, oh, I'm turning it. So I have a perpetuation speech. I have a, my next chapter is on the so-called Temperance Address. I then have a chapter on Lincoln's time in Congress.
Mr. Lincoln goes to Washington. If you read our book on Strauss, we have a chapter that book called Mr. Strauss goes to Washington, so I'm getting tired of it.
Then I have this Henry, and that chapter mostly focuses on Lincoln's speech on the Mexican War, which is very interesting speech. Then I have a chapter, this chapter on the Henry Clay Ulogy, then a chapter on the so-called Peoria Address, which is an attack on Douglas's effort to repeal Missouri Compromise. And it deals with a lot of other things that Lincoln was thinking about at around the same time. Chapter on the, I'm trying to think of what comes next, Dred Scott's speech.
Oh, yeah. I hope I'm not missing something at the moment. Surely the Gettysburg Address and the first second on your roll. Yes, yeah.
All those things. I mean, it's got 16 chapters. Oh, wow. It'll take a while.
Some of the new neurology fans. You mentioned a couple of times that one of the main things you're trying to do is point out what is of major or central concern for Lincoln's lot. Can you give us a little preview of that now? I can't.
A little bit. I mean, can you still have listeners at home, folks? I'm not going to tell them about the book, obviously. But, you know, just a, I don't want to discourage them from doing that.
No. So partly it's my, the title of a nation so conceived, Abraham Lincoln and Democratic sovereignty is an attempt to pick that up. One way to get it, what I'm doing in the book is an observation that I make in the book. Lincoln's first major speech.
That's the first place where we really begin to notice Lincoln as a political thinker and speaker is the so-called perpetuation address where Lincoln raises the question of the perpetuation of the American machine. And even though it appears to be Tony Dory in America at this time, he actually indicates that he has concerns with the, with the perpetuation. There's some problem with this regime. Will it survive?
And 25 years later, in a very different context, with a very different set of issues, apparently on the surface, he asked the question, can any nation so conceived and so dedicated one endure? That's the question raised by the, by the Civil War. And that's the same question that he raised in the, in the, in the perpetuation trust. And so the question I'm posing is, what is it about the American regime?
How does he understand the American regime such that the danger to its perpetuation is a persistent issue? And how is Lincoln responding to that, to that danger? And as I argue, he sees the danger in a variety of different forms as over time, but he also, and he's generating, trying to generate responses to that as he goes along. But there's a solid core of analysis of a way of understanding the basics of the regime that runs through all of that.
And I, I try to bring that out as best I can and try to Lincoln's thinking, obviously it's thinking, it's deepening and changing over time. But, but again, you know, if you go back, if you've gotten through the whole thing, you go back to the perpetuation, as you see, in a way, it's all, it's there, it's all there already. So anyway, that's the, that's the issue, that a central issue that I'm dealing with. And as I call it, democratic sovereignty is the both the character of the regime and the nature of the threat to the regime, both.
Yeah, that's great. So one such person who tried to perpetuate the regime, I'll try to segue as best I can, would be Henry Clay, the, you know, the guy who's so famous for having facilitated so many compromises. And then the other thing that I think is, I think the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the way that we're doing is his eulogy of Henry Clay. And I thought that before we get to the content of the speech, maybe you might want to just give us, since you said you have these, uh, sometimes, and yet sometimes longer parts between chapters, maybe you can tell us just a little bit about the setting or the occasion for Lincoln speech and when it is what's going on politically, you mentioned it was during the middle of his companion and Douglas.
Yeah. Anything that's relevant. Yeah. Okay.
So for folks at home, they can hear that, uh, Mr. Professor Zugert has moved to Chicago. That's why we're hearing some sirens in the background. Please, yeah, comment, you have to learn how to sleep because I noticed it just, I didn't know.
Well, yeah, I didn't know. I just, at least it's not as bad as San Francisco yet, because including the CVS apparently, David's neighbors. Well, it's an interesting, it's an interesting speech attracted my attention for two reasons. First off, anyway, one is, um, or so it's a eulogy for clay.
Lincoln was a follower of clay in his younger days. That is clay had been the leader of the week party and Lincoln was a week and Lincoln even had said of clay during one of the Lincoln, Douglas, the base he said, clay was his bow ideal of a politician. And so, you know, it's interesting to say this is the place most systematically where he speaks about clay. So what does he think about clay?
What does he think about clay? What do you claim to him, especially as a young political man? Um, but the second thing that struck me about it was this odd structure that the speech has this very, very odd structural feature to it. A feature which has led many of the, has led very, has led most scholars who deal with the speech, who read it and then don't deal with it.
Actually, that's the more common effect. Um, to dismiss it as one of them said, profunctory. I think the reason why it was called profunctory by this particular historian was that Lincoln quotes at the almost the very beginning of the speech. I don't know about a full fifth to a seventh of the speech is a quotation of another eulogy given by, in this case, a democratic newspaper in a democratic party newspaper, the opposite party, an admirable example of, of, of bipartisanship, which we're all hungering for these days.
You also point out, Michael, in your interpretive essay that this is instructive for undergraduates. When you don't have a substance for an entire paper. Yes, exactly. I was going to say, I think it struck this historian as, for fun to me because this was like an undergraduate, yes, they tried to try to get the minimum number of words or pages into his paper and can't think about it.
So he makes a long quotation from somewhere else. Well, I mean, that was possible. Like, no, I mean, I didn't, you know, so in any case, though, but also there was another feature of this speech that struck me in prospect, but even more in retrospect as important. So clay dies in 1852.
Daniel Webster died that senior and John Calhoun died in 1850. Now, Webster, Clay and Calhoun, those were the three main political actors of that second generation after the mayor, after the founders themselves. So we have the, the one-one book about the three of them called the Triumvir, the American Triumvirate. So the moment when the Triumvirate passes from the scene, that's right that within those, those very few years, it's a moment of the changing of the guards, so to speak, in American politics.
It's a question of, yeah, racist question. Well, what comes next? What do we do next? And that struck me as I actually worked further into the speech, as what Lincoln was actually concerned about in the character of the speech was Clay, the kind of statesman, for example, that was needed in the next phase of American history.
So, so there's that. So let me, let me say just a little bit about Clay himself, which may or may not be known to our listeners. So Clay, as I said, was the leader of the Whig Party. The Whig Party was part of the so-called second party system.
That is the first party system where the Federalists and then the Jeffersonians or the Republican Party or the Democratic Republican Party variously called. The Federalists faded from the scene after the election, pretty much after the election of 1800 over time. And then there was a second party system that began in the 1830s, which were the Whigs on the one side and the Democratic Republicans or the Democratic, now called the Democratic Party on the other side, Democratic Party led originally by Andrew Jackson, but was the successor party and had definite institutional continuity with the party of Jefferson and the Whig Party, not without, not with institutional or structural continuity with the Federalist Party, but with, let's say, intellectual continuity or political continuity with the Federalists. Because much of what the Whigs stood for was a certain kind of approach to political economy.
And that approach was a bit like Hamilton's approach. That is, favored a more central government action, favored economic development. That was a major part of it. And they were favored internal improvements or what we're now calling infrastructure.
They had a big infrastructure bill, in fact, they were dealing with, and favored banking. So they were very much somewhat in the mold of Hamilton. Although Clay, unfortunately, has not yet a musical yet named for him. So maybe he can look forward to that in the future.
So Clay spent most of his career, almost all of his career in Congress, both in the House and in the Senate. He served as Speaker of the House on several different occasions and he served in the Senate on several different occasions also. I was struck by that. Sorry.
I was struck by you pointed out that he was the public servant for 40 years, but just the interruptions, it's like he's in the Senate. He's out of the Senate. He's in the Senate. He's back in Congress.
Just the ping pong secretary of state. It's everything that he did. It's just an amazing political career. He wasn't, yeah, he had an amazing political career.
And, you know, I'm not sure exactly all the details of why he left, why he left and came back as he did. But that is, that is the truth of it. I mean, he was in normal education also. In this way, he was rather like, he was rather like Lincoln.
Yeah. That is, they came from almost nothing. Lincoln mentions that in his speech on clay. He doesn't compare himself to clay, but he does say clay was a proof that, you know, in our country, a man of talent and effort can accomplish all kinds of things.
And he was maybe thinking about himself at the same time. Clay spent a lot of time in Congress, but he craved being president and he ran for president for different occasions, if I remember correctly. And he washed every time. He was known as a loser in national elections.
On one of those occasions in 1848, Lincoln, even though he considered clay his bow ideal, Lincoln did not in fact support him. He supported General Taylor instead, making the judgment, making the view that Taylor could win and Clay could not, and which turned out to be correct that Taylor did win and Clay wouldn't, well, just didn't even get the nomination. So Clay, one of the things that Clay did near, near in time, there are two things that they did, I should say, actually, near in time to the actual speech. One, he opposed the Mexican War as many of the wigs did, as Lincoln himself did, he opposed the Mexican War.
He opposed the acquisition of new territory through the next, because the Mexican War. And he second, as a result of Mexican War, the US acquired a lot of territory, which then led to renewed political conflict, exceptional conflict, which Clay helped resolve through the so-called compromise of 1850. And we can talk about that a little bit later. But so those are the things where, those are the simple high points of Clay's career.
And he was certainly a prominent political person in the Midwest, in, maybe you all know. I used to live a block over from his house, actually, in Lexington. I thought that. I was with childhood friends, right, correct?
You're right. I meant when he lived there, that's right. So to kind of transition from who Clay is, one thing that came out in your analysis of this eulogy is how Lincoln sort of subtly suggests that the Democrats are appropriating Clay. And so he engages in some of his appropriation of his own.
One thing I was struck by by Lincoln's account of Clay is how much he just came from nothing to be a kind of real political force. At the same time, you make the case that he's somewhat lacking in a popular touch, right? Or though he is, it seems like he's a man of the people in a way. He's somehow not a good, I don't want to hesitate to use the word populist, but you can say able to go to the people in the way that Lincoln is.
You point out this, just an interesting bit of irony, you point out is that Lincoln talks about how Clay refused to give forth his iterations. Or he's trying to put it in his way. Or he's trying to think of it as well. Yeah, this is both of them.
Lincoln presents it almost as if it's a praise of Clay. He never gave a eulogy like this, you know, that sort of thing. But yeah, I mean, Lincoln, in his portrayal of Clay, which is kind of subtle, it's a subtle presentation, I think. He doesn't batter you over the head with the points he's making.
But one of the points he makes is that Clay had a certain model of politics according to which he built his career. And that was a model, let's say it was a pre-democratic or not a thoroughly democratic model. It was a model maybe more suited to the Federalist era than to the post-Xonian period of American history. So Clay was outstanding.
Clay was outstanding as an orator and a leader in Congress that is somebody who could deal with Congress. But Clay never reached out to the people. I think Lincoln's white is he didn't give forth a July orations where you go out to the people and you speak to them about what the nature of this regime is and what's so, you know, what's memorable or worthy of honor in it. What's honorable about it?
He didn't do that. He didn't give eulogies in which he tried to give, if you say, some assessment of the other political leaders and what made them good leaders or perhaps a little bit less than good leaders. So Clay didn't see what Lincoln saw, which is that in a democratic time, in a system of government, other people, by the people and for the people, Clay didn't pay enough attention to the fact that this is government by the people. In a government by the people, the political leaders must speak directly to the people.
And that there are certain things that the political leaders, responsible ones, are going to try to do in their dealings with the people. And so one of the things would be a fourth of July oration, you know, like a fourth of July is a meaningful event in America, or at least it used to be. I mean, now it's meaningful about Frank Ferguson in, you know, French ones, but it usually has a certain meaning. And Clay, I read it every year on the fourth of July.
I have a question on that point, Professor. So as Alex and I were talking this after we read your chapter and also read the eulogy, it struck me that I wonder if one sign that Lincoln understood that one must go to the people, I'm not sure exactly how I asked this because I know that Henry Clay, as you mentioned, and emphasized in the chapter as well that he also wanted to be president. But I wonder if you could connect, could one connect Lincoln's presidency to this? In other words, that the legislative one can't quite do any what one wants to do shaping public opinion by going to the legislature.
So I wonder if we know Clay as the legislative great man and Lincoln as the great president. I wonder if that reflects in any way the sort of difference of strategic approach or how democratically work. Do you think that that weighs? Yeah, definitely.
Yes, I think that because I think Lincoln understood his task as a political leader, not just to cut political deals, but to actually educate the people. Lincoln's famous for having said in a democracy, public opinion is all. And if public opinion is all, then he who shapes public opinion is actually having more impact on the actual outcome of political outcomes than the people who cut the deals. So Lincoln understood that speaking to the people, I mean, when he goes out, all those Lincoln Douglas debates, all those long speeches that he gave, I mean, he gave us three hour long speeches.
One admires that. Lincoln definitely saw a kind of public education opinion formation as one of the major things that he as a political leader was attempting to do. And he especially saw it is important because he saw that the what I think he thought of as healthy public opinion in support of this regime was fading in the wake of the slavery controversy. And that what he was trying to do was to revive it, maybe improve it.
In any case, prevent the decline that he saw is very strong. And that's the thing that I mean, Lincoln saw, I'm arguing, Lincoln saw certain deficiencies in clay as a statesman. One of them was not not reaching the people in a proper way. But also, but it isn't that clay didn't have a good thoughts clay, clay had good thoughts, but he just didn't bring those good thoughts to bear in the places where they most needed to be brought to bear.
So he was deficient. Clay was deficient in two respects. One, he didn't teach the people. And two, he didn't act on those good thoughts in places where he might have might have acted.
In the long run, when Lincoln's concerned was the need to put slavery on the agenda, the national political agenda in a way that clay worked very hard to try to keep it off the national agenda because clay above all, as Lincoln presents him, and especially as the Democratic Eulogist presents him, you might say his main virtue was his main vice. His main virtue was that he was a patriot. He was committed to the country as a whole. And this was something valuable in the US of that period because section was very intense problem and getting more intense as the days went by.
And clay above all, wanted to keep the union together and wanted to speak on behalf of the entire nation and not one section or one party. And that was his virtue. But it was also, it was what led him to try to keep slavery off the agenda and to sacrifice the issue of slavery to the issue of union on every occasion that he could. And after the Mexican war, for example, well, in the wake of the Mexican war, there was a big controversy.
What are we going to do about the new territory that we acquired from Mexico? And there was an effort on the part of the republic, not that they weren't republicans then, on the part of some of the Northern people in Congress to institute something called the Willmacht, the Willmacht proviso. The Willmacht proviso would be a prohibition of slavery in any of the territory acquired from Mexico. And it's hard to remember how much territory was acquired from Mexico.
The entire state of California, Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Texas, Utah, parts of Colorado, I mean, it was immense. So this is we're talking about a lot of territory. And this issue of the Willmacht proviso was very divisive in the country. And Clay was the one who got taken off the table that there wasn't going, Congress was not going to make a pronouncement about slavery in that new territory.
And Lincoln was a strong supporter of the Willmacht proviso in a way, his agenda item, to keep slavery alive as an issue. That was one of the things that he saw needed to be done differently from the way Clay was doing it. And I guess in a way, there's a real limit to what you can do just as a sort of legislative operator, right? Yes.
There are certain issues where you have to turn to the people and make the case for one side. And otherwise, it seems like you're just kind of kicking the can down the road. Yes. Yes.
Absolutely. No, keep going, please. No, I was just saying this, what the agenda, there's a putting slavery on the agenda, which he announces really for the first time in the clay eulogy, this then defines his action all up until really go through the entire 1850s and in his debates with Douglas, because Douglas is in a way, clays air, because what what what Clay was trying to do were to find ways, solutions, deals, deals, there's going to be a deal maker to find deals that would keep slavery off the off the table and not riling up sectional conflict. Whereas Douglas wanted to do the same with his policy of popular sovereignty, where the people of each locality would decide for themselves about whether they would have slavery or not.
And it would not be an issue in national politics at all. And that was the that was the clay policy carried forward in a slightly new context. And Lincoln thought that was terrible. I mean, that the neutrality about slavery, one could live with slavery, but one couldn't live with neutrality about slavery.
That was that was at least Lincoln's view at that time. Yeah. There was another interesting thing that came out of the chapter is so in the democratic eulogy, one of the things you point out is that it makes a suggestion of a new air and that air is going to be Douglas, whereas Lincoln is presenting himself as a new air. And so this really nicely foreshadows the Lincoln Douglas, because I guess you've already touched on that, but maybe you want to expand on that a little bit?
Yeah. Okay. So one of the interesting things in the democratic eulogy of clay is amidst all of the discussion and conversation about clay himself in that is a passage. Let me just read a little bit of it because it's very flowery and interesting here all by itself.
But so the theologian says the flowery. He says, alas, in those dark hours, which as they come in history of all nations must come in ours, those hours of peril and dread, which our land has experienced and which we may be called to experience again, to whom now may her people look up for that council and advice, which only wisdom and experience and patriotism can give, and which only the undoubting confidence of a nation will receive as now the clay is gone. Who can we look to do what clay could do for us before? And here's what it says, perchance in the whole circle of the great and gifted of our land, there remains but one, there remains but one on whose shoulders the mighty mantle of the departed statesman may fall.
One while we now write is doubtless pouring his tears over the beer of his brother and his friend brother friend ever yet in political sentiment, as far apart as party could make them. In other words, the air of clay, according to the democratic eulogist, is a member of the other party of the Democratic Party. And it seems fairly clear in the context that this is Douglas because Douglas is the man who completed the compromise of 1850, which Clay had begun putting together Douglas was the one who actually carried it over the coal line that Clay had actually failed to do. And so Douglas already was beginning to look like the air of clay and here he's being anointed by this person.
And in my chapter, I try to identify how it is that the democratic eulogist, the perspective on Clay's career that he gives us is the perspective shaped by his attempt to make clay like Douglas or, you know, the clay that he presents is the clay who's going to be the predecessor of Douglas and is going to be the one to serve as a certain model for what we need to do in the future. Main thing, key slavery off the table, don't give something like the, will my provider, etc. Yeah. Michael, while researching, did you do any research on contemporary reactions to the speech?
You present a careful reading. It's always amazing to me when reading Lincoln's speeches. It's a little bit like Shakespeare's plays. You can walk away feeling one way and then you can spend like digging a little bit deeper or pouring over the text rather than textually something else comes alive.
So did his contemporaries pick up on the subtlety of his argument? And then I have no idea. Do you use like a clay as a stocking horse essentially? Yeah.
I mean, I've raised that question in my own mind who got the subtleties of the speech and maybe nobody. I mean, it's possible nobody did. It's possible that Lincoln, this was an attempt to straighten out himself what he was thinking about clay, what he was thinking about the future. And I think it was an occasion for him to crystallize his thinking where we are in 1852 and where we need to go beyond.
So I would say even if nobody got it, it fulfilled a certain function in Lincoln's own thinking and that was something, you know? Yeah. And it's still a UOG and it's what's amazing to me. And I've always dimly suspected that Lincoln was somewhat critical of clay for being too conciliatory.
But what you drew up, so that was sort of confirmed in my mind. But what was novel to me was this bit about how ineffectual or ineffective I guess clay could be because he would limit himself to Congress and then to speak a bit. Yeah. So I mean, you really brought that out for me.
And so what's impressive then is that this is UOG that manages to, I mean, anybody, even having read your chapter, you still can wait and think that I mean, he's still praising clay. I mean, he has the virtues. I mean, he gives that he lists them, for example, in contrast to that. But at the same time, he still continues.
This is one of these great works that is simultaneously extolling the virtues of the man, but he's not going to hire virtues, perhaps a Lincoln or at least how Lincoln sees how he might be. So I guess maybe one question to transition just a little bit would be, does this, do you think this speech tells us generally about Lincoln's view of himself as a statesman? Or what does this teach us about Lincoln's statesmanship generally? That's a good question.
And I actually have a little bit of uncertainty in my own mind as to whether Lincoln, how far Lincoln was projecting himself as the statesman at this moment? Yeah, right. You mentioned that in the chapter that some other folks are really latching onto that, right? Yeah.
Other scholars. So Lincoln, there are, let me mention something that happens with the immediate aftermath of this speech. So Lincoln is giving a speech in favor of the wig candidate for presidents in 1852. And he's not actually speaking in favor of the candidate, strangely.
He's actually taking it as an opportunity to give a critique of a speech the douglas had given in favor of Franklin Pierce, who was the Democratic candidate in that election. And he uses it as an opportunity to ridicule douglas in a harsh and not very, not very, not very nice way. It's, it's very funny, but it's still, it's very harsh. But in that speech and in some private writing at the same time, Lincoln indicates that he himself feels that he has fallen behind douglas.
Here is douglas who has become a great man in American political life. Douglass nearly got the Democratic nomination for the presidency. But for the 1856 election, he's really considered one of the favorites to become the Democratic nominee. He has been a Supreme Court justice in the state of Illinois.
He is now the senator, one of the two senators from Illinois, and is the chairman of the Committee on Territories in the Senate. And that Committee on Territories is such an important committee because they're the ones who are dealing with all this new territory out there, acquired during the Mexican, from Mexico, but also all the other territory that we, that we had sitting out there, some of it from the old Louisiana Purchase. So, douglas is like a care, a really important person. Here's Lincoln.
One term congressman, two years in Congress, many terms in the Illinois legislature. That's it. And he was beginning to feel like he just had an amount of anything. And he wasn't sure he was going to amount to anything.
And so he has this one kind of private paper in which he just talks about this. And it is so sad. He was really depressed about it. You know, if they depress about it.
So, so it's a little unclear to me how much he was projecting himself that he had that sense that he was the one to do it at this time. But by 1854, his views change and he begins to see himself perhaps as as capable of that. One of the problems that I should mention that Lincoln faced was this, that in Illinois, in the, in Illinois at this time, the Democratic Party was clearly dominant. It's going to become more or less so over time.
But there was only one congressional district in this whole state of Illinois that was wig that was a wig district. That was the one where Lincoln was in fact elected. It's one where Lincoln did live at the time in central Illinois. That wasn't enough for Lincoln to make a major career.
So he couldn't become an officer in the state. That is he couldn't come to hold state-wide office. That was Democrats. He couldn't become a senator.
And he actually there were a lot of wig, other wig leaders and they engaged in a kind of rotation for this congressional seat. So he couldn't even become a long term congressman very readily. So the question is, what is his political future? What is his political future?
There was, it was a, you know, it was a ceiling that he was running up against. Now over time, that changed. By the time of the election of 1860, the population in Illinois had changed a lot. So that what was now the Republican Party became dominant in the state.
So, you know, that's the demographic exchange for a lot there. But so anyway, that was Lincoln's situation. And he was a bit downhearted about his own, his own prospects at this moment. Yeah.
But so my understanding of the perpetuation speech would be that he did, he seemed to me there to have seen himself in that role. So you think there was a kind of a dissent and then he re-emerges. Yeah, I mean, he had, so in the perpetuation address, he's maybe projecting himself as one of these, what he calls the lions or the eagles of the world. With those ambitions and with that sense of himself, you know, Lincoln clearly was like the smartest person probably in Central Illinois.
And he knew it from age five on or so, you know. And so he had this sense of himself and his possibilities. And now, but it makes it all the worse that he's now coming to, not coming to anything. And so this was a moment of personal crisis for him, I think.
Wow. Okay. Great. I just have one more or something to question.
Sure. You mentioned in the chapter, since this is our July 4th episode, I mentioned the centrality of giving July 4th orations. So I guess I was wondering if you had wanted to speak either about Lincoln's view of eulogies and orations or since this is the July 4th episode, if you want to speak about the centrality of July 4th in Lincoln's thought. Yeah, good.
Well, I've said a little bit about the centrality of July 4th orations. I think Lincoln, as I said, just to repeat a little bit. So Lincoln's thought public opinion was crucial in a regime like ours, we're government by the people as well as other than four people prevailed. And he thought not merely the public opinion is all like, do you favor the infrastructure bill or do you favor the filibuster?
I mean, those kinds of specific issues that we're always talking about. Those are important, but what Lincoln thought was more important was opinion about the fundamental questions of what makes a legitimate regime. And as Lincoln was understanding it by this time, by the 1850s, what makes a legitimate regime is the Declaration of Independence and its principles. And that's what the point for the July 4th is really is to remind people of what the principles are.
Those principles are Lincoln, Lincoln believe those are the principles which are the warrant, so to speak, for the Democratic regime in America. People rule in America because of the truth of those principles. And this is, by the way, related to my theme of democratic sovereignty, the principle of democratic sovereignty is stated in the Declaration of Independence. And so there was nothing more important.
And Lincoln himself, I don't know how many 4th of July orations he actually gave, but he gave a lot of speeches that were like 4th of July orations whether they were given enough 4th of July or not. So that kind of thing was important. But he also thought the 4th of July was important. He has a lovely passage in one of his later speeches in which he says, you know, if we look around the country, maybe half of us are descendants of the original Americans, but the rest of us are immigrants, children of immigrants.
We have no direct link with those people. But when we hear the words of the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July, we know that we are flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone because it says, oh, men are created equal and we are endowed with rights. And this applies to all of us. And this is the machine which recognizes those things.
And so we belong, we all of us who are immigrants and descendants of immigrants, we belong here. It belongs to us as much as any of those folks who were here on the Mayflower, maybe more or so even. It's beautiful. And so, yeah, I mean, it's just it's a lovely thought and thought that we could remind ourselves out of this present environment for them.
Absolutely. Thank you so much. I was really just a master of really fascinating. And I think our audience will learn a lot from others.
Folks are going to love this. Yeah. I don't know if Greg preps you with this, but Greg has these lightning round questions he likes to ask. We should call him fireworks questions since it's so worth lightning round.
Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. So you can perform better than some of your peers who think lightning means very, very slow.
Yeah, there's a lot of molasses around questions. So I'll pitch to you, Greg. Can I kick off the first one? Oh, there's my thing.
What are you doing? Yeah, I know. Can I just ask one now? Right.
Okay, so this starts lightning. All right. Michael, favorite clay. The clay of today that we're discussing or Andrew Dice Clay.
Three clays. Do you know that cash was played was named after an abolitionist who was running around in Lincoln's time? Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, there's a good burden named after him.
Don't ask the question. Yeah. I'd say my favorite clay with this. This is my favorite clay with this.
I'll explain. I'll throw in there. This is my thing. Who do you prefer?
Douglas or Lincoln? Oh, come on. I don't really think but I do try to make a case about this in my book. Very nice.
Very nice. My questions are less interesting than theirs. Who's your favorite philosopher? Oh, that's a hard one because I never met a philosopher.
I didn't like fair enough. All right. Favorite work of philosophy? This would be lightning.
I never met a philosopher. I didn't like it. All right. Favorite work of literature.
How about that? Good work of literature. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that work.
Oh, very nice. A favorite book by your wife. Oh, my favorite book by my wife is postmodern Plato's. Oh, very good.
That's a good one. That was much needed. Who is the best politician in your lifetime? It doesn't have to be American.
I think we're near everybody. I think everybody. No. I was just thinking about American, but I mean, maybe.
Do you guys have pets? Do you have pets? Do we have pets? We used to have cats.
We don't know. I think I heard the answer to this when we were talking earlier, but what do you think you would have been had you not become a professor? Probably a lawyer. Yeah.
But sometimes I wish I would have liked to become an architect. Is that right? Or an astrophysicist, that's one of my other goals. Oh, wow.
Very impressive. Do you engage in any hobbies like that now? Like related architectures, enjoy. I mean, you surely take a boat tour of Chicago.
Yes. Yeah. No, I don't. I got my, it was becoming a father.
I know you're talking about fatherhood, becoming a fatherhood was really the source of it that we had blocks with my children and putting things together. I thought, wow, this is really pretty kind of satisfying. Very nice. Do you have a favorite movie?
I'd like the Dear Hunter. Oh, I just watched that. That's such a great movie. Yeah.
Favorite place you've ever lived? That's hard because we've ridden some wonderful places. We spent a year in Cambridge. And that was Cambridge, Inc.
That was wonderful. We spend, when we go to Arizona, we spend our time in Scottsdale, or actually in a place called Paradise Valley, which really is paradise. And maybe that's my favorite place. I really love that.
Where? When we're there, we leave in the first week of May. And if we had stayed longer, today is supposed to be 115 or something there. I mean, I'd have that same paradise.
That's the inferno. Michael, is Arizona responsible for your turning away from hardcore Strausian methodology toward crystals and the power of where Texas and Sedona? Do you know what I'm talking about? There's that people culture of that stuff.
No, we didn't get to Sedona yet. I said, no, I don't know. We're going to go next year when we go. OK.
We haven't done the virus, kept us away from Sedona. That was the problem. Do you remember your lightning round question? Do you remember your first date with Catherine?
Yeah, pretty much. Anything you want to share? No. No, I don't think so.
OK, fair enough. What was your first car? The first car I actually had was a car she had an MG. Definitely.
Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, I think that's all the lightning round questions. Can you remind us again the name of the book, When We Should Expects?
When the folks don't should be able to expect to buy it? OK. From there, look at the world. A nation so conceived, colon, a ram-linking and democratic sovereignty.
It is right now in the hands of the editor at the University of Chicago Press. I am awaiting a decision by them, as to whether they're going to publish it or not. Assuming that they say yes, I would expect it to be out maybe in a year. That's the usual timetable from this point to that point.
Well, we will re-release this episode. No, we'll be here. That's great. I'll be here.
I think we can come back and know. It could be an Independence Day. Richly. That would be the most welcome.
At least if you could put in a word with us with Catherine, we would be grateful. Yes, of course. I'm sure she'd be happy to come if you want to. Of course we would.
Yeah. Good. Well, thanks to the folks at home. We hope you enjoyed this.
We will. Sorry. Go ahead. Thank you very much.
Oh, thank you. Alex, David, Zoops. You guys to be good. And we'll see you guys next time.
Yeah, I want you to cut your beard, Greg. I know we have really important people on. I know what I look like. I'll have a beard to have showered and intercleaned.
Glad you this. After this, I'm imagining he'll just shave off the mustache to, you know, Abe's in the hole. Link in a bit more. Yeah, that's right.
Happy in the bonus, David. I'm happy to do more than eating Frankfurters. Bye. Bye.