Transcripts For CSPAN3 U.S. Politics Government In The 1790s 20240712

What we can learn from that moment i how it connects our does not connect to what is happening in american political history at this moment. The way this is going to work, i will introduce the four panelists. Each person will talk for five minutes or so. Develop a few lines of inquiry. I will ask a few questions based upon what people have said. Folks will have a chance to have a conversation. We want to leave the last 35 or 40 minutes for questions. Please have in mind things that you want to say or ask about. I will introduce folks from my left to my right. First is katlyn carter. She is a visiting professor at the university of notre dame. Her phd is from princeton. She spent the last two years with a postdoctoral fellowship at the university of michigan. She is working on a book entitled houses of glass, secrecy, transparency, and the Representative Democracy and i have had the pleasure of reading the manuscript. It is about the french revolution in the 1790s and the american constitutional moment in the 1780s and 1790s. It is a trans atlantic history that is discussing the american and french context. Like several other folks, she has written for public outlets. She has had a few pieces in the Washington Post. She has been out there engaging the public with her historical work. Mark boonshoft. He is a professor of history at Norwich University in vermont. He spent a postdoc at the new york public library. His book, which is in the works, is called the rise and fall of aristocratic education and the making of the american republic. Next to mark is lindsay chervinsky. She is currently the white house historian, working for the White House Historical association. She also held a postdoctorate for two years. Hers was at Southern Methodist university at the center for president ial history. Her book she is working on and is under contract with Harvard University press, is entitled the president s cabinet, George Washington and the creation of an american institution. Lindsay has written several pieces for a popular audience, thinking through the cabinet choices are current president has made and what we might learn from history and thinking that through. Last but not least, at the end, david houpt. He got his phd from the City University of new york graduate center. He is a assistant professor at the university of North Carolina wilmington. His book is to organize the sovereign people, democracy and mobilization in revolutionary pennsylvania. Thank you to all four of you. Thank you first to the conference organizers for putting together this schedule. I am going to give some brief remarks to introduce what my research is about. My research has been informed by the time i have spent working in washington before i went back to graduate school. That generated a lot of questions for me about how Representative Government worked and what made it legitimate. What does it mean for government to speak for the people . To what degree should officials be bound to Public Opinion . How should that be facilitated in practice . To answer these questions, i wanted to go back and needed to go back to the founding of Representative Democracy in the 18th century. What i quickly realized was how these questions are central to the founding and how they remain largely unanswered. Much of the political history of the United States comes down to a repeated rehashing and resettlement of these questions. The instability of the meaning of Representative Democracy generated and continues to generate deep disagreement in american political life. The 1790s is critical for identifying the way Americans First grappled with these questions and paradoxes of american democracy. What we are witnessing is the breakdown of a delicately constructed legitimacy of government as a democratic form. The 1790s is useful to examine because it was the time in which the legitimacy was segmented and was cemented and contested. To get at this process, my research has focused on debates over the use of secrecy in government. I use that to understand how early americans thought about Representative Democracy. The issue of secrecy in politics can be used similarly today to identify the same tensions over the meaning and function of Representative Government. The masthead of the Washington Post today proclaims that what to proclaims that democracy dies in darkness. This conviction can be traced at to the origin of modern government. In the wake of the constitutional convention, the decision to work in secret, which was part of a deliberate effort to make representative institutions less susceptible to popular pressure, became a controversy in the american public. Critics of the constitution and George Washingtons president ial administration launched a personal attack on the propriety of using secrecy in a government by and for the people. The critique grew throughout the 1790s as popular societies identified the use of secrecy as a trick being used to undermine the will of the people. With my research, i argue that attitudes about secrecy were tied to evolving assumptions about what it meant to represent people in government. Those who understood representation as the advocacy of the peoples best interest saw a greater utility for secrecy. My work demonstrates that though it came to be widely seen as dangerous in the 1790s, secrecy was essential to the establishment of a stable, Representative Democracy in the United States. It is a paradox we have yet to reckon with. By using decisions and debates about secrecy and transparency as a lens to understand the invention and evolution of Representative Democracy, my research explains how transparency became a cornerstone of modern democracy. These are connotations we live with today. They are the direct result of a transformation of thinking took place during the later half of the 19th century. 18th century. The question of what can be cap secret remains at the heart of representative politics to this day. Political scientists can since only tied the question back to democracy. As a historian, i am not aiming to produce the policy prescription or set of the question of whether secrecy promotes or diminishes democracy. I went to explain how, why, and with what effect secrecy was linked to the meaning of Representative Democracy. Attitudes about state secrecy and transparency, like understandings of Representative Democracy, are not historical. I tell that to a room full of historians. They have been shaped over time, and in the modern world, we still live in the frameworks created during the 18th century. Understanding the way debate over secrecy and transparency played out the foundation of modern Representative Democracy is essential to clarifying those debates today. I will leave it at that for now. Mark you can hear me, right . Let me first echo the thanks to all of you for coming out. Im going to start with anecdote so i am going to break protocol right away. 1784, an essay appeared in a boston magazine. It is intended to show the destructive consequences and tendency of establishing private academies in this government. These were privately run state chartered schools, often founded by pretty prominent individuals usually to serve their own children. To give you an idea, the first one in massachusetts was phillips andover. It continues that if there were no such thing as a private academy, while the parents would have to work in their town to establish a good school in which all of the youths would have the power to receive their advantage. The essay finishes with a prediction. If things did not change, is if massachusetts kept running these privately run schools and ignoring Common Schools for all children, the government will be subverted from a republic to an aristocracy. It will be no difficult matter for that part of the community who have monopolized all of the knowledge to acquire the reins of government and convey them to other students who made the same move. I start with this essay because it starts a debate that plays out in the 1790s. What my work focuses on is the partisan debate over education policy that the rise of academies, these privately run bring about. Ools, in that debate, all of the participants take for granted what the essayist did. Education was an arbiter to access to political power. In other words, these partisan flights over education policy are essentially a larger fight over how to govern the republic and who should govern which was , left unsettled by the u. S. Constitution. You would think most americans agreed with the boston magazine essayist, the idea that equal education for an equal citizenry was necessary. In a Pulitzer Prize winning book, it was wrote that no universal theme was universally articulated as the need for universal education. What i noticed was that the Political Forces are against that position for some time. Around 175 academies were found ed between 1780 and 1800s. These were among the most ubiquitous institutions of the time. They received more charters than virtually any kind of institution besides transportation projects and churches. They received more government funding, direct and indirect, than any other type of school. This happened in the face of arguments like this boston magazine essay. It held that since started academies were created by and serve the interest of an elite, they would produce a country governed by one. These things still opened at quite a clip. The debate crystallized in three positions that i think are interesting about education. They carry through in interesting ways through much of American History. The academies keep getting built because federalists believe in the need for oldschool, europeanstyle ruling class. As one new york federalist road, the constitution would not work administered by men who had the confidence and esteem that the world always gives the property and education. The academy essentially educated men of property. The critique that academies serve an existing elite or essentially aristocratic did not fit republican ideals. Because they were privately run, they could not be changed enough. Democratically this led to a number of positions for reform. There were those who thought the government and the country should be governed by exceptional men. The problem with the academies that federalist created did not find those people. It just credentialed people who already had status and influence. What you needed to do was broaden equality of opportunity and create a system that deliberately allowed meritorious people to rise. You see these in pyramid shaped plans for Public Education that proliferate in the time that would have at the base, a universal Common Schools for white men up through a public or state university. Then the men who ascended the ladder were seen as the rightful rulers. This sounds like our modern notions of meritocracy. Finally, there were those who thought all white men should receive the same education, funded and administered by government, and sufficient to prepare any citizen for public office. In other words, representatives should be made representative. This was the way to make sure to have competent ones. In the end, this debate reminds us that decisions on who to educate and how are fundamentally political questions about how we are governed and by whom. I will leave it at that. Lindsay thank you all for being here. I think if i looked at the program correctly, this is the only strictly 18thcentury panel. I appreciate the vote of support by showing support and engaging in conversation with us. My work is on the president s cabinet and the origins of the cabinet. If you look at the constitution, that word does not exist. No legislation was ever passed yet it is anand institution we are all wildly familiar with. My book set about trying to figure out where it came from and what sort of practices led to the creation and how it evolved and developed and what role it had in the early republic. I ended up arguing that there were three real origins of the cabinet. In particular, washingtons military experience from the revolutionary war. Once he determined a cabinet was necessary to provide the support oft he required in the face crises, he really drew on the practices that served him well as commander in chief of the continental army. Second, all of the states had councils of state or they had governors counsel or executive council. Most of the first cabinet members had experience in those councils one way or another. They had been governor or a member, and they kind of thought they were correct. They felt they limited executive authority. They were a tool the legislative used to control the governor or the executive. That was a system they were looking to not replicate in the new federal government. Finally, the british cabinet. The word cabinet comes from the british government. Most americans were familiar with it. They blamed the british ministers for instigating the conflict behind the revolutionary war. While none of the first cabinet members never wrote this down, i believe it was always something on their mind. They knew there was a possibility they might be compared to it. I cannot say that definitively, but i believe it strongly. All of these origins shaped much more than washingtons perspective on the cabinet. They shaped politics, culture, and society in the early republic. The United States was part of an International Community. Their interactions with the community were reflected in the way they approached the new nation. I think the cabinet is a perfect case study to understand the early republic and the government more broadly. It was created in response to challenges and crises that came up that perhaps were unexpected. International forces often forced the cabinet to meet and respond with something the entire early republic grappled with. It was created to meet the needs of the people governing in an organic way. When the constitution does not provide that many details about what the daytoday governing experience should look like. This organic reactive element is a key to the cabinet and is the key to the early republic. All of that being said, why do you study these dead old white guys . Dont we know everything about them . It has been hundreds of years. The last book that was written on the cabinet was published in 1912. It was about the legislative origins of the different departments. When we think we know something or assume it has been written, it actually is the case that it hadnt. That is an experience have all had, looking back at the 1790s and saying, there is so much stuff here. It needs to be examined and is relevant for all of these reasons. Historians are constantly finding new documents in attics and basements and things we did not know existed. Second, because they have not been written and study. I think that something we are all going to speak to is that this decade in particular set so many precedents that we are grappling with today. The first people in office were crafting a model that for better or worse, we are still dealing with in some ways. For my purposes, i argue that washingtons cabinet has left a significant legacy. The institution has expanded exponentially. It is institutionalized. The National Security council has usurped much of the original function of the cabinet. And yet, each president gets to decide who their closest advisors are going to be. They get to decide if they are members of the cabinet. If they are outside people from the institution, if they are family members, and when we have elections, we ask them, who are your foreign advisors . Who are your Security Advisors going to be . The constitution says that should be the senate. We ask this question because we all acknowledge the president has the power to select their own advisors, to determine what the relationship is going to look like, when they are going to meet with them, when they are foro ask for a die advice and whether they will take that advice. That is a little oversight to those relationships. I look forward to our conversation. I just want to echo my gratitude for mark and the copanelist and the conference organizers. I think it is worth mentioning it being the 75th anniversary of dday, i find it a particularly apt moment to be looking at what exactly this country is founded upon, what american democracy means or in the 1790s and how in might translate to today. My work focuses on getting a better understanding of the meaning and scope of democracy in revolutionary america. I am looking at getting a better understanding of how it is that americans participated in the political process and why elections and parties emerged as the primary vehicles for the expression of the public will. At the conclusion of the revolutionary war, most americans excepted citizens had a right to participate in their government. What this meant in practice remains contested. The constitution provided a broad outline of what american democracy would mean. Thorny questions stemming from the concept of popular sovereignty remained. What we see in the 1790s is a debate that is emerging over what it means to have a government based on the notion of popular sovereignty and when and how the people have a right to speak. On the one side, we have federalists who argue the constitution clearly established elections as the only legitimate expression of the public will. Beyond casting a ballot, citizens were expected to defer to their officials. They could petition, but the representatives were free to ignore the advice. Federalists believe that by casting a ballot, a citizen ceded their sovereignty. Federalists saw an opportunity for the public to symbolically participate in their government process through attendance at festivals and celebrations. These rituals were inherently deferential and designed to promote a sense of nationalism and reverence for the federal government. In contrast to this deferential version of republicanism, in the early 1790s, we see a coalition emerge around the notion that regardless of whether they cast a ballot, citizens retain the right to assert their will directly. These americans, drawing inspiration from the french and american revolutions, turned to different forms of political mobilization such as town meetings, public rallies, voluntary societies in an effort to engage the public more directly. Some residents even went so far as to reject the legitimacy of the Constitutional Government and turn to violence as a way to assert individual sovereignty. In the mid1790s, i argue two events really demonstrated the limits of these forms of obligation. The first being the whiskey rebellion, which coming on the heels of the french revolution, seem to indicate the dangers of the excess of democracy. Just as important was the oppositions failure to implement the jay treaty, which was a humiliating insult to the ally in france. I suggest these events seem to point to the fact that the constitution had been built to be insulated from these forms of public and popular politics. As a result, beginning in 1796, critics of the federalist began to abandon their efforts to engage the public more directly in the governing process and started to focus on winning elections. This process, which occurred from the topdown, bottomup, and middle out, resulted in the emergence of the republican party. This new organization would serve as an intermediary body between the people and the government. Instead of engaging directly in the process, citizens were encouraged to participate in the Political Party. Attend local meetings. They could communicate with likeminded individuals, they could oversee electioneering efforts, and they could nominate candidates. The understanding was however, that when the election was over, citizens would defer the governing to the representatives. In this sense, the emergence of the Political Party did represent a retreat from a more participatory form of democracy advocated in the early 1790s. As has been pointed out, the rise of the Jeffersonian Republican Party necessitated the level of coalition building, which resulted in pushing more radical views to the fringes. However, i would argue the Party Structure ultimately succeeded because it produced results where other forms of mobilization had failed. Voter turnout surged in the years following the emergence of the republican party. Recent scholarship suggests citizens became more educated and engaged in the political process than ever before. Incidents of Political Violence which had spiked declined dramatically as partisans worked to harness passions and channel them into more constructive political action. It is worth pointing out that the party system would ultimately fail when confronted with the divisive issue of slavery. It proved to be unable to deal with all elements of the american democracy. I believe it succeeded and emerged as a powerful tool for the people to assert their will. All right. Thanks. What i want to do is draw out the four big themes we have developed and give folks a chance to weigh in if they want and turn it over to you for questions. As i listen to these four presentations, for some reason, i started thinking about originalism. Here is the constitution and the words, and that is what we need to know. What these presentations suggest is that there is a whole host of things that surround the constitution. The political culture, that makes the constitution function and brings it to life. The constitution was an organic metaphor, the people would refer to the body as the constitution. Or less healthy. It is not sufficient to fully understand what makes a constitution healthy or less healthy. What i heard katlyn talking about was the problem of trust, which is the problem we currently are living through. What is the role that trust plays in a healthy polity and republic and a healthy democracy. It is not just a simple matter of if we just show you everything, you will trust us, right . If we have more hearings on will produce trust. It does not work that way. This was one of the central questions in the 1790s should we trust the people who have empowered to staff this government . That is the essential question of trust. Marks presentation made me think about the problem of equity or the problem of how essential is it for a republic or a democracy to have less extremes of wealth and poverty . Oftentimes, we tend to look at the socioeconomic realm as being a separate thing from the political realm, and what mark suggests is that even back in the 1780s and 1790s, people were thinking very consciously about what sort of social structure, what sort of economic arrangement make for a healthier functioning constitutional democracy, and what is the role the state itself should play in fostering such a world. Anyone familiar with the 18th century knows one of the great concerns of the 18th century was liberty and power. The answer was not they just that the state should make everyone equal and then everything would be great. But yet, its not clear that the answer is everyone thought the state should just do nothing and let things work out as they were already. That seems to me like a rich and fruitful place to dig in. Third and by the way, im not suggesting that mark has not thought about this. Just framing it for all of us. Lindsays presentation made me think about the role of norms, all right which is something , weve been talking about the last three or four years, probably more so than we have in the past. But this has been an issue in american political history since the 1990s especially. Passing on familiar with the freemans book, the break down of norms and stability in the 1840s and 1850s and again, there is nothing in the constitution. So many of these norms are are customs, or they traditions, or they are habits or procedures. What is the status of those . How seriously should we take them . How do they get built . Why do people build them . Why do they evolve and shift and change over time . Obviously the cabinet has changed over time and yet has also remained constant in a whole host of ways. How did the people who built the country how selfconscious were they about establishing a set of norms, cultural norms that would and why did they see those cultural norms how did they see those cultural norms contributing to the health of a Constitutional Republic . Finally, davids presentation made me think about the Political Party. As we all know, the thing that none of the founders ever thought or expected or hoped would emerge, and within a couple of years, there they were. And so what is the role of a Political Party . How should we think about parties . This is i mean, we are living parties always change over time, but this feels like a particularly transitional and Pivotal Moment for both Political Parties. And how should we think about the role and its also a moment when Political Parties have less buyin than historically they have in the 19th century and into the 20th century when more and more citizens do not identify incredibly strongly with one party or another. Is that a good thing . Is that a bad thing . How should we think about the roles that these imperfect institutions, that the founders did not want to exist that we call parties, how do they contribute to the health of a constitutional polity . Those are my four rubrics, sort of general questions around the culture of the 1790s and how we might use them as a touchstone for thinking about where we are today. So if folks have thoughts take it away, and then we can , turn it over to the audience. I will start. I think i will adjust the issue of trust which i think you kind of addressed at me. It is absolutely essential. It was essential today and was central then. That brings me to what david was speaking about, which is there are different visions of what should make you trust politicians. The federalist vision is really you should trust us because we are wise and we are natural leaders in some sense because of that, and if you have elected us, we are working in your best interest, and that is where the trust should come from. I think on the opposite side of that, democratic republicans in the 1790s and before them antifederalist, and theres a , long tradition of of this starting in the 18thcentury saying thats not where trust should come from. It needs to be systematized in some way and there need to be actual mechanisms for ensuring that. And what trust meant to them was that those people they elected were supposed to be faithful to what they wanted them to do. And so that is kind of where the notion of transparency comes in. It sort of becomes theorized as a mechanism for ensuring trust, but i think it is a lot more complicated than that because we can break it down in that kind of way, when we think about what should be secret or what should be transparent, really it is situational. A lot of us have and just speaking from experience or in the modern world, a lot of us, it comes down to a situational question, and it usually is secrecy is ok if we think it is being used to advance a policy that is genuinely good, even if it is not popular, and that exists. And it can be useful in that circumstance. But if we think it is being used to advance a policy that is corrupt or bad, and it is being used to hide it so that it is not known about and there cannot be backlash to it, then secrecy is pernicious. A lot of it comes down to trust. Do we trust the people who are making that decision and do we agree with the decision . So it ends up being complicated and really hard to drop firm lines in terms of when we think transparency is necessary and not. It often comes back to that issue and that issue of trust. So i will tackle equity. No small thing. I think, i mean, the obvious thing is all men are created equal. This is right there in the founding moment. Sometimes i think we take for granted just how much they think about, the founding generation thinks about the connection between arrangements of wealth and status and the political system. And so as david and katlyn have been talking about the , federalists take the position of we are wise, therefore we should be in power, but where does wisdom come from . How do you prove it . Right . How do you convince someone you are wise . The old way in europe, you are , wealthy, you have status and it makes sense, you get past sed down, and you will. They have to confer that notion of understanding who you can trust is nonsense. It is whyill they turn to education as a way to kind of launder the privilege they already have that they think should give them this kind of claim on peoples trust. Thats not totally equal, though, right . And so i think that is in large measure what jeffersonians are responding to, and i think thats what education policy fits in, which is to try and create both more democratic economic arrangement, but in turn more Democratic Political arrangements and the kind of nexus there is the school system. They use the state to do this in the same way federalists do, and i think that is an important point, that this is not a sit back and do nothing moment. If you zoom in, especially at the state level, everybody is trying to use the state to create a kind of version of the relationship between economic and political arrangements that they desire. And so all three of the groups sort of that i was talking about earlier, all see a pretty prominent role for the state. Federalists we usually think of the Big Government types. Their education policy tends to be a less direct use of state power. Chartering private groups to do something and sometimes funding it. A lottery is pretty popular. Whereas is what you get with republicans are a real sense that in order to make a more Democratic Political arrangement, you need to essentially redistribute resources through taxes to create schools that, right, can then use that money to make a more Democratic Political system. That is inherently intervening in sort of the economic arrangements in the society. We dont often think of antifederalist termed more , radical jeffersonians thinking this way, but i will use an example. Somebody talked about robert coram of delaware who was this really interesting guy who thinks not only does the government owe it, not only should the government give education and redistribute property, but the government owes it to the people because the inequality that is present in the creation of society is a product of the creation of society and the creation of government, so they should mitigate the unnatural inequalities that they have produced. He is pretty successful. The delaware Public Schools as they developed in the 19th century start with a school fund that coram gets passed i think from tapping tavern licenses. Anyway, you see the use of state power to create your own arrangement between economic and political democracy across the board. Lindsay so to address norms and customs, i think it is important to start with a disclaimer, which is that i cannot overstate the amount of anxiety that pervaded the 1780s and the 1790s. And it is, you know its hard to , look back and actually get a sense of what that was like because we know what happened, but there was a widespread and constant fear of failure. And the history of republics was a sad one that was full of unhappy endings, and most of the people that were in office knew this history. And so they were deeply concerned that if they failed once they were in office, the republic would fail, and this was their last shot. They were not particularly worried about what washington was going to do. It sort of goes back to trust. He had such a reputation that they were pretty confident that he was going to figure it out. They were worried what was going to happen afterwards and they were worried what was going to happen when maybe someone who was slightly less trustworthy would come into office, and they expected that virtuous and upstanding men would serve, and if they stopped acting in that way, they expected that they would be turned out of office through election or through impeachment. I think there was a fairly widespread expectation that impeachment was going to be whether it be for judges or members of congress or members of the executive branch a more heavily utilized tool to keep Political Behavior in check. In terms of norms within the actual branches of government, creating institutions is one thing, and filling them with people is an important part of it, but having that culture that actually functions and gets people to accept those institutions, and actually makes the institution plug along and work is really where those norms come in. The idea was that if you could establish norms that could ensure that there would be little r republican virtue in every branch of government, then the institutions would probably have a good chance of surviving. What that meant looked really different to different people. For example, to washington, that meant combining a simple homespun wool suit for his inauguration that was made in the United States. It was very nice homespun, but it was made in the United States with diamond shoe , buckles. He had a combination of americanmade products that were simple and not ostentatious with just a little bit of flash. Alternatively, he had the fanciest coach in all of north america. It was creamcolored with gold trim. His the slaves that attended to it had sparkling white uniforms with red and blue trim. All of his horses matched. But then just to show he was a common man, he would take a walk every afternoon in new york and then in philadelphia and get his boots muddy just like everyone else in the sewage that was in the streets of philadelphia. They were figuring out how to show you were a virtuous republican. As they were sort of working through these norms, which is very much a deliberative process, there was no one right answer. Washington had one vision. Hamilton had had another vision. Jefferson had another vision. If you compare the jefferson portraits that were done over the course of his lifetime, there is a portrait that is done when he comes back from france from his time in france and he , has this, like, super freely lace cravat, and his hair is all fancy, and he has a super fancy jacket. Two years later, he has a portrait done as secretary of state and it is starting to shift to a super streamlined look. By the time he is president , he is downright shabby. That was intentional to convey a certain way of governing. To sort of sum all that up, these norms were constantly shifting. They were constantly being negotiated. Some of them still continue to govern today. There is the expectation people will not profit off of office. It was expected from the beginning and carried through. Whereas we dont expect the president to show up to congress in a creamcolored carriage. So a constant shifting process. Well im going to take a stab at sort of addressing all of them because i think in many ways it all comes down to this question of how exactly do you keep a Representative Government from failing. Particularly when you deal with the fact that at the time at least, it was universally accepted that man was at base selfish. When humans are left to their own devices, they pursue their own selfinterest. They are lazy. They choose ignorance over education. If you start from that premise, if it be from the fall of adam, state, natural law selfgovernment is a terrible idea. Democracy is a terrible idea if you are starting from that premise because you are basically giving it to the people that are guaranteed to abuse it. And yet, there is this experiment in doing just that. And i think the founders were acutely aware of the fact that citizens needed to be molded and shaped in order for this to succeed. There was this hope that perhaps, yes, mankind is naturally wicked and prefers ignorance and selfishness, but through institutions, be it norms, be it schools, be it trust in who is in office, perhaps these citizens might be able to succeed as a republic. And for me, i see Political Parties emerging as this balance between liberty and order, power and liberty. The question of how you balance having a popular government where you want people involved, you want people paying attention because ultimately, there is still this since that power corrupts. If left unchecked, power corrupts. Even the most educated, although washington was apparently not, the most educated, you know, will still corrupt, so they must be watched, but who is going to watch them . One way you could do that is to have everybody watch it, which is not really effective or realistic. I think ultimately the party emerges as a way to keep the public engaged, informed, and active, while at the same time channeling some of that energy directly into achievable goals as opposed to each individual trying to pursue individual goals and ends. A party system functions more or less as a filter, not unlike the way madison had imagined the representative system working. The idea being that at each level somebody could participate, have their voice heard, and in the process it would filter up. It is unrealistic. Its absolutely true that none of them wanted it. Most of them did not think they were a part of it. You can debate all you want if whether they actually were parties, and i think in the end, it comes down to a matter of semantics. That is just how you define a Party Decides if parties existed, but the role i think they played continues to be keeping people involved, engaged, and informed, recognizing that when left to our own devices, not because there is anything inherently wrong with every american, but perhaps it is human nature to choose selfishness and ignorance over information and virtue. That in order to combat that, we need to be trained, we need to be taught. We need these norms and institutions to help prevent us from falling back to our natural instincts. Thank you. Lets turn it over to the audience for questions. So raise your hand. We have a question over here. Thank you all, first of all. Wait for the we have a microphone coming. We are on tv. I forgot we are filming everything. Thank you for starting a wonderful conversation on the subject. I am john larson from here at purdue. I am struck by something that katlyn said kind of in passing but will i think lift all of this into a then and now conversation, and thats the idea of good or bad policies. The american founding in my understanding is such a product of the enlightenment era notion that some things are good, some things are bad. We can tell the difference, and that right thinking, decent, honorable people will concur about what is right and what is wrong. So all you have to do is make sure that the bad guys are not pursuing bad policies, and let the good guys pursue good policies, and we will get there. Almost immediately, what begins to rear its ugly head is the fact that we dont agree on what are good or bad policies. We barely agreed even then because most americans were not in fact enlightenment philosophers, but as david said, selfinterested individuals with a lot of interests. And over time as you get into a global, pluralistic, wildly incompatible set of norms and values around the world, how on earth do we expect this procedure to result in people concurring on what is good or bad policy in 2019 . I mean the possibilities are just almost beyond imagining. I will jump in just to give an initial response to that. That is something i have thought about a lot. I think you are right that there was a fundamental belief at the time that if reasonable people had all the information, they would agree that something is good or bad. And i think what is really significant is that they dont let go of that for a long time. After the whiskey rebellion, for example, washington is writing in his letters, hes convinced that if people just knew the truth of it, they could not possibly be so mad about it. They would acquiesce to it. He is really convinced it is a result of people manipulating information and spreading misinformation, and i think that actually that brings us to the sedition act. That actually is, you know, politics aside, which largely it was that, but i do think there was a sincere effort behind that on the part of many federalists actually to say theres too much misinformation going around, and if we could just have a referee and get things straight, that people would agree with them, that people would be able to identify what is good and bad. But i think you are right that what it comes down to is that is not really a matter of reason, necessarily or truth. It is a matter of judgment or opinion. So how do we actually deal with that . I think we have not answered that question. Jefferson wanted to use the sedition act to silence his critics because unlike his people being arrested in the the 1790s, his people were telling the truth. And so there is no harm in arresting people who tell falsehoods, but its wrong to arrest people who tell the truth. I think that is the most jefferson thing ever. [laughter] what is that . I said it is the most jefferson thing ever. Oh, yes, of course. It is useful for us to think about the motives behind the sedition act. There are federalists after the election of 1800 who fight to extend it actually, though they know they might be on the receiving end of you know punishment, but i think there is a sincere effort to say there is a problem with lying and misinformation, and that that is a real problem, and we should recognize the sedition act is related to that is a genuine concern. But as you say, thats not a solution when one team, so to speak, is calling themselves the referee because that is not a neutral notion of defining truth and falsehoods. Yeah that makes me think , about the question of who adjudicates, because of how partisan and sort of partyrelated the press was in the 1790s. Ok, the federalist newspaper said this thing. Of course the jeffersonian newspaper is going to say that. Y. Say x, we say the notion of objectivity in the press had not emerged yet. The idea of who is going to decide, we will. The government should decide. Anyway, sorry. I mean, its a great question, and i think this pursuit of the one truth did ultimately blow up in a number of instances. And yet, you know, if they held onto it people still hold onto , to it very dearly today, and there is we bemoan the bipartisanship of the senate. Theres this sense that if we as individuals would get outside of our partisan bubble and talk to each other that perhaps, while not agreeing with each other, we might at least be able to understand each other, and im not altogether convinced thats incorrect. I think part of the structures we have set up force us or enable us to have contact with primarily people we agree with facetoface and a lot of people we disagree with over the internet. And as a result, we dont engage in real conversation. Now its not the same as sitting down and following logic to the one reasonable truth, but this notion that deliberation cannot still produce some at least useful ends in democracy i think it still exists, and perhaps it is gone and that may be the case, but it is worth noting that i think there is still a strong sense that we as americans agree on more than we disagree. We just dont know it. Because you brought up sedition because you brought up sedition, the other thing i noticed through these policy fights is also how some of the people who seemingly are most committed to the ideals you mentioned, right and wrong, good and bad policy, and you can just come to it after some rational deliberation and also come to some kooky ideas. I am thinking of the bavarian illuminati thing that is surrounding the sedition act along with Jedediah Morse responsible for teaching kids the geography of the united first states and making them good, responsible americans, he is convinced the bavarian illuminati has created the french revolution and is now going to like has designs on the United States, and theres this conspiratorial thing even among people who are committed to rational deliberation. Theres another illuminati, the new england illuminati, this episcopal priest comes up with the idea that the new england illuminati is distorting truth and distorting peoples understanding of what is and is not real through churches and universities. And that is the new england illuminati. There is this underlying current of mistrust in the press and in media by people who otherwise i think would kind of agree with the proposition that john began with. The connection between conspiracy theories and the lack of trust in the political culture is a thats one symptom, right . When the conspiracy theories start to bloom, it is a sign that there is a kind of weakening of that trust. Yeah. Back there. Hello. My name is bill white. I teach in the Cornerstone Program here in purdue. But in another life, i was actually an historian. So i walked into graduate school in 1969, not quite 1912 when a book on the cabinet was written, but i have a generic historiographic question. I want to take all the panelists to the word of the conference, first remaking american political history. Are their sources or questions that you and other scholars are asking in 2018, 2019, 2020 that just would never have been asked, would never have been thought of when i walked into graduate school 50 years ago . Great question. Thank you. Whichever one of you want to be brave and go first . [laughter] sure. So i think that from my own personal work, there has been a renewed turn to looking at institutions as structures, as bodies of people who are responding to International Issues and pressures and trying to prove themselves on an international stage, to state,anding that the the federal state was much larger and more powerful than perhaps we initially gave it credit for and formed much earlier. My work suggests the executive turn of the federal government was actually much earlier than a lot of previous scholarship suggested. A lot of previous scholarship puts that turn after the civil war, and my work suggests there was a lot of executive energy and intensity from the very beginning. So we have mentioned the whiskey rebellion. We have mentioned the french revolution and neutrality crisis. We have mentioned jays treaty. These are all tools i use to show that washington and the cabinet really seized the opportunity to embolden the executive branch and boost president ial authority and power way earlier than what has been previously argued. So i think the institutional turn is the big one for me, and looking at it beyond sort of just biographical focus but sort what are sort of the cultural forces that are shaping this institution, the international forces, and how do we study it as a body of people. I will jump on to this. I think the institutional stuff and the rise of state is related to putting things in a broader and transatlantic context. Katlyn can talk about more authoritatively than i can. Im not sure when palmers revolution came out before or after you got to graduate school. But all of us take are granted the french revolution had some later patient resolution haitian revolution, that this could impact the ability to maintain trust that all of these currents are coming in from the outside, and that it is not just this sort of internal dialogue among insulated pennsylvanians and somenians and then maybe nationalist minded people. I think there is a notion this broader context is pretty important. I will just jump off of that. I think both of these things are right. I will add there is a renewed investigation of democracy which david talked about also. I think there was a long trend in American History taken for granted. Democratic, we democracy. I think there is a renewed questioning from historians about what was that actually, what did it mean to people at the time how is that , constructed, how is that Representative Democracy constructed because that was a new thing at the time. It took a lot of work to legitimate. I think there has been a renewed investigation of that. I think it is coming from current questions and crises informing the kind of historical questions about were asking. I would just add the broad investigation of culture, and as part of that the inclusion of people that were previously ignored, which is something we have not necessarily gone into great detail about, but looking how it is that africanamericans that women, the poor, how do they participate in the political process . What do these institutions and ideas mean to them . Where do native americans fit in the story . Some of these questions were asked at the beginning right around when we started. I think, just as we might take for granted that the french revolution played a part, there is almost an extent to which we now take it for granted that of course we are including discussions of these previously excluded groups. But it is worth emphasizing that this look of political culture more broadly is designed in part to take account for these other voices. Yeah. I would say for me, the question of liberalism and neoliberalism, not in a louis heart sense, but as we look at the sort of resurgence of arguably we call it liberalism, conservative liberalism, whether it is u. S. , or around the world, that i, as someone who went to college at the tail end of the cold war, ancis fukuyama era liberalism is something of the past, vestigial, something that was around that eventually fading and going away. And liberalism, liberal threats were the future. And that shaped the way we told the history, for example, the alien institution acts, which are always understood as weird 18thcentury things that we said and went away because of course , we dont talk about immigrants that way. Of course we dont talk about the government sort of playing a really strong forceful role in , culture or whatever it might be. In that sense, or conspiracy theories and thinking about the role those play in a particular political culture that i had maybe taken less seriously as objects of study to now kind of be the coexistence of american political culture, slavery, or the existence of patriarchy, all these other kind of illiberal forms of culture and structure the filter into politics and shape politics in a way. So what is just something that has been of renewed interest to me, but which have not been when i got to graduate school in the 1990s. Thank you. Thank you, all, for your lovely papers. As much as i would never disagree with my colleague john larson, who i respect so much, i want to disagree on his depiction of the enlightenment and lead to a question. I dont think the enlightenment was quite as heroic or good versus bad as he portrayed it. But rather there was a more humble approach, it was more empirical, more investigative , more practical. There was a real humility to the capacity to generate knowledge. It had humility for what some implications for policymaking in terms of what works and what does not and was good and what is bad. If we take the enlightenment of this idea of investigation and figuring out how things can work seriously, before asking these questions i want to hear your reflections about 1790 and, who gets to deliberate where, who is able to deliberate and how do we translate the product of that deliberation into policy . Those were thoughts i had i would love to hear thoughts about. Thank you. So i would, i would absolutely agree with dean the enlightenment. There will always be a counter example that is just as much a part of the enlightenment. I think you are right, it is just as much recognition that they dont know and the idea of reusingl evidence and deliberation can lead to progress if not the ultimate single truth. There was this hope that maybe some of the writing i think pointed to this state of nirvana, but i agree. You know the question of who deliberate and how i think is fundamental to our country today just as it was then. What does it actually mean to be involved in this deliberative process when what happened in government is, by definition, beyond the scope of what most americans are capable of discussing . We as individuals have lives. Even today when information is so widely available, and we have cspan that can broadcast what is occurring in congress, i mean, you know, i dont know what the house is debating today. Part of that is because i have got my own life to live. So what does it mean to participate in a deliberative process . I would love to have that answer. At the time, i would say, ultimately, the understanding would revolve around Property Owners of course. But nevertheless, there was a sense that you could participate through your actions whether it be demonstrating patriotism, demonstrating a love for liberty. That, if of wanted to mention two things they were deeply concerned, the people to were doing the deliberating, were deeply concerned about who is doing deliberating and recognizing it was a complicated process. And the issues facing the nation and trying to figure out these problems required a lot of knowledge and experience and practice. And if you only served one term in the house for two years, you are not going to acquire the knowledge and the experience necessary to wrap your head around these things. So madison in the federalist papers talks about this extensively that his biggest concern, that especially in the 1780s in the house, you had a revolving door of congressman and how can you have an effective government if they do not know what they are doing. I also want to mention that there was a hope that people would get better at it, that the next generation would have more understanding and would come to better agreements. I often call the constitution a hodgepodge of compromises. And suggest that all of most of all of the participants felt they did not get everything they wanted. And knew there were things that would be a problem in the hope that future generations were going to come to a better solution that may have. I think that is an important thing to remember when we talk about this sort of first generation, that they understood their limitations very, very much. I will answer your first question and i think your i second. Think who gets to deliberate is and who is able here and that is the problem. It is one of those questions in theory answers the other. That is what they have to do it and sometimes, i think this runs back to the original revolutionary constitution. It is definitely there in the constitutional convention, what should make what should , differentiate the senate from the house. It is something about ability but how do you define what the ability is to create the greatest deliberative body in the world . I dont have an answer because i think it sort of runs in a circle in some ways. I will just have a quick, jump on quickly to say, they were extremely concerned with deliberation and how it was best work. Something i have thought about is the way they discussed conditions for deliberation and secrecy and utility, to insulate the process from factional passions. We talk a lot about passions. The idea that you need to have a cool, recent it is separate from all of that where you can have solid and sound deliberation. I have been thinking about that a lot in our modern world. The notion that you should have any space or time to deliberate and complete a policy or make a policy is almost antithetical to our media environment and the way politics works now. It is so much fast, go, and you want to see everything and talk about every step of the process. Pundits are analyzing it all the time. In many ways, i think where we have arrived at is very different from the vision of what many of the framers of the constitution had. Part of it is technological innovation. But also it is changes in values and expectations. Thinking that through and thinking through that expectation is challenging but potentially really interesting. That is a very wideopen answer. Thomas payne, i think it is in the rights of man said people , will not decide wrong unless tily. Decide too has Something Like that. Sometimes they might make mistakes, but if you go to fast or there are self interests kind of gets its way in there. Also when i talk about the remindionary era, i students i teach in salem, oregon, which is 150,000 people, which is roughly three to four times the size of the largest city in the United States in the 1790s. People live in these facetoface communities. Robert corrigan, who was brought up by mark, his idea of how you should adjudicate property get sevens you just trusted people in your community to sort through it all the system, property and arrangements and figure this out. If we were just all in a room, you get like seven trusted people, you configure this out. And the peoplene who followed him, the people legislaturehe first will just be everyone sitting under a tree, hashing it out. Cool lets go back home. ,this idea we are just sitting under a tree. That is the dumbest idea i have ever heard. So today i had the privilege to teach early American History at purdue. It was thrilling to see a panel in my specialty. But my question is really for all the panel. How does your research speak to a tension that seems to exist in this period of the 1790s between the desire to build a new government with principal popular sovereignty and one that would be respectful to the eyes of the world. Treatylarger gould calls elisha gould calls treaty worthiness. That they must be among the powers of the earth. It seems at all of your papers in some way reflect this tension. Theres some contemporary relevance today. On the one hand, balancing the desire for the constituents who elected the president with the desire to also balance the u. S. Position visavis the rest of the world. If you could elucidate that it a bit for us, i would appreciate it. Will just say i think part of it is this question of how do you achieve respectability . Is it through emulating the old world . Is it through getting us close to england as you can because that is their role model, or do you seek to provide some other example . And i think there was a lot of to focusbout how much a what it would mean to have radically selfgoverning country versus one that is a nation among the nations. I dont mean they were acutely aware that people watching globally, but at the same time it is worth remembering that as people did not live in cities, and while the global turn is very important, the vast majority of americans were much more concerned with their daytoday lives. So you know, we are talking about average americans, i would say they were probably, they know about it, but they were a little bit more concerned about their basic needs. My work very literally encapsulates these two quandaries in the cabinet. You have Alexander Hamilton on the one hand who was advocating global, very sort of banking, merchant heavy respectable sort of , englishbased system with Strong Military power and strong presidency, and then you had Thomas Jefferson, who was supportive of some of those things in much smaller doses and then had a smaller vision of how they should look. They literally duked it out in the cabinet to the point where Thomas Jefferson described Cabinet Meetings as a cockfight. There is no better way to describe that because if you think of a bloody and violent spectacle where you are fighting to the death, and they did meet in a room that was 15 by 20 feet, filled with furniture, five very large men by the standards of the day, and they met for hours at a time, they met up to five times per week in the summer of 1793. We know the summer was very hot and humid because there was very bad yellow fever outbreak that fall. They obviously didnt have air conditioning. It was philadelphia and very humid. They hated each other by that point, and they were locked in these battles over, in some ways answers the question of which one, i dont think necessarily either came out on top, basically sort of transpired, but there is a jeffersonian ideal a lot of people hold closely to. In some ways that battle is still the concepts we are grappling with today. It is a great question. I think there is a lot going on there, but in the work i do, you see both, there is sort of anxieties about how europe views americans and anxieties about how europe views america. I didnt really talk about this, but a lot of the impulse to in federal education policy is one sort of status anxiety among elites trying to hold their position and they have to look a certain way. You see an outpouring of dancing schools and french schools. Right after the revolution. They are supposed to have everybody is dressed in homespun fighting a revolution about officernd then the comes out and they go learn how to do a minuet, and that is definitely what you are talking about. That is weird, but it has implications for how governments gets used should you create schools, universities, institutions that teach people to do that because on the international stage, having someone to walk into the core a court and do a minuet is important. Or do you need to do the thing where you teach people how to be, as i said before, humble, Practical Enlightenment that would make the new, more republican american version of things, and all sorts of policy arenas. Historians would not have noticed this years ago, it is not just the socioeconomic stuff but also this kind of geopolitical situation that we are now aware of because of work like gould and others. I would just say i think you , are right to identify this tension, and i think you are right that it indoors it endures to this day. One thing that a significant about the 1790s is the International Community is changing. My think about secrecy, a lot of times, it is justified on the basis of an international level. We need to keep secrets to be able to function as a government internationally. Secrecy is necessary in military realms and in diplomacy for example. With the french revolution, there is a movement to change that actually in the International Community. The french are talking about all diplomacy should be open. Gene comes to the u. S. And says we have abandoned the crooked past of diplomacy and i will do everything in the open, and that is how we should actually interact. There are interesting ways in which International Norms and the questions about things are changing at the same time. And so the u. S. Has moved to adopt an aristocratic french mannerisms and clothing and things like that. Soon that will be a lot more complicated. The french revolution is actually throwing that stuff out. Not everyone goes with it, but i think it complicates those questions a lot. 10 minutes. Want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask. If you have a question, raise your hand. Over there. Over here as well. Thank you. While listening to your papers i was wondering if maybe an institution that could bring them all together in would be the u. S. Senate. It is supposed to be a bastion of the elite. It is supposed to be the cabinet but does not work out that way. It is not directly elected but separated from popular politics to some extent. Could you weave the themes together to make that work . I am just wondering if you have given a thought to whether that could be the representative body for all of these ideas. That is great. Thank you. The question over here. While we are waiting, is there anyone else who has a question they would like to ask . Ok. Because these were face to face communities, i was wondering it if the location of the capital is changing your deliberations that you are seeing about each issue. Does it matter if it is in new york, philadelphia, and washington, and that overheated room, does it matter where that room is . Where the shaded tree is . Thank you. Any other questions . We will sort of take those together. The question about the senate and the question about location. I will start with location. My ideal lot with pennsylvania. It factored heavily into what occurred in the federal government. I mean philadelphia was the sort of preeminent city to begin with. It established itself as the economic heart. Once it became the political heart, what happens not just in the politics of pennsylvania but in philadelphia i think factored heavily into what occurred in government. Pennsylvania had a long history of fractitious politics, more so than some of its neighbors, which were not to say that those were peaceful either. And that definitely spilled over into what was occurring in congress. I mean these individuals were , talking to each other, were interacting with each other. It is an interesting sort of counterfactual about how washington might have responded to the whiskey rebellion had it not been in pennsylvania. But the fact that was made it all the more important that the federal government show force. As to the question of the senate, i think it is a i think it is a good point. One thing, it is worth looking at the process of selecting the senators themselves could be very contentious. And i think this is one of the problems you get into with any sort of body of that sort, that egos and personalities clash. And it, you know if you look at , william mcclays diary from the first senate, i mean all he , does is sit there and grumble. Part of that is he is performing for an audience back home, but based on that evidence, it didnt appear to be working out very well as a deliberative body. Again it is one disgruntled voice, but when youre passing notes about the weight of the Vice President , it might not be the best example. So the Senate Question first, actually i just want to back up. In response to your whiskey rebellion comment, he didnt do anything when North Carolina or kentucky ignored tax. I think youre right that pennsylvania is important. In response to the senate, washington of course has his very famous 1789 visit to the senate which we know because of mcclays diary. It goes very badly. He has these expectations the senate will operate like a council of war and that senators will debate like his officers would and offer him advice and instead it acts like a perfect legislative body and refers it to committee and asks him to come back later. He says he will never go back. That speaks to the norms issue we talked about a lot. Very much in flux. In terms of the location, it absolutely shifts a lot in terms of the cabinet. In philadelphia, the heart of the city was very much about high street or market street, and hamilton and jefferson lived six blocks from each other and they were sort of the outskirts of the cabinet community. They went to the same shops. They went to the same taylors. They went to the same social environments. They could not avoid each other if they wanted to. It was very much a hothouse for political tensions. And elite society was all in that one little clump. When the capital moves to washington, d. C. , it is much more spread out. There are little chunks of communities. Sort of it is an older work but james young talks about how the the executive Branch People cluster around executive Branch Buildings and legislative people cluster, and there is a wilderness with cows in between. He is not wrong. It is more spread out. There is much more space. But then also what we see in terms of the Cabinet Meeting space is very informative. Jefferson selected his private study. He had it set up more comfortably. The secretaries actually have proper workspace. There is larger tables and more comfortable chairs. Has great lighting, it is on the first floor. It is a private space. There is a lot to be said that his experience in washingtons cabinet absolutely informs what he then creates once he is in the white house. I do not have a great answer for the Senate Question. I think you are right, it is super interesting. The debates i read and notesnes madisons sort of prompted a lot of questions i have been asking like the role of education in determining access to power and how they dealt with the question of having an upper house in addition to the lower house. On the question of location, i do not deal to much with National Politics but i do think an important thing to talk about is the presence or lack thereof of women in the capital, the d. C. In its early years is not exactly a fun place to live. If i remember correctly, the number of spouses who come with congressmen goes really far down. Also there is not just that many women living there. The way people do politics orormally in private spaces semipublic spaces is different when you have, you know, women around. There is vast. And on the local level, this matters a great deal. State capital is pretty all moved in this period to make them more accessible to people who live in new york to make them more accessible in northern versus western areas. Even going down more local levels, should school taxes be town level or divide your counsel into districts and do the district have to hammer this stuff out . The real immediacy and face to faceness, it gets intimate about some really important things. Roadbuilding and other things that are just like absolutely fundamental, like can you get your goods to market, can you get your kids to school . That is not just a national story. That is happening in every Little Pocket of the united dates. Yes. These are both really great questions. I will start with the location issue. I think, and everyone has echoed this, it mattered and it mattered a lot to them. The room where it happened, as lindsay said, it matters a lot also in the legislature quite a bit. I am thinking a lot about that in terms of accessibility, how many people can fit in the room if your going to allow an audience. Where can reporters sit to record it . It matters a great deal and to bring up the french revolution, people like Thomas Jefferson, witnessing the meetings and the crowds coming and invading the assembly at points, he is writing home about that. That even subconsciously is influencing how they are thinking about where should the capital b, where should the legislature meet that is safe and insulated. To the Senate Question, i think that is a great question. That is the institution that boils down a lot of what we have been talking about. I have thought about that recently because the senate is being discussed now in terms of is it still functional, does it work the way we want it to work . I think of the cooling mechanism. It is supposed to be the place of wisdom and will not be directly elected by the people and it is supposed to be this check and wise body. It was theorized in that way as sort of a limit on too much democracy, as dave was saying earlier. And the ills they think they are guarding against is demagoguery. Populist threat, these kind of things. I think what is ironic is that actually we find ourselves in a situation where that institution, maybe more democracy may be the solution to those ills. It is not causing those ills. We had a senate designed to be inherently undemocratic. Not really reflective or overly responsive to Public Opinion. That might be what is causing a framershe very ills the feared when they invented the senate. Everyone is focusing on the breakdown of norms in the senate as the problem of democracy. If only the senate could get it right, that would save democracy. It is the thing designed to not be democracy that ends up saving democracy that would be a , wonderful historical irony. Thanks to our panelists and our audience for their questions. [applause] enjoy the rest of the afternoon and conference. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. 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Announcer 1 a life, conversation with american evin. Prise scholar yuval l his book is a time to build. Join the conversation with your phone calls, tweets and Facebook Messages and watch indepth on book tv on cspan two. Each week american artifacts takes you to Historic Places to learn about American History. Theext week tour we tour americans exhibit. She shows us how indian names and images are used on military insignia and state and city seals. In the pocahontas gallery, we see images of the Indian Princess and learn how she has been used as a symbol of americas founding. Cecile we are standing in the central gallery of