Transcripts For CSPAN2 Booknotes 20150307

Because people need to hear what you have to say. I take a lot of encouragement. I for years have been influenced, decades by an essay written by Bayard Rosman called from protest to politics and i hear in what you are saying that beginning of what might be a politics in egypt which means organization which means discussion, which means building from the ground up and finding ways of learning how to resolve differences. Thats how power gets shifted so thank you very much. Thank you cspan for being here. Books will be signed. Just line up over here and watch cspan on windows will appear and you can hear it again and i invite others to watch with you. Thank you all for coming. Thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] next encore booknotes. From 1997 thomas west discusses his book on the teaching of history particularly with regard for how the Founding Fathers are portrayed today. This is about an hour. Cspan professor thomas g. West, in your book in the afterword, you write, `it sometimes seems as if the american founders have no admirers in america except among those who are relatively uneducated. why is that . Guest well, what i discovered in writing this book is that the leading historians political scientists and textbook writers who convey the information to our students and to the general public about the founding all pretty much agree that the Founding Fathers are bad. Theyre racist; theyre sexist; theyre elitists. They werent sincere when they said that all men are created equal. They didnt include women; they didnt include blacks. They excluded the poor from the vote. So all of this is out there, and it requires a response. Cspan where did this start . Guest thehistorically, really, it goes back to the progressive era. The first really serious attacks on the founding took placepeople like Charles Beard, whose book on the economic origins of the constitution basically argued that the constitution was written by a group of selfinterested rich people out to protect their private property. Cspan what year . Guest sometime around 1911 i think, 1913. Cspan did everybody just fall in the line with mr. Beard . Guest well, this became the orthodoxy as time went along. And then particularly since the 60s, theresthe theme has been the exclusion of blacks and women. Thats been the great argument. And so now you pick up a textbook or a standard history book on the founding, a government book, youll find these things just stated as though this is the most obvious thing in the world. Cspan when did you first think about writing this book . Guest i startedi did a series of essays for the claremont institute, where im a senior fellow, in california in the early 90s on this topic. They were doing a series of events for high school teachers, and thats how it got started. And then when i decided to put them together in a book, i went over them, expanded them and really developed the argument in a way that it deserves to be stated. Cspan wheres the claremont institute, and what does it do . Guest theyrewell, theyre a think tankclaremont, california, and theyre devoted to the idea of restoring the principles of the declaration of independence in American Life. Many of the People Associated with the institute are former students of harry jaffa, who was, for many years, a professor out there in the Claremont Mckenna college and graduate school. Cspan how big is it . How many people belong to it . Guest well its not likeits not quite as big as aei, but its one of the major conservativesort of secondtier conservative think tanks in america. Cspan and where is claremont california . Whats it near . Guest well, its about 30 miles east of la. Cspan in the beginning of your book under acknowledgments, you say, `through the generosity of Henry Salvatori, Charles Kessler brought me to Claremont Mckenna college as a salvatori visiting scholar. guest right. Cspan who is Henry Salvatori . Guest salvatori just died guest salvatori just died recently at the age ofyou know, i think he was about 97. He was an italian immigrant who was a very successful businessman and made a pile of money developing techniques of Oil Exploration that turned out to be very successful. And in his later years, he became a major donor to causes and to people who were interested in restoring the principles of the founding. And he established a center at Claremont Mckenna college, the salvatori center, which is directed by Charles Kessler. And they brought me out there knowing that i was somebody who could help advance that work. Cspan where were you when they brought you out there . Guest well, im based in irving, texas, at the university of dallas, where im a professor of politics. Cspan is that a fulltime job still . Guest right. Yes. Cspan and when did youearly on in your life, or maybe it wasnt early onstart thinking about things like the constitution or the declaration of independence or the Founding Fathers . Guest well, it took me a while to get there. I was a student in the 60s and 70s of leo strauss and some of strauss students out in claremont; actually, originally, a student of allan blooms at cornell, then i went out to claremont. And originally, i was really focused on the study of obscure texts in the history of political philosophy written by dead white males like plato and cicero and people like that. And my first book, in fact, was an interpretation of platos apology of socrates. But it really wasnt until the 80s that i got interested in a serious way in american politics and i used my knowledge of the history of philosophy to help to understand the principles of this country. And i think it really did help as a matter of fact, in articulating what the founding was all about. Cspan do you have a family . Guest i do. Cspan kids . Guest ive got four children. Cspan how old are they . Guest . And a wife who teaches classics with me at the university of dallas. Lets see, three boys, 10, 13, 15, and then a daughter whos a freshman at university of dallas whos 18. Cspan you have inside the book under the chapter of women in the family this sentence `bachelors have much higher rates of almost every social ill on which statistics are kept criminal behavior, victimization by crimes, unemployment, disease, mental disorders, drunkenness and drug addiction suicide and even rates of accidents. guest astounding, isnt it . Cspan why is that in the book . Guest why isthats from the chapter on women in the family. And one of the charges thats made against the founders is that they were mean to women. They didnt really believe that women were created equal. The standard scholarship says that women were oppressed; women had no rights; women were excluded from society. And thei hadyou know, i thought that wasdeserved looking into. Its a serious charge, and theres some facial evidence to support that. Women didnt have the right to vote, for example, and there were different legal rights for women within marriage than men. So that led me to the question of `well, what did they think they were doing . jefferson, for example, among others, attacked the indians for suppressing and exploiting their women. He said the problem with the indians is they dont treat women as the equals of men which is what they are. So jefferson must have thought that he and the other americans were treating women as equals. So the question i had is, `well how could jefferson have thought that . How could he have thought that we were better than the indians, treating our women in the right way, while at the same time women werent voting and women didnt have Property Rights separate from their husbands when they were married . so i hadthat led into the question of what did they think they were doing . And the answer was that they thought that the major way in which women would be protected is through marriage, through family and family integrity. Their idea was to support the institution of marriage so that people would get married and stay married as much as possible, barring death, make divorce difficult, focus peoples sexual energies in only one direction, marriage. And in that way, women, men and children would end up being happier and better protected. I ended upand that quote you mentioned about single men is from a section on whether marriage is good for men. The answer is that by practically any objective measurement today, married men are happier, better off, have fewer accidents, fewer pathologies, etc. , than single men. And the same thingsimilar patterns can be observed for women and in terms of the benefits of marriage. Cspan when you speak of the founders, name the ones that are the most important to you. Guest well, i meanby the founders, i just mean those americans who were prominent in the writing of the fundamental documents that governed the nation in the founding era. The top people obviously would be Thomas Jefferson, john adams, washington, hamilton. Those would probably be the top four. Cspan what were their relationships with women . Guest well, jefferson is probably the one whose relationships with women arehis are most thoroughly documented. He had ahis wife died when he was young, and he had very Close Relationships with his daughters, with whom he exchanged a voluminous correspondence, which is now all published. And he had a great interest in their wellbeing and that their education, that they married well and so on. So yeah, hes certainly someone who deserves ayou know, whose writing on this ishasis one of the most important sources. Cspan one of the things i noted is you mentioned abigail adams, john adams wife. And i wanted to ask you whats in the famous `remember the ladies to her husbandletter or what was that . Guest letter, yes. Cspan and why did you use that here . Guest well, this is a letter where she writes to john adams right at the moment of the declaration of independence. And she says, `please, when you make your new laws for this new country, remember the ladies and dont allow men to tyrannize over them. Remember that all men would be tyrants if they would, and theres a need to restrain that. she was referring to the problem of some men abusing their wives and this was a problem that was acknowledged and in the early legislation that was passed in the various states, particularly in the northern states, the laws were changed to accommodate those kinds of extreme situations. Cruelty was established as a ground of divorce in most of the statesnorthern states, actually, in the precivil war period. And that was what she had in mind. The reason why i mention it is because sometimes people will quote that; feminists will quote that, saying, `ahha, heres an early statement of feminism. and thats exactly the opposite of what shes saying. She ends up quoting a passage from the bible from ephesians which tells husbands to love their wives just as christ loved the church. Her attitude was not that women should be free of menfree of marriage, but rather that men should do their duty and treat their women as they deserve to be treated. Cspan whats your wifes reaction to your book, by the way . Guest shes very supportive of this. Wereas i say, i think in our family, we all believe that all men are created equal, men and women included in the term `men, of course. Cspan what evidence do you have that when they wrote `all men arewhether it was the committee or Thomas Jeffersonwrote, `all men are created equal, that they really meant, `all people are created equal . Guest they said so over and over again. If you look at the formulations, there were dozens of different ways they formulated this statement. They talked about the rights of humanity, the rights of mankind, human rights, the human race all having the same rights of life and liberty. It was a constant discussion of this idea of equal rights in inclusive language, so that when the declaration says `all men, obviously it means `all human beings. its a typical canard of certainof some modern scholars to claim that `men means males thats not at all what they meant. And they also spoke very directly about women. As i mentioned, jefferson, in his discussion of the indians, talked about the fact that women do have equal rights. James otis, one of the early writersone of the early massachusetts founders in 1760s in a striking passage, says, `wouldnt it be infamous to claim that the ladies are all slaves by nature . And isnt it true that in the state of nature, they had as much right as the men did to say what form of government they should live under . so theres no question that the founding generation understood this point that the equality of men meant the equality of all human beings. Cspan on your cover, you have a quote from Forrest Mcdonald compelling, accurate, closely reasoned, and entirely convincing. Why did the book publisher think that quote was important to put on the cover . And who is Forrest Mcdonald . Guest Forrest Mcdonald is a leading historian of the founding. Hes at the university of alabama. Hes published many books on the period. One of his early books, we the people, was a refutation of the Charles Beard thesis on the constitutional convention. Mcdonald showed that beard simply had his facts wrong in claiming that the convention was dominated by the rich who were out to exploit the poor. And hes written a very fine biography of hamilton which is wellknown. So they thought his testimony was worth having, and so do i. Cspan the company is Rowman Littlefield. Who are they . •that published the book. Guest Rowman Littlefield . Theyre. Cspan im sorry. Rowman, yeah. Guest yes, theyre a very prominent academic publisher. Theyre now moving into the realm of doing more trade books this book is being marketed more as a trade book than as an academic book. And theyre publishing authors like robert novak, whos got a book out this fall as well. Cspan and where are they based . Who owns them . Do you know . Guest theyre right outside the district, somewhere in maryland. Ive never been there, but theyre close by here. Cspan this your first book by them . Guest with them, yes. Ive published chapters in some books by them before, but, yes this is my first book with them cspan on the back you have some other endorsements. Rush limbaugh `a pathbreaking book, he says. `the American People finally have a definitive answer to the distortions about the founding that liberals have been pouring into the American Mind since the 1960s. I recommend this book heartily. It belongs on every bookshelf and in every classroom in america. whats that endorsement worth to your book, do you think . Guest i think that what the publisher had in mind was this is a guyRush Limbaughwho is very wellknown to the American People. Hes got a huge audience with his radio show. Rather than put on an academic that a very small number of people might have heard of, why not put on a guy like this whos famous . And hopefully by marketing the book as a provocative book in that way, theyll get some attention. Cspan how tough was it to get his endorsement . Guest it wasi dont really know the answer to that question. The endorsement wasthe manuscript was passed on to him by a woman whos a very good friend of his. And apparently what happened was that he read enough of it to decide this is good, and so he said, `yeah, illi want to endorse this thing. cspan what was your reaction when you found out he was going to endorse it . Guest i thought it was terrific. Cspan Newt Gingrich `one of those rare publications that promises to shape the field of inquiry about the american founders for decades to come. how tough was that endorsement . Guest that i dont know anything about. Someonean acquaintance of mine asked him or his office, and he was good enough to do it. Cspan you also have Dinesh Dsouza `an eloquent defense of the principles of the american founding by one of its most learned students. whats the value of that endorsement . Guest well, Dinesh Dsouza is, i think, one of our Outstanding Young writers. His book the end of racism, i thought, was fabulous, really did a terrific job of laying out the whole problem of race in America Today in a dispassionate way, but at the same time, in a way that suggests that our approach to the problem deserves some fundamental rethinking. Soand i know him; ive met him before, and i think we have a Mutual Respect for each others work. Cspan chapter on slaverywhats the premise . Guest the premise is that the founders really did believe that all human beings of all races are created equal, that theyre endowed by god with equal rights, and that the governments job is to respect that. Thats the premise. Now the question then becomes well, how in the world can we justify jefferson and washington and madison owning slaves in the face of this . How do we make sense out of this . So i tried to do that. I tried to show that thefirst of all, that the founders really did say that blacks were created equal to whites. Theres a quote oni think, in the second or third page of the chapter wherefrom samuel eliot morison, very famous harvard historian whos written a book oxford history of the American People, published in 1965 still in print, Still Available in all leading bookstores. And what morison says is thathe asked the question, `was jefferson thinking of blacks when he wrote, all men are created equal . His subsequent career indicates that he did not, that blacks were not men. now that is one of the most misleading statements ever written by a historian because in fact, as morison knew very well, jefferson, in the very draft of the declaration that he wrote that day, saidcondemned the king of england for the institution of slavery and for preventing the states from doing something about the slave trade, and referred to blacks as men, and even put `men in capital letters in his draft of the declaration. And so morison leaves the reader with the impression that this jefferson wasnt even thinking about blacks, whereas in reality he knewor should have known, unless he was incompetentthat jefferson was not only thinking but writing about blacks being men on the very same day he wrote the declaration of independence. So thats point one; they really did believe that blacks were human beings. And second, what about their actions . I mean, the problem is, you know, why didnt they abolish slavery right away . Well, part of the answer is they did abolish slavery. Slavery was legal in every state in america in 1776. They had inherited this institution from colonial times as something that, in effect, no american ever questioned back then. This was assumed as just something that happened, something that was ok. And what happened was during the 1760s and 70s, as they were articulating their reasons why the brits shouldnt be able to run our lives without our consent, they started making these arguments. All men are created equal. All men have the same rights. No one deserves to take away someone elses liberty. And that led to people saying, `wait a minute, what about the blacks . What about slavery . and, in fact, they did say `yes, this is a problem. We have to do something about it. and they did abolish slavery in about half of the original states in the early days. Finally, the really decisive thing is slavery was able to be abolished in america later on, at the time of the civil war only because of the fact that the founders had dedicated our country to the proposition that all men are created equal. As lincoln said in the gettysburg address, thats what made it all possible. Cspan you quote quite often in the book alexis de tocqueville. Why . Guest tocqueville was one of the great observers of the american scene. He really understood a lot about what made america work. He especially, i think understood the necessity for the right kind of character, the right kind of moral character in the citizens. He spoke about the way in which the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty complemented each other in American Life and made it possible for there to be a country devoted to freedom that didnt degenerate into license and selfindulgence. He saw in his discussion of the American Family how different it was from the european family where women were put on a pedestal, worshiped in a sense but then treated with contempt in reality. He pointed out something thats probably not very wellknown today, but that the rape laws in america in the time when he visited here in the 1820s were much more severe against rapists than they were in europe, and he thought that was a sign of the american respect for women which i would argue goes back to the founding, goes back to the fact that we did say all men meaning all human beings, are created equal. Cspan when did you first start studying him . Guest well, hes one of the staples in the history of political philosophy. And i probably first ran across tocqueville in a course taught by walter berns at cornell back in the 60s. Cspan did you graduate from cornell . Guest i did. Cspan what did you study there . Guest i was a government major. Cspan walter berns is here in town now. Guest hes still around, yes. Hes a very prominent writer on american politics, american political thought and a scholar at the American Enterprise institute here in town. Cspan you quote tocqueville in here; youre saying, after his visit to america in the 1820s, tocqueville feared that, quote the most horrible of civil wars would occur if slavery were abolished, terminating perhaps in the extermination of one or other of the two races. Whyd you use that quote . Guest the point im making there is that americans in the precivil war periodmany americans of good will, and tocqueville, a foreign observer, also of good will, people who believed in the principle of equality, also believed that the immediate abolition of slavery in those states where there were very large numbers of slaves could create a situation that would be even worse in the short run than the institution of slavery itself. What i was trying to understand was why is it that in the deep south, men like jefferson and others who favored abolition in principle didnt eagerly rush to create immediate abolition in practice . And that was their concern; they really did believe in the possibility of a race war that might lead to the extermination of one or the other of the two races. And that belief, which was widely shared among many americans, i think, was an important reason and, to some extent, a justification, for their failure to act as quickly as we today think they should have acted in getting rid of that institution. Cspan how much impact do you think the politics of the College Professor has on the student for the rest of their lives . Guest well, i guess thats like asking how much impact does a single cigarette have on the rest of your life. Are you going to get lung cancer from it . No. But an accumulation of cigarettes over many years can destroy your lungs. An accumulation of bad professors over the years can wreck your mind if you dont break with that point of view and start thinking for yourself at some point. So i think its a greati think it has a tremendous impact. And the same is true for good. People who have sensible things to say, who help their students think clearly, become better citizens, understand the principles of their country. It can have a tremendously helpful impact. Cspan what were the politics of most of your professors as you were going to school . And where did you go besides cornell . Guest well, i did my graduate work at Claremont Graduate School in california. Id say the majority of my professors were standard runofthemill plain vanilla liberals of the sort that dominate the academy. I did have a number of professors who didnt fit that mold and by whom i was probably more influenced. Cspan like . Guest well, people like berns and allan bloom at cornell, and then leo strauss, harry jaffa, martin diamond at claremont, harry neumann. These are people that didnt go with the conventional flow. They questioned a lot of the contemporary orthodoxies, made a point of returning to the original sources in the tradition. And i respected that and, i think, got my own turn of thought decisively from that approach. Cspan was there a point where you were starting to figure out that professors had a point of view . Guest thats pretty obvious i think. You walk into a classroom, unless its on Something Like calculus or physics, if it has anything to do with human life the point of view is going to come across pretty quickly and pretty decisively, usually. There are some exceptions to that, of course. But you can telldoesnt take long to figure out who has an ideological agenda and whos really trying to understand something. Cspan i guess the question was related to whatwhen you start out in school, and if youre not paying attention, do you know whats being fed to you, or did you walk in already knowing what your politics were and you were starting to figure it out from the professors what theirs were . Guest i wasi was noti didnt have any definite political point of view when i was an undergraduate student at cornell. I you know, this was the time of the 60s, civil rights. I was very sympathetic to the civil rights movement. I remember walter berns criticizing goldwater. I was persuaded by that at the time probably, although looking back im not sure that was the right position to take. But in any case, you know, i was very sympatheticand during the vietnam war, of course, you couldnt helpat that time i was very much of age to go to fight, and i couldnt help thinking about these questions and where i should stand on them. And, yeah, id say my teachers had ahad helped a lot in giving me a sensible framework in which to think about all those partisan questions. Cspan but as you know, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich spent a lot of time over the years talking aboutthat theone of the big problems in america is academia, the politics of professors. Would you agree with that . Guest i do. Yeah. I think that thei mean, what i found out in writing this vindicating the founders is that there is a massive distortion out there going on about the principles of the american founding and about the actions and beliefs of the founders themselves. To me, thats just wrong. I mean, its wrong historically; its not true. But its also wrong in the sense that it is teaching people to have contempt for the principles of a country which, i think, can be easily demonstrated to be the freest country in all world history, the country that has done more to conquer the poverty problem of any country in world history, a country which has really done a tremendous job in establishing religious and civil liberty for the majority of citizens. Cspan whos gordon wood . Guest hes considered, i think, one of the leading historians on the founding era. Teaches at brown. Cspan his politics . Guest i really cant say what his politics are. I dont know that much about it. Cspan his slant . Do you know whichi mean, im looking at page 46 `both wood and his critics take it as a given that blacks and women were excluded from the declaration. Such is the state of the debate within the historians guild. and you quote him earlier, `gordon wood, widely regarded as the leading historian of political thought of the american founding, asked, what was radical about the declaration in 1776 . We know it did not mean that blacks and men were created equal to menwhite men, although, it would in time be used to justify these equalities, tooyou have that in parentheses`it was radical in 1776 because it meant that all white men were equal. Surprisingly, wood was actually trying to defend the founders with this statement. guest right. I mean, hethe historians profession, as i understand it isright now is being is divided by aone group on the far left, who wants to say that the american founding was just totally contemptible and dismissible, and then people like gordon wood, who waswhos probably more of a moderate awho is saying, `well, look at least they said all white men are created equal. Maybe they didnt include blacks and women, but lets at least acknowledge that they included white males. my point is that both of those points of view are very misleading or id say incorrect; that, in fact, the principles of the founding included all human beings. Its wrong of wood to claim that blacks and women were excluded. They were not excluded. They were understood to be part of that humanity that has equal rights. Cspan one of the reasons i bring up gordon wood is that Newt Gingrich, when he came into office as the speaker, endorsed his book. And it was one of his first choices. And im just trying to figure out, you know, which side he came down on and whether or not he endorsed him because of his politics or whatever. Thats why i brought the two of them up. Guest i dont think so. I think you know, i dont know what newt had in mind when he said that. Newt says a lot of things thatsome of which i agree with. Cspan what do you agree with that he says . Guest i think he has a very sound understanding of the merits of my book. Cspan and is that a period after that sentence . Guest no, there are lots of things he does that i like. Cspan what about Property Rights . You write a lot about property. First of all, why . Guest well, this is another one of those areas where the current scholarship is really opposed to the principles of the founding. They the general line you get in the history books and in the government textbooks is that Property Rights were ok for the first 100 or so years of our history. But then went the closing of the frontier and the rise of the corporation, Property Rights were not ok. Property rights at that point led to the oppression of the poor and the exploitation of the masses; therefore, Property Rights had to be curtailed and to some extent, abolished in the 20th century in order to protect the rights of the downtrodden. My point isor my argument is thats not true. Thats a misunderstanding of 20th century history. And its also a misunderstanding of what the principles of the founding really were. What im saying is that if you understand Property Rights in the sense that they did, namelynot only as the right to keep property, but as the right to acquire, as the right to go into business, as the right to use your mind and use your property in a way that will enable you to provide for yourself and your family, thats a system that is very much in favor of the poor and in favor of the downtrodden. I thinki mean, my argument is the problem with the 20th century is that we are proceeding to abandon their principles, principles of the founding, and were substituting for that this other notion that somehow government knows best about how people ought to use their property; government ought to dictate to people whether they should be allowed to go into business or not. And the result of that, i think, is that its making the country less able to deal with the problem of poverty. I mean, it seems to me that the problem of povertyif you look at athe big scope of American History, 1776 to the present you had a hugely successful Antipoverty Program that lasted from 1776 to about 1965. And the graphs, the charts, any kind ofby any measure at all poverty was dramatically declining throughout that whole period. And then in the 60s you have the charts leveling off; the poverty problem somehow seems to be not improving any longer. What happened . Well, we havenow have a new view of the poverty problem. We haveour view today is `lets give generous welfare payments and lets restrict Property Rights. and that, it seems to methose two things combined, along with the antifamily policies developed during the same post60s period, are in fact undermining the traditional successes of the american tradition of fighting poverty through free markets and marriage. Cspan do you think any of the founders, if they were here today, would like whats happened with welfare and property. Guest oh, i see. Yeah. You mean with these post60s developments . No. I think theno, because the principles that are being followed today are different from the principles that they followed. I mean, if you go backthis is one of the things, i think, that is not as well understood as it should be by conservatives as well as some liberals. If you go back to the progressive era, say around 1900, when the arguments of todays liberalism were first being articulated, what those guys were saying is, `the principles of the United States are bad. The declaration of independence is wrong. We shouldnt allow people to have equal rights. We dont want people to own their own property. people like john dewey, people like herbert crowley, woodrow wilson, all of these people were explicitly attacking the principles of the founding. And they were arguing, `weve got to get beyond that. Weve got to get beyond the declaration. now thats athat is athats a rejection. Thats a confrontation with the founding and a rejection of it. And that is what has led into the policy revolution of the 60s. Cspan what about Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson . If they were sitting here today and were having these discussions, would they differ on anything . Guest obviously, they differed. But ione of thei think one of the most misleading characterizations of the founders is to focus on their differences. There were tremendous battles that took place during the founding area, jefferson vs. Hamilton and so on. But those battles were over questions of how to implement a government that will protect the rights of man. Everybody agreed on what the purpose of government was securing human rights, securing Property Rights. The disagreement was what should the role of government be in these relatively tangential areas or lessfundamental areas like, you know, `should there be a National Bank . To what extent should government try toactively to promote commerce . Or should it just leave the economy free to develop on its own . these arguments, which were huge battles back then, from the point of view of today, look like minor squabbles because all of the founders, from the most radical like thomas paine to the most conservative like Alexander Hamilton agreed on the basic principles of government. No oneeveryone agreed that government ought to be limited; that there ought to be a private sphere in which government stays out. There ought to be protection of Property Rights. This is something which today is questioned by the prevailing opinion of our time. Cspan what would you advisehow olds your oldest child . Guest susannah. Cspan how old is she . Guest nineteen. Cspan so shes in college . Guest yes. Cspan what did you advise her or would you advise her onilets say that youre heading off to college and youre concerned about what your kids going to be taught. How do you tell them to watch for bias among academics either way . Guest well, it so happens that this is a frequent topic around our dinner table and has been over many years. I think my own kids are inoculated to some degree against the most obvious forms of politically correct propaganda. Im not too concerned about them. Im much more concerned about the rest of america who dont know about a lot of the things that we talk about at our table and which i write about in this book. Cspan but you know, what would you tell a parent then watching today, thats got a 15yearold or got a 10yearold and theyre starting the process, they havent had the benefit of sitting around your table, what would you tell them to do . Guest theyve got to stay vigilant. One of the virtues that the founders said that are necessary for a free people is vigilance. And that means youve gotta have that feisty `dont tread on me mentality that americans of the founding era had and have had ever since. You know, there was that revolutionary flag, the rattlesnake, with `dont tread on me at the bottomthat was the attitude of the founders you know . `you step on me, im gonna bite you. in other words, dont try to run roughshod over me. Dont try to tell me how to run the details of my private life. Dont tell me that i cant use the property that i have here to go into business or provide for my family. Thats something that is my right. Im gonna stick up for that right. And if you dont support it, im gonna kick you out of public office. In terms of what people learn, theyve got to find out about the distortions that are in these textbooks. If they read my book, theyll find out about it. But, you know, im not the only person doing this kind of work. You know, there are people like harry jaffa, Charles Kessler, i mentioned, at claremont, edward erler, john marini. There are a lot of leading political scientists who are developing and articulating these themes, talking about what is the character of contemporary america and showing the tremendous break that our policies and our views represent compared to the earlier understanding. Cspan where does your 19yearold go to school . Guest shes a sophomore at the university of dallas right now. Cspan who owns the university of dallas . Guest who owns it . Its a catholic school, but not connected in any formal way with the church. Its got its own independent board of trustees. Cspan whats the political atmosphere of the history and the Political Science department at the university of dallas . Guest much more balanced than youll find at most schools. We haveone of our students working for the newspaper, last year i guess it was, went down and looked up the Party Registrations or Party Primary votes of our faculty and discovered that it was about 50 50 republican and democratic now at most other colleges in america that would be viewed as wildly conservative that there would be actual balance. Somebody did a study of the Cornell Government Department around the same time and found out that there was one republican in the entire department. And everybody else, you know 40whatever number of people there were, were democrats. We have a great atmosphere at dallas. We have a real give and take. We haveyou know, nobodys forced by Political Correctness to shut up about arguments that are considered to be out of the mainstream. Id say theres more free speech actually on my campus than on most campuses that ive visited in america. Cspan why, in your opinion are most College Professors liberals and democrats . Guest well, those arethats a long story. Itstheyou have to go back to the progressive era. What happened in the progressive era . Why did our leading elites back thenthis is 100 years agoturn against the principles of the founding . And the answer is because many of them had decided that that thewhat goes on in private life in america, especially religious life, wasnt enough for them to give meaning to their lives. They began to look to the state for meaningfor almost theological meaning. Many of the early progressives were students of the hegelian school. Hegels argument was, `the state is the divine presence on earth. and a lot of these earlyamerican progressives believed that. They looked for salvation from government and politics. And in a world in which the in which theres a decline of serious religious faith, that is one answer that people have taken, particularly intellectuals have taken to. I think that view of things has had a huge impact on the development of thought throughout the 20th century and helps to explain why it is that so many professors have ended up thinking that way. Cspan if you werent going to send your child to the university of dallas, and you wanted to make sure they had a balanced education, where else would you send them in the United States . Guest well, thats a tough question. There are lots of schools where you can findyou can put together a good program, butand there are some schools that have more balance than others. I think ill just not mention any of them. Id prefer people to think about coming to the university of dallas. Cspan in the acknowledgments you credit a number of institutions. I just want to ask you what they are. You say the first draft of the chapter on Property Rights was written at a conference for the Pacific Research institute. Whats that . Guest theyre a San Francisco think tank. They do a lot of studies focused on Property Rights. I think i would characterize them as moderate libertarians. Cspan how big is the institute . Guest i have no idea, but they do put out some quite good publications. I know theres a particularly good onejonathan emord, a book on electronic broadcasting and how government hascensorship of electronic broadcasting has in effect, eviscerated the First Amendment in that area. Very good book. Cspan you say, `the Earhart Foundation enabled me to take time off from teaching to work on this book. whats the Earhart Foundation . Guest theyre a Michigan Foundation that supports scholars. And theyve supported me on several occasions over the years. They give people grants to take time off from teaching to do writing. Cspan they do a lot of it . Guest do they do . Cspan yeah. Big . Guest i dont know how big theyi dont think theyre huge. Cspan do you know who the earhart is . The name . Guest no. Cspan is it the Aequus Foundation . Guest yes. Cspan gave you a grant in 94, 95. Who were they . What is that . Guest that one i know less about. I really dont know a whole lot about them. I know they have given me somethese two grants. But i cant really. Cspan you know where theyre located . Guest yeah. Theyre located in california, andi justi dont know that much about them. Cspan you dedicate the book, `for my mother and father, irving west and marjorie west. Are they alive . Guest oh, yes. Cspan where do they live . Guest theyre in tulsa oklahoma. And. Cspan what do they do . Guest theyre retired. My dad was an engineer for many years with ingersollrand company. Fine citizens, admirable people and i look up to them. Cspan and how much influence did they have on you when you were growing up, what you studied and where you went . Guest well, they didnt particularly have any academic influence, but, i mean, they raised me, you know, formed my character and, in that sense had the decisive influence. Cspan what is, and i take this from your book, `historicism . Guest yes. Cspan what does that mean . Guest historicism is a commona commonlyheld view in our time among most leading academics. Its the view that there are no objective standards outside of the flux and flow of the historical process. So, in other words, when the Founding Fathers said, `all men are created equal; theyre all endowed with certain rights, what the founders meant wasand that is never going to change; thats always been true and its always going to be true. There will never be a time when men are not, by nature, free and when government should not be by the consent of the governed. Thats always true. Today the argument is, `well that was 18th century ideas and now we have 20th century ideas and then you had 13 and some 14you had greek ideas and roman ideas. the idea today is there are no objective facts. There is no exit from this flux there, in fact, isnt any way to say objectively what is right and what is wrong. And that is one of the things, i think, that is eating away at the principles of the country and is making it difficult for the country to live by its own original principles. Cspan is there anything about the Founding Fathers you didnt like or dont like . Guest i think the yeah. I think the thing that i have the most reservation aboutamongin the founders is that they had perhaps too much faith in progress. They reallyjefferson in particular, i guess, was the most problematic in this way. He really thought all eyes are open or opening to the rights of man and that the world really was going to come to a point where the shackles of aristocracy and despotism would be broken and thrown off. I dont think thats true. I dont think theres ever going to be a time when despotism disappears or when human evil disappears. And the reason is because human nature is permanent. Theres always going to be reason, but at the same time theres always going to be passion. Now jefferson, in a way, knew that. None of the founders were marxists, you know . They didnt really think that there would be some point where all men would become capable of living together in peace and harmony without government. But they did have ai think too much faith, too much confidence in this idea of enlightenment, the idea that everybody would eventually see that all men are equal and all men are free. That hasnt happened. In that sense, the world has gone backwards since the 18th century. The common view in the 20th century is that people are not born free. Cspan have you had a chance to argue with anybody about this book yet or somebody that totally disagrees with you . Or have you talked to anybody that totally disagrees with you . Guest yeah, sure. Ivewe had a panel at the american Political Science association, which i was both praised and attacked. The man who attacked me was a conservative who argued that it is impossible to combine the belief in individual rights with the belief in Strong Families and morality and serious devotion to religion. And so his claim is that my account of the founders is just historically inaccurate as well as logically impossible. And when i asked what that possibly could mean, he said `well, the founders didnt really believe in equality. They didnt believe in equal rights. and, i mean, this is a view that is actually held by a large number of what i would call traditionalist conservatives. I had a colleague at dallas, mel bradford, who used to hold this view. Russell kirk, whos widely admired, holds this view. The view is that, you know since we want to think well of the founders, we have to claim that the founders didnt really believe in equal rights. Now i think thats just nutty. I think its bothits historically easy to refute. But it also, it seems to me, is just imprudent because what do these people think is going to happen if they persuade their fellow americans that all men are not created equal and that all men do not deserve to be consulted in their form of government . Who do they think is going to end up running things . Its not going to be them. Cspan in your afterword at the end of the book, you quote john hope franklinand i guess the reason i want to bring this up after i read it is ask you when you hear this quote and then you know the president has appointed him as the chairman of his Advisory Committee on race discussion, what does it mean . Quote, jefferson didnt mean it when he wrote that all men are created equal, writes historian john hope franklin. Quote, weve never meant it. The truth is were a bigoted people and always have been. Guest right. And thats the man that president clinton puts in charge of a National Conversation on race. This is scandalous. I mean, this is a man whose understanding of the founding isits just incompetent. I mean, its not true what he says. The civil war, what lincoln did becomes unintelligible if hes right. I mean, lincolnyou know, hundreds of thousands of americans sacrificed their lives to vindicate the principle that all men are created equal. And hes saying, `weve always been a bigoted people and we always will be. this is inaccurate and its also a shame that such people would be accorded high honor in our society. Cspan and on the next page you say that robert bork, for example, thinks the founders believed in equality too much. Guest yeah. Thatsborks most recent book, slouching toward gomorrah, makes that claim. Hes got two chapters on the declaration, one of which he attacks their devotion to equality and then the next one he attacks their devotion to liberty. This is part of that conservative view that i mentioned a moment ago where they think that in order to defend the idea of moral restraint, of responsibility, of decency that they have to attack the principles of the country. In other words, what theyve done to some extwhat these people like bork are doing, i think, are theyre buying into the liberal view that if you believe in equal rights and equality, that means you have to accept the welfare state and the denial of Property Rights and the denial of traditional morality. Cspan what would have to happen for you to make the statement, `this has been a terrific success, this book . Guest well, i cant say right now what that would be. I guessi mean, certainly it would help if it got to be wellknown, if it turns out to be a big seller. Cspan do you know how many they printed first run . Guest i dont know the number, but i know it was substantial. Cspan and on the cover of your book, you have this painting. Do you know what that is and did you have anything to do with choosing it . Guest gosh, youre catching me on the spot. No, i dont. It looks likei dont know what it is. I cant tell you. Ill find out for the next time. Cspan go back to the earlier question. Guest i didnt do it. Cspan go back to the earlier question of, again, advising parents about what to tell students or advising students on how toin a classroom, how to figure out what the professors up to, if anything. What would you do if youre a student sitting in a classroom and the professor walks in . What can they demand of the professoranything . To find out where theyre coming from . Guest well, the professors gonna say what he thinks. Cspan always . Guest well, hes gonna tell you what he wants you to learn ok, lets put it that way. Hes gonna give you some readings and hes gonna talk. And the job of the student is to walk into the classroom and read what the professor says to read, listen to what he says, and then if hes fortunate and ambitious, to find out whether its true; to look at alternative accounts, for example, of the same things i mean, there is a literature out therea growing literature, revisionist literature, showing all of the defects of the prevailing dominant view of American History and the american founding. And its available for people to find out about and to look it up. And i would certainly encourage them to do that. Cspan can a student ask in advance about what a professors all about before they go to that class . Guest its not practical. You walk into the classroom, you have tothatsyour job as a student is to listen and to do what the professor tells you to do. Bruce hoffman is next on book tv talking about the three decades that led up to the creation of israel from 1917 to 1947 discussing the conflict between british