His Excellency: George Washington

welcome to books of our time produced by the massachusetts school of law and seen nationwide today we shall discuss a book in the life of George Washington entitled his excellency the author is one of the great historians of our time Joseph Ellis who was thought by many to be the expert on the lives of the founding fathers his book on Thomas Jefferson called American Sphinx won the 1997 National Book Award and his book entitled founding brothers when the 2001 Pulitzer Prize he was generous enough in 2001 to agree to be the very first guest ever interviewed on books of our time an interview that was taped shortly before he was awarded the Pulitzer and Joe I hope that there will be another Pulitzer for your book on Washington and I would make both to say that there will be if there is any justice and I ladies and gentlemen I'm Lawrence R velvel the dean of the massachusetts school of law and the regular host of books of our time joe thank you for coming down and given the absence of justice in this world I've worried about what might happen but if there were any justice you would get another Pulitzer Prize in my judge Oh Larry thank you for those kind comments it's really great to be back with you it really is thank you Joe explain why the book is entitled his Excellency and the derivation of the phrase his Excellency a couple of reasons I seem to be an aficionado of two-word titles you know passionate sage American Sphinx founding brothers passionate sage being about John John Adams yeah and so I guess I'm committed to two words and these two words are appropriate because His Excellency is what they called Washington once he was made commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in 1775 it's an it's an attempt to indicate that he is above all others though his Excellency is not quite his majesty His Majesty is minar kacal and and and this is a republic we're founding and he needs to be a Republican leader but he is a singular figure and the first person to not use the term but to use it in writing is a reasonably famous black poet named Phyllis Wheatley - Phyllis Wheatley goes to visit Washington at the encampment outside of Boston in 1775 meets him and gives him this poem which is then published throughout the country called his excellency and and it's the term that is used even when he's president a lot of people still refer to him not as mr. president right but as his excellency and so it suits my two words and it actually is what they called okay okay there's another two words darn good Joe let me ask you a long and involved question which if you had time to look over the outline you were you're aware I'm gonna ask it's long and involved but it's designed to produce information that's perhaps of the essence of Washington and of what you think about Washington now you say early in the book that what has become a little passe to study Washington among historians they they dismiss him as an imperialist a racist as being elitist as being patriarchal the deadest wettest male the deadest whitest male and at that you seem to take a far more balanced view of them you obviously are well aware of his drawbacks or deficiencies of one wishes to call him that you eat me well aware of his strengths and you present a very balanced picture of him and and yet even though you draw a balanced picture one could get the impression from your book I got the impression from your book that in terms of today what we think today what we've thought since 1960 or 1970 he was not really a very likable guy he was a latest he was deeply worried about took actions to swage the worried about his own economics and his own finances he was authoritarian he was a somewhat sick of Fanta stored the British early in his career one could say he was grasping he ambitious yes extremely ambitious so what do you see I don't know if you agree with any or all of that or some of it but what's your general ideas about what I did what is suppose it sounds like we're Porter's question of the long speech haha but what are your general ideas on these senses I've written about a lot of the founders and I would say that Benjamin Franklin was wiser than Washington Hamilton was more brilliant Jefferson was more intellectually sophisticated Adams was more engaging and introspective he's the one you'd want to have a beer with you wouldn't want to have a beer with Washington you wouldn't talk to you very much Madison was more politically astute the Washington was still the greatest and they would all agree to that all of the people I just mentioned would acknowledge that Washington was the greatest and in some sense what I call the founding esteem all I think that no fifty years ago or said the Great British essayist Alfred Lord North Whitehead said that if in in debate on the basis of his judgment there are only two moments in world history when the political elite of an emerging nation performed about as well as anyone could have expected one was Rome under Caesar Augustus and the other was the United States under this group called the founders I agree with that so I begin with the assumption that this is the most politically creative moment in American history within that understanding though each of these people is a human being mm-hmm and the it seems to me there are two mistakes you can make they're the exact opposite in trying to understand Washington and the founders the one is to canonize to mystify and mythologized them and there's a natural tendency to do that or at least there was within the academy as you say the OP the exact opposite trend obtains now if you were a doctoral student at Harvard or Yale and said he wanted to write your dissertation on Washington's presidency you'd be committing professional suicide and Washington and the founders are often perceived as the you know instigators of races and classes and imperialism patriarchy and all the evils of the world I think these are mirror images of each other these two interpretive postures and both of them are cartoons and I think the distinguishing feature of much is the best work done on the founders over the last 15 years and there's been the surge of interest in readers too especially some of these books have done very well thank God your house education and my child's education depends on this um is that flawed greatness flawed greatness in which it's almost like when we're young and we look at our fathers or our parents we first of all regard them as all all-powerful and omniscient and then we go through a phase at least my children went through a phase where we could do no right yeah your soui generis nobody else ever went through that ha ha ha and but then you should be able to reach a more balanced perspective and understand your parents as as fellow human beings who whose flaws aren't the the only way to define them and yet who are not who are not Saints and then I think we've reached that point now with regard to the founders so in the case of Washington he was avaricious about land he had a huge ego he he's not the kind of person you'd want to work for he you know it was demanding beyond any any sensible level and and all that beside the point because he's the greatest leader in American history his judgment proved impeccable in all the big ways and we wouldn't be sitting here today he's the only person that was indispensable in the revolutionary generation you can imagine replacing all the others with what if but it's difficult to imagine the revolution succeeding and the United States becoming a viable nation without Washington there yeah yeah Joe being a lawyer I've been trained in specifics you know and I'm not just characteristic to be sure let me go through some of the things that you said that would be considered less desirable in our today you talked about his avarice for land right being what one such thing his great demandingness of his staff being another thing all that that you know a lot of people are very demanding today well another thing like his commander in chief war even in his early days as a military officer in the French and Indian War if you deserted or fell asleep on sentry duty he had no compunction about stringing you up right in other words people were begged for mercy and he'd say tough yeah you know he's he's a tough taskmaster and there's a kind of line in his mind if you cross that line there's no mercy for you and when John went when major Andre the British spy and who who was implicated with the Benedict Arnold attempt to take West Point all these people said please let Andre off because he's a good British gentleman and said no and then they said well let's shoot him rather than hang him he wants to be shot no he's a spy he hangs and he hung yeah so there's this you know there's um and while he does reach everyone was the way an honorable man honorable man wanted to be firing squad be killed the firing squad rather than at the gallows Hamilton pleaded with him at that moment to do that and even though he gets to the right place in the end on slavery he's going to disappoint you if you come to him with a 21st century expectation of racial justice and he dies and at the time of his death he owns 319 slaves so there's a lot of things about them that aren't going to fit neatly in some sort of modern sensibility all right right you've covered most of the specifics there there's one other thing which I mentioned to my wife and she was really shocked and I wonder what you think about it do you think that he married for money the notion of marrying for love is essentially a modern idea and and it doesn't always work by the way no and I think that the Indians and the Pakistanis it may have a much better idea but Washington was probably in love with another woman named Sally Fairfax who happened to be married to his best friend George William Fairfax he married Martha Custis Dandridge who was a widow who was the wealthiest Widow in Virginia at the time yeah so she was the prize but I think that making decisions about marriage in economic terms was more the rule than the exception back then and they did have a very good marriage and she visited him at every winter encampment during the war didn't have to that was dangerous to do that and although they destroyed she destroyed all of their letters it saved three I believe so we don't have the same picture of their relationship that we say have of Abigail and John Adams it seems reasonably clear that they have a warm and affectionate relationship and it's not a marriage that is just a convenience on either side yeah yeah Joe he did on the other say well let me ask it this way I got the impression I'm not sure I wasn't yeah you intended to give this impression I don't know one way or the other but I got the impression that he changed dramatically during the Revolution itself in a lot of ways is that true and if so in what ways I think up until the Revolution he's a soldier in the French and in war he's comes from pretty far back in the pack he's not to the manor born his his family's been in Virginia for five generations but he doesn't really inherit an estate or any money he's got to make it on his own then he marries Martha as we said he becomes one of the major Tidewater planters at Mount Vernon and builds Mount Vernon into the estate that it is now and begins to build up his his property and his slave population but he's he's a typical planter and you know he's fox hunting he loves to fox hunt he loves to go to Annapolis to the horse races he's not a tremendous public figure of any sort he's trying to aspire to be one of the leading members of that kind of Virginia political era planner elite with the coming of the Revolution as he steps forward in 1775 to become commander-in-chief of the Continental Army it's the beginning of a transformation in him in part because of the enormous responsibilities that land on him and in part because of the experience he has he's you know he's never been he's only been out of Virginia once before in his life he went to Barbados when he's a young boy he catches the smallpox down there by the way and that's one of the reasons he's always immune to smallpox yeah some people say he's immune to everything but as he's as the war goes on and it's a long war seven and a half year experience you know I think he's exposed to opinions and to people that he hasn't seen before that's when you can see him beginning to raise questions about slavery for example and begin to have serious doubts about whether or not slavery is compatible with the goals of the American Revolution and that's certainly when he begins to think of himself not just as a provincial Virginian but as some sort of national and even international figure and he begins to see himself as a person who's if this revolution succeeds going to be the subject of an interview with Larry the Vela on this program 200 some years later nice to know George was thinking good well he is he's in some sense we're the audience for which he was / for yeah he's performing for posterity you know somebody wants that what does posterity ever done for me but but he he you know he's not sure whether there's such a thing as heaven and life after death and the traditional Christian sense and therefore living on in the memory of future generations is his most secure form of immortality and he becomes committed to that during the revolution and in that sense everything he does after that is part of a of a attempt to fit that role model and the man in some sense starts to become a kind of Monument and though he always remains a human being obviously he's he's he's very concerned with how he appears and what posterity will say about Joe how I think even McCullough made the same point about Johnny Adams rather extensively and you may have also I don't know how did people like Adams in Washington come to the opinion that if this revolution succeeded they would be remembered for hundreds of years forever even mostly by reading Roman and Greek history and the Plutarch's lives Cato's letters and seeing that in the classical world the founders of those two ancient states you know become major historical presences but you're right Adams as almost as much as Washington is obsessed with his own fame and in 1776 he writes a letter to Abigail you know before the Declaration of Independence and says Adams does Adams write student Abigail buy a leather binder save every letter I write yeah and so if this succeeds if this thing succeeds right towns mountains lakes are going to be named after me and he's right you know we have North Adams Massachusetts and they've got Mount Adams and the White Mountains yeah so and Washington is equivalently obsessed with this in fact in the midst of the war when they can't find money for food or you know forms or ammunition Washington requests and receives permission to have ten clerks assigned to transcribe all of his wartime correspondence they come up in Poughkeepsie New York yeah yeah and devote over a year and a half to two years to transcribe all so that they will be the record of his achievement during the Revolution yeah yeah you know I uh sort of funny but I have a cousin well we are equally the sons or grandsons of a Russian Jewish poverty-stricken immigrants II married into the Adams family you know but a generations ha ha ha ha it's kind of funny one thing that you don't see much of in today's day and age I've seen one person in my life who had what you call the gift of silence personally I think it's the trick of silence but you know one can dispute it and you mentioned that and just for the items that's when somebody says something to you and you're expected to say something back and you just sit there and stare at them and you don't say your thing and it makes people uncomfortable and you get a lot of what you want if you just can keep your mouth closed which is a very hard thing to do because you know the nature of hordes of a vacuums and silences he explained how he used the gift of silence and his physical size in his and in getting ahead in life I'll take the physical size first but they sort of go together when Washington entered a room he was a commanding presence and he was six three and a half that's what they they measured his body after he died for his coffin yeah and he was six three and a half and two hundred and two pounds the average American or Britain male at that time is five seven two five eight yeah so he's a head taller than everybody else yeah John Adams said that we always picked Washington to lead us whenever we gathered is because he was always the tallest man in the room yeah he also it's not so different than today now but there are certain tall people that are clumsy and efficient if you did a purely physical description of Washington you had to norm hands and big hips and it could sound off almost like an oath you know but in motion he was like a dancer he was a great dancer he was a great horseman he was a natural athlete he was sort of like John Wayne circa 1939 and stagecoach you know yeah and he's a kind of an action hero almost and so he he commands the space around him in a way that is that is extraordinarily powerful and in fact there's one scene at the Constitutional Convention it could be apocryphal though you'll see it in a lot of the history books where Alexander Hamilton says to another delegate governor Morris to go up to Washington put your your hand on his shoulder and say how you doin George because nobody does that and so Morris goes up to him and does that and Washington just takes his hand off of his shoulders and looks at him doesn't say anything and it's like frozen and but the gift of silence and Adams talks about Washington's gift of sounds which he's so much appreciated because he was incapable of it himself right at some point Washington understood that his own stature and his own significance was such that if he kept silent people would read into him now most like a Rorschach test what they themselves wanted and so when he's chairing the Constitutional Convention throughout the summer of 1787 he never says anything except at the very end he had as the debate at the very end just to get on the record he he knows he has a elemental sense of human nature and he's accustomed to commanding space and to being the person who will have the final say so therefore he doesn't need to enter the debate the debate goes on around him his aides his cabinet and then after it's over he decides and and it's a it's a style of leadership that only certain kind of people are capable of but he was a true master of that yeah yeah we have to take a break you know it would be two entirely too political so I will not ask the obvious question like what presidents if any of modern times do you think have had similar styles of leadership in any way shape or form but that's very political so we'll just take a break now all right stay with us we'll be right back with Joseph Ellis Massachusetts School of Law offers opportunity to persons who would otherwise be frozen out of law schools and the legal profession when making admissions decisions MSL looks at all aspects of the candidates academic and work histories and does not consider the L SAT we also make Law School affordable tuition that is only half or less of most other New England law schools MSL seating and standards are rigorous our students learn to analyze deeply to write well and to speak fluently as lawyers they compete on equal terms with graduates of any other school they also use their training in business government and other fields an education in MSL can put you on the road to a better professional and business life for information about mSL's full-time and part-time programs call us at nine seven eight six eight 108 hundred or write us at five hundred Federal Street and over mass oh one eight 104 for 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discussions on important topics welcome back Joe in the book you make it clear that Washington's passions is his passionate nature his aggressive character that these things had a lot to do with the way he conducted himself self-control being one of them and with the way he conducted at least initially the Revolutionary War and his presidency and in short some of this of what he did as a policy or political or military matter will psychologically determined almost could you lean a little bit of that you're a good reader of the book Larry um instead of being a kind of granite monument that you know like the one thing we see on Mount Rushmore Washington as a human being had a temper he had vaulting ambitions he could mean when he lost his temper and as president or as a general on several occasions people just you know real because it is volcanic yeah in the war his own temperament initially gets him into serious trouble and almost loses the war Washington thinks of war can I make a point that's important I want to really emphasize that almost loses the war in the first year and a half we're lucky he's lucky he's lucky that hey he has General Howe against it yeah yeah yeah because Washington conceives of battle as a summons to the battlefield that has an honor a quality to it he conceives of the Continental Army as the projection of himself and therefore if the British present themselves he must he must do battle and he's also very proud and says I George Washington can defeat the enemy on the basis of sheer well the Continental Army is no match for the British Army the British Army has an average time of service of seven years the Continental Army has an average time of service of six months you know it's it's ravaged by smallpox it's got all kinds of problems and so Washington decision to defend New York and fight in the battles of Long Island and Manhattan proves to be a total disaster and debacle the Continental Army starts out at 12,000 at the beginning of the bell by the end of the battle it's 3,000 yeah deaths desertions wounded and by three or four thousand captured three thousand captured at Fort Washington and George Washington himself is fleeing across New York down into New Jersey and the war could have very well been over at that stage if Howe had pursued Washington's army one thing we might want to say to the audience is that there's a woman in New York named Loring mrs. Loring and she's married to an American and with Sun clear whether she's a British tourist a Tory or a patriot but how wants to spend the winter with mrs. Lory yeah and somewhere we ought to put a statue miss mrs. Laura because if how hadn't done that if he hadn't pursued Washington's army it's almost certain that the word this is the time the first embedded journalist Tom Paine says these are the times that try men's souls and they truly were and it takes a while for Washington to figure out an elemental thing he loses a lot of battles he loses more battles than any successful general in American history but he doesn't lose the war yeah yeah and think about you know Lee was a great general Napoleon great general Hannibal great general they all lose the war yeah Washington isn't that good a tactician but he comes to an elemental strategic insight he doesn't have to win yep the British have to win yep and if he can sustain the Continental Army and avoid annihilation of the Continental Army yep the eventually the British will decide it's not worth continuing and that's pretty much what happens and that's an elemental insight it's called a Fabian strategy after the Britta the Roman general Lucius Quintus Fabius in the peloton in the Punic Wars who it's it's quasi guerrilla tactics it's not quite guerrilla cuz he's got a regular conventional army there but it's a recognition that the strategic center of the rebellion well what we might call the insurgency yeah isn't a place it's not Boston it's not Philadelphia it's not Charleston they capture all those places not New York the strategic center of the rebellion is the Continental Army eventually give up we don't we don't we only win the American Revolution right it's the British decide to go leave yeah and they have a lot invested in this war and that you know that what the the war that's most comparable is the Vietnam War only the British are the Americans in this particular case and the Americans are like the Vietnamese and the British really come to the conclusion early on that this war must be won for a reason akin to the domino theory right if we lose North America we lose the Caribbean if we lose the Caribbean we lose Ireland if we lose our little lose India yeah and it's this notion that everything is at stake and therefore they're willing to spend enormous amounts of money and resources and they have a delivery system if you will a banking system a logistical system a military profession that's much more sophisticated than anything that the United States has one of the things that I got out of the research in this book is how unbelievably fortunate the United States was because the states often refused to meet their quotas in terms of money or troops there's a hard core of three to four thousand young men who served for the duration and a significant portion of them are African Americans right right about 15 percent it's the it's the last war in which African Americans sir alongside whites not in segregated units until the Korean War yep yeah that's an amazing thing but not somehow that's a fact that's been hidden in America right right and that's and it's also one of the reasons Washington starts think differently about slavery he's commanding a lot of African American troops that are fighting bravely yep but these three or four thousand guys aren't representative Americans they're ex-slaves they're indentured servants they're recently arrived are Irish or Scottish immigrants their fourth sons that don't have any inheritance they're not yeoman farmer types and they won the war any it's as simple as if they hadn't stayed together and been the nucleus the Continental Army probably would have dissolved and I can't understand why they did it because they didn't get anything for it the pensions that were promised them were never paid they starved throughout most of the workers they weren't provided with food on any kind of regular basis they were in rags when the British army marched out at Yorktown they laughed at the Continental Army yeah because they look like a bunch of ragamuffins didn't he play something called the world turned upside down they say that we're not sure that really happened there's different sources on that and the British commander didn't want to turn his sword over to Washington and wanted to give it to Rochambeau the French commander instead because they were embarrassed at losing to this these these these people that look like they were just you know bums yeah and and yet this is the group that won the war and that story hasn't been told to pee I mean Washington won the war by being the commander in chief that stayed the course for seven and a half years but these guys at the core of the army the sort what he calls the soldiery and he said it at the end of the war he said if someone ever tries to write the history of this they will be accused of writing fiction because no one will believe that a group of poor young men ill-clad ill sustained themselves for this long and the long against a much superior force and they did so Washington gives them credit hey Joe it is everyth us this is not armies in democracies as elsewhere who come from the economically lowest stratum of the society well that was true in the British Army too and it's true in the French army during the linking of the Napoleonic Wars and Larry I'm afraid it's it's not true and I mean it's somewhat true now the all-volunteer army is not representative of middle-class American society troubles me it troubles me very much straightly and was true in Vietnam absolutely absolutely although the draft then you know leveled the playing field to some extent though most middle-class American boys could get out of it but we've set up a system that essentially perpetuates what was the old you know medieval and early modern notion of the Army as a group of people that are the the bottom of society yeah yeah and another thing that people don't know that I would I would venture Joe then that one American in a hundred thousand knows that 15 percent of the Corps that won the war was African American right and I would venture that even a smaller percentage knows that african-americans played a great role in the building of the capital oh they were the major labor force a major labor yeah and Washington oversaw that the the decision to put the capital there is an interesting story I've told in another in the founding brothers book but one of the things that happens when Washington retires from the presidency is that remember Mount Vernon's only like 11 miles from the District of Columbia so he supervises the construction he goes over there it's almost like his urban plantation to oversee that but that most all of the labor is done by African Americans or Irish immigrants yeah yeah the other thing that I find very interesting was that in believing in this domino theory we wasn't called the domino theory in those days no that's what it was the British government continued this war until the pup apparently the populace finally got sick of it and they continued it because as you say they thought they would lose the Caribbean they lose Canada they lose Ireland they enjoy and what happened instead was that in the 19th century of about 1820 on there the dominant Empire of the world yeah the most dominant Empire in the world and I think that's a matter of extreme relevance because if you ask me at least this is political when it's only one man's view I think we became more dominant than ever after Vietnam well maybe in both instances I think it's certainly true with regard to Britain it's not not enough time has passed for us to say whether we can applies to the United States and its empire Britain learned some painful lessons in the in the American Revolution and one of the lessons they learn is that they cannot insist upon imposing a coercive form of Imperial Authority and therefore they developed the notion that comes comes to be in the course of the 19th century of the Commonwealth where you have a lot of autonomy permitted in places like India now there's some coercive things that happen in India too I don't want to belittle that but they recognize that a more indirect and oblique form of Imperial control works much better and and they do become the great hegemonic power of 19th and early 20th century so instead of being the end as they feared the American Revolution sort of is is something as a foundation for learning there like the United States and Vietnam they're a newly arrived world power in the late 18th century they don't know how to do this yeah yeah and and they're learning on the job and I think that that you know that in the 19th century they they begin to perfect him it is amazing when you read about Britain in the 19th century and you know literally the Sun never set on the British Empire it was just quite amazing Joe explain how Washington happened to be centrally involved in the great events of the revolution starting with the convention in Philadelphia and you know the army and then afterwards the Constitutional Convention and then becoming president why is it how did it come to pass that Washington was always selected for the lead role in these things well I think it follows naturally from I think that the tough question is why did he get selected to be commander-in-chief of the Continental Army because once that happens and everything else follows from that yeah and he wins the war he's the American military hero of the war he is and as a and as a he becomes the symbol of the American nation a nation it doesn't have any kind of coherent identity yet it's you know that it's a confederation rather than a whole nation majestic question I'm sorry to get to it but there's something I wanted to get how is it that Washington knew early on that war was a real possibility before he ever became the military commander right he goes to the Philadelphia Convention in May of 1775 wearing his military uniform okay yeah Lexington and Concord have just happened in April of that year 75 but the formal declaration of war is over a year away we don't get the Declaration of Independence till July of 76 but Washington is reading the newspapers and he concludes that once blood is shed there's no going back and that while some while the bulk of people in the convention the constant in the Continental Congress are looking for some conciliatory posture Washington along with Adams says there's not you know there's not gonna be any conciliation on this and and he steps forward as the prospective commander-in-chief and his chosen part because he's so tall yeah but he's a Virginian they need a Virginian to head this because the war is going on up in New England in Boston that's the and they need a Virginian because they need someone in the same way that's the same reason that Adams picks Jefferson to write the Declaration the New Englanders want to make sure that they get Virginians involved in this mm-hmm once once he's picked and throughout the Boston encampment they sustained the fiction that there's not a war going on mm-hmm now Bunker Hill has happened yeah you know a thousand British soldiers have been killed in a couple of hours and they say that this is not the Kings troops we are fighting these are ministerial troops okay you want to separate the King from this as if George the third eventually is going to see the error of his ways and we're going to be able to reconcile meanwhile George third is over there preparing to send 36,000 troops over to New York and it's crushed this thing yeah a lot of people and a lot of people once and it wants Washington's in that role and once he successfully wins the war then he is the singular figure and he goes into retirement and now stepping away from power something we'll talk about at lunch I'm sure right but he goes into retirement and he repeats the same pattern with the Constitutional Convention they say you need to be the chair of the Constitutional Convention he says no no no no no no no okay yeah I only will do this if it's a unanimous choice then the same thing with the presidency he is the only person ever to be unanimously elected to the presidency and it happens twice it's almost like a crowning it's almost like a you know laying the claim the the the crown around his head and so that and if you asked him what the basis of Israel fame was he wouldn't say the presidency he sees the presidency as a sequel as an epilogue yeah yeah the great thing was the Revolution to revoke the war and and that's success and a cause which at the time well everybody thinks it's inevitable now that we would have won the war but at the time it was highly improv he sort of pulls this off in a way that perhaps no one else could have done yeah you know yep Joe we have to take a break when we come back we will discuss both his exits and the difference between the spirit of 76 in the spirit of 87 which seemed both of which seemed to be vital matters in the life of Washington and indeed in the life of the country unto this day and still there yeah yeah stay with us we'll be right back with the third segment of our show with Joseph Ellis against the tide is a page-turning account of the creation in early years of the Massachusetts School of Law written by journalist Debbie Hagen against the tide tells of efforts by students themselves with the help of only a few professors to start a law school for persons from the working class it describes the efforts of competitors and politicians to destroy this working-class school including a competitor's attempt to burn it down it tells of the efforts by the legal establishment of this country of prevent a working class law school from succeeding the book describes how these efforts were made by a national Bar Association by federal judges and by state Supreme Court judges outside of New England and against the tide tells how the Massachusetts School of Law overcame all this become a successful now seventeen year old institution with nearly 2,000 graduates some of the people whose efforts are describe them against the tide are persons you see regularly on mSL's public service television programs they include Diane Sullivan Michael Coyne and Lawrence velvel against the tide has been highly praised by leading American writers university administrators and politicians including professor Howard Zinn Michael Parente senator Eugene McCarthy governor Thomas salmon and the president of Temple University readers have said it is a page turning account that they could not put down to obtain a copy of against the tide by Debbie Hagen contact the publisher the University Press of America 4501 Forbes Boulevard suite 200 LAN ham Maryland - oh seven oh six at 800 for six to six for 200 or at its website or contact the Massachusetts School of Law at five hundred Federal Street Andover Mass oh one eight one oh nine 78681 Oh 8 hundred part their website w WM s law edu so you have made the point that there was a major difference which carries on to this day between the spirit of 76 and the spirit of 89 and that Washington in fact had a lot to do with both right why don't you elaborate on all of this I'll do my best it's a big question and there are two founding moments and they don't always agree with each other in terms of the values underlying them there is there is the moment when we declare our independence and there is a moment when we declare our nationhood the document of the first founding is the Declaration the document of the second founding is the Constitution right if you read the Declaration you should notice that there's very few kind things to be said about government in the Declaration right right it's a rejection of George the 3rd and it's an establishment of a set of basic principles which Jefferson call self-evident truths but it is suspicious of any form of consolidated political power whether that power would be in London or whether that power would be in nowadays in Washington DC right it has a kind of libertarian ethos to it but it's it puts any form of direct government power on the permanent defensive it's a it's a child of the Enlightenment ISM it is it is it believes as Jefferson believed that there's a natural law out there and that once you get rid of the evil institutions that have been blocking the natural flow as Diderot once said it once you have the last Kings strangled with the entrails of the last priests then things will flow harmoniously in the same way that Adam Smith's markets will flow harmoniously and that government is minimal government minimal governor at all but the fear of any government that comes from far away because if you have governments that are far away then these people connive and conspire inside the corridors of power and they they you know that's what they did in sorry to me yeah yeah yeah and what it's about H Ross Perot said all those people wearing those alligator shoes walking around in the Congress and the spirit of 87 89 is different it says that we must have a federal government that has the power to make laws for all the people to oversee the foreign policy and it it essentially is a statement that says that federal power and state power have to keep working out their own relationship it's not a clear statement of federal sovereignty over domestic policy if it were it wouldn't have gotten past or ratified how did they turn around like that in its in 11 years well in part because the country was going to hell in a handbasket throughout the 1780s Washington from the beginning thought that we needed to have a sovereign federal government from the beginning of you know from the time of his retirement because he had seen what happened to the Continental Army because the Continental Congress was not empowered to overrule the states when the states refused to meet their quotas for men or for taxes so he believed if we didn't create some sort of strong central government we would eventually dissolve into a series of regional sovereignties a New England would be like Scandinavia and the South would be like the Mediterranean and then the European powers would pick us off yeah that's that's what he'd be in a Britain is hovering on the out there in France is looking to get back and so Washington is a nationalist and Washington sees the American Revolution as latent nationalist movement Jefferson believes that's not true Jefferson says we came together in the Continental Congress in the Continental Army during the war for an emergency to fight the British to win our independence but once we get our independence we should go back to being a series of states with only a loose confederation to bind us together yeah so I mean in some sense what will happen over the next few years in Iraq will be an interesting you know the American model is don't try to nationalize everything right away they took them you know some time before they could move towards the Constitutional Convention and and there was a strong anti federalists group in the ratifying conventions that opposed this you know somebody said at the end of the civil war that the epitaph of the south is died of states rights you know you were you were making the point that the same Battle of 1790 to 1800 was fought out in the Civil War and is still going on today between a strong central government and the more rights developing back to the right ones I mean I think that one tradition leads you to a very sees the individual is sovereign and the state as the sovereign unit in the in this equation and it leads you to if you carry it out to its to its logical conclusion it leads you're anarchy yeah and the other one lead you to a form of socialism yeah it leads you to and if you carry it out to its extent it becomes totalitarianism so it's and it's the mix of those two essentially what we've been doing is having an argument for 200 years about these traditions in which no one tradition is completely triumphant yeah I mean the the role of the court in the 20th century is you know does give federal jurisdiction a certain amount of real power to conserve and ultimately the the place that's going to resolve all issues that are otherwise unresolvable but even in the court now is you know better than I you know that we're seeing a return of power to the new federalism of general yeah without getting into it because it's it's a little far afield but it seems to me based on the recent history we've got the same problem I have had the same problem what used to be known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the Balkans in Iraq and people are talking about it now in Syria and elsewhere it's always this problem of how much power goes to the center how much power does not go to the center remains on the outskirts I mean in the same way that the only thing that was holding Yugoslavia together other than the personality of Tito was the Russian yeah the Russian Empire yeah and then when you take that away all of a sudden all the ethnic you I mean I I think that the only thing that was holding the America together was the British Empire you know and when you take it away yeah they you know they break up now they're not all ethnic differences in quite the same way you might find in Iraq or Syria or Yugoslavia but they're really you know people didn't the word American was an epithet mmm think about this people didn't say I'm an American they said I'm a I'm a New Englander or I'm a Virginian and the word American took a while for it to become a favorable term to into the early 19th century because the American was the term a British person used to talk about some provincial American some you know some hick from out there in the province Joe in the time remaining to us we have about six or seven minutes left let's first discuss Washington's exits because you may avoid that he was the absolute master of exits tell what exits he he engaged in and how he came to the idea that this is what he should do he is as I say in the book and aficionado of exits and there are two big ones one is when he steps away from power at the end of the Revolutionary War this is in 1783 and there is a conspiracy inside his army to try to make him the Emperor and then March 1 the Congress in Philadelphia and demand their pensions and some sort of land and return for their service because they know they're not going to get anything and otherwise and Washington refuses that and he gives the famous speech at Newburgh without all kids ought to read he actually wrote this speech himself but at the end of it he it's at the beginning of the end it's not clear he pulls a pair of glasses out of his breast pocket nobody has ever seen him wear glasses before and he says gentlemen you must oblige me but I have grown blind as well as gray and service to my country and everybody starts to cry yeah and the end that's the end of the conspiracy but then he goes down to Baltimore where the Congress is temporarily meeting to surrender his sword and this is a big ceremony and there's a dance you know and the witness says the ladies were lined up in rows to get a touch of him yeah to get a touch of him and then at the end of the dance the horses are waiting at the door he's gone you know like the man who's run the army is the singular most important figure in America is going back to being a normal farmer it's the Cincinnatus role Cincinnatus the Roman general who goes you know it's the thing about swords into plowshares and and so and and and George the third was surprised by an American artist Benjamin West that Washington intended to step away from power and George the third said if he does that he will be the greatest man in the world and later on in in in Napoleon's career when Napoleon was as exiled in st. Helena yeah people always used to sort of say how come you didn't do the same thing George Washington and it really is to upset the public you know because this is the example because Caesar hadn't done it Cromwell hadn't done it Napoleon would not do it Lenin wouldn't do it Stalin wouldn't do it now wouldn't do it now Castro the one guy that's done it in the 20th century is Nelson Mandela this walked away from power and and he does the same thing at the end of the presidency establishing the two-term precedent which now is sanctioned by constitutional amendment as of 1951 but to me the greater exit is the one at the end of the revolution because at the end of the presidency he really wants he wants to get away he wants to get back to Mount Vernon he thinks he doesn't have much time left and he wants to have some time with with with Martha yeah yeah I you know that Newburgh thing which is a very moving episode and you say he salted the audience with his his staff so that there would be applause and so forth at the right time right right he's he and he's a master he's a he's a dramatic figure I mean he you know he has a sense of drama and but he has a sense of preparation he's got his eleven aides to camp going out there making sure that the audience responds in the proper way there's five hundred people in the audience five hundred officers in the kondal army and it's one building yeah and he wants to be sure that that no one group starts to sort of yell at took leave of them at a place in New York which I gather still exists called Fraunces Tavern right right right and it's a it's their famous paintings were prints of that where they stand together and are weeping this is you know this is the central event in all their lives another and they've been together for all these years and and now they're going their separate ways yeah Joe we have one minute left in the one minute that remains to us explain how Washington thought and he course proved very right that the future of America lay not an involvement in the affairs of Europe but in the West she says this pretty clearly in the farewell address partly it's his own experience as a young man as a surveyor in what they call the Ohio country the land west of the Alleghenies and Washington thinks that the business of the 19th century or the next 100 years he's going to be the consolidation of the continent no his his what's the name of one of his European friends asks him to to take a grand tour of Europe and he says no we'll take a grand tour we'll go to Detroit and we'll go to New Orleans and we'll go to Florida he thinks the West is the future for America in some sense it's a little bit of Frederick Jackson Turner here a kind of a sense that that's where the future lay and that's where the values of the newly formed United States will be able to flourish most easily well we have to end let let me say that of course he proved exactly right and we did not have what is called an imperial America until the frontier ran out in in the 1890s then we got the spanish-american war and so on so you could say it's domestic Imperial so yes you could yes because of what happened with you we didn't get to I was very interesting to Washington and his relationships with the Indian tribe well yeah Joe thank you very much for coming down I really appreciate it my pleasure till the audience be with us again next time for the next program on books of our time thank you for being with us

Channel: Dan Harayda

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Length: 59min 50sec (3590 seconds)

Published: Sun May 06 2012