WEBVTT NOTE Historians, the State and Liberty 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 When Lew asked me to deliver the first talk for this program, I was flattered but intimidated, particularly because of the topic. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:17.000 I've not spent a lot of time in my career studying historians as such. 3 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:20.000 I've read some history books off and on. 4 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:29.520 on, but I knew also that many of my colleagues, maybe all of my colleagues in this program 5 00:00:29.520 --> 00:00:40.680 could do a better job talking about this subject than I could and so I urged Lew to get a substitute. 6 00:00:40.680 --> 00:00:49.640 So if I don't do a good job tonight, you know whom to blame. 7 00:00:49.640 --> 00:00:56.960 The talk tonight is called Historians of the State and Liberty. In a way, whenever we talk 8 00:00:56.960 --> 00:01:02.720 about the state, we're talking about liberty. Unfortunately, however, that's a proposition 9 00:01:02.720 --> 00:01:10.220 that is not obvious to many of the people who write history. In fact, if they thought 10 00:01:10.220 --> 00:01:16.560 about it at all, some of them would probably insist that the state is actually an engine 11 00:01:16.560 --> 00:01:18.920 for Bringing About Liberty. 12 00:01:18.920 --> 00:01:22.940 One sees claims of that sort in some history books. 13 00:01:22.940 --> 00:01:33.940 My view is that the state is in practice as opposed to in the dreams of certain intellectuals. 14 00:01:33.940 --> 00:01:41.800 The institution that serves for the most part to deprive people of liberty and wealth and 15 00:01:41.800 --> 00:01:46.440 dignity and many of the other good things that otherwise would exist if the state would 16 00:01:46.440 --> 00:02:01.440 When I talk about the state, I'm talking about liberty almost as its complement, logically speaking. 17 00:02:01.440 --> 00:02:09.440 I want to just run through some of the things that have struck me as an amateur historian over the years, 18 00:02:09.440 --> 00:02:15.440 reading what historians have to say about various episodes in American history, 19 00:02:15.440 --> 00:02:42.440 History. What Little History I Know is about the United States. And when I talk tonight, I'm going to be talking mainly about academic historians. There still are historians who write for the general public, and it's a damn good thing that some of them are still around because they're still writing books that are readable. 20 00:02:42.440 --> 00:02:59.440 I just began a book today on the airplane coming down here called The New Dealers' War by a man named Thomas Fleming who is one of these very successful non-academic historians. 21 00:02:59.440 --> 00:03:05.440 And the first thing that struck me was that, my God, these are nice sentences. 22 00:03:05.440 --> 00:03:10.440 As an editor I'm really alive to that kind of thing. 23 00:03:10.440 --> 00:03:19.800 But it's very nicely written, and it doesn't have the kind of self-importance and puffery 24 00:03:19.800 --> 00:03:24.000 that afflicts almost everything written in academia these days. 25 00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:32.080 So such people are around, but nonetheless, increasingly in this century, academic historians 26 00:03:32.080 --> 00:03:38.320 have been the ones who've taken over the writing of history, and by this time they write the 27 00:03:38.320 --> 00:03:44.320 The Great Bulk of what is seen as serious history, as opposed to just entertainment. 28 00:03:44.320 --> 00:03:48.320 And so they're the ones I'll have in mind. 29 00:03:48.320 --> 00:03:53.320 Now historians come in all kinds, good, bad and indifferent. 30 00:03:53.320 --> 00:03:56.320 Many of them are just indifferent. 31 00:03:56.320 --> 00:03:59.320 All right, you can shrug your shoulders. 32 00:03:59.320 --> 00:04:03.320 Go ahead and be an existentialist about these guys. 33 00:04:03.320 --> 00:04:07.320 Some of them are just atrocious. 34 00:04:07.320 --> 00:04:12.560 So classify them under bad, but but there are actually some good historians as well 35 00:04:13.440 --> 00:04:18.720 And I don't want to give you the impression because I'm going to be speaking mainly 36 00:04:19.040 --> 00:04:22.800 Critically that no good history has been written in the past hundred years 37 00:04:23.960 --> 00:04:30.680 Indeed the other people who are on the program have done a good deal of writing good history themselves 38 00:04:30.680 --> 00:04:35.000 So so there there's a small sample, but but there are a number of others 39 00:04:35.000 --> 00:04:42.720 They don't add up to a big percentage of the history profession, but they do exist. 40 00:04:42.720 --> 00:04:48.120 One of the things that you may make an effort to do this week is just try to find out who 41 00:04:48.120 --> 00:04:53.520 some good historians are, what some really good history books, worthwhile books are by 42 00:04:53.520 --> 00:04:57.120 asking us. 43 00:04:57.120 --> 00:05:02.400 I'm always pleased when I can recommend something that I found worthwhile because I will say 44 00:05:02.400 --> 00:05:17.400 I have to say that probably 95% of the time I spent reading in my life would have been better spent playing basketball or anything, but nonetheless I have to say that there are exceptions to these rules. 45 00:05:17.400 --> 00:05:44.400 Now, whenever you get into any historical topic, you find that it gets very picky, it starts to turn on little details, and the debates get about minutiae, in many cases, or what at least appears to the outsider to be minutiae. 46 00:05:44.400 --> 00:05:51.100 But, I'm going to be talking mainly about the level of historical interpretation and 47 00:05:51.100 --> 00:05:59.380 appreciation that you might find in, say, a college textbook in American history, as 48 00:05:59.380 --> 00:06:01.860 opposed to what all the specialists say. 49 00:06:01.860 --> 00:06:07.480 I'm not myself knowledgeable enough about every topic I'm going to touch on to speak 50 00:06:07.480 --> 00:06:12.880 with authority about what every specialist has said. 51 00:06:12.880 --> 00:06:18.480 But I do know fairly well what is the kind of received opinion that is dished out to 52 00:06:18.480 --> 00:06:23.680 millions of students every year in universities and colleges. 53 00:06:23.680 --> 00:06:28.380 And that's in the long haul probably more important than what the specialists say because 54 00:06:28.380 --> 00:06:35.400 the specialists just read one another and many times that's as far as it gets. 55 00:06:35.400 --> 00:06:40.480 Let's start out by just raising the question, what sort of people are the academic historians 56 00:06:40.480 --> 00:06:47.360 these days. Indeed, for the past hundred years or so, the answers are the same. And when 57 00:06:47.360 --> 00:06:55.880 I ask that, I'm thinking about what kind of people are they, ideologically. And the answer 58 00:06:55.880 --> 00:07:05.560 is that, overwhelmingly, they are leftish. They are mostly left liberals. A good many 59 00:07:05.560 --> 00:07:12.520 Many of them nowadays are left radicals of some kind, and that's become the case mostly 60 00:07:12.520 --> 00:07:16.840 in the past 30 years or so. 61 00:07:16.840 --> 00:07:26.160 In 1971, David M. Potter wrote in one of his books, quote, most American academic historians 62 00:07:26.160 --> 00:07:33.660 have thought of themselves as the political heirs of the progressive tradition. 63 00:07:33.660 --> 00:07:34.960 And I think that's correct. 64 00:07:34.960 --> 00:07:40.800 I think it still stands today, although as I say, there has been a movement toward more 65 00:07:40.800 --> 00:07:50.740 real looniness in the historical profession as the race class and gender people have come 66 00:07:50.740 --> 00:08:00.560 into considerable sway, but it still seems to me that the progressive outlook on matters 67 00:08:00.560 --> 00:08:07.200 is pretty much where the profession finds itself and has found itself since the progressive 68 00:08:07.200 --> 00:08:15.160 era. So this has been going on for quite a long time and it means that most of what is 69 00:08:15.160 --> 00:08:27.560 dished out is the progressive interpretation. I try to find some data. This is not exactly 70 00:08:27.560 --> 00:08:36.120 on the Point, but it's still interesting and bears on the point. Data on the political 71 00:08:36.120 --> 00:08:44.120 affiliations of people who teach history, and I found that efforts had been made in 72 00:08:44.120 --> 00:08:51.560 at least six campuses, I was able to find information about. Someone had gone down to 73 00:08:51.560 --> 00:08:56.600 the courthouse and had looked up members of faculties and found out whether they were 74 00:08:56.600 --> 00:09:04.760 are registered to vote as Republicans or Democrats or not affiliated with any party. At Princeton, 75 00:09:04.760 --> 00:09:12.400 the history department has, this is as of about a year or two ago, 26 Democrats and 76 00:09:12.400 --> 00:09:23.440 one Republican. Stanford has 22 Democrats and two Republicans. Dartmouth, 10 Democrats, 77 00:09:23.440 --> 00:09:38.880 0 Republicans, Cornell, 29 Democrats, 0 Republicans, Colorado, 27 Democrats and 1 Republican, and 78 00:09:38.880 --> 00:09:42.840 lest you think that down here in the south things are different. 79 00:09:42.840 --> 00:09:47.300 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is a giant factory for producing 80 00:09:47.300 --> 00:09:57.300 and PhDs in History has a faculty with 49 Democrats and one Republican. So you can add it up. 81 00:09:57.300 --> 00:10:08.300 It's about 95% of the people who are registered with one of the major parties, Democrats. 82 00:10:08.300 --> 00:10:15.300 Now, I hasten to tell you, I don't hold any brief for Republicans. 83 00:10:15.300 --> 00:10:22.300 But I still think those data are quite extraordinary, and the situation that exists in history departments 84 00:10:22.300 --> 00:10:29.540 is even more desperate than they suggest, because it's not just that they're Democrats. 85 00:10:29.540 --> 00:10:38.740 There may be in the general population sensible Democrats somewhere, but these are not among 86 00:10:38.740 --> 00:10:42.900 them, these democratic history professors. 87 00:10:42.900 --> 00:10:52.820 So we're dealing with a profession which is simply identified itself as on the left, which 88 00:10:52.820 --> 00:11:02.220 is even unwilling to tolerate contamination in its midst by people who represent something 89 00:11:02.220 --> 00:11:11.380 like half of the general population. So it gives you some inclination, some idea about 90 00:11:11.380 --> 00:11:18.380 and what kind of profession this is, and it matters because historians deal with all sorts of things. 91 00:11:18.380 --> 00:11:26.380 If we were looking at people who did work in astrophysics or geology or something, 92 00:11:26.380 --> 00:11:32.380 it might not make much difference what their ideology or political affiliation happened to be, 93 00:11:32.380 --> 00:11:40.380 but that's not the case in writing history because ideology infuses a great deal of written history 94 00:11:40.380 --> 00:11:49.460 History, and the effect of this is to bias what people say in a variety of ways, and 95 00:11:49.460 --> 00:11:56.820 I think the closer you get to the present day, the greater the bias becomes. I have 96 00:11:56.820 --> 00:12:02.980 found that when historians write about the 18th century, they seem to me to be far more 97 00:12:02.980 --> 00:12:08.300 even-handed than they are when they write about the 20th century. They almost seem like 98 00:12:08.300 --> 00:12:16.260 about cheerleaders or demonstrators in the street, depending on the question before them, 99 00:12:16.260 --> 00:12:18.540 when it comes to recent events. 100 00:12:18.540 --> 00:12:22.900 And in some cases, like Ralph Reiko, you know, who's been an actual participant in history 101 00:12:22.900 --> 00:12:32.100 for the past couple of centuries, there are people like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who's 102 00:12:32.100 --> 00:12:37.600 also been a participant out there in the very kinds of events that he writes about. 103 00:12:37.600 --> 00:12:46.400 So if you think he's dispassionate about it, you need to think again. 104 00:12:46.400 --> 00:12:53.600 The way these progressives go about looking at history tends to take certain forms. 105 00:12:53.600 --> 00:13:03.320 One is that they tend to see class conflicts as driving forces, and sometimes this is a 106 00:13:03.320 --> 00:13:10.240 kind of a muted Marxist conception of class conflict, but usually it's a little foggier 107 00:13:10.240 --> 00:13:18.000 than that. It's basically some kind of a contest between the rich and the poor in which the 108 00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:25.760 poor are poor because the rich are exploiting them in one way or another. In the past 30 109 00:13:25.760 --> 00:13:48.760 years or so, it's taken the PC form, so that non-whites and women and homosexuals and other oppressed groups have all been sort of the losing class, and we heterosexual white guys have been the dominators. 110 00:13:48.760 --> 00:13:58.760 and you know that never hit my block but I'm still hoping anyhow that's that's 111 00:13:58.760 --> 00:14:06.200 come to be another way to do class analysis and when when you look at 112 00:14:06.200 --> 00:14:12.880 history that way historians tend to see workers farmers or these PC oppressed 113 00:14:12.880 --> 00:14:42.560 I had a colleague years ago who referred to this phenomenon as the theory of infinite and 114 00:14:42.560 --> 00:14:49.840 and Increasing Misery, something along those lines. 115 00:14:49.840 --> 00:14:55.000 On the other hand, businessmen in general, particularly more successful and big business 116 00:14:55.000 --> 00:15:02.600 people and bankers, are the oppressors and victimizers, and that's always the case. 117 00:15:02.600 --> 00:15:08.140 In fact, these people don't play any useful role in society whatsoever, and it would be 118 00:15:08.140 --> 00:15:13.740 be good if they were simply extirpated. 119 00:15:13.740 --> 00:15:19.820 Historians talk about reform when they mean something that works in the direction of what 120 00:15:19.820 --> 00:15:23.020 they believe to be helping the oppressed. 121 00:15:23.020 --> 00:15:31.660 So when something seems to be pro-labor or anti-business, that's reform. 122 00:15:31.660 --> 00:15:41.180 If there's any kind of change in law or practice that works in apparent opposition to the interests 123 00:15:41.180 --> 00:15:49.100 of labor, particularly unionized labor, or in favor of business, that's reaction as opposed 124 00:15:49.100 --> 00:15:50.940 to reform. 125 00:15:50.940 --> 00:15:55.840 And so taxes are generally looked upon as good things, especially if they are taxes 126 00:15:55.840 --> 00:16:05.080 because it graduated rates on income or wealth, and that's because in the eyes of the historian, 127 00:16:05.080 --> 00:16:11.040 a lot more redistribution of income and wealth is desirable, and again, it's always desirable, 128 00:16:11.040 --> 00:16:17.040 no matter what period of history you look at, some additional redistribution is a crying 129 00:16:17.040 --> 00:16:21.320 need of society. 130 00:16:21.320 --> 00:16:27.640 Things imposed by the government on business in any way are always good because those are 131 00:16:27.640 --> 00:16:35.740 ways in which society, historians often talk about society doing things, society rises 132 00:16:35.740 --> 00:16:41.720 up and resists capitalist abuses and excesses. 133 00:16:41.720 --> 00:16:47.560 And that's good, of course, because just as businessmen perform no useful social role, 134 00:16:47.560 --> 00:16:55.000 in itself is nothing but an unmitigated evil, just the kind of agglomeration of practices 135 00:16:55.000 --> 00:17:01.080 by which property people exploit everybody else. 136 00:17:01.080 --> 00:17:04.000 Free markets, of course, are always bad. 137 00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:10.160 There's never anything good said about them. 138 00:17:10.160 --> 00:17:12.480 Maybe it's between the lines sometimes. 139 00:17:12.480 --> 00:17:16.580 If you look at something like economic growth or the fact that we're all vastly better off 140 00:17:16.580 --> 00:17:21.420 materiality than people were fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago well 141 00:17:21.420 --> 00:17:31.980 that's just because something happened where's that come from it's not because 142 00:17:31.980 --> 00:17:36.340 of capitalism and it's not because of entrepreneurship and it's not certainly 143 00:17:36.340 --> 00:17:40.980 not because of anything that happened that required the market system to 144 00:17:40.980 --> 00:17:46.340 permit its happening if you're a deconstructionist you might say that 145 00:17:46.340 --> 00:17:56.340 Historians privilege the state. They take it for granted, and they take its legitimacy for granted. 146 00:17:56.340 --> 00:18:03.340 They may find its policies better or worse, but the idea that there wouldn't be any policy, 147 00:18:03.340 --> 00:18:08.340 that is that there would be just laissez-faire in some respect, is not even thinkable, 148 00:18:08.340 --> 00:18:14.340 and certainly it's inconceivable that there wouldn't be any state. 149 00:18:14.340 --> 00:18:31.340 Why? There'd be chaos, wouldn't there? That's what I'm told, at least. So they assume there's always going to be a state, and the more it's used to come to the rescue of the oppressed, the better it is. 150 00:18:31.340 --> 00:18:42.340 Now because they think of the world in these terms, whenever they talk about causation, and all historians are constantly talking about causation, whether they use the word or not, 151 00:18:42.340 --> 00:18:53.340 They impoverish their analysis because when we think about causation, we're thinking implicitly, if not explicitly, about counterfactuals. 152 00:18:53.340 --> 00:19:04.340 We say if A caused B, we're saying in a world that didn't have A, that's a counterfactual world, it didn't exist, but we say things would have worked out differently. 153 00:19:04.340 --> 00:19:19.340 But if you can't imagine a world without the state, you lose contact with a whole lot of counterfactuals that would inform you as to how things might have worked, but for the actions of the state. 154 00:19:19.340 --> 00:19:28.340 So this is a built-in infirmity of the progressive outlook. 155 00:19:28.340 --> 00:19:35.340 They do talk about liberty sometimes, but when they do, they talk about it in a collectivistic sense. 156 00:19:35.340 --> 00:19:39.340 They talk about national independence, for example. 157 00:19:39.340 --> 00:19:43.340 There are two main occasions for talking about liberty in American history. 158 00:19:43.340 --> 00:19:49.340 One is when the American Revolution takes place, and the Americans get liberty. 159 00:19:49.340 --> 00:19:57.340 But what the historians are really saying is that one state replaces another. 160 00:19:57.340 --> 00:20:00.340 and they think that was liberty. 161 00:20:00.340 --> 00:20:06.340 When the slaves are emancipated in the 1860s, the slaves get liberty. 162 00:20:06.340 --> 00:20:13.340 But if anybody ever uses the word individual liberty in the ears of the historians, 163 00:20:13.340 --> 00:20:18.340 that's a kind of code word meaning some Neanderthal is talking. 164 00:20:18.340 --> 00:20:26.340 Individual liberty, well that's just what primitive people might say. 165 00:20:26.340 --> 00:20:35.040 I want to take a quick look at some of the episodes and I'll go back to the colonies 166 00:20:35.040 --> 00:20:39.820 and say a few words and move along fairly quickly. 167 00:20:39.820 --> 00:20:49.540 Just to give you how I find these topics have been treated in so far as they help us understand 168 00:20:49.540 --> 00:20:57.540 a little better, the progressive historical outlook on a variety of topics. 169 00:20:57.540 --> 00:21:06.540 Everybody agrees that the British North American colonies were a part of an imperial mercantilist system. 170 00:21:06.540 --> 00:21:13.540 As I said before, historians are fairly sound if they go far enough in the past. 171 00:21:13.540 --> 00:21:18.540 During the colonial period, the British government imposed a variety of restrictions 172 00:21:18.540 --> 00:21:27.540 In their predictions on the colonists, they forbade them, for example, to manufacture certain items. 173 00:21:27.540 --> 00:21:31.540 They couldn't manufacture hats for quite a while. 174 00:21:31.540 --> 00:21:36.540 They were not permitted to manufacture iron products such as tools. 175 00:21:36.540 --> 00:21:42.540 Even though the North American colonies produced a great deal of iron, 176 00:21:42.540 --> 00:21:47.540 the colonies were a major source of iron production in the world in the 18th century, 177 00:21:47.540 --> 00:22:07.340 The British also imposed starting in the 1650s, what were called the Navigation Acts, and 178 00:22:07.340 --> 00:22:13.060 these were regulations on international commerce. 179 00:22:13.060 --> 00:22:23.020 For example, if you wanted to bring something from overseas or ship your own products elsewhere, 180 00:22:23.020 --> 00:22:26.860 you had to do that in a British ship. 181 00:22:26.860 --> 00:22:32.420 Had to have a British captain and most of the crew members had to be British. 182 00:22:32.420 --> 00:22:42.160 Now when I talk about these restrictions, you want to remember that the colonists were 183 00:22:42.160 --> 00:22:44.720 were inveterate lawbreakers. 184 00:22:44.720 --> 00:22:48.680 So it doesn't mean that they obeyed all these restrictions, 185 00:22:48.680 --> 00:22:51.960 but the government did impose these restrictions 186 00:22:51.960 --> 00:22:54.960 and from time to time made efforts to enforce them. 187 00:22:57.000 --> 00:22:58.840 Certain goods were enumerated, 188 00:22:58.840 --> 00:23:01.400 which meant that when they were exported 189 00:23:01.400 --> 00:23:02.480 from the United States, 190 00:23:02.480 --> 00:23:05.900 they had to be not sent to their ultimate destination, 191 00:23:05.900 --> 00:23:08.960 but they had to be sent first to England. 192 00:23:10.380 --> 00:23:11.760 Now you may be asking yourself, 193 00:23:11.760 --> 00:23:14.400 Well, why did they impose these restrictions? 194 00:23:14.400 --> 00:23:19.760 And the short answer is what's now called, in economics, rent-seeking. 195 00:23:19.760 --> 00:23:30.560 There were organized interest groups in England who stood to benefit from having these kinds of restrictions imposed on the colonies, 196 00:23:30.560 --> 00:23:37.460 so that people who made tools didn't have to compete with tool makers in North America. 197 00:23:37.460 --> 00:23:39.600 Hat manufacturers, the same thing. 198 00:23:39.600 --> 00:23:47.960 And these navigation acts obviously were intended to prohibit the competition of French ships 199 00:23:47.960 --> 00:23:53.680 and Dutch ships and Spanish ships in trade and so forth. 200 00:23:53.680 --> 00:24:01.680 So this was a way of trying to get rid of competition, which is one thing that producers 201 00:24:01.680 --> 00:24:06.560 are frequently found trying to do. 202 00:24:06.560 --> 00:24:11.060 The land regulations that were imposed by the British government were perhaps the most 203 00:24:11.060 --> 00:24:16.660 important of all. They didn't matter in the beginning because there were so few colonists 204 00:24:16.660 --> 00:24:21.360 that they didn't have the ability or even the interest of getting very far from the 205 00:24:21.360 --> 00:24:29.160 coastline. But increasingly, the colonists became interested in going farther west. And 206 00:24:29.160 --> 00:24:36.520 when they did that, they always got into squabbles with the native people who lived there and 207 00:24:36.520 --> 00:24:46.280 And when the Indians would kill the entrepreneurs who were out there trying to grab land, they 208 00:24:46.280 --> 00:24:51.240 would clamor for the British Army to come and protect them. 209 00:24:51.240 --> 00:24:59.440 And this was expensive, and the British government tired of always having to bail out these colonial 210 00:24:59.440 --> 00:25:02.640 land grabbers. 211 00:25:02.640 --> 00:25:08.080 And finally, after immense expense born in the Seven Years' War, the French and Indian 212 00:25:08.080 --> 00:25:16.840 War, the British drew a line in the sand, so to speak, along the Appalachians and said, 213 00:25:16.840 --> 00:25:25.360 don't go beyond there. You just create too much trouble and we're broke anyhow, so stay 214 00:25:25.360 --> 00:25:31.140 out of there. And of course, the colonists didn't want to stay out of there, so they 215 00:25:31.140 --> 00:25:39.580 They continued to go there anyhow and in 1774, the British government got even more serious 216 00:25:39.580 --> 00:25:45.220 and it passed something called the Quebec Act, Quebec Act, I guess in English, and it 217 00:25:45.220 --> 00:25:49.540 said all that land out there that we just told you you couldn't go to is now part of 218 00:25:49.540 --> 00:25:55.920 the province of Quebec and you're still not supposed to go there. 219 00:25:55.920 --> 00:26:02.860 and they went there anyhow, of course, but nonetheless, this was another issue in the 220 00:26:02.860 --> 00:26:09.120 British colonial system and I think ultimately probably the most important economic provocation 221 00:26:09.120 --> 00:26:10.880 for the American Revolution. 222 00:26:10.880 --> 00:26:16.440 Now, economic historians particularly have studied these imperial restrictions that were 223 00:26:16.440 --> 00:26:23.640 placed on the colonists and they've gone about this in what you might roughly call 224 00:26:23.640 --> 00:26:33.640 cost-benefit terms. They've tried to add up how much benefit the colonists got, say, from the protection they received from the British Army and Navy, 225 00:26:33.640 --> 00:26:40.640 and from certain subsidies and bounties that were paid for various crops they produced, such as indigo. 226 00:26:40.640 --> 00:26:49.640 And then they've tried to, against those benefits that the British provided, estimate the cost of this system. 227 00:26:49.640 --> 00:26:59.640 In fact, for example, they had to pay more for shipping when they had to send everything via Britain instead of sending it directly to Europe. 228 00:26:59.640 --> 00:27:09.640 And when they do this exercise, they usually find that it's almost a wash, depending on the exact numbers you use. 229 00:27:09.640 --> 00:27:18.640 There wasn't any great benefit or any great cost for the colonists to be part of the British imperial system. 230 00:27:18.640 --> 00:27:30.640 But the thing that never comes into play here, which is our refrain tonight, is that these restrictions were invasions of the individual liberty of particular colonists. 231 00:27:30.640 --> 00:27:38.640 If I wanted to make hats in Pennsylvania, the law was telling me you can't make hats, and that infringed on my economic liberty. 232 00:27:38.640 --> 00:27:43.640 If I wanted to make something out of iron, ditto. 233 00:27:43.640 --> 00:27:50.640 If I wanted to get in my ship and carry products straight to Spain, 234 00:27:50.640 --> 00:27:53.640 the government was telling me you may not do that. 235 00:27:53.640 --> 00:28:00.640 So all of these things constituted infringements on the individual liberty of specific persons. 236 00:28:00.640 --> 00:28:06.640 And that's the sort of thing that never gets brought in, 237 00:28:06.640 --> 00:28:12.160 and much less given any value in this kind of cost-benefit way of looking at historical 238 00:28:12.160 --> 00:28:18.800 events. It just disappears. It's not counted. It's not counted in any kind of cost-benefit 239 00:28:18.800 --> 00:28:24.280 analysis. These days, when the government project is going to be made and the economists 240 00:28:24.280 --> 00:28:28.920 in Washington, D.C. do a cost-benefit analysis to say whether it's worthwhile, there's never 241 00:28:28.920 --> 00:28:35.280 any account taken of the fact that the funds for that project have to be taken by force 242 00:28:35.280 --> 00:28:41.160 from individuals in the form of taxation, that certain people will lose liberties as 243 00:28:41.160 --> 00:28:46.560 a result of the construction of the project. Their property may be condemned, for example. 244 00:28:46.560 --> 00:28:51.680 That just doesn't enter into this mode of analysis. And so something is lost. And if 245 00:28:51.680 --> 00:28:58.120 you think about events in this cost-benefit term, not only are you thinking about it in 246 00:28:58.120 --> 00:29:04.320 aggregates, when it would be more sensible to think about these events as they affected 247 00:29:04.320 --> 00:29:13.460 specific individuals, but you're finding yourself completely stumped when you go back and see 248 00:29:13.460 --> 00:29:21.860 the colonists going to revolution talking about preserving their rights as Englishmen 249 00:29:21.860 --> 00:29:29.560 or talking about their desire for self-government. Well, if it's just costs and benefits, who 250 00:29:29.560 --> 00:29:34.880 Who cares about that stuff? Well, some people cared enough to put their lives at risk for 251 00:29:34.880 --> 00:29:41.120 self-government or to preserve what they call the rights of Englishmen. 252 00:29:41.120 --> 00:29:48.460 And that brings us to the American Revolution. That's one where I think the historians have, 253 00:29:48.460 --> 00:29:57.180 as they tend to do, have rooted for the winners. I haven't read enough about the American Revolution 254 00:29:57.180 --> 00:30:09.180 This has been written by British writers to know whether there's a nationalist take on it from the other side. 255 00:30:09.180 --> 00:30:20.180 But most historians write, as what Lew Rockwell called, court historians, at least with regard to the revolution, therefore it. 256 00:30:20.180 --> 00:30:33.180 They see it as a kind of success and they call it liberty, although what it was, was the creation of a new state, the United States government. 257 00:30:33.180 --> 00:30:40.180 And that should give people pause more than it usually does. 258 00:30:40.180 --> 00:30:53.180 Now, when that war was fought, the revolutionaries were not able to find a lot of people willing to pay for it, 259 00:30:53.180 --> 00:31:04.180 and that was the main difficulty they had in mounting opposition to the British, getting financing for their efforts. 260 00:31:04.180 --> 00:31:13.180 So, the Revolutionary Army was an extremely rag-tag group. It's not all myth that they 261 00:31:13.180 --> 00:31:19.100 were wrapping their feet in rags at Valley Forge. They were just very ill-equipped and 262 00:31:19.100 --> 00:31:28.100 often low on equipment and arms and ammunition, and not a very good match, most of the time, 263 00:31:28.100 --> 00:31:31.220 for the British troops. 264 00:31:31.220 --> 00:31:38.980 So what they were able to do, they did by issuing paper money, fiat money, which immediately 265 00:31:38.980 --> 00:31:45.340 depreciated and within just a few years became worthless. 266 00:31:45.340 --> 00:31:53.040 And they had currency reforms, that's a funny word they used to reform. 267 00:31:53.040 --> 00:32:01.240 Money reform is what a government does when it gives up its last effort to create money 268 00:32:01.240 --> 00:32:09.600 and starts again creating the same kind of money that it hopes by renaming the experiment 269 00:32:09.600 --> 00:32:14.280 that people will be more gullible the second time around. 270 00:32:14.280 --> 00:32:17.920 In addition, the revolutionaries just took a lot of property. 271 00:32:17.920 --> 00:32:21.720 They just confiscated things as they came to them. 272 00:32:21.720 --> 00:32:28.360 That's a time-honored way for armies to operate, by foraging, and they did a lot of that, sometimes 273 00:32:28.360 --> 00:32:36.400 with and often without leaving Farmer Jones a note for two cows and a pig. The American 274 00:32:36.400 --> 00:32:40.120 Revolution owes you. 275 00:32:40.120 --> 00:32:44.560 So what we got at the end of that war was that the British decided it wasn't worth the 276 00:32:44.560 --> 00:32:51.560 It's interesting, I think, that the historians say very little about the Tories. They were, by the way, among the people whose property was taken away by the Tories. 277 00:32:51.560 --> 00:33:04.560 But that wasn't liberty. That wasn't liberty. The people were left with a new government, and whether they would be more or less free than they had been before depended on how that new government treated them. 278 00:33:04.560 --> 00:33:21.560 It's interesting, I think, that the historians say very little about the Tories. They were, by the way, among the people whose property was confiscated, and many of them were simply driven out of communities, sometimes tarred and feathered on top of it. 279 00:33:21.560 --> 00:33:27.560 And it would be interesting to hear more about them than the historians have told us. 280 00:33:27.560 --> 00:33:39.560 The Constitution of the United States has been studied to death, and it's still being studied to death, even by historians. 281 00:33:39.560 --> 00:33:51.560 One of the most famous of the original progressive historians, Charles Beard, wrote a book, what was it, 1913, 282 00:33:51.560 --> 00:34:10.560 The Constitution was not the work of enlightened statesmen. It was the work of interested elites, particularly merchants and people who had come into the possession of bonds issued by the United States. 283 00:34:10.560 --> 00:34:36.560 The work of interested elites, particularly merchants and people who had come into the possession of bonds issued by the United States or by the individual states to borrow money for the war, traders, bankers, you know, the kind of people progressives love to hate. 284 00:34:36.560 --> 00:34:55.560 and they were the ones who had got together and conspired in the Philadelphia State House in 1887 and put together the Constitution and then presumably rammed it down the throats of all the ratifying conventions in the states. 285 00:34:55.560 --> 00:35:08.560 And the bearded interpretation of the Constitution pretty well took over the profession, I think, for a number of decades, until it was challenged in the 50s and 60s. 286 00:35:08.560 --> 00:35:18.560 And after that, historians began to be a little more even-handed about the nature of the making of the Constitution. 287 00:35:18.560 --> 00:35:38.560 Forrest McDonald wrote a book, a historian named Brown wrote a book, and these always got cited along with Beard's work as if they were more thorough than Beard, more up-to-date, and they refuted Beard in some way. 288 00:35:38.560 --> 00:36:08.560 But in the 1980s, a Ph.D. student of mine from the days when I taught at the University of Washington, Bob McGuire, and another fellow, Bob Osfeld, went back and, as it were, reworked this debate again from the ground up in a statistical fashion by getting measures of everything that Beard 289 00:36:08.560 --> 00:36:26.560 McDonald and Brown had talked about in a literary way, and the upshot of a number of articles that were published in very good economics and political science journals by McGuire and Oelsfeld was that Beard pretty much had it right. 290 00:36:26.560 --> 00:36:43.560 that the people who voted for the Constitution at the original 1887 creation of it and the people who voted for it at the ratifying conventions in the individual states 291 00:36:43.560 --> 00:36:53.060 did indeed tend to be, very strongly, merchants, holders of government debt and so forth. 292 00:36:53.060 --> 00:37:03.560 And the people who opposed the Constitution did indeed tend to be small farmers, small business people and people who live far from the coastline. 293 00:37:03.560 --> 00:37:10.060 Those are the sort of people who have been identified as the anti-Federalists from time to time. 294 00:37:10.060 --> 00:37:16.080 The Anti-Federalists don't get much press in the textbooks and that again is a shame 295 00:37:16.080 --> 00:37:23.380 because they were a very large group of people and many of them had very strong feelings 296 00:37:23.380 --> 00:37:30.220 and equally strong arguments I think and yet they got dismissed because they were the losers 297 00:37:30.220 --> 00:37:38.740 and historians tend to look upon them as hicks. Hamilton and Madison could write pretty powerful 298 00:37:38.740 --> 00:37:45.380 Pro's and these Anti-Federalists could barely read and write, sometimes, not always, some 299 00:37:45.380 --> 00:37:50.500 of them were quite literate too. Some of them even have universities named after them now 300 00:37:50.500 --> 00:37:56.580 like George Mason. But nonetheless, that's the characterization that has come down to 301 00:37:56.580 --> 00:38:03.540 us. Now, when historians make this judgment about the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, 302 00:38:03.540 --> 00:38:11.340 What they really never do, so far as I've noticed, is that they never show any appreciation 303 00:38:11.340 --> 00:38:18.380 of the principal reason the anti-Federalists didn't want the Constitution, which was their 304 00:38:18.380 --> 00:38:21.700 fear of political centralization. 305 00:38:21.700 --> 00:38:28.220 They said, this Constitution puts too much power in one place, and centralized power 306 00:38:28.220 --> 00:38:29.780 tends toward tyranny. 307 00:38:29.780 --> 00:38:40.780 North Carolina is plenty big enough. It takes us several days to go from where we live to the state capital if there's business going on there that affects us. 308 00:38:40.780 --> 00:38:49.780 It's impossible for us to go from our homes to the national capital. So if important things are being done there, we're going to just be left out. 309 00:38:49.780 --> 00:38:55.780 We're going to have to rely on delegates. We're not going to have the same control over things. 310 00:38:55.780 --> 00:39:04.780 People are not going to understand our problems as well, and they're going to tend to get together and feather their own nests at our expense. 311 00:39:04.780 --> 00:39:10.780 So the fear was that the Constitution would centralize power and jeopardize liberty. 312 00:39:10.780 --> 00:39:17.780 And sure enough, if you go look at what happened in the 1790s, that's just what happened. 313 00:39:17.780 --> 00:39:29.780 Under the Washington administration and the Adams administration, even worse, the Federalists started getting very nasty indeed with people's liberties. 314 00:39:29.780 --> 00:39:37.780 And I think that too is one of the episodes that the textbooks pass over far too quickly. 315 00:39:37.780 --> 00:39:51.780 Indeed, when we look at the early nation in this period, particularly up to the election of Jefferson, we see some interesting things. 316 00:39:51.780 --> 00:40:03.780 Unlike the textbook view, which is that the Constitution is ratified, the new government begins to operate, and then we just have a blissful continuity, at least until the Civil War, 317 00:40:03.780 --> 00:40:09.580 The new nation was a very much iffy creation. 318 00:40:09.580 --> 00:40:15.140 It was by no means clear to many people that it was even going to survive, because it had 319 00:40:15.140 --> 00:40:23.600 many opponents, and it still faced very powerful pressures from outside forces. 320 00:40:23.600 --> 00:40:33.700 It had little or no military prowess, and the Spanish and the British lay on its flanks, 321 00:40:33.700 --> 00:40:40.420 And to make matters even worse, many of the Americans who had drifted out into the Trans-Appalachian 322 00:40:40.420 --> 00:40:46.500 area were at best indifferent to the government of the United States and in many cases they 323 00:40:46.500 --> 00:40:51.180 were actively hostile to it. 324 00:40:51.180 --> 00:40:57.200 So much so that some of them got together in western Tennessee and decided to found 325 00:40:57.200 --> 00:41:03.760 on their own state, after the man who perhaps should have been known as the father of our 326 00:41:03.760 --> 00:41:09.360 country, Benjamin Franklin. So the state of Franklin, which never really quite existed 327 00:41:09.360 --> 00:41:22.920 but was thought to exist for a while, operated as some kind of a legal fiction between 1784 328 00:41:22.920 --> 00:41:30.920 in 1788 and maybe it's better to call this a secession movement and the Franklin secessionists 329 00:41:30.920 --> 00:41:39.840 took pains to go down, send people to New Orleans to talk to the Spanish about getting 330 00:41:39.840 --> 00:41:46.160 some assistance, that is arms and ammunition and troops who would come up and help them 331 00:41:46.160 --> 00:41:56.000 Defend Their Secession Movement. Meanwhile, up in Massachusetts of all places, the farmers 332 00:41:56.000 --> 00:42:03.720 were more than restive about a variety of issues in the western part of the state, particularly 333 00:42:03.720 --> 00:42:12.760 the way they were being treated by the courts. And so in 1786, they mounted what has become 334 00:42:12.760 --> 00:42:19.440 known as Shay's Rebellion and that I think was a very important event particularly in 335 00:42:19.440 --> 00:42:28.440 frightening the elites who wrote the Constitution in 1787, the very next year because it struck 336 00:42:28.440 --> 00:42:37.920 them as indicating the jeopardy of property rights and that the masses were going to get 337 00:42:37.920 --> 00:42:44.520 out of hand and perhaps start dispossessing the property classes. 338 00:42:44.520 --> 00:42:50.140 So of course one of the things that the Constitution does is guarantee every state a Republican 339 00:42:50.140 --> 00:42:51.140 form of government. 340 00:42:51.140 --> 00:42:56.700 In other words, it created an apparatus for coming to the armed assistance of governments 341 00:42:56.700 --> 00:43:05.200 such as that of Massachusetts in 1786 should they require it to defend themselves. 342 00:43:05.200 --> 00:43:12.920 In Kentucky, the people out there were scheming with the Spaniards, and as if they had no 343 00:43:12.920 --> 00:43:19.320 loyalty at all, they also began to scheme with the British, trying to see which one 344 00:43:19.320 --> 00:43:23.880 would come and help them out, and they were also thinking of secession. 345 00:43:23.880 --> 00:43:29.560 So when you look at all these things, what you see is not, we get a constitution, boom, 346 00:43:29.560 --> 00:43:34.800 there's this fine United States of America that just sails gloriously into the future. 347 00:43:34.800 --> 00:43:40.520 It's not like that at all. This country was extremely uncertain for many years after the 348 00:43:40.520 --> 00:43:48.360 Constitution was written. One of the grievances out there was again the Indians and the fact 349 00:43:48.360 --> 00:43:53.400 that the United States Army was not being made available, not even the militias from 350 00:43:53.400 --> 00:44:01.740 the states frequently made available to come out and defend people against Indian attacks. 351 00:44:01.740 --> 00:44:15.420 Now to add injury to insult, Alexander Hamilton, that most Federalists, of all the Federalists, 352 00:44:15.420 --> 00:44:23.520 you may already know that Jefferson, that Washington was more or less a puppet ruler, 353 00:44:23.520 --> 00:44:30.340 and that Alexander Hamilton was the real power in the United States during the Washington 354 00:44:30.340 --> 00:44:39.700 Administration. Hamilton decided at one point during his fiscal creations in the early 1790s 355 00:44:39.700 --> 00:44:46.940 that the provision of the Constitution allowing the government to impose excise taxes needed to 356 00:44:46.940 --> 00:44:53.420 be exercised lest the people decide that it's having never been exercised they would never 357 00:44:53.420 --> 00:45:22.420 are tolerated. So Congress passed an excise tax on whiskey. Now, Americans were big drinkers in those days, and besides that, whiskey was an important article of trade out in the frontier, because transportation was very difficult and costly, and so the only things that would pay to transport were things that had a lot of value per pound. 358 00:45:23.420 --> 00:45:47.420 Well, whiskey was something that satisfied that criterion. So whiskey was almost a medium of exchange. It was like a money you could drink out in the frontier, and it was probably the most traded article in the trans-appalachian area in the 1790s. 359 00:45:47.420 --> 00:45:58.420 So to, first of all, put an excise tax on was extremely antagonizing to the anti-Federalists 360 00:45:58.420 --> 00:46:06.420 because excise taxes had a long and bad tradition in the minds of people of this political leaning, 361 00:46:06.420 --> 00:46:09.420 going way back in English history. 362 00:46:09.420 --> 00:46:15.420 In those days, people thought of the excise tax collector as a kind of home invader. 363 00:46:15.420 --> 00:46:22.420 You know, might come in to actually invade your home and find out what kind of property you had that was subject to tax. 364 00:46:22.420 --> 00:46:33.420 And so, they didn't like the idea of any excise tax, but for it to be placed on whiskey, of all things, made them hopping mad. 365 00:46:33.420 --> 00:46:37.420 So, they decided they wouldn't pay. 366 00:46:37.420 --> 00:46:44.420 This was decided sort of drunkenly. 367 00:46:44.420 --> 00:46:52.780 That's not a joke. Most people were more or less drunk all the time in those days, because 368 00:46:52.780 --> 00:46:59.060 besides being a medium of exchange, whiskey was a basic food stuff, really. It was a major 369 00:46:59.060 --> 00:47:06.100 source of caloric intake. Not everywhere was it whiskey, in some parts of the country it 370 00:47:06.100 --> 00:47:12.340 was other beverages, but whiskey was the most common one. So they decided they wouldn't 371 00:47:12.340 --> 00:47:17.660 would stand for this, excise tax on whiskey, and when the tax collectors came around to 372 00:47:17.660 --> 00:47:26.180 set up shop, they would either intimidate the householder so he wouldn't rent space 373 00:47:26.180 --> 00:47:31.260 to the tax collector, or they'd intimidate the tax collector by telling him to get the 374 00:47:31.260 --> 00:47:36.700 hell out or they were going to kill him, or in some cases they would actually attack the 375 00:47:36.700 --> 00:47:41.620 tax collector and beat him up or threaten to shoot him, and in other cases they would 376 00:47:41.620 --> 00:48:03.620 I really like this movement. This was back when people had some pride, and they wouldn't just take anything like sheep. 377 00:48:03.620 --> 00:48:10.960 But needless to say, Hamilton thought this was a complete outrage, and he was always 378 00:48:10.960 --> 00:48:16.620 looking for an opportunity to lead another military expedition. 379 00:48:16.620 --> 00:48:26.860 So they got one together, it took a few years, and finally in 1794, with Virginia Governor 380 00:48:26.860 --> 00:48:35.860 General Henry Lee, that's Light Horse Harry to you. Light Horse Harry Lee leading the 381 00:48:35.860 --> 00:48:43.360 militias drawn from Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They got 382 00:48:43.360 --> 00:48:50.700 together almost 13,000 troops and that's about as big an army as General Washington 383 00:49:20.700 --> 00:49:50.700 And they tried to find somebody to arrest. And they had a lot of trouble with that because there weren't too many of the some 7,000 rebels who just showed up and presented themselves for arrest. So they had to go house to house, more or less, until they found some people who were said to be active whiskey tax protestors. And they finally arrested, I think, about 50 of them. 384 00:49:50.700 --> 00:50:03.700 and they marched them back to Philadelphia and put them on trial for treason. 385 00:50:03.700 --> 00:50:10.700 All but two of them were acquitted and of the two who were convicted, 386 00:50:10.700 --> 00:50:14.700 President Washington magnanimously pardoned them. 387 00:50:14.700 --> 00:50:33.700 So, if you put all this together, what do you have? A lot of pomp and stomping around with troops to no particular avail, except to show that the government is serious about collecting taxes, and it won't tolerate tax rebellions. 388 00:50:33.700 --> 00:50:42.700 George Washington went out and reviewed the troops while this military operation was organizing. 389 00:50:42.700 --> 00:50:50.700 And I just will say in passing that if we have to have Washington as the father of our country, 390 00:50:50.700 --> 00:50:57.700 it would have been better that we be orphans. 391 00:50:57.700 --> 00:51:02.580 I, some time ago, I stopped actually using the name George Washington. I just now refer 392 00:51:02.580 --> 00:51:09.220 to the blockhead because that was what some contemporaries called him in celebration of 393 00:51:09.220 --> 00:51:16.580 his military prowess. He was the object of much contempt by officers in the French and 394 00:51:16.580 --> 00:51:22.220 British armies because he was such a military nincompoop. But fortunately for him, he was 395 00:51:22.220 --> 00:51:32.500 He was even less inclined to fight than Lincoln's generals in 1861, so he didn't show up to 396 00:51:32.500 --> 00:51:36.880 fight very much during the revolution, and that was all for the best. 397 00:51:36.880 --> 00:51:42.820 And finally, the French showed up and saved the rebels' cookies. 398 00:51:42.820 --> 00:51:45.700 But Washington was one thing. 399 00:51:45.700 --> 00:51:55.860 If he wasn't a great general, he was a notorious land grabber, and part of his blockheadness 400 00:51:55.860 --> 00:52:02.540 was that he had gone out there to the West as a very young man and made a fool of himself. 401 00:52:02.540 --> 00:52:08.020 And then he had gone back, not having learned his lesson the first time, and started the 402 00:52:08.020 --> 00:52:17.060 The French and Indian War, almost single-handedly by his incompetence, and he even had the Indians 403 00:52:17.060 --> 00:52:25.220 laughing at him that time, they made a mockery of him, that's a nice story you should read. 404 00:52:25.220 --> 00:52:35.140 Washington claimed 63,000 acres in the Trans-Appalachian area, and a lot of it he got by fraud, I'll 405 00:52:35.140 --> 00:52:39.900 I'll just quote one sentence from Thomas Slaughter's book, The Whiskey Rebellion. 406 00:52:39.900 --> 00:52:47.660 He lied, broke the law, and betrayed public trust in pursuit of private gain. 407 00:52:47.660 --> 00:52:50.500 That's a genteel way to put it. 408 00:52:50.500 --> 00:52:55.400 But in a way, it was apt that the father of our country was a land grabber because the 409 00:52:55.400 --> 00:52:57.920 country was built on land grabbing. 410 00:52:57.920 --> 00:53:04.920 And my speculation has been the quintessential American occupation, and still is today in a way. 411 00:53:14.920 --> 00:53:25.920 Now this is not a new picture for you, I hope, but the reason I'm putting it up is because I want to emphasize something. 412 00:53:25.920 --> 00:53:36.920 The United States was an expansive empire. It's not usually called an empire, it's called a nation, but it was an empire. 413 00:53:36.920 --> 00:53:50.920 At the time of the Peace of Paris, when the Americans became independent, they lived between about right here and right here 414 00:53:50.920 --> 00:54:20.920 and hardly anybody more than a hundred miles from the coast and altogether there were about two and a half million of them that's about the same number of people who live in the Seattle Tacoma area today stretched over a thousand miles here very thinly clinging to the coast and that's as far as they had gotten in over 150 years but look what they had just 415 00:54:20.920 --> 00:54:25.800 Just under the terms of the Peace of Paris that settled the war, they had land all the 416 00:54:25.800 --> 00:54:28.960 way out to the Mississippi River. 417 00:54:28.960 --> 00:54:35.160 No wonder Jefferson spoke of land for the thousandth and the thousandth generation. 418 00:54:35.160 --> 00:54:43.560 He didn't do his math very well, maybe, but you can get the picture he had in his mind. 419 00:54:43.560 --> 00:54:51.940 This was just an endlessly vast area, huge, unthinkably big area, even if you only went 420 00:54:51.940 --> 00:55:00.740 out to the Mississippi. But very quickly, the Americans decided that was not enough, 421 00:55:00.740 --> 00:55:08.840 and they wanted more land, and so they began to take it by conquest or by intimidation 422 00:55:08.840 --> 00:55:17.440 and Purchase until they had scooped up the entire continent, and of course it then took 423 00:55:17.440 --> 00:55:23.600 a long time, it took another hundred years or more before they had managed to people 424 00:55:23.600 --> 00:55:30.840 that area to some extent, much of it's not, not much people even today, and if you've 425 00:55:30.840 --> 00:55:38.920 I've been there, you know why, but nonetheless, a great deal of this continental expanse was 426 00:55:38.920 --> 00:55:47.320 extremely valuable potentially, and Americans wanted to own it and exploit its potential 427 00:55:47.320 --> 00:55:55.960 value. So land policy became a central, some might say the central kind of government action 428 00:55:55.960 --> 00:56:03.760 in American history. Now, in a sense, you could think of this as a form of vast privatization. 429 00:56:03.760 --> 00:56:07.680 It's owned by the government of the United States, and they proceed in various ways to 430 00:56:07.680 --> 00:56:15.020 hand it over to private owners. In that sense, it's one of the biggest privatization projects 431 00:56:15.020 --> 00:56:23.380 in the history of the world, I suppose. They handed it over in a whole variety of ways, 432 00:56:23.380 --> 00:56:31.740 But privatization suggests that the government was bearing some kind of a loss by transferring 433 00:56:31.740 --> 00:56:35.020 this territorial expanse to private owners. 434 00:56:35.020 --> 00:56:39.740 But you can also see it as something the government used for its gain. 435 00:56:39.740 --> 00:56:44.980 When we look back, we think government was small until the 20th century. 436 00:56:44.980 --> 00:56:48.340 And by the way we measure the size of government nowadays, it was. 437 00:56:48.340 --> 00:56:53.340 It didn't spend much money and it didn't collect much tax. 438 00:56:53.340 --> 00:57:03.360 But it didn't need to. It had land. And in the 19th century, that's what everybody wanted, 439 00:57:03.360 --> 00:57:10.380 to get hold of that land. And the government could use that land in lieu of money to reward 440 00:57:10.380 --> 00:57:16.800 its supporters, its followers, its favorites. And this could be done by Hamiltonians and 441 00:57:16.800 --> 00:57:21.160 and Jeffersonians Alike. 442 00:57:21.160 --> 00:57:33.740 You look at the way the land was transferred, you see an extremely uneven pattern. 443 00:57:33.740 --> 00:57:40.360 These are original entries when some action is taken to transfer title to a private party. 444 00:57:40.360 --> 00:57:46.780 Sometimes it's a sale, sometimes it's a homesteading when we get out here past 1862. 445 00:57:46.780 --> 00:57:54.180 It's cashing in a bounty that the government has issued as a claim to the public lands. 446 00:57:54.180 --> 00:57:58.700 And if you look, if you can see that well, you probably can't from way back there. 447 00:57:58.700 --> 00:58:05.460 But a number of instances are indicated on here of military bounties. 448 00:58:05.460 --> 00:58:11.740 And possession of this public domain was used by the government to finance its military 449 00:58:11.740 --> 00:58:12.740 operations. 450 00:58:12.740 --> 00:58:17.740 If you didn't have money to pay soldiers, you paid them in land bounties. 451 00:58:17.740 --> 00:58:21.740 And that was done repeatedly in the early 19th century. 452 00:58:21.740 --> 00:58:26.740 So in here, the second war with England, there's a military bounty here, 453 00:58:26.740 --> 00:58:32.740 coming after the war with Mexico, another one here. 454 00:58:32.740 --> 00:58:39.740 In the later 19th century, you've got lands being used to reward not soldiers so much 455 00:58:39.740 --> 00:58:48.940 as corporations, railroads, what have you. 456 00:58:48.940 --> 00:59:03.340 The picture here shows you areas in which land grants were made to railroads. 457 00:59:03.340 --> 00:59:09.340 The fact that you can see a big line like that on the map tells you 458 00:59:09.340 --> 00:59:19.340 That's a lot of land. That thick line on the top, which was the land-grant area for the Northern Pacific Railroad, was 80 miles across. 459 00:59:19.340 --> 00:59:27.340 And every other section in that area was given to the Northern Pacific Railroad. 460 00:59:27.340 --> 00:59:38.340 So the government started doing this in the 1850s, first with the Illinois Central Railroad and after the war for the transcontinental railroads. 461 00:59:38.340 --> 00:59:54.840 So a great deal of land was transferred or something like 180 million acres transferred to a handful of railroad corporations, mostly by the Republicans, in the 1860s and 1870s. 462 00:59:54.840 --> 01:00:06.340 Some scandals grew out of this and they stopped doing it in the 1870s, but by that time they'd given away a great deal of land to their political pals. 463 01:00:08.340 --> 01:00:24.220 Ultimately, it was land policy that led to the War of Secession, because in that area 464 01:00:24.220 --> 01:00:31.460 that was unorganized in states in the 1840s and 50s, the question was, will slavery be 465 01:00:31.460 --> 01:00:39.460 Permitted or not, if it is, it means that the slave state is going to have two pro-slave senators. 466 01:00:39.460 --> 01:00:49.460 And up to that time, the interests of the slave states had hinged on their ability to dictate, as it were, 467 01:00:49.460 --> 01:00:56.460 or at least to resist anti-slave policies in the Congress by having a sufficient number of senators. 468 01:00:56.460 --> 01:01:09.460 and so the fight over organizing slavery or anti-slavery provisions in the new states to be created was essentially a land policy question. 469 01:01:09.460 --> 01:01:20.460 Historians have tended to look at it as a moral question about slavery but it was only indirectly that and finally when it resulted in war it was not that at all 470 01:01:20.460 --> 01:01:30.340 at all because in 1860 neither side really, that is to say, the Union wasn't talking about 471 01:01:30.340 --> 01:01:37.940 destroying slavery. In fact, Lincoln was prepared to have an amendment passed to the Constitution 472 01:01:37.940 --> 01:01:43.660 that would guarantee slavery where it existed at that time. So you can't say that the North 473 01:01:43.660 --> 01:01:50.680 North had a holy cause of abolishing slavery because it had nothing of the sort, and nonetheless 474 01:01:50.680 --> 01:01:59.680 when the slave states seceded the Lincoln government went to war against them and we know what happened 475 01:01:59.680 --> 01:02:00.680 to some extent. 476 01:02:00.680 --> 01:02:07.680 The War of Secession was the most destructive war of American history. 477 01:02:07.680 --> 01:02:21.880 620,000 dead, 400,000 wounded, vast property destruction, financial cost of about $3.3 billion, 478 01:02:21.880 --> 01:02:31.280 which was vastly more than the governments of the United States had spent for everything they'd ever spent for up to that time in American history. 479 01:02:31.280 --> 01:02:45.280 It's hugely costly. These things are recognized by historians, but what's not recognized is the sense in which a constitutional revolution took place as a result of that war. 480 01:02:45.280 --> 01:02:56.280 Even historians talk as if there's been a continuous constitution in force in the United States from the time of initial ratification to the present day. 481 01:02:56.280 --> 01:03:04.280 And it's absolutely wrong because the first constitution was destroyed by the secession. 482 01:03:04.280 --> 01:03:14.280 And a new nation was created. It looked the same because they just apparently added three amendments. 483 01:03:14.280 --> 01:03:24.280 But the upshot of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments was to change the character of the system from one of federalism 484 01:03:24.280 --> 01:03:31.000 Capitalism, to want of national domination. Now it didn't immediately become national 485 01:03:31.000 --> 01:03:38.800 domination because after 12 years all the United States troops left the defeated states 486 01:03:38.800 --> 01:03:46.960 and they began to run their own affairs in large part, but there had been a revolution 487 01:03:46.960 --> 01:03:54.040 nonetheless because from that time forward the ultimate check that the states might exercise 488 01:03:54.040 --> 01:04:02.040 over Federal Domination of their Affairs was gone. Never again would any state think, oh, 489 01:04:02.040 --> 01:04:06.540 well if worse comes to worse, we will just leave this political organization. We'll just 490 01:04:06.540 --> 01:04:12.680 secede. And that had been an option not just of southern states, but of many states of 491 01:04:12.680 --> 01:04:18.760 the Union in the period prior to the Civil War. New England states came close to seceding 492 01:04:18.760 --> 01:04:28.480 during the Second War with England. So this was a commonplace option for states to think 493 01:04:28.480 --> 01:04:34.080 about in the antebellum period. And indeed, two of the states, when they ratified the 494 01:04:34.080 --> 01:04:41.720 Constitution, reserved the right to leave the Union, should they find that to be necessary. 495 01:04:41.720 --> 01:04:48.080 That didn't cut any ice when war came. It was just a matter of who could win on the 496 01:04:48.080 --> 01:05:08.080 on the battlefield. But nonetheless, the understanding of what kind of a political organization the United States was to be, was changed forever by the outcome of the war. Genuine federalism was destroyed, political centralization became a trend. 497 01:05:08.080 --> 01:05:15.320 Not a rapid trend for a while, but from the beginning of the 20th century onward, quite rapid. 498 01:05:15.320 --> 01:05:27.920 And statism began to grow, slowly at first and then much more rapidly in the 20th century. 499 01:05:27.920 --> 01:05:36.920 Are we going to take a break before, till nine and then take a break or finish then? 500 01:05:36.920 --> 01:05:46.920 Okay, I'll just go ahead and say a little more and then we'll take some questions then. 501 01:05:46.920 --> 01:05:56.920 I have a tendency to over prepare for a speech and I've done that once again. 502 01:05:56.920 --> 01:06:02.920 Once again, let me say a little bit about the 20th century. 503 01:06:04.920 --> 01:06:15.920 I'm skipping over some wonderful topics that I myself have worked on in the late 19th century, but I'd be happy to talk about that privately with you if you're interested. 504 01:06:15.920 --> 01:06:28.920 Progressivism is, I think, in a way, the most important event other than the Civil War in our history. 505 01:06:28.920 --> 01:06:39.920 In a book I wrote, I have a pathetically brief chapter on it, but the one thing I admire about that chapter is the title. 506 01:06:39.920 --> 01:06:46.920 was called at a bridge to modern times, and I think that's exactly what it was. 507 01:06:46.920 --> 01:06:59.920 The society that lived and worked and cooperated in the United States prior to 1900 was quite different, worked quite differently, 508 01:06:59.920 --> 01:07:06.920 thought about itself differently than the one that's operated here in the last century. 509 01:07:06.920 --> 01:07:11.640 And the progressives were the ones that brought about that change. 510 01:07:11.640 --> 01:07:14.360 In the beginning, there was no grand movement. 511 01:07:14.360 --> 01:07:18.200 In fact, there's no grand movement ever of progressivism. 512 01:07:18.200 --> 01:07:27.040 They had a party once in 1912, but that was a transitory thing and an unsuccessful one at that. 513 01:07:27.040 --> 01:07:33.440 But despite their not being coherently organized, the progressives were immensely effective 514 01:07:33.440 --> 01:07:36.940 in bringing about the realization of their vision. 515 01:07:38.940 --> 01:07:47.940 When you look at their specific platforms at local level, state level and nationally, 516 01:07:47.940 --> 01:07:50.440 it looks as if they're for all sorts of things. 517 01:07:50.940 --> 01:07:52.940 And some of the things look good. 518 01:07:52.940 --> 01:07:59.940 They're for referendum and initiative and recall to keep the politicians in line. 519 01:07:59.940 --> 01:08:01.940 It looks like they're anti-political. 520 01:08:01.940 --> 01:08:07.940 So, who wouldn't like that? Unless he's a politician. 521 01:08:07.940 --> 01:08:23.940 On the other hand, there are all sorts of things that involve bureaucratic management of natural resources, of public utilities, of transportation. 522 01:08:23.940 --> 01:08:36.820 The one common denominator that all the progressive schemes, but those voting procedure changes 523 01:08:36.820 --> 01:08:44.260 I mentioned, except for those, the common denominator of all the progressive proposals 524 01:08:44.260 --> 01:08:49.340 is make government more active and stronger. 525 01:08:49.340 --> 01:08:55.580 Use government power to deal with some perceived problem. 526 01:08:55.580 --> 01:08:58.720 So in that sense, the progressives are statists. 527 01:08:58.720 --> 01:09:00.720 They're collectivists. 528 01:09:00.720 --> 01:09:07.280 They're against the classical liberal type of thinking that had been a very strong if 529 01:09:07.280 --> 01:09:13.240 not always dominating in the 19th century. 530 01:09:13.240 --> 01:09:26.740 When Wilson was running in 1912, he had a kind of a program that he put under the label 531 01:09:26.740 --> 01:09:37.240 New Freedom, and I think captures a very important kernel of what was changing. 532 01:09:37.240 --> 01:09:40.240 What was wrong with the old freedom? 533 01:09:40.240 --> 01:09:45.240 Well, what was wrong with it was that for the progressives it was backwards. 534 01:09:45.240 --> 01:09:50.240 The old freedom said, government should leave people alone. 535 01:09:50.240 --> 01:09:52.240 Let them manage their own affairs. 536 01:09:52.240 --> 01:09:59.240 Do not use force against people unless they use force against their fellows. 537 01:09:59.240 --> 01:10:02.240 The progressive said, use force. 538 01:10:02.240 --> 01:10:09.240 And the condition that you bring about by the use of force, call freedom. 539 01:10:09.240 --> 01:10:21.520 of Freedom. That's the new freedom. We're going to set people free by force. That sabotage, 540 01:10:21.520 --> 01:10:27.720 rhetorical sabotage of the understanding of freedom is one that became very effective 541 01:10:27.720 --> 01:10:38.520 and one that I think has lasted to this day. The progressives had many policy successes, 542 01:10:38.520 --> 01:10:45.240 Things like creating the Federal Reserve System, ratifying the Income Tax Amendment, many changes 543 01:10:45.240 --> 01:10:53.960 at state and local levels as well, but nothing was more important than their rhetorical success 544 01:10:53.960 --> 01:11:01.160 in changing the terms that Americans used to think about the nature of their society 545 01:11:01.160 --> 01:11:06.560 and the nature of freedom and the relation of government to it. 546 01:11:06.560 --> 01:11:14.360 Well why don't I stop my talking here and let you ask questions or make comments and 547 01:11:14.360 --> 01:11:15.240 see what's on your mind.