#443 - “Freemason TRUTH!” - #1 US Historian on LOST History, Ben Franklin & Washington | HW Brands

A

I was just telling you off camera, your bibliography is absolutely insane. I don't know where you get the time to write all these books.

B

Well, when you do it, when you've been doing it for a while, the time adds up. But actually the biggest trick, if there's a trick, is that I like to write. There are a lot of writers who like to have written, but the actual act of writing sometimes causes them to think for excuses why they shouldn't. And I just, I still like doing it. And so if I have 15 minutes, I'll sit down and write a paragraph.

A

Yeah, by the way, if you just pull that mic in a little bit. But it's very cool when you meet people who have clearly lived out their dream of doing the things they love to do the most. What always amazes me though, is when I meet people like you who also find time to do other things. And too, like, you've been, as far as I know, you've been a professor

B

for decades now too. Well, I get to do the two things that I like most.

A

You love that too.

B

And in fact, I consider my writing an extension of my teaching. So the target audience for my writing is the students in my classes at the University of Texas, who are mostly non history students, but 35 or 40 or 50 years later, because at the age of 20, most people are not particularly interested in history, but they get more interest in history the more history of their own they've got. And so I think about who they will be 40 years from now, 30 years from now, and those are the ones I'm aiming at.

A

That's. I've never heard someone explain it like that before. That's pretty cool. Because when you're, when you're writing down the written word literally, I mean, we can all look at history from a thousand years ago, 2,000 years ago, and see the people who captured what happens and how much of that still shapes how human beings think today. I gotta think when you have a bibliography of like 42 books that cover basically, for all intents and purposes, the entire history as we know it of America to this point, you're gonna be a dude they look back on and they go, wow, this guy HW Brands, was cooking on what was really happening with this little experiment we had.

B

Well, I hope what you say is true, but I gotta tell you that my experience at the University of Texas, which I think is characteristic Utah used to have an entire library devoted to undergraduates. And these are books that the undergraduates had used commonly in their classwork. They discovered about 20 years ago that that library wasn't getting much use because students weren't going to the library and use the books. So they cleared out all the books and they turned it into office space. Even the main library, which is still mostly books, every time I go, they've moved more books off site, so to warehouses. Now this is partly because more books are available online than was the case before, but it's, it's a, a period when people are consulting books less often than they did. I've had this theory for about the last 20 years that we're at the beginning of the end of the age of literacy. And so the age of literacy, really, really sort of general literature literacy began when Gutenberg vented his movable press. And so for the first time, books were something that ordinary people could hope to buy. Before then, it was just a small slice of the elite because books are expensive, right? So we've been writing for common people and reading by common people about 600 years or so. But we're now at a stage where it's quite possible to get pretty much all the information, information you need about the world without reading much. You can see it. There's video, there's audio. You have to read enough to be able to read a stop sign or something like that, or headlines of newspapers help. But in terms of consulting books, it's very possible to get through life these days without reading books. And people do it. So, yeah, I used to think that, boy, it would be a great thing to leave behind. My epitaph would be, I just say, you know, go to the library and read my books. But now I go to the library, and in my own library, that is at the University of Texas, they're not all there, they're off in a warehouse somewhere. So that's the way things go.

A

Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Do you think part of that is just us still? Learning is almost like an infantile era of learning how to interface with tech. And there will be some sort of potential reversion to the mean, if you will, to where people will be able to 30, 40, 50 years from now consume tech where it's useful, video, audio, whatever other mediums they come up with, but also see the value in the written word and kind of go back to that, if you will.

B

There will be people who do that, but those people will be like scholars who still wrote and read In Latin a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire. And so Isaac Newton's famous book, Principia Mathematica, the one that put forward the theory of universal gravitation, it was written in Latin, and there were people. And by writing it in Latin, he made very clear, I'm writing this for this very specialized audience. Ordinary people had to wait for the translation. The reason, I think that it won't be much broader than that is that writing. Excuse me, reading. Reading is something you have to learn. Speaking and understanding spoken speech is something that we absorb from the time we're two months old until three years old. And we're pretty good at it. But everybody has to learn how to read. And reading is. It still is. Even if you do it a lot, it's still an act in deciphering. And so if you and I are communicating face to face, that's more natural, easier than if I write something down and you read it. So, I mean, the big advantage of writing, of course, is it you can freeze speech and you can save it for later, and you can send it across the world in a way. You can't accept that now. Now that we have various kind of digital technologies, you know, I can send a video. You can send a video across the world and it can be preserved. Although that is a big question for historians like me. I deal in documents that are hundreds and hundreds, centuries old. And I'm confident in doing it because archivists over the last 500 years have learned how to preserve paper. I don't know if you guys are comfortable knowing how long the stuff that you produce is going to be around, because the media, the technologies, the formats change all the time. I've lost the manuscript, the equivalent of manuscripts of my first books, because they were on floppy disks, and I never got around to putting them on hard disks. And then in the cloud, I remember those things, and they're gone forever as a rest, you can't.

A

But there's not something you can buy off Amazon and, like, plug that in.

B

No. Because the originals are gone. I don't know where they are. They're in a landfill somewhere.

A

Oh, they're literally not.

B

Yeah, yeah. I don't even have them.

A

Like the guy that lost his Bitcoin in 2011.

B

Well, so there was a thing like that having to do with the presidency and history of Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson was a president who, unlike many of his predecessors, didn't put stuff down on paper. And I did a lot of research on Johnson in the LBJ library. In Austin. And if you go searching for Johnson in his library, you hardly see him. You see the papers, the memos that were sent to Johnson, but the stuff that comes out from Johnson had, in fact, they had a special format for materials that Johnson would see and hit three boxes. On the last page, the memos had to be no more than one and a half pages. And on the third, on the second page there would be I accept yes, no. And in each box he would put this script, l for Lyndon. And then last one was see me because now I need to have more information. And so people were writing biographies of Lyndon Johnson, not aware that there was another trove of information. Johnson had tape recorded his telephone conversations. Now, historians knew that Johnson had operated by telephone, but it was assumed that once the calls ended up, it's gone, but Johnson had recorded it. And so if you read a biography of Lyndon Johnson that was published before 2000, you miss a whole lot of Johnson, because the historians had not found that. More precisely, the keepers of the Johnson record, the archivists at the LBJ library hadn't told the world that this exists. But finally they did open and all of a sudden you see more Johnson. But when they finally got around to opening it, they discovered that it was recorded on Dictaphone. You maybe don't know what Dictaphone was, I don't know what that is, but it was a voice activated recording system. And so a guy at his office, a president in his office, would start talking on the phone and the recording would kick in. But the technology had been surpassed and bypassed and it was gone. And so when the archivist tried to figure out how they could access these Dictaphone tapes, they looked all around and there weren't any Dictaphone machines around. Finally they found the last one in the Smithsonian in Washington. It was in a museum of technology, but if not for that, this would still be lost.

A

And that's. And you're talking about a guy, you said, pre 2000, basically, those books. So that's a guy who wasn't even dead for three decades at that point and you don't even have a record. That's insane. How much do you think about with history, how much percentage we've just lost and we'll never know?

B

I think about it all the time because there are a lot of people that I would be inclined to write about that I can't write about because there's no record on it. Now, this is why, I guess historical novelists exist because they can imagine it and then they can write down their imagination. But I'm a historian. I stick to the facts. And if I don't have the facts, if I don't have the evidence, I got nothing to write. And so I have. I've developed this rule of thumb, and that is that you can write about extraordinary people in ordinary times because they're extraordinary enough that people pay attention to them. And if somebody met Benjamin Franklin on the streets of Philadelphia in 1776, they would go home and they'd quickly write to their friends and record in their journal, I met Dr. Franklin today, and they record it. And somebody would save that for history. But actually, Franklin's a good example, because when I wrote a biography of Franklin, I had all the coverage I needed. I had way too much coverage for the last 30 years of Franklin's life, because he was famous. He was world famous, and everybody kept the letters that he wrote, and everything that he put his hand to or his pen to still survives. But for his first 30 years, he's essentially anonymous. And so there's nothing. I mean, I have to take his word for what his childhood was like, because that's the only source. So you can write about an extraordinary person like Franklin in his whole life because people pay attention, and you can write about ordinary people in extraordinary times. I wrote a book about the California gold rush. And when people dropped what they were doing in New York or in Pennsylvania or in France or in Chile and headed for California, they knew they were off on a grand adventure of their lives. And so they kept a record of it, and they would write a journal, or they would write letters home. And people, when they got the letters, they would realize this is a big deal in the life of my brother, my son, my husband, whatever it might be, and they would save them. And so I could go to various libraries around the country and around the world and find those letters. But the thing is, I couldn't find the context for this adventure in these lives, because there was nothing before they headed off to California. They were just ordinary people in ordinary times. And ordinary people in ordinary times don't keep records. Or if they keep records themselves, nobody saves them because they figure this is ordinary, not worth saving. But they. In the window of time when they were heading off to California, and in California, I've got full coverage of them. But then if they leave California or they settle down and life becomes normal, they just dropped off my radar screen. So I wrote this book that was an ensemble story of about a dozen people who hear the news of gold in California. They come from all over the world and I trace their paths. And because they're traveling and they're keeping these journals. By the way, journal comes from the same word as journey. So this is what you keep on a journey.

A

Wait, I actually never knew that.

B

That's crazy. Yeah.

A

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B

I sent you so you. So you get this coverage. But then. And so I bring them to California and I really had to sort of orchestrate the whole thing so they would. This episode is brought to you by Starbucks.

A

That is fire. Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one too. I'm rocking with it.

B

Okay, try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours. Arrive And I didn't realize this when I picked these individuals, but some of them actually met each other in California. But then, but then they sometimes go back where they came from to Australia or to China or wherever it was and they're gone. And when I write about people in my books, I like to let my readers know what happened to them. You know, and typically, I mean, I'll spend a lot of time on this particular portion of their lives, but then I'll say he went on to do da da da da and died in such and such. But for some of these guys, I have no idea what happened. Just gone.

A

You get what you do have though, I would imagine when you're writing about. Let's go back to the Ben Franklin example, because that's one person. You get really attached to these people, whether you like them or not.

B

Oh yeah. So I'll give you a couple, two examples here. So I wrote a biography of Benjamin Franklin. I wrote a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. And both of them were very interesting individuals and very writable in their own way. Franklin was very engaging. And in fact, I did get attached to Franklin. Franklin himself, in his Persona as poor Richard, said that fish and guests stink after four days. But he was my companion for four years and he didn't stink at all. He was great. In fact, I will confess, I mean, I try to keep an emotional distance from the subjects that I write about. I don't want to become a fan, right. I just want to be able to tell their story to the extent that I can. I try to let them tell their story. But in the case of Franklin, he kind of drew me in. He, he was always saying wise things and he had a great sense of humor, which is something you either don't find in history or the humor of the past doesn't translate to the present very well. What used to be funny isn't funny anymore. But with Franklin, I became sort of attached to him. And I can still remember drafting the paragraph where he dies. And I got misty eyed because here's a sort of a friend, this, a guy that I came to admire. He's dying. But also I realized, okay, now my time with Franklin is done and that chapter of my life is over. Now Theodore Roosevelt was a different story. Roosevelt was very much more sort of cinemagnatographic. He was somebody. Well, as he liked to say that, you know, there's no reason not to shout if there's any excuse to. And another thing he said was he did recognize the distinction between Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, when he was President of the United States. And by virtue of that, he had everybody's attention. So he didn't have to speak loudly. He could just speak in a normal voice or in the equivalent. But when he wasn't president, he didn't automatically have the attention of everybody. He said, that's when I shout. But Roosevelt was somebody I admired kind of from afar, but he was somebody who, when you were in the same room with him, he was just too much. And his daughter said, if you want to understand my father, you have to remember that he's got to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. And. And so he lived actually a quarter century less time than Benjamin Franklin. Franklin lived 84. And I was sorry Franklin died at 84. When Theodore Roosevelt died at 60, I was happy he died because he was wearing me out. If he hadn't died, then I would have had to kill him off.

A

Oh, my God. Yeah, I don't. That's a whole different ball game too. When you're dealing with someone where as you go about it, I would imagine you're learning more of these things, obviously what he was really like and what the people around him thought. And then you're kind of like, man, I set off on this journey to do a biography because I admired someone. And now I'm like, all right, where's the clock going here? Time to run it out, you know? Yeah, yeah, that's crazy. But with Ben Franklin, I'm a little biased here because I'm from South Jersey by Philly. But I always thought Ben Franklin was the greatest founding father of them all, just because he was so unique in the sense that obviously he was this scientist, this polymath. To be clear, he was. He was so good at so many different things. He was self made. He had come to Philadelphia, I think, when he was 17 or 18 after basically like having to leave home and built this whole life for himself. But then was also this international deal maker that later not only came in handy for the United States during the war, but literally helped decide the war by him being over in France and making the deal. I mean, am I crazy to think he might be the greatest American?

B

Julian, I would have agreed with you until last week when a book on George Washington that I wrote was published on flogging that. So Washington's my guy. No, as a matter of fact, I think there's probably consensus that there were two individuals who were pretty much indispensable to the way the American Revolution turned out and Washington handled things on the Military side, you got to have a general. General has to know what he's doing. But Franklin held down the diplomatic side, which was just as important because the U.S. the new U.S. needed the help of France. And Franklin was the one who was going to get it. And Franklin got it by means beyond what most diplomats would have been able to pull off. There eventually came a point when it was in the national interest of France to support the American project. But before then, Franklin, when the king of France was very suspicious of this idea of overthrowing kings. That's not a good idea. It might end badly for even a French king, as of course, it did in the French Revolution. So Franklin had to rely on his charm. And he was a very charming individual. He was just. He had a good sense of humor, he was a raconteur, and he knew how to appeal to people. And there are stories of Franklin and Franklin's great success with the ladies. And these stories, all circum. They are concentrated on his time in Paris and they greatly exaggerate the reality. But the reason they do is that Franklin was his best PR guy because he was the one circulating the stories. And the reason he did was he knew that this would make him charming to the people in France, that he had to charm in order to get them to write their checks to the United States. And so Franklin is in his mid-70s by the time he gets to France, early-70s and mid-70s during the time he's there. And so he's this charming guy. And everybody thinks that Franklin has all these love affairs. And so this really appeals to French men who could imagine, well, when I'm 70, I can have the same luck with the ladies. And it appealed to the women of Paris because he is this world famous guy. In fact, sometimes I pose this hypothetical question. If there had never been a revolution, which of the founding fathers would the world would we have ever heard of? And the only one we can say for sure is Franklin, because he had a world reputation before the revolution began. But for the others, George Washington, he was a planter in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, he was a sort of politician. But there would have been no Declaration of Independence, so he certainly wouldn't have written that. But with Franklin, he already had this reputation. And so when Franklin would come around and flirt with the ladies in Paris, oh, that's very charming.

A

So he did still flirt.

B

Oh, he did. There's no question. And he did fall in love. So he had two women that he was particularly associated with. Attached to one was a much younger woman, young enough to be his daughter or younger than that. And this was one where she just sort of teased him along. She liked him and he played along with it. And he would shamelessly flirt with her right in front of her husband standing there. And so he knew that was not going anywhere. So it was really safe for them to play that game. And it was a game that they did play. There was a woman, a widow, who was maybe 20 years younger than Franklin, and he fell in love with her. But she, having been married for a long time and now, free from marriage and having economic means of her own, wasn't about to get married again. So she actually had a number of wooers. And one of them made Franklin think, well, he might really be the one. Because this other guy, Franklin was in his 70s, this other guy was in his 90s. And this woman, she went by Madame Helvetius, and she used to entertain her guests, her male guests in her boudoir, and sometimes she. Her bedroom. And so sometimes she would just come in from the bath, and she would come in with her bathrobe on, but not tied up. And this older guy, the guy in his 90s, was sitting there one time when she walks in from the bath that way, and he looked at her and he said, oh, to be 70 again.

A

So basically what you're telling me is Ben Franklin was his own personal tmz, and that's part of the reason we were able to make very important diplomatic deals to the United States.

B

Yes. Well, I won't say that's the only reason. It helped a lot that Washington's army eventually won a big battle at Saratoga, because that's what caused the French government, in particular the French King Louis xvi, to say, okay, I'll take a chance on these Americans. So Franklin could play it both ways. He could play it diplomatically, he could play it in the salons of Paris. So his partner in Paris for a time was John Adams. John Adams was a Puritan by upbringing and sort of pretty much a Puritan by temperament his whole life. And Adams was one of these people, one of these people who ironically took to heart Franklin's advice, again, in the Persona of poor Richard of early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. So Adams made a point of getting into the office of the embassy, called a ministry in those days, in the office of the embassy at 7 o' clock in the morning and start in at the work, doing the old work. And Franklin would stroll in at noon or after, and Adams would get so upset, thinking he was doing all the important work of the American mission in Paris, but not understanding what Franklin did. Understand that the important connections, the important impressions, the important decisions were made at the parties at 2 o' clock in the morning, not in the office at 8 o' clock in the morning.

A

Different culture.

B

I would say we could probably learn something from that.

A

I think so. But for people who don't, you know, like you said, we know a lot about the last 30 years of Ben Franklin's life, and I'm sure we're going to talk about that more. But for people who don't know how Ben Franklin came to be like, you also said you had to rely on how he tells it. What was he just born with? Something different, though, to make him a literal genius in so many different things, or were there certain parts of his education we don't know. We don't really know, like, as much about that. Maybe he had access to that other people didn't.

B

Franklin was really bright, there's no question about that. In his autobiography, he says that he can't remember a time when he didn't know how to read. Now, there are two ways of interpreting that. One is he's got a lousy memory. But I know that he doesn't because of all the other stuff that he remembered. So he must have learned to read very young. I actually. I recite this to my students and I asked them if they can remember when they didn't know how to read. And most people can, because I remember when my father was reading bedtime stories to me and I couldn't read themselves. I could look on the page, but I actually couldn't decipher it yet. So there was that. So he was clearly smart. On the other hand, it wasn't something that was. It didn't run in the family. He had more than a dozen siblings, and none of them went on to particular renown or anything like that. It helped him a lot that he was born toward the end of that line of 15 kids because it caused him to learn a lot of social skills he wouldn't have learned otherwise. He learned, for example, that if you're always putting yourself forward, if you always present to the world that you've got the best idea, you annoy people after a while, even if it is the best idea. And he certainly learned this around the house when his older brothers would say, well, you might be smart, but shut up and sit down on here, we're going to beat you up. And they probably did. And so he had social skills that were really important. And here's an unusual secret to his success. He had very little formal schooling. So he had, you could sum it up maybe two years in school, that's it, until he was about the equivalent of third grade. But it got too expensive. There was no free schooling in those days and his father had to raise all these other kids. So he pulled Franklin out of school with the result of this, that Franklin, having learned how to read at an early age, decided or realized that he would have to teach himself. And I've been in education long enough to know that one of the things that students learn in schools and in college is not just what you need to know, but all the stuff you don't need to know. I mean, it comes down to that trite question, is it going to be on the test? And if it's not on the test, then you don't have to know it. And so students learn this what they don't have to know. Franklin never had the advantage of being in that situation. So he kind of assumed he needed to know everything. And so Franklin is an early example of polymath, somebody who is interested in nearly everything. And it helped his case in that regard that he lived at a time when science, because he was a world class scientist, when science wasn't so specialized as it would become. And so nowadays if somebody decides, I want to learn high energy physics, it's pretty hard to teach yourself that and to start writing articles for academic journals without having gone through at least the exposure to the labs in universities and places like that. But in Franklin's day, you could make the experimental equipment fairly easily and so, or you could have it made. So he had a glassblower friend who would make the things he needed when he needed glass and stuff like that. But it was a great time for him. It helped a lot too that he was a kid who grew up on the equivalent of the frontier, the frontier of an empire. So he was a city kid his whole life. He grew up in Boston and then became an adult in Philadelphia and then basically migrated for the middle 30 years of his life to London. But the fact that he was from Boston and Philadelphia, from North America, which was the frontier of the British Empire, meant that he could test himself out sort of in the equivalent of the farm leagues in baseball. He didn't have to just jump right into the major leagues because if he had, it would have been a lot harder, a lot harder to get noticed. But he could build his skills, his knowledge, his reputation in the equivalent of AA baseball, then triple A baseball. And then when he did get to the majors in London, by then he really was up to speed with everybody.

A

Well, actually, there's a question I haven't thought about before. When you were growing up in pre revolution america in the 18th century, obviously, we know it's well documented throughout a lot of history that there's a clear class structure society in the uk, Great Britain, and you know, you're born into royalty or the area is right below it and things like that. If you're not in it, you're not in it. But in the United States, pre war, were people, was it, I don't want to say common, but more possible for people to, I don't know, switch between class structures and get themselves into the types of crowds of, say, visiting British dignitaries from the upper classes and be accepted by those people because they were

B

colonists most definitely within limits. And it depended on which colony you lived in. So Franklin was born in Boston, and Boston had wealthy merchants, but you could become a wealthy merchant by starting out as a relatively poor merchant and making a lot of money. And so there wasn't the class structure there. Some of that reflected the Puritan views, the religious views of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts, where they didn't acknowledge a class. If you were good in the eyes of God, then you were good in the eyes of everybody. And so it helped a lot if you're of the right denomination. So there was that there was religious distinction, but there was very little in the way of class distinction. It still was case. Some people had money and some people didn't, but there wasn't any. When people met each other on the street, it wasn't this person had to step off the curb into the street and walk around. And they'd all worship at the same churches, same meeting houses. So it helped Franklin a lot that he was born there. If he had been born in Virginia, it would have been a very different thing. And here. So this new book that I've got on George Washington, the beginning of the book, is all about the class structure in Virginia. And so George Washington was born into what they called the gentry. This is what passes in America for aristocracy in the United. In America, there were almost no really titled aristocrats. There's no earl of this or duke of that. There were some minor aristocrats who had hereditary titles that would come over. And George Washington got associated with the Fairfax family, for whom Fairfax, Virginia is named. He became friends with some of them, but it's clear that he was of this upper class. But he was at the lower end of the upper class, and that one was a harder wall to get through. And in Washington's case, and this is different from Franklin's, in Washington's case, he made his mark in the world as a soldier, and he was really good as a soldier. There are some people who simply have that gift, and he did. And he found himself serving alongside British officers. He's a Virginia officer serving alongside British officers in the French and Indian War. And one of the ways you discover how good you are is you measure yourself against people who have established reputations. And the reputation of British soldiers and British officers was they were the class of the world because they had the best, they had the biggest empire, and they fought all sorts of wars everywhere. And so Franklin measured himself against them in a couple of crucial battles. He did a lot better than they did. And so he thought, boy, if there's any fairness in this world, I ought to be promoted from the colonial ranks into the ranks of the British Army. That was a big step up. It was like moving into the big leagues. But his efforts in that direction were foiled. The British commander in chief in North America said no. And there were political reasons why he didn't. There were some social reasons as well. There was clear snobbery on the part of the British regarding these people they considered provincials. These are the hicks from the countryside.

A

Is that at the end of the French and Indian War, to be clear,

B

it's actually in the middle of the

A

French, in the middle of it, that he gets stopped.

B

Yeah. And so Washington is all of a sudden thinking, my God, I've hit this ceiling in America. I'm sorry, excuse me, I've hit this ceiling in America as long as America is part of the British Empire. And maybe if America. I mean, he probably doesn't formulate this explicitly in his head, but it does gradually occur to him that if we take the ceiling off by removing the British overlordship of America, then there's no limit to what I can accomplish. But back to your question about the classes. So there were classes in Virginia. There weren't classes so much in Boston by any means. Philadelphia is a little bit in the middle and in the middle geographically, but Philadelphia is a very open city. And one of the striking things about Philadelphia was its tolerance for all sorts of things, starting with tolerance for different religious beliefs, but also tolerance for different ways of life. And so if you were somebody who felt constrained by the neighborhood you grew up and the expectations of people around you, then you'd run Away from Boston and land in Philadelphia, which is exactly what Franklin did. Yeah.

A

Wasn't he, like, if I remember correctly, wasn't he trying to get away from an apprenticeship contract he had with his brother?

B

Yes. Yeah. So when Franklin's father took him out of school, he said, okay, the kid's got to learn something to support himself. I don't want to be supporting him his whole life.

A

Taking him out at, like, 8 years old.

B

Well, almost. They were usually a little bit older than that. So Franklin was. He actually was tried out as a silversmith, and he probably would have been good at that, but he didn't particularly like the guy he was apprenticed to, and so he turned his back on that. His father really wanted him to come into the family business, which was. Is candle making. But candle making, those days, you start with a dead cow, and you boil it down, and you take off the fat and you make it into candles.

A

That's how they did wine.

B

That's how they did it. And they're tallow candles and tallows is the rendered fat of the cows and pigs. And you can probably imagine if you've ever walked behind a restaurant on a hot summer day, what this smells like. It just stinks. And people who work in candle. Who worked in Candleworks, they would come home with the smell in their clothes, with the smell in their hair, with the smell on their skin. I guess it's worth a reminder. In those days, people didn't bathe every day. You couldn't come home and take a shower. There were no showers.

A

I think about this a lot.

B

Okay, well, this is indoor work and no heavy lifting. Yeah. So Franklin decided not to do that. And so his father finally put him into an apprenticeship with an elder brother. So there were lots of kids in the family, and so this was the kind of thing you could do, is his elder brother James is nine years old. And Ben. And here's a dynamic. I don't know if you have siblings or where you are.

A

I'm an only child.

B

Okay, well, then you won't. You won't. You will not appreciate this. I'm one of four. I'm the third of four. My two older siblings are sisters. My younger one is a brother. And when you are in a sibling relationship, and if you're the older sibling, in this case, James Franklin vis a vis Ben Franklin. So James Franklin was a fully conscious kid of 9 or 10 years old when Ben Franklin is born. So James Franklin thinks of Ben Franklin as this baby. And babies are often annoying. I mean, sometimes they Seem cute, but eventually they get annoying, especially if they tag around behind you and do all this stuff and babies. So James, Frank. Oh, and you also, in the eyes of the baby, in the eyes of the kid who's nine years younger than you, you're a God. Because you can do everything. And you know, a little toddler can't run fast, can't do anything, and they don't get to stay out late and do all this other stuff. By the way, I speak as a father of children in which there's a gap between the second and the last. And the youngest was he's 10 years younger than his next sibling and he always felt deprived because his older brother could do these things that he couldn't. I say, well, Your older brother's 17 years old, you're 7, you can't do that, you're a dunk. But anyway, so James lives most of his life thinking that he's just better than Ben in everything. Because when you're that much older, you are better. You can run faster, you're better in sports, you can read better, you can write better, you can do all this other stuff. But here's what happens when you have siblings, that the difference in age, the effective difference in age between a 12 year old and a 3 year old might as well be infinite. But then when you get to be 20 and 11, the gap is closing. When you get to be 29 and 20, then if that 20 year old is pretty bright, well, I'll go back to Ben Franken. When you're 16 and your brother is 25, the gap had closed, right? And if you're the older sibling, it's as though the world is being turned upside down because you're used to this idea that you are the senior member of this relationship because you're better, you're the older brother. But when you get in a professional relationship, because James was a printer and Ben was really good at the stuff you have to do to be a printer. So when James realizes that his younger brother is better at being a printer than he is, then he finds all sorts of ways to get into denial about it. And one of the things he starts a new newspaper, but he prevents, he forbids Ben Franklin to write for the newspaper.

A

Is this when Ben was doing the silence do good thing?

B

Exactly, Exactly. So Ben, who's beginning to want to write and learn to write, originally proposes some things for the paper under his own name. And James says, forget it, forget it. You're the apprentice. You sweep the floor. You know, you don't get to write for the paper. Meanwhile, James, with this new paper is soliciting contributions from everybody that he knows because he needs more people to write for the paper. So Ben gets this idea, well, I'm going to write for the paper, but I'm not going to tell James I'm doing it. And he cooks up this assumed personality and it's very far removed from teenage Ben Franklin. It's this middle aged woman that he calls Silence Dogood. Now it was very common in those days for people to write under assumed names. So James didn't think there was actors, actually somebody whose last name was Dogood, first name Silence. But this was clearly a woman because the stories that she told, well, you had to be a middle aged woman to be able to tell these kinds of stories. By the way, I have to add here that when you asked about Benjamin Franklin being the greatest American in this regard, I would say yes, because, and I will confess that biographers, at least this biographer, at some point, we sort of measure ourselves to some degree against our subjects and say, okay, how did he do that? Could I do that? And when I was writing about, I wrote about Lyndon Johnson as president, okay. And this is before I wrote on Franklin. And I could. I mean, I realized there are things that require political expertise to do. I didn't know the protocols of passing legislation in the Senate and Johnson was a master of that. So I don't even bother to try to compare myself to that. But when Johnson is making an argument for escalation in Vietnam in the 1960s, I was alive at the time and I could sort of look at the evidence and say, well, Lyndon, did you really think of this sort of thing? So he wasn't really. I didn't feel as though I was entirely out of my depth. But when I got to Ben Franklin, who at the age of 16, this 16 year old guy who creates this Persona of this woman who's 40 years old and had all the tragic and melodramatic experiences. She lost a husband in a storm at sea, he was washed overboard and all this stuff. And I thought if he could pull that off and make people believe it, I could never do that. And so it was really a very liberating moment for the biographer because I no longer had to, you know, silently resent that he might be better than me. Oh, he is. Okay, fine, go ahead and be as

A

good as you that long to figure it out. You had to get to that point

B

to realize, well, he's only 16. I think I was, I was in chapter two.

A

So.

B

And I had lots of chapters to go.

A

Do we have any idea where the hell that came from? Like where he had the ability to find the voice of a 40 year old middle aged woman when he was 16.

B

He was an extremely keen observer. And you encounter this very often in novelists and playwrights because what they're trying to do is tap human experience, human imagination. And what Franklin was doing was writing fiction at this point. Now, he never got close to writing a novel, but these were novelistic contributions to the paper. And I should add here that James Franklin was delighted to receive these letters because Franklin would. Ben Franklin would write them. And on Sunday nights he would slip them under the door of the print shop and James would get there in the morning and open the place up. And here is a contribution from Silence Doogat.

A

He didn't recognize his handwriting.

B

He was able to disguise his handwriting in some way. That's so yeah, he was good at that kind of thing.

A

I try to disguise the handwriting on the whiteboard with Jimmy and every time it doesn't work, that's actually like really hard.

B

And so James would come in and he'd read, oh my gosh, this is great. Who's this science dogood? And he didn't know. But in order to encourage her to continue to write, he wrote a letter in his newspapers called the New England Courant. He wrote a letter in the front page of the newspaper saying, dear silence Goode, keep sending this stuff. And so Frank, Benjamin Franklin's over here at the side sweeping up the floor like he's supposed to and hearing James boast to his buddies on the other side of the shop about this great Silence Newgood and what a wonderful person she is. And he's so glad that she's writing for the paper. And this goes on for, I think it's about 10 or 12 weeks, until finally Ben Franklin cannot resist saying, you idiot, this is me. I could have been writing for the paper all this time under my own name. And this led to fist fights in the shop. And Ben Franklin said, I'm not going to do what you tell me to do anymore. I'm better than you. And you may be my big brother and by law you may be my master, but forget it, you know.

A

Yeah, what was the law there with the apprenticeship? You sign yourself over.

B

So the father, because Ben Franklin is a minor, he can't sign contracts himself. But the father signs a contract with James Franklin apprenticing Ben, the minor son to James as the master. And the deal is that the master provides living for the apprentice and provides training in a worthwhile skill. And Ben is apprenticed till probably he's going to be 21, at which point the deal is that the master has to supply some tools of the trade and recommendations so that this guy can go out and be a printer on his own. So he's an apprentice, and the next step is a journeyman, and then he becomes a master. But Ben sort of wanted to short circuit this because, hey, I'm as good as you are now. But at this time, it's as much. He has had enough taking orders from his older brother. And so they get in a fight. They finally decide that they're going to appeal to the father. Josiah Franklin is the name, and they're both going to present their case. And they do. And Josiah sides with James and said, Ben, you gotta do what he says until you're of age. And it's at this point that Ben decides that he's going to get out of town, he's going to flee. He's breaking law to do so. And so he has to do it surreptitiously. And what he does is he arranges. Now, Boston is a seaport. It was a seaport. Still is. But especially if it was a seaport, it was the ocean that linked Boston to the other parts of the colonies, primarily because the wilderness was still kind of wild. And if you traveled, especially if you traveled alone, you were subject to, you might be robbed. I mean, the reason that highwaymen were called highwaymen, people who would rob you on the highways, was that's where they would rob you. You. But if you're on a ship, it was easier.

A

So at the time, by the way, what are we talking population in Boston? 20, 30,000 people?

B

No more than that.

A

More than that.

B

No, no, I say no more than that.

A

No more than.

B

Yeah. So Philadelphia is the biggest city in the American colonies then, and its population might be 40, 45, 50,000. Yeah. So Boston's maybe half to two thirds of that size. And geographically, by the way, Boston looked very different then than it did now, because much of what now is downtown and near downtown Boston is infill, where they filled in various bays. And so the neighborhood of Back Bay used to actually be a bay, and they filled it in to build on it. So anyway, shout out to the Irish. Yeah. So Franklin sees all these ships that are sailing off, and some are going off to England, but some are just going down the coast. And so he figures he's going to make his getaway There. So he has a friend go to one of the ship's captains, and the ships are loading and taking, unloading stuff, taking cargo on, and then they'll be leaving pretty soon. And this friend of Franklin goes up to the ship's captain, who's. Who looks like a. A guy who's been around the block a few times. And this friend of Franklin says, sir, captain, I got a friend. And my friend has a problem. And the captain says, what's the friend's problem? Well, you see, he got a girl pregnant, and the father of the girl is insisting that he marry her. And he doesn't want to marry her. He's not in love with her, you know. And Franklin's friend looks at the captain and says, you know, maybe you understand this kind of thing. And the captain nods kind of sagely. Well, anyway, anyway, so my friend, he's got to get out of town. Anything you can help us with? And the captain kind of nods as though I understand. And he says, well, after dark tonight, have your friend come down and just quietly get on board the ship. And I'll be looking the other way. And he needs to stay below deck until we're a day or two out of harbor, and then he can come up and, well, people stow away. And what can I do about it? So this happens now. There was no pregnancy. There was no girlfriend. This was just a story he made. And it got him out of Boston and it took him to New York, which was where he expected to land. But when he got to New York, there were no jobs for printers. So he presented himself as a printer.

A

There were no jobs for printers?

B

Well, there were printers there, not very many, but none of them had jobs open. So he kept going to Pennsylvania and to Philadelphia. But he walked and he walked from

A

New York to Philly.

B

Yeah, he took a ferry across the Hudson.

A

My kind of guy.

B

Yeah. And he actually walked across New Jersey and got on the Delaware river and hitched a ride on boats that were going. There's a group of people who are rowing down the Delaware to Philadelphia. And so he's a strapping guy. He's a big, strong guy at the age of 17. And he says, if you'll take me on, I'll help row. And so he did. And so he rode his way down. And it was one of those strokes of good luck, because Franklin, at an age where he was questioning everything, he was questioning religion, he was questioning God, he was questioning the laws that bound him to his brother. He was questioning the Puritan orthodoxy that really clamped down on Boston that he landed in Philadelphia, which was the most open and most open minded city not only in America, but probably in the whole British Empire.

A

Why was that?

B

Because it was founded by Quakers who were radical dissenters from both political and religious orthodoxy in Britain. Now here's something, here's why the United States evolved differently from France and evolved differently from Mexico and all the countries of former formerly Spanish America. The British had this. It turned out to be an enlightened policy. And whether it was actually enlightened by design or just enlightened by accident, they let dissenters go out to their empire. In fact, they encourage dissenters leave. If you don't like it in England, go to America. And in fact they took this to the extreme of if you break the law in England, we will send you as a convict. Georgia, because Georgia was created originally as a penal colony.

A

Oh, that was like the new Australia.

B

Well, it was Australia before Australia. Australia was the new America. So Australia got founded after, after the American Revolution when Georgia's no longer accepting convicts from Britain because it's an independent state. And so that's when they go to Australia. So anyway, so because of this, because of this, the people who went out to America, they were independent minded people and furthermore, they didn't have to pass any orthodoxy test to go out there. In contrast, the French in Canada, the Spanish in Mexico and point south, they insisted on orthodoxy among the people they sent out with the result that the people, the orthodox people that got sent out, they usually kind of resented having been sent out because they were comfortable at home. And furthermore, not many of them volunteered to go. And so Canada was very lightly populated for many years simply because there weren't very many French people who wanted to go out to Canada. And the Spanish colonies in the Americas, from Mexico on south, they were never very heavily populated by people from Spain for precisely the same reason. But the English colonies in North America, they filled up because there were lots of dissenters and they had a place to go.

A

Dissenters and criminals. Like, what could possibly go wrong here to set up a future tete a tet.

B

Well, the thing that went wrong was what came to be called the American Revolution.

A

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's like they're like, yeah, we'll just send everyone who disagrees with us to this land far, far away. They will never cause a problem.

B

Right. And so there is that part of it, but the other part and the other reason, I mean the reason that the American Revolution succeeds and the America The United States of America becomes what it does. Is it filled up with people? Yes, because Canada never filled up with. I mean, say there were, of course, aboriginal people in all those places, but after the introduction of diseases from America, they were. They weren't very numerous. And so in order to increase the population, you had to attract people from Europe. And the United States filled up with people, whereas Canada didn't, and Mexico and Point south didn't either. And so that's one of the principal reasons of America's success.

A

Yeah. And by the time it was at the Revolution, they had what, like 2 million non slaves in America in the 13 colonies, something like that?

B

It was about 4 million. So it was about 4 million 4 and 4 million slaves. So it was about equal numbers.

A

Whoa. Oh, I didn't realize it was that high.

B

I should add. I should add there's a legacy of this, that the United States had this long history of immigration because there was heavy immigration into what would become America from the start. And even after independence, the states and the United States encouraged immigration because there was a lot of land and a lot of resources and we don't have enough hands to develop. So keep it coming. Whereas Canada was never by any means as attractive to immigrants, and neither were countries of South America. And so the reason the United States has this immigrant issue is that we have such a long history of immigration. It's what made us who we are in a degree that our northern neighbors and our other neighbors haven't experienced. In fact, there aren't many. I mean, there's really almost no other country on earth that has been so heavily dependent in its history for immigration into making it. The culture, the people that it became.

A

I can't. I can't think of one. Because when you look at it in areas. I'm going to oversimplify this right now, but you think, like, obviously build up to the revolution, so people from the empire coming over post revolution, you have some of that as well. Eventually, in the 1800s, you have a huge Irish basically like, wave coming in. And then you have the wave from everywhere in the late 19th century into the 20th century. And then eventually we have, like, people coming from South America, which is where we are now, like, more traditionally, if you will. It's like we've had every type of wave from it from all over the world, which I think is a really, really cool thing that people want to come here. But it's also like, there's never been an experiment like our country arguably ever done before.

B

And I'll add That there has always been tension between the people already here and the newcomers.

A

Yeah. You see the picture I have outside the studio?

B

No, I didn't.

A

So it's build a butcher gangs in New York.

B

Oh yeah, Natives. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, somebody as liberal minded as Benjamin Franklin in the 1740s and 50s was annoyed with German immigrants to Pennsylvania. But he was annoyed with them not because they came, but because they refused to adopt the ways of the English. Now this has always been one of the complaints against immigrants. They keep their old ways and they don't learn the language. What Franklin was complaining about was that the Germans came from. There was no Germany per se, but German speaking lands. They came to America, they settled in Pennsylvania and they'd settled in these closely constrained colonies and they would just act as though this was a town in Germany. And he said, well, this is no way to live because you're creating this foreign influence, this foreign entity within this province and that's not good for future unity. Oh, and by the way, they're not buying my English language newspapers and stuff like that. And so when he, when he lost that argument, he, he wanted the British government, the British colonial government to restrict immigration from Germany. But they didn't. They had their own reasons. Not. And so he decided, okay, well, I'm not going to stop it, so I guess I might as well go with it. And so instead of printing, trying to sell English language publications, he started publishing in German.

A

No.

B

Yeah.

A

Yeah, I didn't know that about him. That's. Wow. So he was doing multilingual publishing in Philly at the time?

B

Yeah.

A

How did he. So he was looking for a printing job like you said, in New York. There weren't jobs available there. That's how he ends up in Philly. Didn't he like make some sort of similar to an apprenticeship type deal with somebody to be able to get his foot in the door in the printing business?

B

So he, he became in effect a journeyman, which is, he's, he's not bound in the way an apprentice is, but he has a contract or an agreement. And the idea is he's a junior partner and he will work for a while. And what's the guy's name that he was working with? Well, there are various people in Pennsylvania. One was a guy named Keemer, but there were some others that he worked with. And so he would present himself as, okay, you know, I'm going to work and if I do good work, then maybe you'll promote me. But there was always the problem in fact, one of the people that he worked with, it was the same problem he had with his brother James, that he was better than his boss. And furthermore, now at this point, Franklin is realizing that he has to develop a reputation, and so he lets it be known in the community. So Philadelphia is now a large city, but in those days it was a large city only by comparison with what else existed. It was the equivalent of a medium or small, medium sized town today. So the business people in Philadelphia all knew each other and they knew, oh, there's this new young printer. And this is where Franklin decides as soon as possible he's going to go out on his own. And so he starts looking around for patrons. And one of the patrons is the colonial governor of Pennsylvania. And he makes. He impresses the guy with his diligence, with his imagination and so on. And this guy thinks, okay, I think I ought to support Ben Franklin in setting up a printing business. And in the back of his mind, or maybe it even came out in the front of his conversations with Franklin, Franklin will start up a newspaper and the newspaper will support me. Now, this was at a time when the idea of independent newspapers, independent news outlets, it was foreign thinking. No, you created a newspaper because you wanted to get a message across and it was your message. So he sponsors a trip by Franklin off to London, because you can't acquire printing press materials in America. They're not made in America. So you got to go to London to get it. So he goes off to London.

A

How old is he? 23.

B

He is maybe 21 or 22 at this point. And he's kind of engaged to be married before he goes because when he landed in Philadelphia, he had to find a place to live. And a guy named John Reed had a room to let. And this is the way people helped fill out the budget and so brought Ben Franklin in. And John Reed had a daughter, Deborah Reed, and they kind of hit it off. She was three years younger than Ben. And the father sees that the young man is very promising. He's talented, ambitious, he's trying to. The father's also trying to figure out what he's going to do with his daughter, because at 17, she certainly have marriageable age. And another year or two, she's probably getting to be toward a spinster. So he's happy with the match, the apparent match. But they're not going to do anything until he gets back from London because he's going to be gone for a while. And so Ben Franklin, as I say, there's this apparently Informal agreement that he and Debbie are going to be wed. And off he goes to London. And just as he found Philadelphia way more available in opportunity, way more willing to let someone of talent blossom than Boston had been, when he gets to London, his eyes open, he's, oh, my gosh, this is the greatest place ever.

A

Had he ever thought about the context of, like, living in America, but it's a part of the British Empire?

B

Or was this the first time? So he didn't think of himself as a Massachusetts man. He didn't think of himself as a Pennsylvanian. He didn't think of himself as an American. He thought of himself as an Englishman. An Englishman who lived in one of the outer provinces. Got it. And that in this case, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. And so for him to go to London was as natural as for talented kid who grows up in Tennessee to go to New York, because there are more opportunities in New York. And it wasn't going to a foreign country. It was going to his own country, the biggest city, the capital of his own country. And he got there and he thought, again, sort of like the stereotypical kid who arrives on the streets of New York, you know, and wow, look at all these people and all these. Everything going on. And so Franklin just fell in love with it. And he quickly lost contact with Debbie, who's back home in Philadelphia waiting on his letters. And he writes once or twice, and then he stops writing and he just

A

having a good time.

B

Yeah. And he had expected to be in London for maybe three months. Well, the trip over would take at least a month. A couple of months there and then a month back. So he may be home in four months or something. He does write Debbie and say, I'm probably not going to be back as soon as they thought. So the trip extends to three years. And so Debbie, meanwhile, what's the deal? Is he thinking of me? Are we still engaged? And she goes off and marries somebody else. And that story gets more complicated. But anyway, so he finally comes back, but he's had a wonderful time, all sorts of adventures. And he comes back. Well, one of the. Actually, the reason. The main reason that he stayed longer than he thought was he went over there with a letter of credit. And what it really meant was a physical letter that says, please provide this young man, Benjamin Franklin, with what he needs and I will pay you, signed the governor of Pennsylvania. And he got over there, and people read this letter and said, you, governor has no credit whatsoever. We're not selling anything. And so Franklin had essentially been. It's hard to know what the motives of the guy who sent him over were. He did want this new newspaper, but he must have known his credit wasn't any good. But he was kind of a big talker and hoped things would fall into place and they didn't hear. So Franklin, he didn't have the money to buy his passage back or to buy the printing materials that he wanted. So he went to work in London. And it was handy for him because London had more sophisticated printing facilities and techniques. And he learned a lot while he was there. And he made a good impression. Franklin was somebody who made good impressions on people. And so he did.

A

But eventually he was that because of his wit and charm.

B

Part of it was necessity. He's a poor kid, he has to make his way in the world. He can't rely on anybody else. He needs a job. And he was somebody who had a great deal. He was intelligent in scientific ways, but he was also very intelligent socially. So he could read a room, he could read you, and he could figure out what you wanted and what would persuade you to support him in the project that he has in mind. And he was charming with men, he was charming with women. He stayed in a house, had a housekeeper, a lady, she fell in love with him. And a lot of people just kind of fell in love with Frank. And he was very charming, lovable guy. He was a good looking guy, big, strong guy. So he's an impressive young man. But eventually he decides he's got to come back to Philadelphia because he is seeing in London a bit of the class structure that he hadn't seen in America. Because as charming as he might be, as talented as he might be, he's still a kid from the hicks. And there were those groups in London that would say, sorry, you're not part of us. So he goes back and he sets up his. He acquires the. The Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper. And he's going to make something of it, but he's going to make a lot of it. Meanwhile, he has to mend fences with Debbie. And that was very complicated because she was married, except that her husband had abandoned her already. Yeah.

A

So quick.

B

Well, three years. So the guy she married to. I think the marriage lasted a few months, maybe a year, and then he disappeared. Oh, wow. And she didn't know whether she was legally married or not anymore. In fact, she didn't even know if she'd been legally married the first time because he arrived from out of town the way Benjamin Franklin did when he came from Boston. And maybe he'd been married before. There were rumors he'd been married before. So anyway, Debbie's kind of in a situation where on the marriage market she's damaged goods. And Franklin comes back and apparently there was a strong attraction between the two because they fell back in love together, at least to the extent that they decided to get married. Now, Franklin must have had some explaining to do to get her to trust him again, but maybe she was. She kind of heard the clock ticking and she's got to marry somebody. And Franklin's kind of a good catch, assuming he doesn't run off again.

A

So imagine you go halfway around the world. I'm going for three months. You can't call anyone. If you write a letter, it takes a 12 weeks to get there. And then you leave for three years, come back, be like, hey, sorry about that.

B

Okay, well, you'll excuse me for interjecting an illustration from the career of George Washington.

A

Oh, here we go.

B

So George Washington was married to Martha Washington, who herself was a widow. So he was her second husband, but they had a long and affectionate marriage, so that's all good. But when he goes off at the beginning of what's going to become the Revolutionary War to Philadelphia to accept command of the Continental Army. Well, actually, when he leaves Mount Vernon, he doesn't know he's going to be offered the job, but he has reason to think it might be him.

A

He wanted it, though.

B

He was quite happy to accept it if offered. He didn't lobby for it. And if he didn't get it, well, he probably would have felt bad judgment on their part.

A

But, okay, didn't he wear like his general uniform?

B

He didn't have a general's uniform. It was a colonel's uniform. He arrived in his military uniform, and so when people saw him rive in uniform, they realized, okay, he's up for the job.

A

But then he gets up and he's like, I could not possibly accept this honor. And it's like, well, you're already wearing the.

B

Yeah, it wasn't quite that. He did say. He didn't say, I won't accept it. He said, I'm probably not worthy of it.

A

Right.

B

And then he did say that, and I will refuse a salary for this. And it was partly he could afford not to take the pay, although, turned out he said, I'll refuse a salary, but you just cover my expenses and we'll be good now to jump ahead. Well, I'm going to tell you why we have to jump ahead. Because he wrote a letter to Martha, his Wife who's back home at Mount Vernon. So this is near Washington, D.C. and he's in Philadelphia, not that far. And he writes a letter saying, you know, when I left, I said I was going to be gone for a couple or three weeks. Looks like it's going to be longer than that because I've been appointed head of this army that's just being created. So don't expect me home before this is in June. Don't expect me home before September. So he's thinking my military assignment is going to last maybe three months. So he's saying to Martha, I'll be home in September, 1775. He doesn't get home till 1783.

A

That's right.

B

So it turned out to be a bigger deal than he thought. But anyway. But anyway. So Ben Franklin and Debbie decide to get married. And they're going to take a chance on this because her husband has not turned up dead. And divorce was nearly impossible in those days. You have to wait seven years in a case of desertion. So they're going to do it by common law means. They don't do it in a church. They don't get adjusted to the peace. They just announce to the world we are husband and wife, and they shack up together. And then if the husband never shows up and this relationship sticks together, then everybody says, okay. And it was common enough that it created no scandal. So they about to do this when Franklin has to break some disconcerting and uncomfortable news to Debbie. And he goes to Debbie, and I know in substance what he said, and I know in substance what she said by way of reply, but I don't know in detail. Nobody wrote down exactly what the words were. But the message that Franklin gives to Debbie is, honey, I'm going to be a father. And it's not yours, and it's not yours. And she knew it wasn't his or hers. And so after having gone off and been gone for three years and consorting with other women while engaged to Debbie, and he comes back and they're engaged again. And now he's obviously been having an affair with somebody else, and this one is leading to a child. So he says, I'm going to be a father. And then in the next breath, he says, and I'd like you to be the mother. Thus the stepmom. And so, wait, who had he knocked up? We don't know. We don't know. And when I started writing my book about Benjamin Franklin, I thought, I'm going to figure out who this is. This is a Case. I mean, it's a knowable sort of thing. There clearly was a woman who was. The mother of. The child's name was William. William Franklin. So the question is, who's the mother of William Franklin? And I thought, you know, it's. I mean, there's some things where you don't know if there is an answer, but there was an answer. It's just that we don't know who it was.

A

It had to be somebody.

B

Yeah. And so I dug and dug and talked to everybody who might know anything, and I just came up blank. But anyway, I will say this, that I put this. This scenario to my students. I teach at the University of Texas, and these are students who are in a required US History class. So this is. I introduce them to aspects of colonial life. And in this case, I tell them the story about how Franklin is telling his fiance Debbie, that he, Franklin, has knocked up a girl, and she's going to have a kid, and he's going to take custody of the kid. And so when they get married, this little brat, not hers, is going to be her responsibility as much as his. And I have my students imagine what the conversation was. And one of the reasons I do it is that they're roughly the same age as Franklin and Ben Franklin and Debbie. And I don't presume to think that any of them have been in exactly that situation, but they've been in uncomfortable situations. And so. So anyway, I do know that because the first reaction might be Debbie would slap him in his face. How could you do such thing? Go away. I never want to see you again. But she didn't. They agreed to go ahead with this common law marriage. So this tells me. Well, first of all, she might have realized that her options were declining anyway. He certainly was charming. She, by evidence of the next 40 years, she loved him. And so she was willing to forgive him. And she. She eventually became a pretty good stepmom for William. There were the step family difficulties at times. The neighbors recall hearing her yelling at him, little William. And William saying, you're not my mother.

A

Oh, so he knew. They told him. Yeah, they told him earlier. Yeah.

B

Yeah. So anyway, so Franklin kindly gets back going in Pennsylvania, and his business takes off. And it takes off in part because he's just really good at what he does. He's good at soliciting business. He's good at delivering on time. He prints a newspaper. He creates an almanac. This is what made him sort of famous as the author and publisher of Poor Richard's Almanac. And this is the source of all of those sayings of poor Richard. And he just pursued all sorts of business opportunities. He had several irons in the fire.

A

When did he really start? Obviously he had always had an interest in science, but when did that start to click to where he was trying to figure things out all the time?

B

So I mentioned earlier that one of the secrets of Franklin's success was he was a great observer and he would look at things. He would ask himself, why is that the way it is? And this applied to natural phenomenon. And so he would ask, why are there bolts of lightning in the sky? They certainly are there. They look a little bit like sparks that one sees on a dry winter day when you rub your feet and you touch the doorknob or something like that. I wonder if there's a connection. And other people had suggested maybe, maybe. I mean, it's a big difference. A bolt, you know, lightning bolts, miles, miles long. And that's just little. And lightning bolts can destroy trees and start houses on fire and little sparks. But, you know, you could imagine if you magnify that little spark. And so. But Franklin had a very, a very practical kind of intelligence. He had theoretical intelligence, but he also could be a practitioner. And so while other people theorized what lightning was and what these little sparks were, Franklin devised an experiment to determine if they were essentially the same thing. And so this is the famous kite experiment where he flies a kite in the build up to a lightning storm.

A

Was he with William when he did that?

B

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So William is his assistant. And this really falls in the category of do not try this at home. Because in fact, Franklin, before he did it himself, wrote down how one would determine whether lightning in the sky is essentially the same as those little sparks that you get in the laboratory or in your home. Here's how you do it. You go up on a high steeple and you get something in the air. And somebody in Europe actually did try it, but wasn't sufficiently protected from the electricity and got electrocuted and died. And so Franklin was able to do this experiment, and this is what made his reputation as a scientist, because in those days there weren't academic journals like we have today, but people would correspond and they would write letters to various people. I should add, though, that by this time Franklin had created something called the American Philosophical Society, which was kind of a human version, a human precursor of the Internet. It was a collection of people in America who were interested in science. And I should say here that philosophy in those days included science in fact, if you said you were a philosopher in America in the 1700s, people would more likely think you were interested in electricity and the growth of plants. As a philosopher. Yeah, yeah. Because philosophy just means love of wisdom. It was later that philosophy went off in the direction of humanities and science went off in the stem direction. And so Franklin considered himself a philosopher, but he was really on the science side rather than why am I here? And what's the meaning of life kind of thing. So this is. So when Franklin went. Eventually, Franklin does well enough in his business that at the age of 42, he can retire from the business. The business runs itself. When did he do? He's got a managing partner after that. So this is the thing. So he retires early. More precisely what he does is he hires on a managing partner and cuts the guy in on the ownership, and this other guy's going to run the business, and Franklin just collects half the profits. And he has other similar partnerships in other cities. So he's. He's created a corporation and he is now essentially just the head of the board. And I mean, not even that, but the corporation runs itself and he collects the profits, or his share of the profits, and so it supports his other activities because he has all these other interests and activities. And what. And the first one is science, and he wants to pursue electricity because he's been intrigued by it, because it's in the very early stages of development. People have observed lots of things like lightning and sparks on the ground and have said, well, maybe that's connected to this. But nobody's been able to test it. But Franklin had this common sense approach to things, and he devised experiments to test it, and he did other things, and he had explanations for things like the nor' easter storms in New England, how they form and what causes them, and why they have the paradox, sometimes paradoxical aspects that they have.

A

How close was he to being on to something with that?

B

Basically. Right.

A

He was basically.

B

He was one of the first people to. Other people had noticed the Gulf Stream. They noticed that when you sailed from America to England, you went faster than if you sailed from England to America. And precisely if you wanted to sail from England to America, you had to circle around to the south, otherwise you'd be battling this current. So they knew there was a current in the ocean, but nobody had actually measured it or tried to figure out what it consisted of. And so Franklin devised this method for measuring it. And one of the things that they had observed was the sailors had observed that the Gulf Stream, as it's called, was warmer than the water around it. And this is why England and Scotland, which are far north of New England or New York or even Minnesota, they're much warmer than those places. And they're warmed by the warm water of the Gulf Stream. And so there's this basically warm river of water that's flowing over the ocean. Well, Franklin measured. He devised this, a clever method of lowering a thermometer into the water. And it would be in an enclosed. Basically a test tube, enclosed tube, until it got down to a certain depth. And then the pressure of the water would push in the cork and would allow the water to fill up. And the temperature would be registered at 10 fathoms, so 60ft at, you know, 200 fathoms and whatever it was. So he could. He could take the temperature of the water, and he discovered that this warm current wasn't infinitely deep. It was. It could be 50 miles wide. But if you went down 100ft or so, then it was probably deeper than that. You went down deeper than that, then there was cold water beneath it. So it really was this warm flow of water on top of this cold ocean. And so Franklin wrote this stuff down. He was also a budding sociologist. People observed that the population of the American colonies was growing, but nobody ever bothered to figure out how fast it was growing. And so Franklin consulted various records he could colonial records and record, excuse me, records of ships manifest, bringing people in. And he came up with this rough rule that said that the population of America, the population of British America was doubling every generation. Now, that's a rapid rate of growth at the time.

A

Were they measuring generations? More like 15 years.

B

What he was talking about was in 20 to 25 years, the population of North America is doubling. And real quick.

A

Bill, can I just run to the bathroom?

B

Sure.

A

We'll be right back.

B

Yeah.

A

All right, we're back. So you were talking about the population doubling idea and how he did this experiment to determine it.

B

Yeah. So Franklin observed that the population of the North American colonies was doubling about every generation. There wasn't. It wasn't something that suggests a particular change in policy, except that it gave to the colonists an understanding that they had a future that was maybe greater than what people in Britain had been thinking about. Because if you double something in a fixed period of time, you know, three or four of those generations and you've grown a lot.

A

Right.

B

And so Franklin could see that although the population of the North American colonies at this time, we're talking 17, 40, 40s, mid-40s, 1750 was substantially less than the population of the United Kingdom, Britain and Scotland, Wales. It wasn't going to stay that way forever. Assuming that this growth pattern continues, it wouldn't be 50 years before the population of America, of British America, was larger than the population of, call it British Britain. And he began thinking of a future for America. And he's one of the first who thinks of America as this entity, rather than just the sum of Virginia and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Massachusetts. Most people from Virginia thought of themselves as Virginians, right? And if they thought they had connections anywhere, it was a closer connection between Virginia and England than between Virginia, say, and Maryland or Pennsylvania. So those Atlantic ties were something. But Franklin gets Americans thinking, gee, there are more and more of us, and eventually maybe we can make something of this. Now, it was something that caused Franklin to think of America as America, which, by the way, is the book that I wrote on. Benjamin Franklin is called the First American because he was one of the very first to think of all these people living in British North America as Americans. And so it influences thought. Fairly early on, he's talking to both the other colonists and the British government about an American union, a union of the colonies. And he says, this will allow us to cooperate on things, not step on each other's toes. For example, Pennsylvania was always squabbling with Virginia about who owned land west of the Allegheny Mountains. So what is now western Pennsylvania, Virginia claimed it. And what's now West Virginia, Pennsylvania claimed it and thought, okay, if we could get just a meeting of the various people, then we could sort this stuff out. And they had a meeting. The meeting went fairly well, this in 1754, and they were talking about frontier defense against the Indians, against the French. So that was an obvious reason for bringing them together. But Franklin thought, we ought to make this permanent. We've got to create a structure to do it. He proposes such a thing. But the other colonies, especially the governors of the other colonies, they're kind of jealous. They don't want to give up some of their own turf. And the British, they're leery of what this might lead to. So this goes nowhere. But Franklin has presented this idea, and this idea will take root and take shape in the 1760s in the opposition to the Stamp act, in the 1770s in the Continental Congress, and eventually become the United States, States of America. So this is what Franklin is thinking, and it also reflects the fact that. That after Franklin retired from his business, and as I say, he was a young guy, he was 42 years old when he Sets this aside, it's been successful enough that he never has to worry about income after that.

A

So he was young back then? Yeah, 42.

B

Well. Oh, definitely.

A

You're not on your way out.

B

Yeah. And this was before Silicon Valley and billionaires and cryptocurrency stuff where things just blow up. You actually have to make money the old way, you know, a step at a time. But he was successful enough at it that he could and he was able to indulge his other interests. And so the first interest was as a scientist, but the second interest was as a public spirited citizen. And so he got into politics for the first time. He had eschewed politics while he was trying to build the business. You don't want to alienate potential customers, but once the business is running on its own, then he gets into politics.

A

He was born in 1706, is that right?

B

Yeah.

A

So this is like the late 1740s. Okay.

B

So we're coming on right about the midpoint of the 18th century.

A

Got it.

B

Midpoint of the 1700s. And he's beginning to step into politics. And he has a certain political personality that's very useful. He is not. He never has what one could call an executive personality. He doesn't have to be the top dog. He doesn't have to be the public decision maker. He's quite happy being an advisor, coming up with good ideas, getting people in committees and groups to sort of shave their differences a little bit and add a little here, a little there, and so they can come up with a solution, a committee solution. I think this probably reflects the fact that he was nearly the youngest in a large family. Firstborns, they always want to be first. They want to have their opinion felt. They want to make their mark in their own name. Younger siblings, they learned that you can actually get stuff done better if you don't insist on having your name on it. In fact, Franklin as a young man had some friends in Philadelphia and they consulted about this and that and how their businesses were going and what they could do to make themselves more successful. And one of them pointed out this. Franklin was actually ever grateful for this, but it's not something every friend would tell another. But fortunately, this friend did tell Franklin. Said, Franklin, you know, you've got all sorts of good ideas, but people get annoyed that it's always your name on these ideas. So why don't you take one of your good ideas, for example, and let somebody else take it and put their name on it and run with it. And all of a sudden more of Franklin's ideas got put into effect because there wasn't on the part of other people, there wasn't this envy of Franklin, Franklin, Franklin. Oh, here's another, another good idea. Well, you know, quietly, it was Franklin's idea, but somebody else.

A

So.

B

So Franklin was quite happy doing this. And so he became a member of the, the Pennsylvania Assembly. This is the popular body of the colonial self government here. I have to add that the colonies all had their own elected officials, so typically called an assembly, but they also had governors. And the governors were almost always appointed from Britain.

A

Were the assemblymen democratically elected like the citizens actually elected them?

B

The citizens elected them. Not in a perfect democracy. So there were voting restrictions, women typically couldn't vote, and propertied people were more likely to get elected than people who didn't have property. Sometimes by explicit rules and sometimes just by implicit expectation.

A

And then you'd have the governor.

B

So there's a governor and the governor was appointed, sometimes appointed by the people who owned the company that had founded the colony. So Virginia was founded by something called the Virginia Company, and it had a board of directors back in England. And the board of directors would choose the governor who is their representative in Virginia. Now, the Virginians in Virginia, they would elect their own assembly. In their case, they called it a House of Burgesses. And those people would represent the Virginians, but this governor would represent the interests of the company back in England. Eventually, because of politics in England, the company governors were replaced by royal governors. So the governors, by the midpoint of the 18th century, nearly all the governors of the American colonies were appointed by the crown, the British king. And so the governors represent the interests of the king, whereas the assembly represented the interests of the people. And very often the two were in conflict. And so Franklin, being a very diplomatic type person, a tactful person, seemed to members of the Pennsylvania assembly that he would be a good person to appoint as the assembly's representative in London and talk to Parliament, because parliament was the lawmaking body there, because they thought that the governor wouldn't accurately represent the interests and desires of the people in Pennsylvania. He'd just tell the king what the king wanted to hear. I should add here that there was, although parliament was technically supreme over the king, they'd fought a war and executed a king for this. In the 1600s, there was still some tension between the two, the king and Parliament. And so the Pennsylvania people in the assembly wanted to make sure that Parliament heard from them. So they hired Franklin to be their guy and off he goes. And this is when Franklin discovers. Boy, he really likes London. London's a wonderful place. And there is. Here's a moment where history kind of hangs on a thread, because Franklin goes off to London before he gets there. He has a reputation in London. He has a group of correspondents, people he's been writing to in London, and they're eager to see him come. They're really impressed by this guy. And he seems to be a very congenial guy, a very bright guy. He has good ideas, but he also has a good sense of humor, the kind of person everybody wants to get to know. And so when he gets to London, oh, they say, this is great. Now, that's within a particular. I'll call it the intellectual circle, the scientific circle above, or at least kind of aside. And above that is a circle of the aristocrats and the British crown. And they don't necessarily have any particular respect or. And certainly not deference to the scientists, and especially if they allow somebody like Franklin to come in. So Franklin is there. He's making friends with this influential group. But this influential group is not really the powerful group. They're not, though, the ones who make the laws. But anyway, he goes over there and he be. And as we were talking about earlier, it's just another move within the British Empire. And so it's not like he's emigrating from America to England. He's just going to one in the same place. Precisely. And he gets there, and he really likes it. And the people who live there, they really like him. And they say, franklin, you ought to live here permanently. You know, don't go back to America. We miss you when you go, and you're a great addition to our conversations and all this other stuff and the advancement of British science and so on.

A

He left the wife behind, right?

B

Well, that's it. That's the thing. And so he writes to Debbie and explains that everybody here would love me to come over and basically, can you come over? And she says no. And at first she says she's afraid to sail. And being afraid to sail in those days was not unreasonable. It's certainly more reasonable than. There are plenty of people today who are afraid to fly. You know, they really don't fly unless they absolutely have to. And she. That was probably part of her answer. But beyond that, she recognized that she was just a Philadelphia girl and she didn't want to move away from friends and family there. And she sensed, even though she'd never been to London, that she wouldn't fit in, that he had this life there that suited him but didn't really suit her. So they wound up with this long distance marriage and he was gone for years and years and decades at a time. And it was, oh, but here's the thing. But because he had a wife in Pennsylvania and because he had two children by her. No, sorry. One by her and then one by the other one. So two kids back in Pennsylvania. He always felt himself connected to Pennsylvania. But if she had been willing to move, then he could have. He would have told the kids, okay, you're going to come with your mom, stepmom, and you're moving over here. And so at the time, it would have been uncontroversial, just, okay, he becomes an Englishman. I mean, he's always been an Englishman, but now he's an Englishman resident in London. And if that had been the case then when the troubles broke out between the Americans and the English, he would have been on the English side. And because, as we suggested, he's one of the indispensable men of the American Revolution, he wouldn't have been on the American side, he would have been on the British side. And history could have turned differently.

A

We might have lost. We probably would have lost, maybe been on the other side.

B

I mean, that's one of those imponderable questions.

A

History for sure.

B

Yeah.

A

Now, did he, when he was over in London for basically on and off for three decades there, he, I think he wrote about this. He was a part of, obviously some of the higher societies, became who he was, ended up being known to be respect as a polymath, all that. Did he join the Freemasons when he was over there, or was this something he had done earlier in his life?

B

I believe he had done it earlier. I'm not absolutely sure about that. And one of the reasons is hard to tell is the Freemasons are a secret society and so people don't advertise.

A

He didn't write down much about it.

B

I don't recall. I mean, I don't recall a letter that he wrote saying, you know, yesterday I took the oath from the Freemasons. And it was, it was one of those. It was a secret society. Kind of like, you know, in some Ivy League schools there are secret societies and people sort of know you're in it, but you don't acknowledge it and you don't talk about what goes on in there.

A

Skull and Bones, all that.

B

I mean, actually, now that I think about it, I'm almost sure he became a Mason when he was in America because It was exactly the thing that an aspiring businessman would have done because it's great for connections. And so you go up and you say, would you consider hiring me as your printer? And you give them the secret handshake or something like that. They know you're one of them. So in fact, there's a lot said about the Freemasons, and often it involves conspiracies and deep state kind of things. But in fact, it's a version of networking that people have been doing forever. And if you find yourself in community where members are Freemasons, well, you know, you got nothing to object to in the philosophy you join in. And so Franklin attitude, Franklin's attitude toward that was similar to his attitude toward religion generally. So Franklin had been raised as in the Congregational Church. Basically it was the modern version of Puritanism. And he ran up against that when he was in Boston. One of the reasons he left Boston was he had a fight with his brother, but he also got in trouble with the Puritan authorities in Boston. The Puritan hierarchy was sufficiently influential in Boston that it was almost the same as the city government. And so he didn't like that kind of theocracy. So he gets to Philadelphia, which has nothing like it. So Philadelphia is an active competitive market of religious denominations. He really likes this. And Franklin so went from being this Puritan to In his early 20s, he was toying with atheism and saying there's no God. But he, like a lot of scientific minded people, could not figure out if there was no God, where did everything come from?

A

Right?

B

And how did you know? Why are there humans and cows and all this other stuff? If Franklin had lived after Charles Darwin, Franklin quite likely would have just become an atheist because he was drawn to religion for its explanatory power. And in the absence of a theory of evolution, there really was no alternative theory to divine creation. And so anyway, so he was not attached to any particular denomination he did believe. He acknowledged that religion tends to incline people toward good behavior and if only because they fear they're going to go to hell when they die. And so he thought that religion within reason is a stabilizing influence on society. And so for this reason he gave donations, religious donations, but not to any one denomination, but to all the denominations, as a way of saying, keep doing what you're doing and this is a good thing. So this was his attitude toward religion. This was his attitude toward human gatherings. But Franklin was what could really be best described as a humanist. So he believed in human potential, he believed in One thing Franklin did not spend any time to speak of on is the problem of evil in the world. Because there are people and there's whole philosophy and a religion of this. That evil is this existing thing. There's this force for good. There's the light and there's the darkness. There's the good and there's the evil. And Franklin, in fact, Franklin thought that what is characterized as evil is really a matter of just sort of sloppy habits and inattention in humans. When he was a young man, he devised this scheme for what was not, what would have been nothing less than moral perfection. And he was going to become perfect. And so he wrote down a list of virtues that everybody ought to cultivate. And they involved thrift and diligence and order and honesty and all this other stuff. And there were a dozen of them. And he said, okay, I'm going to practice these. And he thought that you could make a habit of virtue if you just practiced. And so order. He had a tendency to leave things out and around, and he couldn't always find them when he needed. So order. I'm going to everything in its place, and I'm always going to put this tool down over here and this thing over there and these books over there, so I'll always know where they are. And it's interesting. I mean, this reflects something of Franklin's Puritan background that he conceived something like messiness as an aspect of morality. Because most people don't. They just say it's a bad habit or something like that. But so Franklin was, in that sense, something of a child of the Puritan culture that he grew up in. Significantly, though, the virtues that he identified were habits and traits of behavior that would conduce to success in business. So you don't want to mislay the bills payable. You don't want to mislay the records of who owes you what, because if you do, you can't keep your business straight. And diligence, well, you both have to be diligent. You got to get the work done. But it also helps if people see that you're diligent. So they will know, okay, if Franklin says he's going to deliver this print order by this date, it will get here on time. And I should add here that it also fits in with the whole philosophy, the express philosophy of his Poor Richard, the Poor Richard's Almanac, all these things about a penny saved is a penny earned and so on. So these are good bits of advice for this guy who's trying to build A business. So this is Franklin's. This is Franklin's philosophy. It's almost his religion. Later on, he becomes more of what in those days was known as a deist somebody, because he couldn't figure out how the universe could have come about and how things could have evolved. He believes in this divine thing, this divine entity that somehow sort of set the world in motion, set the universe, the planet spinning around, but really doesn't pay too much attention to what individuals are doing. And didn't think of a divine presence in people's lives.

A

Why did he not think a divine presence would be able to pay attention to everything that it created?

B

I don't think he would have doubted that the divine individual could have. But he had a hard time figuring out why this divinity would have wanted to do it. And also, why just humans on this planet. So they knew that there were other planets, they knew there are many stars in the sky. So what's so special about America? So Franklin was one who wanted positive evidence for stuff. He didn't take things on authority. Now, most people, when they get the religion, they take it on authority. Their scripture says they ought to do it. Their prophets say they ought to do it, because, you know, you can't. Religion doesn't really stand. What most people take as religion doesn't really stand on evidence. It stands on belief. And at some point you make that leap of faith. And Franklin wasn't one who took a leap of faith. He wanted to see the evidence.

A

But that was one thing I really took away from him. And you just described a lot of it really eloquently to me. My interpretation of him was he was humble enough to know that he didn't know what was going on up there. But like you said, it had to come from somewhere. So he tried to live his life in a way to where, if he had to answer for that, when he's gone, he feels like his balance sheet would be more in the asset than liability.

B

Very much in that line. So he was asked toward the end of his life, when he was famous, and he wasn't going to probably too much upset anybody if he told his real religious views. So somebody, a longtime friend, said, Dr. Franklin, he didn't say, you're about to die, but it was clear that he was going to. Would you care to share with us what your religious beliefs are? And Franklin thought about it a bit, and he said, at this point in my life, I find it not particularly important to conjecture on something that I will soon find out for sure. One way or the other.

A

So that's a Franklin Barr, if there ever was one. He was. And you're so right. Like, to me, he's the original. Like, he's the original troll, the original Memer, but the original genius writer as well, in America. Like the way he talks. Yes, it is time period sensitive in the lingo and stuff, but you get it, you hear it today and you're like, it's not like other things where you're like, all right, what were they trying to say? You completely understand what he meant.

B

And some of the things that he said were really immortal. So I remember when I was reading through the Franklin letters and there's a great published collection of them, and I was flipping the pages, reading one by one, and I came across the point where he said, and of course, I had heard this many times before, but in this particular letter he said, there is nothing certain in life but death and taxes. Well, this has been quoted again and again and again because it's universally true.

A

Yeah, yeah. Now he. I'm trying to think here because it might be good to tie in Washington and Franklin when they come to the war later. Yeah. Because we just covered Franklin's life. So let me actually put a pin on that, because Franklin, as you said, goes to London for 30 years and it's towards the end of that time when he gets beat up in the pit where he makes the flip and he's like, all right, I'm full blown American. Like, we gotta do this thing. But George Washington lives over a similar time period, obviously. Yeah, you mentioned earlier he was from Virginia. There's the famous story that apparently is not true about him chopping down a cherry tree. That didn't really happen. So maybe George Washington did lie. But what. Why now? Why book 42 or whatever it is, 41. 42, 43, something like that. Did you finally decide to write about George Washington?

B

Washington, of course, has been on my radar for a long time. I guess I should probably say that when I started off in this business of writing history books, I started in the 20th century and I had gotten my graduate school training in post World War II American Foreign Policy. So my first book was about Dwight Eisenhower and his foreign policy. But one of the things that happens to historians, not all of them, but to a lot of historians, is that they suffer from, or at least they exhibit this chronic behavior of regressing in time because the historian is inclined to look backwards to explain things, what came before. And so how did this happen? And once you've gone back 20 years to explain today. Well, then you're kind of tempted to go 20 years before that to explain that 20 year period. And so I kept getting back further and further and further. And so finally I bumped up against Franklin. And I thought, okay, that's probably about as far as I can go because he's born in the first decade of the 18th century. I could go back to the 16th century, but the records are harder. And I just thought that people weren't that interesting. But the reason I came to Franklin as a particular project was that after I'd written a first few books, the ones that got me my first teaching job at college and then the one that got me tenure. So once you're there and it's hard for them to fire me, then I can. Because in the back of my cook. Well, exactly, because in the back of my mind I had known there is a wonderful purpose for writing specialized histories. But I didn't want that to be me. I wanted to write general histories. I wanted to write for general audiences, not simply for specialized audiences. In part because I had at one time been one of those generalists. And that's what hooked me on history. The stories of the past. Not so much the analyses of past, not the arguments, the theories about the past, just the story and the individuals. So that's what I was aiming for. I realized there was kind of narrow gate I had to get through to get that job. Because if I got a university job, then part of before I started teaching at the college level, I taught at the high school level. And if you're a high school teacher, your full time job is teaching, and you're in the classroom for six, seven, eight hours a day, five days a week. I was aware that if you're a college professor, you're in the classroom a third of that time, a quarter of that time, and the other part of your time is expected to be devoted to doing the research and writing that you do in your discipline. And for historians, that means you research and write history books. And I had this notion I wanted to write history books. So I figured, okay, that's how I'm going to. And I like teaching, so I would be able to keep teaching. So I basically become a part time teacher, halftime teacher and halftime writer. And I could do it. But the great thing is, of course, if you teach at college, you get paid a full time salary by the college. But this reflects the fact that most academic historians write books for these narrow, these specialized audiences. As a result, they don't sell any books. I Mean they'll sell enough to support at, increase their income much. So they do rely on the college, whatever the college or university pays them. So anyway, so I did that. I wrote the narrow stuff, but always with the intention in the future of broadening out.

A

So I got to explain just exactly what you mean.

B

I know what you mean.

A

But like, because you're an American historian, right, you write across all the different eras, but when you're specifically saying academically, like narrow, would that mean I'm going to write about these five years of Cold War history?

B

So more precisely, I'm going to write on a subject that will enlighten people in a way that nobody has enlightened them before. So I wrote my first book on the foreign policy of the Eisenhower administration. I wrote it at a time when the documentary record of the Eisenhower administration was first becoming available. So I could write details and I could make arguments with evidence from a record that nobody had seen before. Because when you write on foreign policy, especially American foreign policy, there's usually a 20, 30, 40, 50 year time lag between the events themselves and when historians really get at them. Because I couldn't see, I mean, right now I have no access to the debates within the Trump administration over the war in Iran, okay, Because that's classified now. 50 years from now that will be made available. And so historians then will be able to say, and this is what they did in May of 2026, and these were the reasons and so on. And so I was able to do that from the perspective of I was writing in the early 1980s. I could do that from this perspective of the 1980s on events in the 1950s, because roughly that 30 year time lag, right? But the point is that I'm writing something, I'm effectively creating knowledge. And so what historians in that part of their work do is equivalent to what chemists do. So when a chemist comes up with this new compound or with this new process of producing something that already exists, nobody's done that before. And so they produce new knowledge. And at a research university, and I've taught, I've been teaching at research universities, the idea is to create this new knowledge and it's knowledge that is of immediate interest to a relatively small number of people. Because if in the 1980s, or now for that matter, if you took people off the street and said, boy, I've really got this great explanation for America's role in the suez crisis of 1956, you want to read a book about it, and most of them would say, what Are you talking about. And no. But on the other hand, if you say, I just wrote this great book on George Washington, what do you think? Oh, I know George Washington. Okay. So that's kind of the distinction that if from the academic. For the academic purposes, they're more interested in the narrow one. Because I'm advancing the frontier of knowledge. When I write about George Washington, I will admit that I'm not advancing the frontier of knowledge in the sense that I'm saying stuff that nobody knew before because there isn't new information on George Washington. I have interpretations of Washington, what his life and career meant. We'll talk about those. But. But the idea is that my books will be enjoyable by a larger number of people.

A

Yes.

B

And part of it was. Part of it was a desire to expand my classroom because I think of my writing as an adjunct to my teaching. And I should say vice versa. And I'll admit to mercenary motives as well. I wanted to sell some books.

A

Well, I also think it's just great from a storytelling perspective because you could sit there and look at this one era, like you were saying, and just describe. Describe, like the meat and potatoes of what happened and then get into the different ingredients that go into that. Or you could tell the same stories through the lens of a protagonist, like people would think of in a movie, where you then cover everything that happens there as a result.

B

So you've anticipated my plan. And my plan was. So I. I was young and ambitious at one time, and I thought, I'm going to write a big history of the United States. You know, American history is a big subject. And I should say, just to think that I was going to write across the realm of American history was really ambitious for an academic historian. Academics don't do this. And so I pitched the idea to a publisher, and the publisher just laughed in my face and said, God, you know, nobody's gonna publish that. And if we publish it, nobody would buy it. Nobody would read it. And so I was. I pretended to be suitably chagrined. Okay, all right. But in my mind, I'm thinking, no, I'm going to do it anyway. Except I realized I had packaged it wrong. I had presented it wrong. Because when I said, I'm going to write a six volume, because I was thinking six volumes, a six volume history of the United States, what the publisher heard was six volumes and history. Now, by this time, I. I had been teaching long enough to realize that not everybody is as intrinsically interested in history as I am. I chose this for my field. So Obviously I'm interested in it. But a lot of people, a lot of people have unfortunate memories of history classes they took in school. Most of them avoided taking history in college, if they went to college at all. And from high school they remember this boring class where they had to link dates to events and they had to try to figure out who this person was and what this person did. And none of it seemed to hold together and none of it had any intrinsic interest. And I thought, well, that's really too bad because that has to do with the way it's taught and the way it's presented, because that's not the way it is. So I said, as you're thinking, people are interested in people. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to write a series of biographies and in my head they're going to be linked. So I eventually did. I got my six volume history of the United States, but it's not.

A

You went out of order.

B

Yeah, so I mixed up the order a little bit.

A

I like that.

B

Yeah. So as they weren't published in this order, but they arranged themselves in this order. Volume 1 of my 6 volume History of the United States is my biography of Benjamin Franklin. And this begins in the early 18th century, the early 1700s, and carries it to 1790 when he dies. So that's volume one, that's Benjamin Franklin. And I'm also thinking in terms of the period of my subject's life has to be one in which America collectively undergoes a characteristic transformation. Or from a historical sense, there's a certain task that has to be accomplished during this time to get us from the beginning of American history to the present. How in 2026 does America look like it looks? Because it didn't start this way.

A

From Ben Franklin to Andrew Jackson.

B

Yeah, well, exactly. So Benjamin Franklin, he is. And I try to sort of summarize it in the, the overall take of the book or sometimes the title of the book. So with Benjamin Franklin, the title of the book is the First American. And for reasons that we were speaking about earlier, he's the first one, one of the very first to consider himself an American. But that happened to everybody in his generation. So Benjamin Franklin was born an Englishman and died an American. George Washington was born an Englishman, died an American, Thomas Jefferson, and so on, everybody. And so it's in this generation that this identity of American comes out. So Benjamin Franklin's volume one, he dies in 1790, at which point, at which point this young man named Andrew Jackson is 23 years old. And he is becoming an adult in Tennessee.

A

He's a goddamn American at this point.

B

Exactly. And he lives until 1845. So he is volume two. And the task of Andrew Jackson's career is the birth of American democracy. Taking this republic that Franklin and his generation created. Which republic is kind of a vague term. It basically means a political system that doesn't have a monarch. And so somehow the people are responsible for it. But who the people are and how they exercise their responsibility is a little bit unclear. But democracy, that's more concrete, and it means something where essentially everybody gets involved. Now, actually getting that everybody involved takes a while. But by the time Andrew Jackson dies, America has gone from being simply a republic to being a democracy, a democratic republic, which has the added feature that this thing called equality, political equality is a fundamental value of this system. Now, it's not always practiced, but that's the aspiration. And so by the time Andrew Jackson dies, every adult white male in America can vote. Now, that still leaves out a lot of people, but it leaves out far fewer people than was the case when George Washington, for example, was the president of the United States. So that's the task there. And then volume three is. Turns out to be Ulysses Grant. And that book is called the man who Saved the Union. Because he's my. He's the. My figure in the Civil War and Reconstruction after the Civil War. And that's the big task. How do we hold the Union together and then put it back together after the Civil War? Anyway, so it was only when I got to about volume three in this series that I informed my publisher what I was doing. So they just thought.

A

They said, oh, now they saw the sales and they're like, you know what?

B

And. Exactly.

A

Yeah.

B

So, yeah, so that's.

A

And you're filling in other books, like in the eras that are on specific topics or telling other stories, too, so you can like floating in stuff to keep them off the track.

B

That's right. Well, sort of. Yeah. And sort of smaller. Smaller stories that I can fit in while the editors are working or the printers are working on my big books.

A

So. So I'm trying to think here. Franklin Jackson. Grant. Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Eisenhower.

B

Reagan. Reagan's the last.

A

Reagan's the last one.

B

And when I. Franklin Roosevelt was one that I simply couldn't skip because he is the. The linchpin for the United states during the 1930s and 1940s, World War II. But he dies, of course, at the end of World War II, just at the end in 1945. So that got me to five volumes, and I wanted. I didn't want to do more than six. So I needed somebody who would get me from 1945 into the 21st century. I didn't have to get all the way up to. By that time, it was 2015 or something like that, but at least get me into the 21st century. And I was thinking, so, who's a good follow on to Franklin Roosevelt? And I thought, well, one of. One of the most fascinating figures to me of that post Franklin Roosevelt period is Richard Nixon. And I might yet write a biography of Richard Nixon. And he's fascinating to me precisely because there's such a dark streak in him. And of course, there's this dark shadow that hangs over his reputation. And so he is. He was in some ways, one of the most talented people ever to be President of the United States. But there was this gnawing thing inside him that said I got to get not just most of the votes, I got to get all the votes. I mean, there's no other way to explain why he allowed Watergate to happen and why he responded to Watergate the way he did. But anyway, so he was a possibility. But the thing that has kept me from Nixon until now is that. Well, one of the reasons my series of biographies eventually flew with the publisher is that the sales were good. And this reflects the fact, and I was aware of this ahead of time, that while people. Some people, many people, have this bad memory of a history class, nobody has a bad memory of biography class because there are no biography classes.

A

But the other thing is, I was really lucky. I had some great history teachers. Right, I know, exactly.

B

And the shows. And you're interested in history, and so. And me, too. That's why. But nobody has a bad memory of biography classes. But in addition, biography. I contend that biography is the closest genre of nonfiction to the novel, because novels, and I'll include plays in this. Yes, they're all about getting inside the head of somebody. Most novels are either told from the point of view or sometimes from the inner point of view of a protagonist. And the whole idea is to let you know what this individual is like. Now, in the case of novelists, these are imagined individuals, but they're projecting their own understanding of human nature. So this is what it must have been like or must be like to be such a person. Now, historians, we. I mean, those of us who are historians and play by the rules of historians, we don't get to do that. I mean, we can sort of get inside the heads of our characters. But can only do it through their own voices. If they kept a diary, if they wrote letters, we can do that. But other than that, most histories, novels are often written as though from the inside out, where the protagonist, the character, is what the reader sees the world through. Sometimes it's explicitly written that way, but sometimes it's sort of it's a third person. But still, it's. From this point of view, histories are mostly written from the outside in. It's the historian commenting on the actions of these people. To the extent that I can, I try to make. I don't try to make my history books look like novels because that would suggest that I'm making stuff up. And there are historical novels, and some of them are very good. Some of them are lousy, but they're lousy books in all sorts of genres. But some are very good. But I don't want to do that. But I do want readers. And I will say this is what I do in my classroom as well. The main thing I want to do when I teach history, when I write history, is to make my readers, my students, understand what it was like to be somebody back in the past and to see the world through that person's eyes. And I do it just because I'm interested in people. I want to know what people have been like over history. But I also. When I'm proselytizing for history, one of the things that I say is that historians, practicing historians, even just sort of students of history who take it seriously, what they have is a superpower. And the superpower is the ability to see the world through other people's eyes. And because this is what we do. This is. We try to recreate the world. In this case, the George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. I. Benjamin Franken book. How did they see the world? And this is extremely important in success in all kinds of human endeavors. Because if you're in business and you're in a negotiation with somebody, you have to imagine, well, how does this negotiation look from that person's point of view? What's his bottom line? How far is he willing to go? If you're in a personal relationship, how do my actions appear to the person that I'm in the relationship with? And so if you can develop this habit, your life will be just more successful and more pleasant, and you'll just thrive as a human. And it's not simply the ability to do it. It's the inclination to do it. Because a lot of people just aren't inclined to do it. A lot of people are quite happy with my point of view. And if you don't match up with my point of view, you're wrong. And, and I mean, I certainly didn't do this to try to make people explicitly better citizens, but we live in a democracy where everybody gets a say. And if I just say I'm right and you're wrong, that doesn't get us anywhere. But I have to say, well, so why do you think the way you do? And it keeps you, it inclines you to be open to the fact that, well, maybe you yourself don't have monopoly on knowledge or the right or anything else. And I would say that this informs my writing, it informs my choice of just biography as a way of writing. But it also causes me to approach biographies in a way that's different than some, maybe even many biographers. So one of the things I studiously refrain from doing is passing anything that sounds like a moral judgment on my characters. Now, there are a lot of people who think that's an abdication of the biographer's responsibility. Well, that's what you ought to do. And I say, well, no, I don't think. That's not what I'm really trying to do. What I'm trying to do is to make you see what George Washington's world looked like to George Washington.

A

And then you get to make your own decision.

B

Well, exactly, exactly. If you, as a civilian, you want to say, I don't like George Washington, I don't like George Washington, that's fine. But one of the reasons that I do this, this is that in my time studying the past, observing people, I've concluded that differences in political positions

A

are

B

rarely the result of intellectual differences. They reflect value differences instead. And so, for example, I wrote volume five in my six volume series. It was about Franklin Roosevelt. And the centerpiece of Franklin Roosevelt's history in my book on the 1930s is the New Deal. This is Roosevelt's reform package as it relates to domestic problems relating to the Depression. And people today, they're split almost as much as they were back then as to whether the New Deal was a good deal or a bad deal. You think it's a good deal if something about your experience, your outlook, your demeanor makes you think that humans owe something to the collective, the community that they live in, or that maybe people simply need the help of a community. At times you're likely to think that the New Deal was a bad deal if you think, no, no, people ought to stand on their own. And you know, life can be good, life can Be bad, but we're better off as a whole if we're responsible for ourselves. And why one person comes to this conclusion, one person, the other. Sometimes it can be as simple as, well, you were the first child in your family, and you were the third child in your family, in the case of this, came home. For Franklin Roosevelt himself, who had had this really wonderful life. He was born into a wealthy family, and politics came easily, and he was successful. And then when he was 39 years old, he contracted polio, and he lost for the rest of his life the use of his legs. And he hobbled around. He spent most of his time in a wheelchair. He could lock his knees in place with these heavy knee braces, and he could kind of hobble around with one arm on his, an adult son, and the other arm, and the other arm a crutch. But it was driven home to Franklin Roosevelt that bad things can happen to people through no fault of their own. And that was really the essence of the American experience during the Great Depression, because millions of people were thrown out of work. Millions of people lost their houses, lost their livelihoods, lost their families. Not because they did anything wrong, not because they were lazy or drunk or didn't show up at work, because the business they worked for closed, because the bank that they had invested their life savings, their family's nest egg, and it went bankrupt. And so Franklin Roosevelt himself, all of a sudden suffered this bad thing through no fault of his own. And he could relate to those people, Americans suffering during the Great Depression, in a way that he wouldn't have been able to otherwise, and in a way that Herbert Hoover, who was the president during the beginning of the Depression, could not, because Herbert Hoover had been the model of individualistic success. He was the first serious businessman to be president of the United States, and he made himself a millionaire. He was an orphan from a young age, and he'd gone up and he'd done all these things, and for understandable reasons. It's tempting for people who've achieved that kind of success to think that other people can, too, if they would just try harder. And so I can't say that whether the values of individualism or the values of tolerating certain collectivism, I'm not going to say that one is better than the other. People bring that to my books. People bring that to my classroom. That's their own business. But what I try to do is give them the evidence of what Roosevelt himself experienced to make their own decisions. And if they want to think that Roosevelt was a Great guy, that's fine. If they want to think he's a bad guy, that's fine too. And the way I put it is that I'm not going to tell anybody whether the new deal was a good deal or a bad deal, but I'm going to explain to them why it was a big deal. And then what you should, how you should arrive at whatever conclusions you want to draw on it. The last reason that I decline to pass judgment on my individuals is I think it's just very presumptuous of individuals to pass judgment on him. I don't want you passing judgment on me, you know, my moral code or anything like that. And I'm not going to do it for somebody else.

A

This is like listening to Michael Jordan talk about basketball. Like it's so it's. And, and it, and it drives home what I already took from what I have read from you, which is that you're on a fact finding mission so that we can make our best determination of the time. And that's the thing. Hindsight's always 2020 with everything. And people are a product of their time. Human beings do great things and they do terrible things and they do it at a societal level level as well on, on both of those fronts. And so, you know, you look at something that is objectively, in today's time, horrific in every way, which would be the fact that like we had slavery in this country. When you are going to do the biography of someone like a George Washington who's from that era, you have to, as hard as it is, see it through the lens of like, okay, what had society brainwashed or ingrained into people at that time as something that's just naturally accepted? And how did they then deal with that? Someone like Ben Franklin, I believe he wrote about it in, in his biography. He, he moved on that issue over time. He was someone who at one point was like, yeah, we have slavery, it's what it is. And over time he was like, wait a minute, these are human beings. We, we shouldn't be doing this. You know, and to me, I look at that as like, my perspective is that's kind of like a moral victory where you see a smart man who was a part of a, a bad system that accepted something. And over time he asked questions and he was like, wait a minute, no, like, isn't that, shouldn't we reward something like that rather than judging him maybe initially thinking it was okay? Right?

B

Yeah. So I got a couple of comments on that. One is, you mentioned George Washington, the Fact that he controlled hundreds of slaves, not all of which were his personal property, they belonged to his wife's estate and so on. But here's the, Here's a point that I try to make, and you're absolutely right that at any given time society is marked by good stuff and bad stuff. And the bad stuff is only evident in hindsight because people who own slaves in Virginia in the 1730s, that's just the way the world works. And I will go a little bit farther than I think maybe you were intending it. And that is to say that it's tempting for, let's say somebody like me who's writing a biography of George Washington, wrote a biography of George Washington. And who would like people. Well, people are more likely to buy a biography of George Washington if they think George Washington's a great guy because, you know, you like to read about your heroes. And if, okay, well, George Washington, the hero of the American Revolution, needs good first president. But dang, those slaves, you know, that's a tough one. And so there's a part of me that sort of would want to be able to say, well, you know, well, let's rerun history and same George Washington, but no slaves. How about that? That would be great. That would make my job easier and make people warm up to him. But here's the thing. If George Washington, I'm going to put it as strongly as I can, if George Washington had not owned slaves, he never would have achieved what he achieved. Because it is a fundamental of human success, especially in any public facing realm, like a general in an army that's appointed by a government, the Continental Congress or a president of the United States, that you have to fit the times. You can be a little bit out of fit, you can be a little bit ahead of the times. But if you don't, if you're way out of sync with the times, then nobody will trust you, nobody will value your judgment because your judgment is so strange. So if George Washington, for example, had had it in his power, which he didn't, but if he had had it in his power to say in 1750, all the slaves at work at Mount Vernon, tomorrow, you're all free, go your way, good luck. He never would have become commander of the Continental army because he never would have been trusted by his Virginia neighbors and the Virginia rulers to think, well, his values are pretty much like ours. They would have thought him. I mean, suppose that somebody today wanted to run for president of the United States but said, I am a radical pacifist, I will Never use violence in response to violence. And by the way, I'm also an extreme vegan. Now, somebody like that is simply not going to get anywhere in the political world because when you vote for people, it's not that you're really identifying with them in everything, but you have to feel that they share your values. And the reason that I mention pacifism and veganism is that there are people who are pacifists and there are people who are vegans, and there are people who are pacifists for moral and ethical reasons and people who are vegans for moral and ethical reasons. So our generation today can't say nobody ever told them that eating meat wasn't wrong. Yeah, people have been saying that for a long time, but most people don't internalize it in their lives. And people who push that too hard get to be annoying. And you don't vote for somebody who annoys you. If. More than that, if George Washington had freed his slaves, by the way, he couldn't. I mean, it was difficult under British law to do so. And the fact that they were his wife's property and not his, and she couldn't have done it either because they were actually in trust for her children until they became adults and they weren't yet. So that all is complicated stuff. But if he had done that, then he would have been seen as wildly eccentric in his day. And wildly eccentric people are not given this responsibility. And he would have been eccentric in this way that was also threatening because he would have been seen as. And this is one of the things that makes, let's say, vegans, some vegans, annoying, is that they seem to be tutting, tutting people who eat meat. You're really going to eat that Big Mac. You're going to tear that cow apart with your teeth. Come on. George Washington would have been seen as somebody who was setting himself up as morally superior to other people. And people don't respond to that. So you have. And I'll do the same thing. Thomas Jefferson. In the case of Thomas Jefferson, the contradiction seems to be most striking because Jefferson owns hundreds of slaves at Monticello, and then he writes, all men are created equal. Well, I'll make essentially the same argument. If he did not, if he was not a slaveholder in Virginia in the 1770s, Virginians never would have made him a delegate to the Continental Congress. So he never would have been there to write the Declaration of Independence. And this all men are created equal thing.

A

I never heard this argument before like this.

B

And then. But then I'll carry it on. And this also connects with something you said toward the end of your remark on this, and that is the fact that we can look back and say, oh, Washington, you shouldn't have owned those slaves. Jefferson, you shouldn't have done that. It is testament to the fact that we've made progress, because in 1750, only radicals were saying that slavery was wrong. Now, I'm not saying that slaves wanted to be slaves, but it's just like people don't want to get cancer, but people get cancer, and it's considered unfortunate. So almost nobody was saying slavery was morally wrong. After the revolution and after the Declaration of Independence, then people like Washington began to believe that it was politically a bad idea, and he began to get uncomfortable about it because he's fighting this war on behalf of this principle of equality while he owns all these slaves. So that's what causes a change of mind. But the fact that we can look back today and nobody will say, good for you, George, for owning those slaves. No, we've gotten to the point where we've acknowledged that slavery is this bad thing. I guess I should add here that if you do the numbers, there are probably more people living in enslaved conditions today than there were back in the 1750s. Really just human trafficking situations, forced labor and all this. I mean, some of this is just an artifact of the fact that there are a lot more people.

A

That's terrifying.

B

But the thing is, compelling people to do stuff they don't want to do, it's been around forever, and it still is. It's just we don't do it openly. So, you know, it's. I think we're better off not making. Not allowing slavery to be legal. But we shouldn't think that we are so far improved that we don't actually do it.

A

Right.

B

I mean, I don't do it, you don't do it, but we allow it to be done, right?

A

Yeah. It may not be. It's certainly not legalized code now where people can do it. But to your point, not just looking around the world, let's look here with the examples you gave. Yes, these awful things have been covered on this show. Whether it's human trafficking or anything under that umbrella, they happen far more mathematically than we'd be comfortable thinking in our very free country.

B

And in that vein, one of the ways of figuring out what societies value is what they're willing to overlook. And so nobody would come out today and defend the trafficking of minors for sex purposes. Nobody would defend it. But could we do more to Stop it. Yeah, we could do more to stop it.

A

Yeah, we're living through a moment right now.

B

Yeah, exactly. And so we put up with stuff. I ask my students to do a hypothetical and I say, well, what do you think we're doing today that your grandchildren are going to say, oh, God, how could you do such a thing? Because you say that about your great grandparents. I teach in Texas and a lot of their great grandparents own slaves. And they say, oh, you know, they think, oh my God, how could great grandpappy have done such a thing? And it's really hard for somebody in our day and age to imagine anybody having only a slave and not feeling really bad about it. But certainly we are doing things that our great grandchildren are going to say, how could you do such a thing? And the fact that that is the case, in fact, I hope that is the case. I tell my students, I hope you hope that is the case because that's a signal of progress. We're getting somewhere. If we're doing the same wrong stuff and never becoming enlightened about it, then we're not getting any anywhere.

A

Yeah, I, I actually, I totally agree. It just gets heavy whenever we're talking about anything with human beings. That hindsight 2020 thing comes in like crazy. But the way you're looking at it, you know, and to be clear, the parallels you're making about attitudes are not parallels in the things. It's not. You're not making parallel between being a vegan and being a slave owner. You're making a parallel between the mentality of how society looks at other people, people around them and how they think and what their values are. And I think that unfortunately, in the context of history, I think that that is a really compelling argument. Because if a guy like Washington had just, or Jefferson had just done this whole thing like I'm morally superior to you, they wouldn't have been put in that position. It's like an uncomfortable truth, but probably a truth nonetheless.

B

Yeah. So the way I sometimes put it is, I call it the half step rule of, of political success. If you're going to lead a group of people in a democracy where you're asking people to vote for you, you have to get this buy in by the people that you're governing. You can be maybe a half step ahead of them. That's what makes you a leader. And you're going to pull them in this direction. But if you're more than half a step, you're too far out of a step and they won't even follow you at all. So I always hope that we have leaders that are ahead of us, but not too far ahead of us.

A

What made Washington such a great leader, someone that people gravitated towards really throughout his life? In my amateur opinion, I could trace it back to when he was in the French and Indian War, probably before that.

B

I'm going to answer your question also by answering sort of why I wrote about Washington and why now. Washington was not part of my original six and he wasn't part of my original six because I couldn't get a good handle on Washington, the cause of his success. And as you say, he was a very successful person. He was described by one of his eulogists, Henry Lee, just after his death as first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. And those are quite accurate. He was first in war. He led the Continental army to victory in the American Revolution, the most existential war America ever fought. America loses that war and there is no United States of America that's first in war, first in peace. He's the first president, sets many examples and so on, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. This gets at the answer to your most recent question. So what was it? What was the secret of Washington's success as a leader? And I'm going to get to how I arrived at this. First in the hearts of his countrymen and its connection to his leadership. Because when you look at Washington, in contrast to say, Benjamin Franklin, we both agreed that Franklin was the most intelligent, most multi talented people, just somebody you could look at him, you could size him up and say, this guy is going to be important, he's going to be big. He has those traits. And if you looked at somebody like Franklin Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt was the most successful politician as politician. And by politician I mean somebody who's able to persuade people to work with him to accomplish what he wants to accomplish that I've ever run across. And he was. So that explains his success. Theodore Roosevelt, he had lots of interest, but he had energy coming out. You know, he, he never could slow down, he never could stop. And so one can sort of see why those different figures were successful with George Washington. It's more subtle, it's really hard to tell. And it's one of the reasons I kept away from writing about him because I didn't know what the answer to that was. I have an advantage over many of my fellow history writers in that I'm also a history teacher and that means that I cover the topics that I'm eventually going to write about for a long time in my classes, I lecture about them. I discuss them with my students for years before I decide to take them on. And so I didn't take on Washington precisely because he didn't seem dramatic to me the way an Andrew Jackson was. Andrew Jackson just sort of leaps off the page. And with Andrew Jackson's letters, oh, yeah, you know, you can almost see the smoke rising from where the pen raced across there. You really know what he's feeling. Washington was much more tempered, and I'd read enough of his letters to know he's never, you know, blowing out steam that way. Washington never killed anybody in a duel the way Andrew Jackson did. So nothing as dramatic as that. But clearly he's the successful guy. And although the main purpose of my historical writing and when I write biographies, my main purpose is to make their world understandable to modern readers. I also try to figure out what makes them successful. I try to explain why this person's a success. Because it reflects not only the individual, but the times in which the individual lived. And as I said earlier, my original idea of writing these biographies was writing a history of the United States. So every biography is a life and times, and sometimes they're explicitly called. My book on Andrew Jackson is called Andrew Jackson the Life. And. No, it's. Yeah, it's called Andrew Jackson His Life and Times. And so the life is his life, obviously, and the times, but is the history in which he lives. So every book is implicitly that. And so when I'm writing about Washington, I acknowledge. And this actually reflects something I just said too, that you have to be a part of your time to be successful. Otherwise, if you're too far off, then nobody follows you at all. You have no resonance. So if I can figure out Washington, I can also figure out Washington's time, because the two go together anyway. So I'd been. He'd been in the back of my mind. And if you're gonna. You think big about American history, you gotta deal with Washington. He had had cameo roles. Big more than cameo roles, his subsidiary roles. He was supporting actor in a few of my book. So he's a bit. He has a big part in my book on Franklin. He has a big part in a book that I wrote on the emergence of party politics in America called Founding Partisans. And another one I wrote on the American Revolution as a civil war. That one's called Our First Civil War. He's got a big role there. But to make him the centerpiece of a whole book so that's I kept putting it off. But then I thought, okay, you know, maybe, maybe it's about time. And when I was thinking this, oh, you know what else is about time for the 250th anniversary of American independence, Wouldn't that go together? So I'll admit to that wasn't an accident. The two came together. And so what was the secret of Washington's leadership? This is going to sound very retrograde, but I'm convinced it was what people in his own time thought it was. And actually, I shouldn't have to apologize for it sounding retrograde, because the people who were alive then knew Washington better than we do. So if that's what they think we ought to presume, maybe they're right. So what they valued in Washington was his sense of honor, the public character that he displayed, and his devotion to principle. So it's hard to say what I'm about to say without coming across as sounding flip or demeaning, but he was essentially never the smartest guy in the room. But, and here's something that I have inferred long ago and many people encountered eventually, in any field you choose, you got to be smart enough. But beyond being smart enough, there are other qualities that are more important than being smarter. So if your field is high energy physics, you know, the bar of being smart enough is pretty high. And you can accommodate people who are personally quirky. Beyond that, you will tolerate that if your field is. If you want to be a good first grade teacher, you know, the intellectual bar. I mean, first grade teachers are great, but, you know, they're not. The first priority is not that you're in the 99th percentile of your class academically. You have to have social skills and empathy and all that other stuff. So with Washington, he had sound. Well, to put it very simply, Washington had sound judgment. He didn't arrive. He didn't make his judgments quickly. He thought about them a lot. But once he made the judgments, when he came to a judgment on an individual, when he made a judgment on an issue or a cause, he stuck with it. And people knew what they were getting with Washington. Now, this came about in part because Washington was the person he was, also because Washington was. And again, this is going to. This is the kind of thing that could be open to misinterpretation. Misinterpretation. What I'm going to say, Washington was very concerned with his reputation. He wanted to be seen as a man who had a stellar reputation, a reputation as a man of honor, a man of principle. And one could interpret that as. Well, he's more interested in the reputation than reality. No, no, not at all. In fact, he lived at a time when the reputation emerged from the reality. And this has to do with Washington's upbringing, the time in which he lived. So he's a member of the Virginia gentry and gentry. Gentry, okay. Gentry means essentially a landed class of people who in America are. They're not titled. They're not inherited aristocrats, the way there were lords and dukes and so on. In England, there were wealthy folks, and they inherited land, but they didn't have titles in most occasions. There were, of course, the occasional earl of somebody who came over to America, but for most part, that was not America. But it was this wealthy class. However, it was a class where the wealth was based on land. Not like in Philadelphia or especially in Boston or New York, where it was based on commerce and money. And when you're based on commerce and money, there's effectively no ceiling to how much money you can have, how much money you can make, because you can always sell more product. You can always do this. And if you are a merchant, you tend to monetize things. Can that make me a profit if I sell it? And because business is often competitive, and humans, to some degree, are often competitive, the measure of one's stature in a place like Boston is, are you wealthier than John Hancock? No, John Hancock was wealthier than everybody else, so that's why he's number one there. Okay. That's not the case in a place like Virginia. It's just a different society. It's based on land. And whether somebody has 10,000 acres or 50,000 acres, that is hard to tell the difference between the two, because their style of life isn't any different. So what mattered with the class of Virginians into which Washington was born, in which he made his way, was how were you viewed by your neighbors, your peers? And again, it's not a matter of peer judgment per se. It's a matter of what kind of man are you? Are you a man of honor? Are you a man that people admire? And the way you become a man that people admire is to do things that are admirable. So this is the standard that Washington sets for himself. We'll hold that in the background. And as a young man, he's trying to figure out what to make of himself. He was born into a somewhat wealthy family, but not the wealthiest family. He couldn't be idly rich for his whole life. He had to be doing something. He managed his Farms, his plantation at Mount Vernon, to which he added greatly when he married this widow. Widow Daniel Custis, Martha Custis. She brought most of the property and wealth to the marriage. But he's doing something with himself, and he discovers something in himself at an early age, and that this is something that is characteristic of people who become. Of many people who become military leaders, military heroes. He could function just as well or better when his life was in imminent moral danger as he could at other times. He was in his first military firefight at the beginning of what would become the French and Indian War. And he's leading a small group of British and Virginia soldiers into the disputed territory in what's now western Pennsylvania and Ohio. And he was met by a group of French counterparts. And each side had its own Indian allies. And this firefight comes out, and Washington, for the first time, is shot at with the intent of somebody trying to kill him. And he doesn't get killed, but he writes a letter home to his brother, and he says, I've heard the bullets whistle past my ear, and I can tell you there is something charming in the sound. So he realizes when, you know, the bullets are flying. He was at his best. Now, I've seen this in other people who become really successful military leaders. Ulysses Grant had essentially the same experience. Robert E. Lee was the same way. These are people for whom they're at their best when everybody else is at their worst. And especially because we humans define ourselves, our communities, our relations with others, in a way that often puts us at war. I mean, this is a question that I've considered for a long time. I put to my students, why are there so many wars? Most people don't like wars, but we're always going to war. Not just us, but America and other people. Why do we do it? And part of it is that there is this group of people that are really good at it and who are at their best at it. I mean, Ulysses Grant might be the extreme example of this, because he wasn't good at anything else before the Civil War. And then the Civil War comes, and all of a sudden he's really good at military command, and he rockets to the top and becomes the hero of the United States. Anyway, so Washington discovers this. There are a couple of other traits of personality and character in Washington that conduce to his becoming a soldier. One is that he likes being out of doors, and he's really good at being out of doors. So in my book, I essentially introduce the reader to Washington when he's on this surveying Trip. He's a teenager, and he's. His formal education was almost nothing, but he had tutoring that taught. That got him up to speed a little bit in enough mathematics and geometry so he could be a surveyor. So he's on a surveying mission, and it takes place in the winter, and the weather is horrible. They're getting this other guy he's out there with. They're getting snowed on and sleeted, and the ice is breaking on them underneath, and they're falling in the freezing water and they're suffering hypothermia, and he's having the time of his life. So he really likes this. And this is going to be important because if you are a soldier in those days, you spend a lot of time out of doors. Another thing, he was a really good horseman. He could handle a horse. And if you're galloping across the frontier, if you're galloping across a battlefield and you can do it, then that counts. He was a big, strong guy, an impressive guy. Now, in the 18th century, warfare had gone beyond just the giant on your side meets the giant on the other side, or the broad action. You hack at each other until one of them's dead. It had gone beyond that. There were firearms, but still, war was a very physical undertaking, and very often it came down to bayonets at close quarters. And, you know, if you're a cavalryman, you've wield your sword and all this other stuff. And Washington cut an impressive figure, and he was good at this kind of thing. There was a last thing. Washington could make decisions. He could make hard decisions, and he could follow through on. This is something that is not given to everyone. I've posed this. I don't have. It's not that I'm on close terms with career soldiers and generals and stuff like that, but when I get the opportunity, I put this question to them. And the question is, when you're a military commander, when you're a general, and if you go to war, usually you have to have been at war to be a general. How do you give the decision to start the battle knowing that giving that decision is going to lead to deaths among your soldiers?

A

I think about this all the time. I can't. I can't even fathom it.

B

So this is a question. This came up. I wrote a book about Ulysses Grant. He's one of my six subjects of biographies. And the thing that characterized Grant and made him different than the previous generals that Abraham Lincoln had had at the head of the Union armies was Grant was willing to give that order. His previous generals that always hesitated, they had prepared for battle. George McClellan was the best example. He prepared for battle. He got the troops ready for battle, but he just wouldn't give the order to go. And I don't know if it was because McClellan was afraid that they'd lose the battle and he would be blamed, or if it was out of sympathy toward the soldiers who might die. But Grant could walk among the troops groups and talk to them, get to know them and still give the order, knowing that 2,000 were going to be dead by noon the next day. And I think, thankfully, that's not given to very many people to do it. Because if it were easy to do, then, my God, wars would be even worse than they are now. Because you ought to think very carefully about doing this. But I was talking earlier about a pacifist not going to be elected president of the United States. And it's a good thing. It's president. Pacifist is not elected president of the United States. Now, one might think, I'll take another president. Harry Truman's the best example. So Harry Truman gives the order to drop atom bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, and he knows that tens of thousands of people, civilians, non combatants, are going to die as a result of this. Now, there are plenty of people who wish that Harry Truman had had a bit more of a pacifist streak and said no.

A

Sure.

B

And there are various reasons for taking the position that that was a bad idea. Idea. On the other hand, if you are the. If you volunteer for the job of the United States president and you observe that in the world, there are bad actors out there who, if they conclude that the United States is not going to respond with military force to anything they do, well, then they might take advantage of these people. It's. It's like you can even narrow it down. Being a pacifist is fine if you're the only person you're responsible for.

A

Sure.

B

But if you have children, you know, if somebody breaks into your house and they're threatening the lives of your children, are you going to say sorry?

A

Right.

B

Yeah. So these are all part of the complications of history. And I'll just add here that one of the things that attracts me so much to history is exactly how complicated it is. It's like, you know, peeling an onion, and every layer you take off, there are more layers beneath it. And some people find that very frustrating because there's no right answer. But it's also. It makes it endlessly intriguing because it's, it's about us. And we are this way.

A

And that's the point. The human nature never changes. The mediums change, the way things are legislated changes, society changes, technology changes. But the end results of, like, you know, how we decide to practice our meaning of life and how that manifests in good ways and bad ways, it doesn't change.

B

Okay, Julian, I'm going to say that with less confidence than you do.

A

Okay.

B

And here's why. Because one of the tasks of the historian, especially somebody who writes about figures that lived hundreds of years ago. When I was writing about Ronald Reagan, I never met Ronald Reagan personally, but I lived during much of the life that Ronald Reagan lived in. And so if Reagan did something there was anything akin to something, a similar situation I had been in, then I didn't have too much problem saying, well, okay, if I'd been in that position, I would have done this. So Reagan was mightily motivated by the same sort of considerations. But when I was writing about Benjamin Franklin Living 200 years, 250 years before I did, and he did certain things, I would say, so why did he do that? And I said, well, if I was in that position, I would have done that or I wouldn't have done that. And I figured, yeah, there is this thing called human nature. But a fundamental question for a historian is, is it stable? Is it constant over time, or does it evolve the way lots of other things evolve? And I'll give you a specific example that specifically came up with me when I was writing about Franklin. Benjamin Franklin had two sons. The other one was William. We spoke of, the younger son was called Francis in the household, he was Frankie. And Frankie died at the age of four of smallpox. And so Franklin lost his son at the age of four. And at the time I was writing about Benjamin Franklin, I had a four year old son. And so I tried to imagine what Benjamin Franklin must have felt when he lost his son. And I thought, well, how would have I, how would I have felt if I lost my son? And I know that I would have been devastated. Okay? And I should add that Franklin felt a certain guilt in it too, because he was in favor of vaccinations, they called them inoculations, those inoculation for smallpox. But he just never gotten around to inoculating Frankie. And Frankie died of smallpox, so he felt badly about it. And so I could imagine, add on a little bit of sense of responsibility, of guilt for my son's death. You know, thankfully, my son didn't Die. He's alive and well. But I imagine this and I thought, okay, but then is my feeling the same thing that Franklin felt? Well, father, parent loses child. Certainly that's a human constant, but the context is different. If I had lost my 4 year old son in 1997, as far as I can think of, I would have been the only person of my peer group who would have lost a child. Because in the 1990s, four year old kids don't drop dicks.

A

Expectations change.

B

Precisely. In Franklin's day, every family had four year old kids who had died. And so it didn't necessarily make the experience less poignant, but he had more company in it. If I had lost it, I might very well have said, God, why did you do this to me? Whereas with Franklin, he couldn't say that because God did it to everybody else too. So there is, it's a real challenge.

A

I might, it's, it's a tough one because I, I can't relate to it either. And I hope I, I never can. But I might push back on that one a little bit. Yes, there, there is, you can even see it today around the world where there are societies where there's far more strife, far more poverty, far more afflictions that occur that maybe wouldn't occur in America to where death rate and infant mortality rate is higher. So there may be a bigger acceptance that that does happen more, but it's still one of those things where, oh, that's such a shame. It happens. It won't happen to me. And then it does. Yeah, right. And people have that idea. And I'll look at it with animals, like there's, there's. I, I love elephants. I love all animals, but I really love elephants. And you'll see videos online of like a mother elephant seeing, you know, her child elephant die and she's gotta leave, she's gotta leave it behind as it sits there dying. But you know, you can literally see the elephant weeping.

B

Yeah.

A

This is a, this is a culture, an elephant culture where thousands of them get poached every year.

B

Right.

A

You know, and including the children in some cases who fall victim to that. So they have a higher rate of that than we do. Obviously it's an intelligent creature. We're intelligent creatures and they still experience that type of grief. I could see across a societal level though, where like more death and more affliction is, is accept it as a reality. I just think like on an individual basis, there's still something so emotionally intelligent about humans there that you, he, he probably would take it a similar way to you. Maybe he would more expect something like that to happen.

B

Yeah, well, one of the things that he did, and this was, is quite touching when you read it in his letters. He kept track of how old Frankie would have been in subsequent years. And so six years after Frankie died, Benjamin Franklin saw a group of 10 year old kids, 10 year old boys playing. And he wrote, I can't remember who he was writing to, but he wrote, I saw these children. I thought Frankie would have been at that age. And it tugged at my heart. So it never quite goes away.

A

And he lost two sons because, I mean, that's one of the tenets of your other book about our nation's civil war. There was literally a civil war in the Franklin household that never got solved after that. Right.

B

Yeah.

A

Which is, which is a real tragedy.

B

Yeah.

A

But you know, you talk about this decision of like generals sending men to go die and I actually think it's really unique and maybe advantageous. I'm not sure if you would agree that you had a chance to write about all these other generals that came after Washington throughout your life, whether it's Grant, whether it's Eisenhower, all these other guys. And then you get to go back to the og, the original, who had to send, you know, the Continental army men to die. But like, you know, on Eisenhower, for one second he just stands out. There's a really poignant interview he gave that I'm quite certain you've seen. I don't know if we can pull it up deep, but if you type in Eisenhower, 20th Anniversary D Day, Normandy. Have you seen this video?

B

Yeah.

A

So he's literally sitting on the ledge at Normandy with. I can't remember if it's Cronkite. Someone, someone's interviewing him and he's. It's still black and white tv and it ends up zooming out on the cemetery at Normandy as Eisenhower is clearly all these years later struggling with the idea that he had to be the one to make the decision to send all these men to their death for a greater cause. And he knew he wasn't going to be on the front lines with them. And it just hits it home to me. A, oh my God. Like having to live with that. B, the fact that he knew he was gonna have to live with that before he did it.

B

Right.

A

And C, the fact that he was a strong enough man to know that

B

that was exactly what the needed to happen.

A

Yeah, that's like. That is a whoa moment.

B

It is, it is. And it's as I say it's. It's a good thing that there aren't. That we can't all do that. We can't all basically treat other people as means to an end. Because if you're a general sending troops to die in battle, what you are doing is you're saying your life is going to be sacrificed for this greater cause. And it's one thing for the individual to say, I will sacrifice my life for a higher cause, but for you to tell other people that they're going to do it, that's a big deal. But this is. When I've spoken to generals about this and I've read about other people, the way they do it is that this is necessary for this higher purpose, that there things will be worse in the future if we don't do this. Some people are going to die in war, but the war is necessary to defend the country and the future generations of this country. And so, yeah, it's. It's a tough decision to make. It's a good thing that some people can make those decisions. It's also a good thing that not everybody can make those decisions because they might be made too lightly.

A

I agree.

B

Yeah.

A

Real quick, I gotta go to the bathroom one more time and then we'll get to Washington.

B

Okay.

A

All right, we're back. So you had alluded to earlier a couple times now about some of the battle that George Washington saw in the French and Indian War. And there was one thing that stood out to me when you were talking about how he had that moment where he realized he couldn't get the promotion that he wanted to get because British. The British military, I guess, General wouldn't give it to him. And to me that kind of strikes me as the. Oh, shit moment. The moment where he. The villain origin story. I don't mean it as an actual villain, but like, that's where he's like, oh, you're not going to give that to me, I'll show you. Is that fair to say that that's where a little shift happens? Where he starts to think about this plot of land over here is different than over there?

B

Well, what I'll say is this, that when I'm writing the screenplay for the movie that this book. Book is going to become. I'll take the Hollywood license and really emphasize that point. And when he comes away from that meeting, having been denied his promotion into the. The British army, he will be sort of muttering and seething and. And we will see this dark almost show you. Yeah, it's was more. It was more complicated than that. But it, what it did was it made him begin to think that this connection between Virginia, he's a Virginian, and England wasn't all he thought it was. It was tempting for Americans, including Virginians, initially, to take British pride and self esteem at their face value. When the British said, we have the best army in the world, well, they had the history to back up that they had fought against the other great powers of the world and they had won. And so it was pretty easy to think, okay, well, they're probably right. It's sort of like a baseball player who wants to get to the major leagues and assumes that the reason they're in the major leagues is because they're the best. And even if you might be really good in the farm leagues, even when you arrive there, you still have to, well, am I this good? Do I match up? And when Washington realized that he, on an individual level, he could be there, he could be as good as they were or better, and then he realized they weren't going to let him, then he sort of asks, well, so what is in it for me? But it's beyond that. And this is something great. Leaders at any event, at any time have a tendency, natural and maybe cultivated, to extrapolate from their own experience to the experience of others and to assume that if they're screwing me over, not letting me get the advancement that I need, they're probably doing the same thing to America. General. And it's just sort of natural. In humans, we try to see where we fit, and we often take ourselves as an example of this larger thing. So this occurs in the 1750s. It's not until the 1770s that Washington or really anybody else is thinking, well, and now we have to break away from Britain and create a country of our own. But it still, it gives him these doubts and these reasons. He thinks they're good reasons for doubting the wisdom of British policy, British approach to things. One of the reasons that he wouldn't get the promotion is that the British army had this habit of selling commissions in the army. So this is why they made money. And he wasn't about to buy one. And so the commander was thinking, well, if I give him this commission, that means one less I'm going to be able to sell. So there was that aspect of it. And so it was just, the British government is kind of screwed up and if they leave us alone, that's fine. And so when Washington, essentially, he retired from the military before the French and Indian war was over. But the Fighting in America is largely done.

A

Oh, I didn't realize that it was before it was actually even officially over.

B

Yeah, because. Well, so the French and Indian War segued into what became known as the Seven Years War. And the last couple years of the fighting had to do with stuff in Europe, because the Seven Years War was in some ways a first world war. It was fought all around the world, and a lot of it had nothing to do with what was happening in America. The Americans, the British Americans had defeated their French counterparts and won all they were going to win there. So they're just waiting to see what else happens before the war is officially over. And Washington retired from the military, and he probably thought that was the end of his military career, but he was ready in case another war broke out. But he didn't think at that point, he had no reason to think the war would be against Britain. The French might make a comeback in Canada, and there would be problems again.

A

He knew he was harbored some of that frustration.

B

Oh, well, there's no question about it. Countries that lose territory in war, they're often trying to figure out how they can get it back. Now, this would actually turn out to work in Washington's favor because when the United States did go to war against Britain, the United States wanted to get the French to ally with the United States against Britain. And one of the things they held out was the opportunity for revenge for what the French had lost to the British at the end of the French and Indian Seven Years War.

A

So when he goes away, though, and retires, because like you said, there's a gap here, you know, over a decade, at that point, is he pretty much just going back to his land and tending it and being a farmer the whole time?

B

That's it. Essentially, Washington, when Washington thought of himself, he thought of himself. The things that he was good at, the things that he liked to do, he thought of himself. The base value was essentially farmer. Now, farmer, as in plantation owner. And farmer in this case includes managing a bunch of slaves and free laborers and so on. But he's a farmer, and this shows up in Washington's own record. He kept a diary, a journal of pretty much every day of his life. But his journal was not. And here's what I'm thinking, and here's my reflections on the meaning of life. It's, we planted oats in the South 40 today, and we'll see how they turn up. And we built that new dam below the watershed and such and such. It's a very practical thing. And It's a way of keeping records. It was almost a scientific approach to agriculture. And he did read agricultural journals. He read sort of the latest because he considered himself an enlightened farmer. That's one thing. When he was young, Virginia was still a large producer of tobacco. Tobacco was the cash crop that had saved the Virginia colony in the early 1600s. They needed cash to support it, and the Indians showed them how to grow tobacco, and they grew tobacco, and they hooked people in England and elsewhere in Europe on tobacco and then saved the colony. But tobacco is really hard on soil and especially if you don't have much in the way of artificial fertilizer. So by the time Washington came along 100 years later, much of the soil in Virginia wasn't producing good yields in tobacco. And so Washington, having consulted the literature and other people who were expert in the subject, he decided, we got to get out of tobacco, and we're going to grow wheat, and we're going to grow oats, and we're going to grow other things. And in part because of this. This is one of the things that contributes to Washington's evolution in his thinking about slavery. Because one of the reasons that slavery was so common in the south, but not in the north, was that the agriculture in the south was labor intensive for very long periods of the year. Tobacco, in particular, was a crop that has a long growing season, and it requires great preparation in the fields before the season begins, and cultivation and curing and other processing of the product after the season's over. And so if you have work for basically manual labor that's going to be. That has to be done for 11 out of the 12 months of the year, then slavery, just on economic grounds. Slavery is more appealing than it is if you have an economy that requires the same kind of labor, but at intermittent times for shorter period, because in those cases, strictly on economic grounds. Leave ethics aside. You want to be able to hire the people when you need them them, and then not have to pay for their support when you don't need them. And so as he shifted into wheat and oats. Wheat, for example, requires intensive work for two weeks when you plant the crop in the spring. And then basically you just go away and come back for two weeks intensive when you harvest it. And there's a little bit of processing involved. And so as Washington moved out of tobacco into the crops for the first time, he could say, well, you know, slavery for me is no longer economically necessary. So it raises possibilities. And in the last decade of his life, Washington was trying to Figure out how he was going to sell off some of the property at Mount Vernon because he needed the cash. He had a cash flow problem. He had lots of land, but he wasn't generating much cash. But he could generate some cash and sell the property and free the slaves who worked on the property. It never worked out. For various political and economic reasons. And I should add here that Washington, even as late as the time he died, he and Thomas Jefferson and various other people thought that slavery was on its way out in the United States for the reason that I described regarding tobacco. That it was this vestige of an earlier time that was no longer suited because it had worn out the fields and everything. And only in a few years before Washington died, did this guy named Eli Whitney invent the cotton gin. And what the cotton gin made possible was the growing, the economically efficient growing of a different kind of cotton that had seeds that were hard, that could be pulled out of the bowls by this machine. And all of a sudden, so cotton could be sold at a lower price than other things. And so that greatly enhanced the market. And so when Washington, for example, Washington was part of the Continental Constitutional Convention, and at the Constitutional Convention, it was generally assumed that all slavery, although slavery still existed in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, places like that, it would eventually go the way it was already going in Virginia and Pennsylvania, sorry, in Massachusetts and New York and Pennsylvania, that it would be phased out, partly because it was no longer economically as necessary as it had been me for, and partly because it clashed with this new equalitarian philosophy of the Declaration of Independence. And so this is why at the Constitutional Convention, the thing they agreed on was, we will end the slave trade, the import of slaves from abroad, because we won't need them anymore. And anyway, that's the worst aspect of slavery. That's the most brutal part of it. And there was really not much of a debate about that. We'll give it a 20 year grace period so people can make adjustments accordingly. But they figured, a lot of them figured, okay, we'll end the importation of slaves in 1807, which is when it finally kicked in. And then not long after that, slavery will just be gone itself. But this changed because of the cotton gin, and it opened up new territory in the Southeast and all that stuff. So cotton gave slavery a new lease on life. But Washington didn't foresee that.

A

It's wild because also they're not. You're trying to look at this in the context of the times. And when they finish the war itself, you have that period where things are really, really tenuous. And then you have to all come together as these 13 countries, if you will.

B

Yeah.

A

And make it all one thing, which means you have to appease different places that have different priorities. So even if you see, like, a trend, as you said, maybe in the more northern states where. Where, hey, we're doing a lot less of this, the Southern states are like, whoa, you know, we're not gonna be done by 1807.

B

Right, exactly. In fact, we're getting ahead of ourselves maybe a little bit here. But a lot of people sort of criticize the Constitutional Convention for not addressing slavery and not saying, okay, we gotta end slavery, they end the slave trade, but they should go the whole way and end slavery. But it essentially didn't occur to the people at the Constitutional Convention that they had any authority to do that. Because you're absolutely right. They came to the Constitutional Convention as representatives of independent countries. And people in Pennsylvania, people in Massachusetts didn't presume that they could tell South Carolina what to do on areas, certain, particular areas where there was this common interest, where they depend on each other, like trade, okay, national defense, those fell under the realm of common action. But on what were considered domestic issues, domestic policies and domestic institutions, and slavery was considered that, then they had no authority whatsoever. It didn't occur to people in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention that they should dictate to, let's say, states on what their policy of education should be. They weren't going to pass a law saying everybody has to have free private schools or free public school or free elementary schools, whatever it might be, because, no, we don't do that. We can't do that. We don't do that. And I should add, even today, we still don't do that. The feds don't make policy regarding elementary schools and secondary schools. That's up to the states. And so we have this federal system where we still do a lot of stuff state by state, even though there are people who say, well, wait, we ought to have a single policy. The problem there is, though, you got to agree on what the single policy is.

A

That's right. That's right. Now, going back to when Washington ends up becoming a part of the Continental Continental Congress and eventually is named the General, like we said, the original doubts creep in back all the way in the French and Indian War. But then he goes about his life over the next 15, 20 years. You know, as far as we know, it's not like he was saying, let's start a revolution, but he's living through the times when the Stamp act comes in the town send acts. And then some early events happen in, in particularly in the early 1770s to where there are clear rebel events, where people are like, we're not doing this, we're not paying for it. They make international news in some cases. When did he have his official moment where he goes, line in the sands been crossed, let's go.

B

It's between the Stamp act and the outbreak of fighting in 1775 with the stamp Act. He realizes that Americans can't rely on Parliament to have the best interests of Americans at heart. And it takes form in a measure that is particularly sensitive to people of an English history tradition and that having to do with taxes. Because the original, sort of the big first step of the evolution of English politics and English self government was Magna Carta in way back in 1215, where the principle was established that people cannot be taxed except through their own elected representatives. And this is why the slogan no taxation without representation was so pointed and so effective in the American Revolution, because Parliament presumed to tax the Americans, but there were no Americans or representatives sitting in Parliament, so it didn't seem to work. Now some of this, some of this was exaggerated. It was as much for political show as it was reality. A lot of it reflected the fact that Americans had just gotten used to governing themselves. They went off to America as colonists and for 100 years parliament basically paid them no heed. And so the Virginia Company managed the affairs of Virginia and the other companies did this. And they were most off on their own and far away from England. They were out of touch with England and they didn't seem to be of much value to England. So Americans sort of grew up thinking it was their natural right to be able to govern themselves. And one of the principal characteristics of governing is deciding on your taxes. Because if somebody else can tell you to pay taxes, they can pick your pocket. And that's not self government. And so if Americans had been used to the idea of Parliament taxing for the Americans and the Parliament just said, well, you're represented the way people in England are, even if you don't send representatives there, they would have been used to, and that would have been no big deal. In fact, there was an aspect of that that showed this point. Parliament had been imposing taxes on imports to America and Americans got used to it and they didn't make a big deal of it. They, in fact, I mean, oddly enough, they got upset when the tariff rate was lowered rather than being raised. And the reason I got upset was the lower tax rate made it more economical for importers to actually pay the tax and import the stuff legally than it was to smuggle it. And the smugglers got upset because they'd been cut out of the business.

A

Most American thing I've heard today.

B

Exactly, yeah. And so some of it had to do with just tradition and habit. They're breaking this new rule. Some of it had to do with the fact that the tax, the stamp taxes, were explicitly to pay off the war debt, for that was acquired during the French and Indian War. And the parliamentarians in London said, well, hey, the French and Indian War was to defend you guys. And they said, well, wait a minute, we defended ourselves, we taxed ourselves to do that. And we fought and died for this behalf. We've paid our part, so don't make us do that. And then what happened is what often happens, happens is people started standing on principle and they started saying, well, you know, we're going to do this because we have a right to do it. And instead of saying, well, is this smart to do? Is this prudent to do? No, we have a right to do it. We're so going to do it. And it got wrapped up in politics in both America and in Britain. But focusing on Britain first, the politics in Britain was there was a group of people in Britain who said, the colonies are colonies. They're called colonies for a reason. They have to obey our laws, and if they don't, that it's sedition. It's going to lead to the end of the empire. So we have to make a point of making them pay those taxes. Even if, even if the particular taxes were maybe not the best, but still, it's the principle of things. And so as soon as they started standing on principle, then they would say, okay, we're going to have to make sure those Americans, they toe the line. And some of that developed a momentum of its own. We're going to pass these laws just to show that we're going to govern those Americans. The Americans are thinking, well, first of all, it was a bad tax, and secondly, we don't think they had the right to do it. But now they're doubling down on it. They're just making it worse. And so the expectations on each side build up other counter expectations on the other side. If somebody had said in 1765, after the stamp act, you know, if you keep doing this, it's going to lead to this big war that's going to separate America from England. And if you could have really gotten their Attention, make them believe that was a possibility. Then they probably would have said, oh, hold on, wait a minute, that's not such a good idea.

A

You think they ever would have bought

B

that, though, that that could happen under the circumstances? No, because they had no context for making the decision. But I'll give an example where sometimes it does work. World War I and World War II broke out because, in part because the, the competing sides really didn't believe that the other side would follow through. And they, they tended to think they would win and they would come out of it ahead. There has been no World War III to date, in very large part because everybody knows a general war among countries with nuclear weapons is going to be far more costly than anybody can justify on a cost benefit analysis. And so if somehow there had been the equivalent of nuclear weapons in 1765 and say, you got to pull back from the brink, because otherwise, boom, then everybody's worse off. Now. In fact, that would only go so far because as it turns out, the American Revolution was good for the United States. We got this independent country. For the British, it was a bad idea. It was a really bad idea to fight it. So somebody with greater vision in America, sorry, in Britain, would have said, hey, don't alienate the Americans, because if you do, they will break away and they will succeed in breaking away, and we will have lost that. Now, there were people with vision like that, starting with Benjamin Franklin, who said, if you do this, he said, if you might, you might send an army to America to put down the uprising in Boston. You will not find a war, but you might make a war. So he warned them about that. Other members, not of the British government itself, the ones who were the parties who weren't in power, they said, if you provoke the Americans, you're going to wind up losing this thing. That's, of course, exactly what happened. But it's easy to say that's what happened when you know what happened. The other side could have said, well, you know, if we just stand tough, if we stand our ground, then we'll make our case and everything will be,

A

well, how did, how did Washington. Because, like, we kind of take for granted all the guys that were on the Continental Congress. They all came from these different states, but they had to end up there to, like, be the, I guess, elected leadership to go represent the state's interest. How did Washington end up in that role for Virginia?

B

So when Washington was a member of what I've called the Virginia gentry, this class of landed people, they all believe the men of the group felt they had an obligation to the public interest. And this involved things like becoming a member of the House of Burgesses. And Washington was a member of the House of Burgesses. He was not interested in politics. He paid little attention when he was there. He almost. He never made any speeches. But he was one of the largest landowners, one of the most. And by that, by virtue of that, one of the most important people in Virginia. So anybody who is saying, we want to show the British that Virginia is behind this measure, we got to get Washington into that Continental Congress, then they'll take us seriously. If we just get small landholders like Patrick Henry, a great speaker, but he's not a heavyweight. You need the people who represent the wealth of the place, who represent the principles of the place, who have the reputations that other people take seriously.

A

And is part of that reputation also the fact that he was a serious military guy?

B

Oh, no question about it. Yes. Yes. So Washington was a Virginia military hero at that point. He was the finest soldier that Virginia had ever produced.

A

Oh, wow.

B

Yeah. So he was at a very young age. He was in his early 20s when he had command of Virginia's entire militia, the Virginia Army. He was the guy who ran it. And I was talking about this a little bit, but he had a gift for military command, and some of it was knowing the decisions to make. He had good judgment on military grounds, but he also had had a way of getting people to do what he ordered them to do, but to get them to do it without feeling so much that they're being. They're not doing it because they're ordered to do it, because they don't want to disappoint him. And this really comes out with Washington. It's toward the end of his military career rather than at the beginning, but at the end of the Revolutionary War. Washington bids farewell to the officers who served under him in the Revolutionary War. It's important to remember that the Continental army was not a big army by certainly by modern standards. So the officer class, you could all fit in a large room at Francis Tavern in New York, which is where they had their going away party. And Washington knew them all by name, knew them all by biography and background. And he made a point. He called each one up one by one, to shake his hand. In fact, they embraced, and it hadn't gotten through the first one, when he himself was in tears. They were in tears because they realized, and this is very common when soldiers go off to fight a war, when they go off, when they're in it when they come out, they realize, this is the biggest deal of my whole life. There is never going to be a time when I will feel more alive because I'm more likely to die soon. When the stakes are greater than this. And a whole lot of this sometimes shows up as ptsd. But life after war is often hard to adjust to because it's so trivial compared to this kind of thing. And in Washington's case, these officers, they'd been this small body of men. They had gotten to know each other, they had fought together, they had bled together, they had suffered together, they had lost comrades together. And so there's just the survival, the common survival. We survived this, we survived it. We were attached to the cause, but many of them were just personally attached to Washington.

A

And that's what they called it, right? They called it the cause.

B

You bet, the cause.

A

What they call the American Revolution, right? The cause.

B

And the cause is of freedom. They're not. They don't say the cause of the United States. They don't say the cause of American Page, the cause of freedom. And they thought they were in the vanguard, the cutting edge of human freedom, of human rights, because what they were attempting was something that had never been done, to create a new country based on a principle of equality and human freedom. Other countries had evolved out of earlier things and they had vestiges of all that, but they were just right, this brand new thing. And so not only have they form these personal connections during the war and as personal each to each other, but especially to Washington. The critical moment in the war, Washington's critical victory in the war was not at Yorktown. That's a big deal. And that was kind of the decisive, finally thing. But the most important victory was his victory at Valley Forge, which was not a battle at all. It was a struggle to hold the army together during this time of crisis. And Washington managed to do it. You asked me what was the secret of Washington's success. I can't say exactly what it was, but I can say what it did. It caused people to say, I'm not going to go home, I'm not going to mutiny, because I will disappoint General Washington. And that effect that he had on people, a lot of it, was that he himself had risked everything. If America lost the war, the privates in the army, they're not going to get hanged for treason. But Washington would. If they lost the war, they would lose personal fortunes. But he had a much larger fortune to lose. He was the real high profile guy. He was the One that the British were gunning for. And he never left them during the time of trial. I mentioned that he told Martha he was going to be home in a few months, but no, it took him eight years to get home. That's because he didn't go home. He stayed with his troops. He could have other commanders and other armies. They often, when there wasn't any fighting, they'd go home for a while. No, he stuck with his troops. And so they believe, I should add here, Washington had no children, but his soldiers became his surrogate sons and they looked on in that way.

A

Wasn't he also the last guy when they crossed the east river to escape from the British in New York? Oh, yes, he was the last boat. Right?

B

Precisely.

A

Because to me, like that was Dunkirk, before Dunkirk, what they pulled off there. And as an example for a general, he was like, everyone is off and then I'll leave.

B

Yeah. And he was a general at a time when generals still took the field. And he wasn't at the front lines usually, but he galloped pretty near the front lines, you know, often nearly got killed. And so people saw that he had put in together a lot. So there's this personal connection. But the last thing is the people in the tavern in New York when they're taking their leave of each other, the first thing is they realize they'll probably never see many of them again. They had this intense experience for eight years and then poof, it's gone. But they also, aside from just personal survival, they have done this thing of world historic importance. And they knew then that should America survive 250 years, we would still be talking about them as indeed we are.

A

They knew that.

B

Yeah, because they had created this country

A

based on this new principle, even though they hadn't done the Constitution yet and all that. They were that confident.

B

Well, no, no, what I'm saying is they didn't know that the country would survive until then, but they knew that if the country did survive that long, everybody would look back to this earlier time. Because if they had not won that war, if they had not accomplished their purpose, the country would have gone away just then. Yeah, this was, I think I've said, the most existential war in American history. If we lose it, there is no. The United States has gone out of existence.

A

There are so many things I could go into with Washington, but we're coming up on the end here. First of all, I got to figure out when you're in New York next, because we got to keep this going. But you know, first, people can go down in the link in the description and check out your latest website book on Washington American Patriarch and check out the entire 42 book bibliography. I would highly recommend. But hw what? When you look at the context of the American Revolution, if there's one thing I want to make sure we get to before we close out today, it's the fact that this is one of the only revolutions in world history where it worked. Meaning not the fact that they overthrew the guard, we see that all the time. But the aftermath works. They were able to organize and not make something worse than what it was, or create something that would eat itself alive right away. These were guys that found a way to be the anarchist revolutionaries one day and the next day create an established order. Not quite literally the next day, but you know what I mean. What is it about this one in America? As we're sitting here on the 250th anniversary of this great experiment, what is it about this one that truly made it work?

B

Well, if I had a lot of time, I'd give you a full complicated answer. And it would reflect, among other things, that they had this large continent to expand into. And so when tensions arose, people could move west and take new territory and take all their aggressions out there. That's part of it, of course. At the expense of the aboriginal peoples living out there. That's part of it. A lot of it has to do with the fact that the losers in the American Revolution, on the American side I mentioned, I wrote a book called Our First Civil War, and it focused on the Loyalists as well as the Patriots, the Americans who didn't want success. But when the war ended, the Loyalists got to leave. They left with the British. They went to Canada, they went to Britain, they went to the West Indies, some went to Africa. And in places like France, the losers in the French Revolution didn't have anywhere to go. And so you settle the scores with the people who were still there. And in France, a lot of them got their heads chopped, dropped off, so there weren't executions like that in the United States because the losers were gone. There's that, but there's something else. And it has to do with the understanding that they've really created this new thing. They have created this experiment in self government. And everybody who was involved in the creating, the creating was two parts. The revolution to get America separate from Britain. That's the self part. And then the government is first the tribe with the art of confederation, but then this new constitution. And once they Got the Constitution up and running. And once it ran successively for a little while, the confederation, the article of Confederation was thrown over. After just six or seven years, the Constitution, it got going. But the people who were involved at the start, the people of the next generation, people of the generation, are that they all were aware that this country that we have, the system we have, is this experiment. It's an ongoing experiment, and it's still an. I can still call it an experiment, because the question is, can people govern themselves? This republic was new. It's not a monarchy. People had always been governed by somebody else. But can we just as individuals, govern ourselves? We've stumbled through for a long time. We've had a couple of big breaks, like the Civil War. That was a really bad break. But we've managed to carry it this far forward. And it sometimes gets harder and harder the farther away from the founders we get. Because the founders, they created, and they knew how fragile this system was. And the thing that we really should carry from their experience forward to us is to remember this is fragile. It's tempting when something's been around for 250 years, to think it's always going to be there, to think that it was inevitable it was going to turn out that way. It wasn't inevitable. And each generation has to operate from the principle, okay, we are now part of this experiment. We better not screw it up. And it's pretty negative counsel to make to people. But really, that's at the heart of it. Give the experiment the respect to handle it carefully. You can't just beat it up, you know, you can't. You know, it's like being in a relationship, and you abuse the other partner in your relationship, think they're never going to go away, but they can. And so we could lose it. I mean, this experiment is. It's a kind of experiment that never will be a success definitively, because as long as it keeps going, it might fail the next year. So it's on us to just keep this going for another generation. The next generation. Take it from there.

A

If I touch that one, we're going to be here for another two hours. So I can't touch that one right now. But this has been a real honor to talk with you. You have, for my money, the most extensive background as American historian of anyone alive right now. So I would love to see you get on every show and talk about this. And you were talking earlier about things changing from the written word to other mediums of people consuming information in the future. I think when you've done so much work to write down this history. Now also being able to put it out there orally as well, whether it be on podcasts or other mediums like that, I think that would be incredible to look back on 100 years from now, 200 years from now. So thank you so much for making this a place where you.

B

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

A

All right, pleasure meeting you.

B

Thank you.

A

Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.