November 15, 2023 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the new Constitution was an experiment—a unplayed sheet of music— and we wouldn't know what it would look like in actuality until people picked up their instruments. Here to tell the story of the first real test is Bill McClay, author of Land of Hope.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American Stories and our series
about Us, the Story of America series with Hillsdale College
professor Bill McLay, author of Land of Hope. Let's get
into the story.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Take it away, Bill, George Washington was our first president
and the logical man, the inevitable man, the indispensable man.
But the funny thing about this man is that he
wasn't a politician. He was a military man. So Washington
(00:45):
had a different set of criteria, more like what a
general might have perhaps than a typical politician. Of course,
nobody had been president of the United States before. He
chose his cabinet on the basis of who were the
most competent people in his view, who were the most skillful,
most intelligent, most experienced, most far seeing. He didn't play
(01:10):
favorites according to politics or party. There were no parties,
so he chose his cabinet from all over. He did
not show any loyalty to region. Well, you know, he
was a loyal Virginian, but he didn't appoint all Virginians.
His top cabinet picks were Alexandra Hamilton of New York,
(01:31):
who didn't know very well as his former aide to
the Treasury Department. He was Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas
Jefferson of Virginia, Secretary of State, and Henry Knox of Massachusetts,
who would be the Secretary of War. That's a pretty
nice distribution. This was a very unique approach because he
(01:53):
wasn't look at, for example, did Hamilton have a different
view of the Constitution than Jefferson, which it actually turns
out they were fiercely opposed, But that didn't matter to Washington.
He was interested in what they brought to the table
in terms of fulfilling the particular function that he had
(02:15):
in mind for them. It would be a very, very
long time before we have another leader that taught quite.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
In those terms.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
It was unique. It was important because at this stage
of the national enterprise, when things were brand new and
very fragile, the Constitution was like that unplayed.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Piece of music.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
We didn't know what it was going to sound like
until actual musicians picked up their instruments and started to
make sounds. So Washington's approach was quite appropriate to that tentative, exploratory,
experimental character of the Constitution once it was put into action.
(03:01):
He was not a fan of political parties. He thought
partisanship was one of the worst things that could befall
a nation. He saw the effects of it in Great Britain,
so he didn't want to encourage political parties. Some kind
of partisanship, however, was going to be hard to avoid.
(03:24):
People are going to have loyalties to their region no
matter what.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
They're going to have.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Loyalties to their local institutions, no matter what. They're going
to have loyalty to the economy that fuels the life
of the region in which they inhabit, no matter what.
This was not going to be something he could completely avoid,
but to mitigate the effects of partisanship was one of
his goals, so he took no notice of partisanship in
(03:50):
making his appointments.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Hamilton was a.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Very inspired choice for Treasury. Hamilton had thought a lot
about the American economy, the American future. He called America
the Hercules and the Cradle, meaning they could be a big,
big economy. It had all the advantages of natural resources, ports,
(04:18):
all of the things you needed to become a commercial
power in the world. Hamilton had a vision of an
American economy that would be not merely agricultural, but would
also be commercial and industrial. It involved in the production,
so that we would not be importing those things from
Europe and thereby placing ourselves at risk from Europe cutting
(04:42):
us off or charging exorbitant rates. So Hamilton had a
very shrewd, well informed, economically literate understanding of the American
economy and big plans for it.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
He did not think small, Alexander Hamilton.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
But he had some obstacles to overcome, perhaps a severe obstacle,
since any Secretary of the Treasury would face for another
one hundred and thirty years or so. The biggest problem
under the new constitution was the dire financial situation of
the country. The war had been fought by borrowing money
(05:26):
printing money. The account books of the country were amassed.
It was not the kind of economy that foreign nations
with whom we would be trading could have much confidence in.
Just as you wouldn't have much confidence in doing business
with somebody who owes more money by three or four
(05:47):
or five times than the value of their property. He
would think twice and three times about doing business with
such a person. So Hamilton realized we had to clean
up our act, we had to clean up our books.
We had to get ourselves out of dead or at
least show ourselves to be credit worthy. And this is
something that others like him, like Jefferson, were not really
(06:08):
thinking much about. Well. Hamilton had a plan, a three
part plan. The first part meant paying off the national
debt in full and the state debts that were incurred
in fighting the revolution. Brilliant idea for all sorts of reasons.
(06:31):
It would make the nation as a whole seem more
credit worthy to pay off the national debt but also
paying off state debts. What this did was it lifted
off of the states a great burden, in some cases
an enormous burd particularly in the some of the northern
states where a lot of the revolutionary battles were fought,
(06:53):
like Massachusetts. Those debts would be paid by the federal government.
So this was a a genius plan for welding the
state's loyalty to the country which had bailed them out.
It was not equally well received in all the states.
The southern states had far less debt to pay than
(07:14):
their northern counterparts, but the disagreement was settled by the
location of America's permanent.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Capital, what's now Washington, d c.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
In as it so happens a swamp on the Potomac River,
but in the South. Hamilton also hoped to use tariffs
to develop an industrialized America. This was not quite as
controversial as you might think. The notion of using taxes
taxation of imports, that's what we mean by tariffs, to
(07:48):
protect nascent American industries from being swamped by foreign goods
that were much cheaper and therefore much more attractive to
hard pressed consumers. Tariffs were part of the plan. It
was not seriously challenged. Now, what was seriously challenged was
the third part of this three part approach.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
That was the idea of a national bank.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Madison James Madison, with whom Hamilton had written the Federalist
papers in New York, disagreed on this, so did Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
For them, the idea of a national.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Bank would be a way that the financial elites, which
were so worrisomely powerful in Great Britain, could grasp hold
of the national economy by controlling banking from a central source.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
They didn't like that.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
They saw this as a aggrandizement of national power, of
power in the national government. So it was a bit
of a constitutional crisis. This not only produced a crisis
over the policy, but it produced the first great debate
over the nature of the Constitution. And it was simply
(09:07):
a debate between the strict interpretation of the Constitution that
was Jefferson's point of view.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Hamilton's point of view.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Was that the Constitution should be interpreted loosely.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
When we come back more of the Story of Us,
the Story of America series with Bill McClay here on
our American Stories, and we returned to our American Stories
(09:41):
and our Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor
Bill McLay, let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
We have the golf between these two visions. The golf
between Jefferson and Hamilton their visions.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Of America was.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
These were competing visions of America for the kind of
nation that America was going to become. They were competing blueprints,
and that they were reflected in the difference between the
two men. Jefferson, of course, was a very sophisticated man
of the world who spent a lot of time in
(10:26):
Paris and was involved in the international discourse of the
Enlightenment as a scientist. But when you boil it all down,
he was a rural advocate. He was an advocate for rural,
agricultural Virginia. He remember he said that those who labor
in the earth are the chosen people of God. If
(10:47):
he had a josen people, that farmers are the source
of national virtue. They live virtuous lives, their virtue is
communicated to the larger populace of his idea of the
way America would expand as simply as a farming nation
going westward further and further. Hamilton wasn't that guy. Hamilton
(11:09):
actually was not born in the United States. He was
born in the Caribbean, and he found his way to
New York, which was a place where he was able
to realize his dreams of being a greater man than
whatever have been possible on the island of Nevis or
in the places where.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
He grew up.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
He was the opposite of Jefferson. He was a big
city boy. Hamilton was a guy who liked stock exchanges.
He liked the flexibility that paper money provides. He was
very interested in developing trade. Interested in commerce, he was
interested in making America into one of the world's powers,
(11:52):
and not only economically, but in other respects. He saw
the possibilities as being limitless for America, the United States
of America, to take its place among the.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Great nations of the world.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
He was frankly not much of a republican. He often
said privately that he might have thought a monarchy would
be better for America. There was fighting words for people
like Jefferson. Jefferson had no such aspiration. Jefferson wanted to
see America beat the odds and be a republic that.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Would last and last and last, and.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Not founder on the rocks of factionalism and partisanship and
loss of civic virtue.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
We were not going back to the idea of monarchy.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Republicanism forever would have been their motto. So Washington had
a conflict, a fundamental conflict, right up close and personal,
in his own cabinet, between his two leading cabinet of
five issus.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
He had to take signs.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
He couldn't create a somewhat national bank, a regional bank.
It was all or nothing, and so he sided with Hamilton,
and so it was decided okay. So one of the
other problems that Washington faced is that he was not
starting off this country in this constitution, in a geopolitical
(13:27):
vacuum you know. It wasn't as if he could say
to the rest of the world, Okay, hold off for
a while while we get ourselves started, maybe thirty forty years,
don't bother us.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
No, we couldn't do that.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
We couldn't do anything like that. The French Revolution began
in the same year that George Washington was inaugurated as president.
The French Revolution had been influenced by our revolution. It
was a very tumultuous affair, and our own government became
divided between those who favored the reforms of the French
(14:03):
and those who did not favor them and in some
cases abominate.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Hamilton was one.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Of those who were opposed to the French Revolution. Frightened
by the French Revolution because it was going around not
just deposing and beheading the king, but also deposing elite classes.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
At all levels.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
It was rattling the entire social structure of the French nation.
Hamilton was not a fan of that kind of social revolution. Jefferson,
on the other hand, he was a philosoph himself, a
man of the Enlightenment. He corresponded with French authors, French thinkers.
Some of the great influences on the revolution itself. Jefferson
(14:49):
thought a revolution every twenty years or so was a
good thing.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Countries got stale, they.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Got ossified, they got our hardening of the arteries.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
They needed to be shaken up. So he thought boldly
for the French Revolution.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
And you know, added to that as the time he
had spent in Paris, his great liking for the French people,
and particularly their wines, led him to side with them.
But it's a serious debate. It's not just debate over
who likes wine. It's a serious debate over whether the
sympathies of the American government would be drawn more to
(15:27):
the French, who, after all, had not only been our
allies that understates the extent of it, the French had
helped us incalculably crucially to win our revolution, to win
our independence. So it was a choice for me siding
with them or siding with England, which of course had
been the mother country against which.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
We had rebelled.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
But the English were the source of so many of
our institutions, of our cultures, of our taste, our language.
So you had figures like Jefferson who were drawn to
the French Revolution out of ideology and personal sympathies, and
then Hamilton, who for similar reasons, was drawn to the England.
(16:10):
Hamilton and Jefferson were on different sides. Once again, Washington
sort of split the difference and decided to pursue a
course of neutrality, and in fact, he issued a statement
on April twenty second, seventeen ninety three, as followed, the
duty and interest of the United States require that they should,
(16:34):
with sincerity and good faith, adopt and pursue a conduct
friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers. I want you
to notice something very small in that statement. The duty
and interest of the United States require that they should,
with sincerity doesn't say it we would today say it
(16:58):
the United States. It required that it should sincerity and
good faith adopt it, says the they. The significance of
that is that Washington is using language that emphasizes the
degree to which the United States is still best understood
as a confederation of more or less independent states. Washington
(17:24):
warned Americans the federal government would prosecute any violations of
this policy by its citizens and would not protect them
should they be tried by a belligerent nation. Well, now
that's a serious infringement on the ability of Americans who
express their sympathies for one or the other of the
(17:46):
other belligerate parties and be found to be in violation
of this presidential edict.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
But it was.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Representative of how important Washington thought it was to keep
the America from getting entangled in foreign affairs. This was
a constant theme for him, that we do not want
foreign entanglements to the degree we can avoid them. We
must avoid them to the degree we cannot avoid them.
(18:21):
Let's keep them as attenuated, as minimal, as small, and
as temporary as possible. He really understood war. He understood
the costs of war, the unpredictable nature of the war.
He did not want to see the United States undermined
by being dragged into a war that they could avoid.
(18:42):
Washington showed his prudential wisdom, the aspect of his character
that we come back to again again. He's a great
statesman because he's prudent. He's able to wisely, and not
by using abstract reasoning, but by looking at the facts
of the case and comparing them to abstract principles, working
(19:07):
out the best possible combination.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Of the two.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
That was Washington, and that's one of the primary qualities
that a statesman in any time of history needs to show.
You've got to know what to do and when to
do it, on how to do it and when to
stop doing. He risked unpopularity, which is something he was
not accustomed to, but he did it for the sake
(19:33):
of the country.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery, himself a Hillsdale College graduate.
A special thanks to Hillsdale College professor Bill McLay, author
of Land of Hope and the terrific young reader's edition.
Go to Amazon or the usual suspects to pick up
the book. And my goodness, what Washington faced, what the
Constitution faced immediately two competing visions for the country in
(19:59):
his own cabinet, Jefferson's the rural vision, Hamilton the big city,
big economic power, world power vision, and my goodness, there
are competing visions that sound familiar today. The Story of
Us The Story of America series on our American Stories
And we returned to our American Stories and our series
about Us, the Story of America series with Hillsdale College
professor Bill McLay, author of Land of Hope. Let's get
into the story.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Take it away, Bill, George Washington was our first president
and the logical man, the inevitable man, the indispensable man.
But the funny thing about this man is that he
wasn't a politician. He was a military man. So Washington
(00:45):
had a different set of criteria, more like what a
general might have perhaps than a typical politician. Of course,
nobody had been president of the United States before. He
chose his cabinet on the basis of who were the
most competent people in his view, who were the most skillful,
most intelligent, most experienced, most far seeing. He didn't play
(01:10):
favorites according to politics or party. There were no parties,
so he chose his cabinet from all over. He did
not show any loyalty to region. Well, you know, he
was a loyal Virginian, but he didn't appoint all Virginians.
His top cabinet picks were Alexandra Hamilton of New York,
(01:31):
who didn't know very well as his former aide to
the Treasury Department. He was Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas
Jefferson of Virginia, Secretary of State, and Henry Knox of Massachusetts,
who would be the Secretary of War. That's a pretty
nice distribution. This was a very unique approach because he
(01:53):
wasn't look at, for example, did Hamilton have a different
view of the Constitution than Jefferson, which it actually turns
out they were fiercely opposed, But that didn't matter to Washington.
He was interested in what they brought to the table
in terms of fulfilling the particular function that he had
(02:15):
in mind for them. It would be a very, very
long time before we have another leader that taught quite.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
In those terms.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
It was unique. It was important because at this stage
of the national enterprise, when things were brand new and
very fragile, the Constitution was like that unplayed.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Piece of music.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
We didn't know what it was going to sound like
until actual musicians picked up their instruments and started to
make sounds. So Washington's approach was quite appropriate to that tentative, exploratory,
experimental character of the Constitution once it was put into action.
(03:01):
He was not a fan of political parties. He thought
partisanship was one of the worst things that could befall
a nation. He saw the effects of it in Great Britain,
so he didn't want to encourage political parties. Some kind
of partisanship, however, was going to be hard to avoid.
(03:24):
People are going to have loyalties to their region no
matter what.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
They're going to have.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Loyalties to their local institutions, no matter what. They're going
to have loyalty to the economy that fuels the life
of the region in which they inhabit, no matter what.
This was not going to be something he could completely avoid,
but to mitigate the effects of partisanship was one of
his goals, so he took no notice of partisanship in
(03:50):
making his appointments.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Hamilton was a.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Very inspired choice for Treasury. Hamilton had thought a lot
about the American economy, the American future. He called America
the Hercules and the Cradle, meaning they could be a big,
big economy. It had all the advantages of natural resources, ports,
(04:18):
all of the things you needed to become a commercial
power in the world. Hamilton had a vision of an
American economy that would be not merely agricultural, but would
also be commercial and industrial. It involved in the production,
so that we would not be importing those things from
Europe and thereby placing ourselves at risk from Europe cutting
(04:42):
us off or charging exorbitant rates. So Hamilton had a
very shrewd, well informed, economically literate understanding of the American
economy and big plans for it.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
He did not think small, Alexander Hamilton.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
But he had some obstacles to overcome, perhaps a severe obstacle,
since any Secretary of the Treasury would face for another
one hundred and thirty years or so. The biggest problem
under the new constitution was the dire financial situation of
the country. The war had been fought by borrowing money
(05:26):
printing money. The account books of the country were amassed.
It was not the kind of economy that foreign nations
with whom we would be trading could have much confidence in.
Just as you wouldn't have much confidence in doing business
with somebody who owes more money by three or four
(05:47):
or five times than the value of their property. He
would think twice and three times about doing business with
such a person. So Hamilton realized we had to clean
up our act, we had to clean up our books.
We had to get ourselves out of dead or at
least show ourselves to be credit worthy. And this is
something that others like him, like Jefferson, were not really
(06:08):
thinking much about. Well. Hamilton had a plan, a three
part plan. The first part meant paying off the national
debt in full and the state debts that were incurred
in fighting the revolution. Brilliant idea for all sorts of reasons.
(06:31):
It would make the nation as a whole seem more
credit worthy to pay off the national debt but also
paying off state debts. What this did was it lifted
off of the states a great burden, in some cases
an enormous burd particularly in the some of the northern
states where a lot of the revolutionary battles were fought,
(06:53):
like Massachusetts. Those debts would be paid by the federal government.
So this was a a genius plan for welding the
state's loyalty to the country which had bailed them out.
It was not equally well received in all the states.
The southern states had far less debt to pay than
(07:14):
their northern counterparts, but the disagreement was settled by the
location of America's permanent.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Capital, what's now Washington, d c.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
In as it so happens a swamp on the Potomac River,
but in the South. Hamilton also hoped to use tariffs
to develop an industrialized America. This was not quite as
controversial as you might think. The notion of using taxes
taxation of imports, that's what we mean by tariffs, to
(07:48):
protect nascent American industries from being swamped by foreign goods
that were much cheaper and therefore much more attractive to
hard pressed consumers. Tariffs were part of the plan. It
was not seriously challenged. Now, what was seriously challenged was
the third part of this three part approach.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
That was the idea of a national bank.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Madison James Madison, with whom Hamilton had written the Federalist
papers in New York, disagreed on this, so did Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
For them, the idea of a national.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Bank would be a way that the financial elites, which
were so worrisomely powerful in Great Britain, could grasp hold
of the national economy by controlling banking from a central source.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
They didn't like that.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
They saw this as a aggrandizement of national power, of
power in the national government. So it was a bit
of a constitutional crisis. This not only produced a crisis
over the policy, but it produced the first great debate
over the nature of the Constitution. And it was simply
(09:07):
a debate between the strict interpretation of the Constitution that
was Jefferson's point of view.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Hamilton's point of view.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Was that the Constitution should be interpreted loosely.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
When we come back more of the Story of Us,
the Story of America series with Bill McClay here on
our American Stories, and we returned to our American Stories
(09:41):
and our Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor
Bill McLay, let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
We have the golf between these two visions. The golf
between Jefferson and Hamilton their visions.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Of America was.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
These were competing visions of America for the kind of
nation that America was going to become. They were competing blueprints,
and that they were reflected in the difference between the
two men. Jefferson, of course, was a very sophisticated man
of the world who spent a lot of time in
(10:26):
Paris and was involved in the international discourse of the
Enlightenment as a scientist. But when you boil it all down,
he was a rural advocate. He was an advocate for rural,
agricultural Virginia. He remember he said that those who labor
in the earth are the chosen people of God. If
(10:47):
he had a josen people, that farmers are the source
of national virtue. They live virtuous lives, their virtue is
communicated to the larger populace of his idea of the
way America would expand as simply as a farming nation
going westward further and further. Hamilton wasn't that guy. Hamilton
(11:09):
actually was not born in the United States. He was
born in the Caribbean, and he found his way to
New York, which was a place where he was able
to realize his dreams of being a greater man than
whatever have been possible on the island of Nevis or
in the places where.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
He grew up.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
He was the opposite of Jefferson. He was a big
city boy. Hamilton was a guy who liked stock exchanges.
He liked the flexibility that paper money provides. He was
very interested in developing trade. Interested in commerce, he was
interested in making America into one of the world's powers,
(11:52):
and not only economically, but in other respects. He saw
the possibilities as being limitless for America, the United States
of America, to take its place among the.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Great nations of the world.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
He was frankly not much of a republican. He often
said privately that he might have thought a monarchy would
be better for America. There was fighting words for people
like Jefferson. Jefferson had no such aspiration. Jefferson wanted to
see America beat the odds and be a republic that.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Would last and last and last, and.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Not founder on the rocks of factionalism and partisanship and
loss of civic virtue.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
We were not going back to the idea of monarchy.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Republicanism forever would have been their motto. So Washington had
a conflict, a fundamental conflict, right up close and personal,
in his own cabinet, between his two leading cabinet of
five issus.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
He had to take signs.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
He couldn't create a somewhat national bank, a regional bank.
It was all or nothing, and so he sided with Hamilton,
and so it was decided okay. So one of the
other problems that Washington faced is that he was not
starting off this country in this constitution, in a geopolitical
(13:27):
vacuum you know. It wasn't as if he could say
to the rest of the world, Okay, hold off for
a while while we get ourselves started, maybe thirty forty years,
don't bother us.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
No, we couldn't do that.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
We couldn't do anything like that. The French Revolution began
in the same year that George Washington was inaugurated as president.
The French Revolution had been influenced by our revolution. It
was a very tumultuous affair, and our own government became
divided between those who favored the reforms of the French
(14:03):
and those who did not favor them and in some
cases abominate.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Hamilton was one.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Of those who were opposed to the French Revolution. Frightened
by the French Revolution because it was going around not
just deposing and beheading the king, but also deposing elite classes.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
At all levels.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
It was rattling the entire social structure of the French nation.
Hamilton was not a fan of that kind of social revolution. Jefferson,
on the other hand, he was a philosoph himself, a
man of the Enlightenment. He corresponded with French authors, French thinkers.
Some of the great influences on the revolution itself. Jefferson
(14:49):
thought a revolution every twenty years or so was a
good thing.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Countries got stale, they.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Got ossified, they got our hardening of the arteries.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
They needed to be shaken up. So he thought boldly
for the French Revolution.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
And you know, added to that as the time he
had spent in Paris, his great liking for the French people,
and particularly their wines, led him to side with them.
But it's a serious debate. It's not just debate over
who likes wine. It's a serious debate over whether the
sympathies of the American government would be drawn more to
(15:27):
the French, who, after all, had not only been our
allies that understates the extent of it, the French had
helped us incalculably crucially to win our revolution, to win
our independence. So it was a choice for me siding
with them or siding with England, which of course had
been the mother country against which.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
We had rebelled.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
But the English were the source of so many of
our institutions, of our cultures, of our taste, our language.
So you had figures like Jefferson who were drawn to
the French Revolution out of ideology and personal sympathies, and
then Hamilton, who for similar reasons, was drawn to the England.
(16:10):
Hamilton and Jefferson were on different sides. Once again, Washington
sort of split the difference and decided to pursue a
course of neutrality, and in fact, he issued a statement
on April twenty second, seventeen ninety three, as followed, the
duty and interest of the United States require that they should,
(16:34):
with sincerity and good faith, adopt and pursue a conduct
friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers. I want you
to notice something very small in that statement. The duty
and interest of the United States require that they should,
with sincerity doesn't say it we would today say it
(16:58):
the United States. It required that it should sincerity and
good faith adopt it, says the they. The significance of
that is that Washington is using language that emphasizes the
degree to which the United States is still best understood
as a confederation of more or less independent states. Washington
(17:24):
warned Americans the federal government would prosecute any violations of
this policy by its citizens and would not protect them
should they be tried by a belligerent nation. Well, now
that's a serious infringement on the ability of Americans who
express their sympathies for one or the other of the
(17:46):
other belligerate parties and be found to be in violation
of this presidential edict.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
But it was.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Representative of how important Washington thought it was to keep
the America from getting entangled in foreign affairs. This was
a constant theme for him, that we do not want
foreign entanglements to the degree we can avoid them. We
must avoid them to the degree we cannot avoid them.
(18:21):
Let's keep them as attenuated, as minimal, as small, and
as temporary as possible. He really understood war. He understood
the costs of war, the unpredictable nature of the war.
He did not want to see the United States undermined
by being dragged into a war that they could avoid.
(18:42):
Washington showed his prudential wisdom, the aspect of his character
that we come back to again again. He's a great
statesman because he's prudent. He's able to wisely, and not
by using abstract reasoning, but by looking at the facts
of the case and comparing them to abstract principles, working
(19:07):
out the best possible combination.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Of the two.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
That was Washington, and that's one of the primary qualities
that a statesman in any time of history needs to show.
You've got to know what to do and when to
do it, on how to do it and when to
stop doing. He risked unpopularity, which is something he was
not accustomed to, but he did it for the sake
(19:33):
of the country.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery, himself a Hillsdale College graduate.
A special thanks to Hillsdale College professor Bill McLay, author
of Land of Hope and the terrific young reader's edition.
Go to Amazon or the usual suspects to pick up
the book. And my goodness, what Washington faced, what the
Constitution faced immediately two competing visions for the country in
(19:59):
his own cabinet, Jefferson's the rural vision, Hamilton the big city,
big economic power, world power vision, and my goodness, there
are competing visions that sound familiar today. The Story of
Us The Story of America series on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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