All right. Welcome back to the new Thinkery. If you hear my voice, that means our third co-host David Barr is not here. I'm sure he's died once again.
We're joined here by a third, much more excellent that our typical fourth. David, I'm sorry, Greg. Do you want to introduce our guest? I'm here, actually.
Yeah, of course. I'm happy July 4th, folks. This is our July 4th episode. I hope you'll maybe listen to us while you're eating hot dog or firing off some fireworks.
I don't know. In any event, happy America's birthday and celebration of that event. Now we have with us this evening Professor Paul Caris. He's the professor at Arizona State University in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership there.
He was actually the founding director of that center where he served from 2016 to 2023. He's also a senior fellow at the Jack Miller Center who actually helped coordinate this episode. So thanks to Tom Cleveland for reminding us that it's our civic duty to do a July 4th episode every year. We try to do that every year.
Professor Caris is the author of a book called Democracy in Moderation, colon subtitle, Montes utopil and Sustainable Liberalism that was published with Cambridge University Press. In 2016, he's currently working on a book on civic education. The title is Teaching America, Colon, Reflective Patriotism, which is a sort of a shout out to Montes utopil, that empat scholar of America. And so welcome tonight.
I think we're actually going to talk about George Washington, our nation's first president, and you're going to persuade us that he's underappreciated and that he was sort of instrumental in infusing the regime with moderation. If I understand, thanks, probably. So welcome. It's nice to have you on the show.
Thanks for being here. Thank you very much. Thank you for marking the 4th of July and the Declaration of Independence and preparation of this. I listened to your episode last year.
It's been a while since I've been. It was great. I'm going to add some elements that I think ought to be recognized in the Declaration and how they connect to Washington, universally recognized as the founding father before we became more democratic, to say, and we had to refer to founding fathers, founding brothers, these kinds of things. He was universally recognized in his lifetime before he died as the indispensable founding father.
But my pitch to you and your listeners is that he thought to model his constitutional statesmanship on the Declaration of Independence and the principles of the Declaration and his advocacy in his first retirement for a new constitution to improve in the Articles of Confederation was for the sake of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and his consistency at the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debate, two terms as President, the only one, and then in his farewell address, which I will mostly wish that we talk about. In his farewell address in 1796, it echoes the Declaration of Independence. Even when he's not explicitly invoking it, he's trying to be faithful. And I should add that he would have been a signer, except he had been given the assignment in 1776 to go fight the British.
That's a little reoccupied. He was a delegate to the Second Constitutional Convention. He shows up in uniform. In uniform, he wore as an American officer under the British in what we call the French and Indian Wars, the Seven Years War.
And he shows up in uniform as if to signal to his fellow American colonists, we have got to take this seriously, right? This is after Lexington Concord and things are not going well. The arguments American colonists are making to Britain to back off. So he's not a signer, but within a week, he's in New York, he's won the Battle of Boston, so to speak, he's driven the British out of Boston.
And in July of 1776, July 9th, he calls together all the troops in the office, it's called parading the troops in New York. And he has the Declaration read aloud word for word to the troops in New York, so they would know and the phrase he uses is something effective, the principles, the reasons for which they are fighting. So I'll stop there with my introductions to why George Washington and the July 4th holiday and the commemorations of the Declaration of Independence are much more of a natural fit than we tend to think today. That was actually my first question I was going to ask, why George Washington Independence Day and not on a wooden teeth day or a contrite cherry tree murder or something like that.
That was really well. And I think maybe one follow up. So you have a chapter in a book co-edited by Greg's colleague, Jessica Gud. Do you want to mention what we're talking about just so that listeners could pick it up?
It's a mighty book, by the way. This is the history of American people thought, edited by Frost and Sick and your chapter is chapter 5. Liberty constitutionalism and moderation of political thought of George Washington. So that's kind of where you're drawing our attention, it seems.
Yeah, very much so. And I'm grateful to the most of them, the editors who are inviting me to write the original version of that chapter and then in the second edition to revise that chapter. Yes. So one thing you mentioned early in the chapter is that, you know, Washington's writings are not voluminous.
You know, this is not a large tone, the complete writings of Washington. It seems like much more, he was the author of his own actions or the author of the model that he put himself for. And you mentioned as well that he was a model of moderation. So much so that is his compatriots named to the American Cincinnati.
So talk about George Washington as a moderate season and what that looks like about I'd like to hear about that. And then again, after that, I guess how that relates to the declaration. Yes, I should get credit here to Richard Brookheiser. His biography of George Washington came out in the 1990s with the title founding father, rediscovering George Washington.
I taught it every year I taught at the Air Force Academy. I was on leave for few years, but every year I was at the Air Force Academy teaching the required course in political philosophy to the political science majors and some philosophy minors. And I would begin with Brookheiser's book on George Washington because his account of Washington's soul was very platonic and Aristotelian. And I told Richard this at one point, Rick, and he said, I like to send to that Brookheiser as the warm up act for Plato.
So and I just thought for these young Spartans, young men and women who've agreed to serve, you know, as military, they want to be officers. How in the world can I just start with Plato? Yeah. And I'm not sure.
But that they might have a residual respect for the American founding for George Washington. And here's this book by a journalist who takes very seriously Washington as molding his own character, his own ambition to serve ideas. So a great theme of Brookheiser's biography is that this is a much smarter man than we tend in the 20th, 21st century, tend to give him credit for. He read more, he owned more books than we would think.
And they weren't all just about gardening and about, you know, agriculture and war. And he was smart enough to have very smart people around him. And how intelligent you have to think you are to what Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton and John Jay and John Adams talking to you and giving advice and then you can get to it about that and not to be. Yeah.
Yeah. And to make the final decisions right in war and in constitution making and presidency and peace. So his moderation is an intellectual quality as well as the traditional Greek moral virtue. And I'm borrowing them intellectual part from Montesquieu who makes this the signature idea of his political philosophy and spirit of laws that the spirit of moderation ought to be the spirit of the legislative, the founding statesman, the founding constitution maker and my moderation and intellectual sense as well as a political moral sense.
Montesquieu means reconciling and balancing principles, right? So this Aristotle's idea of the mean by avoiding the extremes of vices and finding the golden virtuous high mean and intellectual sense that means being able to reconcile a balanced principle. So, you know, another way of saying that you could say is practical wisdom or prudence, but to particularly give it this quality of avoiding extremes while seeing as more than one principle at stake. So while I'm rambling on this is why I think the Declaration of Independence does, which is also not so well appreciated.
Yes, it's obviously Lockean radical enlightenment philosophical echo, right? It's not a philosophical document, but it's echoing those principles. But it is more complicated than that. There are four implications to divinity.
The first one is very important with the laws of nature and nature's God. That has to fit together with the more radical enlightenment principles. The bulk of the document is common law arguments that Jefferson makes in his initial draft and then the committee and Congress ratifies this. Yes, common law, constitutional arguments for all the violations for the king and the parliament.
In the middle of one of the charges he has combined with others. In Jefferson's draft it refers to the king of the parliament have done things that finally are constitutions or alien to our constitutions plural. In the final version, he has combined with others, let me get the phrasing just right. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, comma, and unacknowled by our laws.
Jim Stoner, now at one time at Louisiana State, said this is a reference to the common law constitutionalism. That's another crucial source here. So we've got Jefferson invoking Lockean radical enlightenment philosophical principles, but also the Congress and the committee having these multiple implications of divinity, who's the agent carrying divine providential divinity. We've got common law constitutionalism and then I'll stop here.
The final sentence, which you have to give to Jefferson's, his final sentence, slightly revised by the committee and Congress. Jefferson's final sentence refers to mutually pledging to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Or standing up for the principles, writes, amounts to this declaration. The final version begins with the invocation of divine providence and then that phrase.
So the support of this declaration with a firm relies on the protection of divine providence, and mutually pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor. So even Jefferson's moderate in this sense, complex, radical light principles, but also common law principles and sacred honor. We're in John Locke's philosophy, and you find sacred honor. Yeah.
And also, no rebellion, no mention of revolution. We're just altering and abolishing things. We're just moving some couches around. That's all.
Nothing to see here. Yeah. There's a curious phrase that thinkers scholars about Washington used to refer to him. Gordon Wood may be one of them.
I might not remember that correctly, but he's a conservative revolutionary. That's my way of getting across moderation. There is a need for revolution here. Yeah.
But not to repudiate the entire political, legal, constitutional, and religious inheritance. Right. This is not a resellen or the jacoben revolution to come in France in such a decade. I'm a one small follow up for something you said a while ago, and this is just a small digression.
But I'm interested to know how the students found the biography. You said you taught this for years. That must mean it was somewhat successful. But it just seems like in my experience, I'm sort of pressing, now I'm interested in following your lead here because it's me, a biography of any length seems like they might get kind of bored or lost in details, but it seems they must have gone well if you do the year after year.
I think it went well as far as what as one can tell with students here, both professors say, you know this. Yeah. Alex asked about the particular moderation of Washington. I emphasize the intellectual qualities, but he is famous for the fact that he resigned power.
Right. One of the episodes that Rick Rieger counts in his wonderful book is that Napoleon, in his final exile, right, having declared himself an emperor and lost it, has disparaging remarks about Washington. They wanted me to be a Washington, meaning serve a republic and the new constitutional order and then resign power as he did. Yeah.
And then he said, but Washington would have done what I did if he'd been in my situation, but there's also an implication that the Washington is not smart. It might not have figured out that I, Napoleon, had to do what I had to do. So the question is that the normal course of human events to use that sort of integration is for a successful warrior, warlord, warrior king to be near absolute in power, even quite well, if it's in the name of the republic, everything in the monarchy, you take near absolute power. That's probably the normal thing for Washington to do.
So the fact that he resigned, he resists an offer to him by rebellious minded officers in the Newburg rebellion in 1733, when the war is basically won, but the officers in the soldiers aren't being paid by Congress. He denounces that, any effort to use the military to threaten Congress. Right. But the normal thing for him to do is say, oh yes, great idea.
He doesn't. Yeah. And then he resigns his commission, absolutely, and retires to Mount Vernon. That's the Cincinnati's reference that you made.
And then he doesn't want to be president for more than one term. He agrees to be president, everybody around him. The Jefferson Hamilton feud is already open. Both sides say, you must stay.
You watch it too much stay. And then he thinks they're going well enough in 1796 that he says, I'm out as a matter of principle. He should not die in office as president as the first president. And also he knows he's tired and it's a republican principle to rotate office.
Other people might do better. So that's part of his extraordinary, as I mentioned earlier, the ambition to show up at the Second Continental Congress in your uniform. Right. And he never wore uniform.
He didn't design himself. The man is the size of Shaquille O'Neal in our day and age. He's six foot four when he dies. He's massive compared to these other people around him.
Right. And he shows up in this striking uniform. So this is a guy who could have been an Napoleon, much taller. And the libertly decides not to serve the founding of a republican constitutional order.
I mean, would you say how he makes me think he could never be an Napoleon? He does not that. The complex. But I mean, just reflecting on this now, just the power of that example is so clear in that it's not the two term, you know, precedent is not violated until FDR and then it becomes turned into a constitutional amendment.
Right. I mean, this is incredibly important because you think, well, another Washington comes off first of all, that's rare, but another political talent comes along. And one hopes in the infrequency of that by the time they do, they can avoid the Napoleon problem. If not, that person's own moderation, at least to a sense that this is the way things are done around here.
You know, he encourages Madison in the period when there's discussion of revising the articles or replacing them. He's thinking about replacing them. He doesn't use that word. He says we need bold measures proposed for this invention.
And how such a dimension is really to attend. And that's the way a major reason why there's a separate executive, right? Madison knows he's got Washington's backing and Washington's the model. They thought, oh, if we could trust anybody with this monarchical like set of powers in article two as drafted, it would be him.
But of course, as the federal says several times, you're not always going to have enlightened states about the helm. You're not trusting to win characters. So Washington agrees to the separation of powers principles to all the limits on the executive and to the federalism principle that this is not going to be all powerful government. So that's a constitutional expression of his moderation.
But as you mentioned, there's no limit and there's no constitution on the number of terms. And so he sets the limit. He adds that further constitutional principle in the larger sense. Yeah.
Do you think that there's any recognition on his part? I sort of get this in Machiavelli that actually the greatest honors, the court of defenders, are those who in fact set up republics. And so Napoleon, how he actually understood the more clear side about his ambition maybe, would have seen that actually there's a greater glory for people who set up a law code divine or otherwise, but something like that. Is there any notion in what you've read from Washington that he understood that he is giving up power would actually resound his reputation in a very positive way or no?
There is the view. Gary Wills was noted for saying that the Washington was somewhat Machiavellian about his resignation to power. He did it to gain more power credit. Resigning his commission, staying quiet at the constitutional convention, which in fact gave him more influence.
He could change some things behind the scenes and on the final day of the invention, make a speech about enlarging, in fact, the size of the house of representatives. And there was no debate about it. It was just voted up unanimously. So this idea that he was the great book about Eisenhower, Fred Greenstein, who uses the metaphor of the hidden hand.
Right? And in a way, Eisenhower is we know that Eisenhower read about Washington. There's a way in which Eisenhower may take a Washington as the model. So you can have more influence by not making too much of yourself.
On the other hand, he knew he was the most famous man on the continent and famous in Europe. So I think there's a real intellectual moral effort of virtue here to control himself and to make sure he's serving this Senate principle. So he invokes in his first inaugural address, which he writes himself. He had asked an aide to write a longer inaugural address in 1799 as policy questions and ended up making too much policy speech, like the awful state of the unit dresses we all hear now, right?
And watching scrapped it and wrote his own short statement of the implications of the principles of the revolution and the decoration and virtues, the virtues of all of us who have been elected as he speaking to the house of the first house and the first house and the first Senate. The virtues needed to operate this new constitutional order. And then the farewell address, the end is on this principle of moderation. Yes, it takes constitutional legal principles, but virtues, a character, the citizenry, and then the elected and appointed public servants to operate Constitution.
I think it's more than one principle on the right balance and blend of principles. I mean, this is Machiavellian, Washington, theses, is a strange, if not just implausible. I mean, it's pretty clear from like federalist 51, right, that the Constitution is in large part designed to restrain kind of petty, maybe not full-witted Machiavellian types, right? And say, well, we'll put them against one another, though, hopefully by a large neutralized one another.
You think that when this is out in the open, Washington, if you want to be a real Machiavellian, you know, bend the system or something like that. What it seems like more plausible than me, and tell me what you think about this, is that he perhaps recognizes that the Constitution has a built-in moderation when the actors don't have any, but that would still require it as a positive model or exemplar of moderation, that as you put it acts almost like, if not a part of the Constitution, as something scaffolding to the Constitution say, when we have enlightened states, they might act like this, like me, look at how I've restrained myself. When they don't, hopefully they'll restrain one another until we have, you know, the better angels of our nature are able to sort of come to the fore of our government. Yes, yes, and Hamilton, as well as Madison, as well as Jay, writing as published in the Federalist, makes exactly that side point, Alex, that there will need to be a certain character, especially in certain constitutional offices.
So Madison makes references to a level of virtue we presume in the citizenry of Republican citizens to operate a constitutional government. Then there's more disparaging remarks about the House. Well, you know, the House are going to get sort of what we get, right? The Senate, Jay and Madison and Senate, Hamilton, on the executive Hamilton on the judiciary, there's much more explicit language there from all three voices of the police about the virtues and characters, the desconcentitutional sections of Article 1, Article 3, call 4, and give an opportunity for people of ambition and virtue to serve.
Again, make a connection to Washington's. No accident that Hamilton was deeply shaped by being around Washington in the war. Madison and Washington had this relationship. Jay and Washington had a relationship already by, by 1777, 1788.
So Washington in the ways behind, and I'll mention one other point here, that to use a popular culture reference of these young people like me, there's a way in which in the Washington farewell address of 1796, Washington does the Blues Brothers thing. He gets the band back together. He had wanted to resign from public life in 1792. He asked Madison to write basically farewell address, that he would not be, he was, he would not be candidate in the upper college in the election of 1792.
Madison doesn't want to do it, but he does what the big guy asked him to do. And then everyone around Washington talks about it. He doesn't say anything. He's unanimously elected a second time.
But then in 1796, things are going well enough, even after the terminal of the French Revolution. Foreign policy, domestic policy, economics, J-Treaty, things are going well enough. Washington thinks it's responsible for him to get out of here. For personal reasons and for Republican reasons, he asks Hamilton, who's already left the government, to write farewell address, but he says to Hamilton, use as much as you can of Madison's 1792 address.
And then Hamilton and Washington go back and forth and drafts, and Madison's voice is still there, minimally, but still there in Hamilton's success stress. And then Washington likes a final draft and says to Hamilton, I would like you to show this to John J and discuss this to John J because both Jay and Hamilton are New York. And so Jay and Hamilton spend a day together. So the final version, then we'll also make some final revisions after that Jay, Hamilton, final document.
So you could say that Publius, as well as Washington, are the voices. And this is after the Madison Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, one side, Hamilton split. And as you're up to it, and Washington is trying to pull the Republican spirit back together. Can you, so we've been talking a lot about the farewell address.
I was wondering, you sort of have some places where you think there's some clear allusions to the Declaration of Independence or some ways, and the spirit of moderation, so is there anything else you wanted to connect there, specifically in the farewell address to the Declaration of Independence? Well, the Declaration calls for government to protect these rights, to government to be in accord with the laws of nature and nature's God and the rights endowed by our Creator into all of humankind. And the articles, enough of a consensus, develops that the articles are failing at that, a new government. And it has the balance of this new constitution, the balance of common law, principles, and enlightenment principles about universal rights, for the Declaration calls for it.
But also in the farewell address, in the first inaugural, and the farewell address, Washington can talk more about the virtues of the century, and the virtues of the officeholders. And this is why he spends the bulk of the address offering councils, since he has a responsibility. And it's all about civic virtues and invocations of divine providence, which again, if you take seriously the closing line of the Declaration of Independence, which is there in initial form, it just is draft, then the Committee and the Congress, right, to call citizens, self-governing citizens, to mutually pledge to each other, life's fortune's sacred honor. So that's the opening line is friends and fellow citizens, the opening line of the farewell address, friends and fellow citizens.
It's a kind of classical Sicilian invocation of civic virtue, Aristotelian civic friendship. You could say that Washington, again, never went to college, but absorbed these ideas from his own reading and from these very smart people who he has wanted to have around him in his public life. So the invocations of civic duty, its his civic duty, to apologize for the fact that he would like to not stand for office for a third term. He in effect asked permission of his friends and sisters, don't think badly of me that I'm failing at my dude.
This man has spent 25 years of his life, basically half of his life at this point in public service to the country, more if you can't be serving as a colonial officer under the British. And he says, but don't think that I'm failing you. So civic virtues and then the prayers that he makes, the four invocations to a divinity and the Declaration of Independence, they're more muted here in the farewell address than they are in the first and wrongly address. But he refers to prayers to heaven for his country at the end of the opening section and then says, here I perhaps ought to start, stop, but these councils have a warning of a friend, a civic friend, in saying for a while, when I owe you.
But he concluded sort of the opening section with prayers to heaven for the United States and for his fellow citizens. The civic virtues he calls through throughout stick to the Union, stick to the Constitution, beware of parties. Those are the three big ones and ones we tend to remember. But we also remember the invocation of religion, that sort of a strong call for civic virtue after he's defended all the constitutional principles and the Union principles and warned about party.
So it's really the sixth, the big council warning to his fellow citizens. And it's fairly often quoted by conservatives in the 20th and 21st century. Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable. Supports then as a brief invocation of education, invested education and civic education, then there's the session on foreign policy, but the session on foreign policy begins by invoking religion and morality.
And compel us to cultivate peace and harmony with other nations. Of course, as an old officer in general, he has the view we would say today of a velvet glove covering a steel fist. You know, simply gonna rely on invocations of religion, morality and justice and harmony. You're gonna have a defensible strong republic.
But even there, there's this kind of balance that's called for in the Declaration, right? We're not undertaking rebellion, illegitimate overthrow of a former government. You don't even want to talk about revolution, right? We are defending our rights and regretfully separating that kind of balance of principle and necessity.
Well, this is a section of foreign policy, that he says, we need to be strong enough to be independent and a dangerous world, but don't have permanent antipastions, don't have passion, reigning, don't have permanent affections, either. You really can't trust anybody. So you want to be making temporary alliances, not not permanent alliances. And then in the final section, he returns to invocation of a kind of civic virtue.
I've given these warnings, I hope now to be able to enjoy as a fellow citizen, no longer, no longer the helm, as a fellow citizen with my fellow citizens to enjoy the benign influence of good laws under free government, the ever favorite object of my heart. And the happy reward as I trust of our mutual cares, labors and dangers. That is an echo of the last sentence of the Declaration. We mutually pledge this to each other, these dangers, but they're rewards that come from this.
This might seem like completely out of left field, but a lot of what you're saying reminds me of the moral education that's described when Socrates is conversing with Adam Antison, Republic, books, two to three. And when he introduces the poets, he says, well, you know, the poets molds the poem and the poem, then in turn molds the souls therefore you need to supervise the poets. And by the end of his discussion with Ironman to sort of where glaucon comes back in, he dismisses the wise poet who can imitate everything and replaces him with the austere poet, who somehow is flexible, yet doesn't allow himself the flexibility, understands what the founders are after, and he almost seems to collapse with the citizen. And so I don't know how, whether this is probably just a comment, not even a question.
But Washington comes across as somebody who understands the principles, the founding principles, their sort of moral and political integrity, and consciously molds himself to it, and is loath to depart from them. But understands also that he is in a way involved in a founding, right? And must eventually, must embody the virtues of the citizen, and then it sounds like eventually returned to being a citizen at some point, which is, I mean, the Republic is full of flights of fancies, and this seems to be one of them, but it seems like you can find, you know, he's not an actual poet writing writing poems, but he is a kind of author of his own narrative, you could say, and creating a kind of history or story in the process. But I think Greg gets something to jump in that.
If I could just respond to that out, it's a wonderful thought. And again, I'm going to think I've never had an original thought about Washington by going to vote Brookheiser again. Heiser knows that one of the great biographies about Washington is written by an art historian, and Brookheiser being a journalist, he knows this things that we, had to have to narrow mind the academic types and tend to miss. You know, Washington was a very poetic figure.
I mentioned he never wore a uniform, he didn't design. He made himself incredibly fit with this huge body that he had graceful Jefferson called him the greatest horseman of the age, which meant a lot then, and that he was known to dance beautifully, right? So there's a certain poetry to how he presents himself. He had a play, you know, the great play about Cato performed during the Revolutionary War, Acadia-Resistening the Tyranny of Caesar.
In a wonderful poetic moment is in the Newburgh Rebellion, when he is talking to officers, whoever the rebellious ones were, talking them down. It's a shameful that anyone would suggest that the army should pull away from our camp here and march toward Philadelphia and threaten Congress for our pay. Despicable, shameful, vile, the principles of revolution, etc. And then Brookheiser is this view, he's maybe worried it doesn't quite have them, you know, because they are pissed off.
And so he does, we've maybe heard about this, his schoolboys, he reads a letter from Congress, but he doesn't in a dramatic way. He starts to read it, fumbles the paper, pulls out his eyeglasses, which most of them have not seen anywhere. And he says, in fact, excuse me, I have grown not only gray but blind in the service of my country. And it's recorded by the people there that some of these officers weep.
Right? How could we? So this is all part of the, you know, how do you make the Declaration live? You need figures like Washington who will pledge to it and then be exemplars of it and take the risks and show I can stick to the principles, I can stick to the rules in all my greatness and ambition, I can stick to the principles you can to.
And then in the first scenario address that he takes the oath that he adds to help me God and he stories on a Bible, right? The drama and the poetry of that. And then here at the end there's all kinds of rhetoric and poetry in the, he knows Hamilton could do that and Jay. So he's using those qualities, all these implications of Richard, but against example, right?
I'm the most famous man. I'm held in the most single powerful office and I'm asking to just be a simple fella sis with the drama. Can I have one more thing while I'm rambling on? The final dramatic act of his life is his last will, right?
And it's tragic in a way, because after decades, we know this from his private letters, which he knows are going to be composed decades of struggling with slavery and being a slave owner and what to do about it. Virginia and former the Union and all the compromises of the founding, he decides in the most persuaded Martha that he's a bill Allen, William Allen is wonderful in this. He had a plan for well over a decade to build up enough wealth to give away most of it by emancipating the slaves that he inherited from the Custis, Fannie Martha State, and he inherited from the Washington family. And it's going to emancipate all of them, but he knows that that's not fair or just to slaves who might be old or ill or they're box to broken.
And so if they don't want to be freed, they can have pensions and stay on the state. By the 1830s, the Washington state is so bankrupt that that's why the Mount Vernon Ladies Association has to be founded, because the roof is leaking, the place is falling apart. So he, I think, one way of reading is he thought he could give one last dramatic example to his country. How it's going to take personal sacrifice to get over slavery.
If he, the great founding father could give away his wealth by mass banks like maybe others could do that, maybe could encourage some steps toward abolition of emancipation, whatever. It totally fails. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on, yeah, it failed. Yeah.
I was wondering if you had any thoughts on, I think that's a way of reading that was very beautiful and very moving and it's impressive. And I'm just, I'm wondering if there's some way to, I don't know if I can articulate this question very well, but for me, the singular moral principle, the Declaration of Independence is all men are great equal. Yes. And here you have this man who, common sense might say one look at him, he's living evidence that that that's not true.
And so here he is submitting him. So I mean, people seem to recognize that his excellence somehow was essential for the union. It was imperative that he be the guy that is president because they know he's willing to step down and he can handle his power. It just seems like such a, it's, I don't know, it just seems like, you know, Napoleon could ever do this.
Why not? Well, probably because Napoleon didn't subscribe to this. He thought he was great. And I just, I don't know how, how do you reconcile his greatness with the principle of equality or maybe what he's doing here, the Cincinnati's moment is that sort of him sort of bowing to that.
We all are great equal. Yes. John Marshall seems to recognize this paradox about Washington and wanting to celebrate it. He committed, he committed his greatness, his ambition, his talent to equal natural rights for all.
Yeah. That's a principle that's really caring it out because the decoration can't do it by itself. Needs government, needs a new government, needs a second try in government, the Constitution. But even that parchment has to be implemented.
Even the new 1777 Constitution has to be implemented in his first inaugural dress he calls for. He puts his weight behind what he knows are the calls for the kind of gentleman's bargains made in certain ratification conventions about a bill of rights, about amendments to the Constitution, equal natural rights for all right. So Marshall's biography of Washington, which Marshall works on to the end of his life. And I should mention that as one of my four minutes of all the experiences.
When I was a Dr. Stephen of Boston College in the 1990s, Liberty Fund approached my doctoral mentor Robert Faulkner about Faulkner, who had written his doctoral dissertation long ago. It was his first book on the jurisprudence of John Marshall, and the constitutionalism of John Marshall. Liberty Fund approached him.
They wanted to bring back into print the one volume edition of the Marshall biography of Washington that Marshall himself had rewritten and reduced in size in the very last years of his life. It's Marshall in the Jacksonian era wondering maybe the republic is lost, maybe the Constitution is lost. We're going to have this just crazy controlled democracy. And so Washington is still an exemplar, right?
Marshall, many decades after Marshall fought under him in the revolution. He's still the model of the constitutional statements, states of the great soul who commits himself to equal natural rights and constitutionalism. So Marshall rewrites the life of George Washington and gives it a new subtitle written for schools. It's a shorter one volume edition, but it's all his own words.
So Faulkner asked me as a doctor student basically to write the footnotes. Wow. And more Faulkner's credit cut the footnotes I've written in half, but to keep the focus on Marshall and I'm watching today and to keep the voice there. And then Faulkner writes his beautiful preface, but that experience in the 1990s led Faulkner to think about greatness.
Yeah. Right. That's great. That's Yes.
Xenophon, right. And the seeronemesis and the serpidaean and the kind of cisaronian quality that's in Marshall and other great, you know, how do you fit together greatness and great ambition with constitutional republican government and a democratic republican. So that's inspired by scholarship about all this, by reading of Washington. It is a paradox, but it's not mythical.
Right now he really did it. He Washington, he really inspired Marshall to do it and to write about it. You could say the same about Lincoln. Right.
That Lincoln talks about towering ambition in the, in the 1838 YC address and, you know, their references to whether or not Lincoln thought himself as this kind of towering figure, why was he so obsessed with the Beth? She's calling Shakespeare's Macbeth the greatest of Shakespeare's plays. Right. Had he become the Beth, right?
But the example of Washington is there, you know, as great as your ambition may be a greater, I think, Alexander, greater ambition is to commit to a republic to some government for a broader group of people. Right. And Lincoln actually, he mentions Washington in that speech as being one of the towering oaks. And then there's also that remark when he leaves Springfield to go assume the presidency, leaving with a task perhaps even greater than Washington.
So, yeah, the final invocation of that listening address is to Christianity and Washington. Yeah, that's right. Christianity and Washington. Those are the two great things.
I mean, I don't want to press the point, but you're going back to Marshall and how it's interesting that Marshall is self-consciously trying to revive the memory of Washington because he doesn't have to dance and stuff. And Lincoln almost was sadness. I mean, at least my reading and the perpetuation address is he's trying to sort of harken back to the Washington's, but seems to be recognizing that that simply won't be enough going forward. And I think that's why the Christianity, for example, is another stuff.
He's Lincoln's like summoning a bunch of more stuff to the fold to say, okay, we need something else for every country regime. But yeah, I mean, that's really impressive. So that's the moderation theme, right? More than one principle is in the Declaration of Independence, civic virtue, as well as enlightenment philosophy and common law and Washington is adorsing that and supporting it and the embodiment of it and the complexity of the Constitution, right?
More than one principle and the sort of internal moderation of the Constitution itself. Yeah, I mean, in a way, the Constitution, in its own balancing of principles, encourages the ambitious who rise above, let's say the checks and balances, if they're going to be honored within the system of government as it penetrates itself, they're going to have to embody that kind of moderation. They can't emphasize. And the funny thing about Washington versus Napoleon is how many things are named after Napoleon, and that they can't dance versus complex.
Yeah, they're complex. And where- Brandy, I think there's a Brandy named after Mr. Thunberg. There is a- there's a- there's a- there's a cognac guy named after him.
Yeah, that's right. Sure. But I mean, and it shows perhaps a greater sort of awareness of the fact that any idea of greatness is bound up with the regime under which it arises. And in many ways- I always have this- I'm wearing a thing out too, but I look at Napoleon.
I always wonder why people look at him as such an amazing- I mean, obviously he was very successful in many ways, but he also had to colossal failures and colossal overreaches. And, you know, his attempts to return to politics were fails, whereas George Washington got what he could get done and he did it well and then bowed out and he's all the greater for that. That sort of- it's not a moderate accomplishment. It seems crazy to call it a moderate accomplishment.
But compared to Napoleon's, I'm obviously a Napoleon thought it was moderate, but he accomplished great things and then was done. I mean, he's remarkable. If moderation is a virtue, it's an excellence. So there's a greatness to be achieved in each of these particular virtues, moderation, which we think of mostly in relation to appetites and pleasures, but the civic virtue dimension of moderation is a greatness.
To just like any virtue, to discipline yourself, to commit principles, you're reminding me of the question earlier that this work, trying to teach the Burkhaiser book, the biography, great praise, but with seriousness of Washington. I think it did and the connection was- I had no prior military service, I said, civility, and we used to- the phrase I didn't invent it, but we civillium and career economics at the Military Academy referred to ourselves as Athenians in Sparta. I had not done what they- Yaga and many women were committing to do, and I had a student killed in Afghanistan. She volunteered.
She was smart. She was athlete. She volunteered. She was safely in Hawaii as an intelligence officer.
She volunteered to go to Afghanistan. She had blown up. I was teaching in my two decades there. I had not done what they had done.
They had committed to serve the Constitution. They had taken only to the Constitution, not to a commander and chief or officer, like that. So that's what Washington had done to invent the Constitution, to defend the Declaration and to invent the Constitution. The ambition to be officers, to risk your life, the moral risk of killing others.
They were risking all that for these principles. I think for most of them it did work to think, okay, he's a great person, but there were big ideas that disciplined him or that he chose to commit to. It's complicated. It takes some study.
It takes the civic education. It takes some philosophical education. It takes some work to figure out how these complicated things fit together. One thing that came up a few times in the notes that this is Montesquieu, and obviously, Montesquieu is deeply important for the founders.
You can see the most cited guy in the Federal Center of Federal debates and like this. Correct. I was just wondering specifically about the Declaration and about Washington's sort of saying that Washington's moderation is Montesquieu. Had Washington read Montesquieu, or he was just saying that that's actually a good lens to understand what he's doing.
Is there anything more to the Declaration than I'm missing? I'm missing Montesquieu's fingerprint. It's on it. Yes.
Well, to be fair to skeptics about that connection, Montesquieu, to the Declaration, to George Washington. To be fair, in the Library of Mount Vernon, which had 800-some of the books, there is John Locke. There's not a volume of the Spirit of Law, so there's not Montesquieu. As I mentioned earlier, Washington didn't, his father died, he did not get sent off to England at the time to college, as his older brother said, Vincent.
But he studied and bought books and wanted smart people around him. And so I think he imbibed and reflected, but also ennobled. If Jefferson is able to write about the Declaration near his death, 50 years later, that it was not meant to be original, is this the letter to white men? It meant to be an expression in American mind.
Washington was trying to be an expression. Washington was trying to be an embodiment of the best and highest principles of America. He didn't have to invent them. He didn't have to read all the scholarly books.
I was not going to use the contribution. He was listening and responding and synthesizing his two neat words, blending and balancing together these principles. So just a word about Montesquieu and the Declaration. I assume Jefferson, I've never seen anything about Jefferson in Montesquieu, but you would assume this rank of vile must have read.
This is part of Jefferson's complexity. The reason why we don't think about Jefferson's philosophy is that Montesquieu was condemned. Jefferson turned against Montesquieu in the early 17s, after the French Revolution, to risk to critic, friendly, to risk terrorist secrecy, to monarchy and not republican enough. But we know, there's wonderful scholarship done by American intellectual historians.
We know that in 1773, 74, Jefferson is writing out by hand excerpts from 29 of the 31 books of the Spirit of Laws. So I think it's fair to think about how Montesquieu was a presence in the 1770s and an influence on Jefferson and others. Don't forget those references to the divinity. This is what Montesquieu does in the Spirit of Laws.
You said, you know, 19th century Dominican priests said that Montesquieu was the greatest friend of Christianity in the 18th century. And you might say, well, that's the bain of the ending with fake braids. Not a lot of French Christianity. The philosopher's enlightenment, but still, compared to others, there's a way of reading Montesquieu that's friendly to Christianity sees Christianity as the source of the modern liberal republican genesis, the blend that Montesquieu's praising in England.
So it's not far fast to think that Montesquieu's presence is there. I mentioned the word honor, right? Where in John Montesquieu, you're going to fight this kind of phrase, specific religion, honor. That comes out of before the Spirit of Laws and other references in the Spirit of Laws.
So the complexity of Montesquieu's political philosophy, if you read him as genuinely taking some ideas from Greek and Roman classical philosophy and from medieval Christian thought, medieval constitutionalism, and then moderate, embodying the moderate, modern enlightenment, then that shows up in the Declaration. And then, you know, there are praises in the Spirit of Laws to great statesmen and great figures and honorable figures who risk their life and their security for principle. And so that invocation of a kind of republican civic virtue is in the water. And Washington is embodying that, trying to live up to that and embody it.
So I think of it as a reflection of Montesquieu's influence on American political law. Very good. Well, I was going to give it to a study of topics of everything else to say about Washington in relation to the declaration, please feel free. But you've been doing a lot of work and your newest book project is on civic education, civic virtue, and you've mentioned civic virtue a bunch of times.
I was just wondering if you have any thoughts on that. You're at one of these very first state legislatively founded organizations about it. I know you're deeply involved with all these around the country. I mean, we can lament, of course, I'm sure we both would agree that the decline of civic education generally, and that some of these institutes are trying to sort of compensate for and make up for it deficiency that probably should be happening at the younger age.
But I don't know, give me just general thoughts. What should we be doing? What kinds of things we would be teaching? What virtues should we be inculcating?
Some of the things you mentioned, I couldn't help but think to myself, gosh, there aren't a lot of people who you said at one point in this evening's recording, which I think is true that Madison, Jay, and Hamilton and others understood that you had to have republican citizens who had sort of republican virtues if you're going to have republic. And as you sort of listed some of them have hazardous remarks, I couldn't help but think, gosh, we don't seem too civically virtuous anymore. And so I don't know what that tells us. I mean, maybe you can make it more optimistic than I'm making it out to be.
But well, thank you for mentioning that my role. One figure in a renaissance of concern about civic education, it did take institutional form first at public universities, but you can see the rationale for that. 1789 North Carolina under the Constitution, the University of Georgia was actually established before that in the comparison. That's right, folks.
But it's a civic education rationale. You can't leave it to just private colleges and religious colleges. The states ought to establish universities to educate what they are going to be leading citizens of the state republics and then centennial island of the new national federal republic. Washington is interested in a national university from the first year of his presidency.
And he mentions it in his final, what we would call state of the university, his final annual address is eighth. He and Hamilton are still at it. There should be a national university. In addition to the state universities, they're just nascent and the private universities that predate the American republic, Harvard and others.
They're ought to be an astronaut to educate leading citizens as American, leading citizens in the nation's capital. He gives some of his own private money to it in his final well. He endows his own money to a struggling Virginia Academy in Lexington called Liberty Hill Academy. And in gratitude, they rename it the Washington Academy.
Then it becomes Washington College. And when it's struggling, when it's struggling after the Civil War, a guy named Lee, partly rehabilitates himself by becoming the president of Washington College. And in gratitude, after Lee's death, they rename it Washington and Lee. So Washington talked about education, what his money, where his mouth was, mentions, I mentioned the paragraph, in the fair world.
So it was a widespread idea. If you think of the the storied remark that Franklin makes in the final day, the convention in Philadelphia, it's a leading republican citizen, Eliza Powell asks him, Mr. Franklin, what foreign government does the convention recommend. And Franklin says, a republic, if you can keep it, that's calling for civic education.
And Franklin is one of the founders of the University of Pennsylvania, is it? So this was a big theme among many founders, Lincoln's talking about it in the Lacey address in 1738. When wonders what he would have done, if he had it, if he had it in the second term as president, in retirement, right? A mentally self-educated man.
So I'm just grateful to be an American, an American educator, and to have had the opportunity offered to me by leadership at Arizona State University to leave the University of Pennsylvania and come to help found that new department. But credit goes to legislators in Arizona and the state governor at the time, Ducey, to mandate that ASU recover. It's part of its original mission, a civic education mission established a new department for civic and leadership, while other such departments, centers, even colleges have established in seven other states. But to give credit, Stanford University has got a Stanford civic initiative.
Johns Hopkins is on the verge of requiring what they call a democracy education requirement. So, and then, you know, your question, what to teach, right? I think it does matter to be able to point to examples in the founding period of principled characters who aren't so just easily caricatured, you know, the 1619 project, as hypocrites and frauds America's been a shaman hypocrisy and fraud for the beginning, to point to figures like Washington even, even by terms of the tragic attempt at the end of his life to reconcile the contradiction of the Declaration of Labor. These are real people, and these are admirable people.
But, you know, what does Washington call for in the farewell address education, just like Lincoln, in the 1738 education of the Constitution. So I'll recommend this new book by Yuvala Vin, American Enterprise Institute, this wonderful book on the Constitution, the philosophy behind it, and we need to re-learn it to deal with our problems of polarization and anger and civic decay and civics, so the book is American Covenant, and then it refers to the Constitution was at one time able to unite us, and perhaps it could again. That's the long subtitle. But of course, we have to study it and take it seriously.
So these departments, colleges, centers, super centers of civic thought, partly what Stanford is doing, I hope what Hopkins will do, other places will do, rediscover the principles of the American founding as serious, worthy of higher education study in a liberal arts,ocratic spirit. You don't have to take them as gospel truth. You ought to take them seriously. I think if you give the the Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the founding party, if you give it a decent chance, it's going to come out okay.
Yeah, I think so. Even with younger cynical students who have had an awful, if any civic education, that's the fault of people are age. That's not their fault, right? Yeah.
I think what you've said about education examples, I'll just say I think students are hungry for the sort of thing. I think they, especially younger ones nowadays, are since the poverty of their education and they don't like it. But, Steve, you mentioned one of your former educators, Bob Faulkner, former guest on the show, the late Bob Faulkner. And one thing I think our audience, they tend to be undergrad, graduate students and then some faculty as well.
I'd like to hear how people got interested in this, you know, your young person, you're doing whatever and then, you know, suddenly you find yourself studying Washington for decades or whatever, and America political, what brought you here and, you know, who was it? What did they all mean to you? So if we had another hour, I'd give the full version, but the brief version is born into family of fairly recent immigrants in Northern New York and Italian and my father, from Southern Italy, Irish and German on my mother's side. And like a lot of immigrants, I was not an immigrant myself, but for the recent immigrants, learning to be grateful for America.
You know, you leave someplace else to work to come to America, because it's better, hope, for it being better here. My father was an educator, I had a master's in history, and was at the time, it was called in the public schools in New York State, New York State, New York State, and started in 1950s. He was a history teacher, and that became such a studies teacher. So I grew up in that kind of family, went off to a very good liberal arts college and found students of Leo Strauss at Middlebury College in Vermont in the 1980s, students of Herbert Storing, himself, a Leo Strauss.
And I know you did an episode of a lot of stories, essays about education, and Faulkner himself had studied with with storing. So after being off at Oxford, and I should mention something about ambition there, I'll say it by the grace of God, I was elected to a Rhodes Scholarship, because of the wonderful mentors at Middlebury, the Leo Strauss students and other wonderful faculty, I was plausibly candidate for it. I was awarded it, sometimes these committees by mistakes, I was awarded it. Rhodes's will is about the criteria in Rhodes's will, established in scholarships by 1903, it's Aristotelian moral and civic and inflectional virtues, those are the criteria for the Rhodes Scholarship, but it's about greatness and ambition.
So I had that theme, finally, I went to Boston College, and I mentioned this by many wonderful faculty there, David Lornthall, Robert Cigliano, Faulkner, among others, but Faulkner is a term of my destination committee, not an expert on Montsquieu, but fond of Montsquieu, Lornthall is a Montsquieu expert. And then I mentioned the request from Liberty Fund to re-issue and edit a new dish of Marshall's life of Washington. And then, you know, Bob Faulkner's book, The Case for Greatness, late in his career, the last decade of his life, this wonderful study, just like the civic education, needed to understand Washington's fair web address in Washington's greatness, right? Faulkner's got a beautiful chapter in Washington in that book, and it's standing away, Washington's a theme throughout the whole book, but how does Faulkner think you need to study and think in order to understand it, figure out Washington, you got to go back to Aristotle, Plato, and then move forward from there.
So there's such a rich field of study here for civic education. So we refer to these departments in public universities, and now I think they should spread to private universities, blending a classical liberal arts education and an American civic education. And in the phrase I'm hoping to use in the subtitle of my book, A Reflective patriotism that as to Bill refers to it, right, that you know you need an education to be a self-governing citizen, including to argue with other self-governing citizens, argue with government, but even as to how to understand an education, to understand the principles of the decoration and how to operate them. So that's how that's my long story of how I got started on this, I learned an enormous amount at the Air Force Academy as a young professor and stayed there for 18 years, learning from my military colleagues, my civilian colleagues, visiting faculty from the State Department and CIA, learned from the cadets about this reflective patriotism as an educator about America.
Wow, that's great. So and Middlebury just happened upon these folks by chance that when you went to Middlebury. Middlebury is very good school, so you went there because it was good reputation, but not necessarily to study history or politics with these folks. I knew it was good at Middlebury's college and had good, you know, history and I wasn't sure it was a history major, philosophy major, it was Catholic, you know, it was not a Catholic college, but I could study blended subjects that are sort of the tinnestic Catholic, you know, approach of blending philosophy and faith.
And I had neighbors, friends, who had the parents and the children had been at Middlebury and they strongly recommended I apply and I think they may have helped, you know, to take this fairly New York High School, public high school student from up here and give me a chance. So that's the and then, you know, speaking of immigrants, legal Strauss, right? And I taught, there's another thing I taught for 18 years at the Air Force Academy. Strauss, in that same course, I started with Berkheiser as the warm up as the warm up actor Plato as Berkheiser called it.
The course, the last thing we read was Leo Strauss's essay on liberal education and responsibility. That's fantastic. Which is a blend of some talks that Strauss had given that was published later. I've ended many a class that way and I'll just say, you know, this is July for our July 4th episode and I've been amazed in my life, you know, your experience sort of ringed through to me that some of the most openly patriotic people I've met in my life have been immigrants, people who have fled somewhere and come here.
I was nominated my parents are American, but I did grow up in Berlin, Germany, West Berlin during the Cold War. And even that experience also just like I think a lot of times I meet sort of sophisticated academics, I actually don't love this country. It's always from a lack like they just don't have they have no real awareness of what it's like other places. It just kind of blows my mind.
I'm like, have you ever been to these other places where you think about one small anecdote and then we'll move on? I remember one of my friends was saying, you know, we've treated minorities terribly in this country. And of course, there's some truth to that. But I said, look, it's really hard to treat minorities well.
Like, it's not something that a lot of countries have done well. And she was going on and on how bad America was. I said, well, that's a name of country that has a better history of with the treaty minorities. And she said, Germany, and I just thought, well, I guess if you found one 10 year period, and treat their own.
I was like, okay. So anyway, it's just a straw like this country, your family, 11th country. I work the Ashbrook Center, which for a long time was directed by a guy named Peter Schran, who's Hungarian and fled here. So just the patients has a lot of immigrants is great.
So anyway, Schran was a great American. Back in the day, I taught in the Ashbrook Center in the summer. Oh, it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. I learned a lot from Peter Schran.
Yes. Well, I should mention among the influences of my life in Korea, my wife, Susan, the my wife, Susan at Oxford University, an American, but she had been born in South Africa and her parents brought her here as a baby. And then in Oxford, she's studying cultural social anthropology with a focus on Africa. And when we're first married, we go to South Africa for a year to do her field research.
I teach in a small college there. So then later, when we're parents, and I'm oh, Savannah from the efforts of the African students, assisted, I apply for Fulbright Fellowship, and I applied to teach at the University of Delhi in India. Oh, wow. Having lived on the edge of Europe, so to speak, had written a graduate student and then taught in Africa, taught in India as a professor.
I take your point very directly. You know, America doesn't have to be perfect to be worthy of respect as regard and gratitude and to have this kind of reflective argumentative, thoughtful patriotism about it, especially if you've had a little experience elsewhere. And the same is true also of some of our sort of luminary figures, like even Washington far from perfect, but really, really very impressive with a set of impressive virtues. And trying to correct the failings of the necessary ugly compromises of the decoration, as I tried to correct it in his last Mac, that last one, and the Testament.
Yeah. So we usually end with some lightning round questions, but George Washington, that seems undignified and it's funny. One sort of, I was going to ask you, you know, you said he's huge, I was going to ask you how much you get better expressed, but we'll leave that aside. But you mentioned he has 900 books in his library, and they're not all about agriculture.
He did a couple surprising volumes in his library, once that he wouldn't, or like even shocking ones. I mean, maybe there's not just something like that, but just sort of some oddities that I've got library that you might not expect. Maybe there's nothing here, but I was curious. I'll mention one at least that he, and this reflects the spirit of Montesquieu in a way.
Books were not easy things to come by, they're expensive, and he was very careful with money. This is why he could attempt to bankrupt his estate by mass-making slaves the end of his life. He has a copy of Grosius of the Rights of War and Peace in that library. And you could say in a way Grosius' work is written for the enlightened statesman.
Montesquieu refers to it. The idea of the just war tradition brought into an early modern period, and this should guide statesman about whether to fight a war, and what's the justification for a war, and then how to conduct a war. The updated version of medieval just war, there it is, on Washington's bookshop. I mean, that's a coffee table book.
I should do more research on that. What evidence do we have that he actually dipped into it? But the fact that it's there, that's a striking example. Well, it's July 4th.
Folks, if you don't, it's my tradition to read the Declaration of of July 4th, so I hope you do that as well. Professor Carice has also given us a lot of other ideas to read. We should read Marshall's book on Washington. We should read this biography by Burke Heiser called Founding Father, We Discovering George Washington.
Is that right? Correct. And of course, Professor Carice himself has written a chapter on Washington in the book called The History of American Political Thought by Eddied by Frost and Sickening. And you can also keep your eyes open for a book coming out soon from Professor Carice called Teaching America, Reflective Patreicism.
It's been a pleasure. Folks, happy 4th of July. Go out and celebrate the blessings of Liberty. But don't forget to like, rate, and subscribe to the show as well.
That's something you're also free to do. We'll see you next week on The New Think Ring.