the 13, 14,ded in and 15th amendment. it is not because they did not care about rights. it is because it was not their priority. they were therefore other reasons. this has been shrouded in myth. is unique about the united states constitution is that there are so many different layers. they have their myths about the constitution. even people who studied a little bit have their myths about it. and people who studied a lot have myths about it. think about these russian babushka dolls. this is just an outer cover. it is not the real thing. take it away and then there is a another beautiful one. wait a minute. there is something more. you keep taking more and more layers away to try to get at the roping. that is what i want to try to do today, you peel away some of the layers of mythology surrounding the constitution. i will do about 40 minutes on that. maybe you can help me peel away some more. wanted to talk about the notion that the constitution at the democratic document. if you look at the actual complaints that the people who constitution, they had 13 sovereign nations. as sovereign as the united states and mexico and canada are today. they had complaints about them to listen to some the things they said. the problem was in excess of democracy, a headstrong democracy. a republican frenzy, democratic will -- democratic appearance. a couple of them used the analogy that really became useful for me. seems like the reins of government were held with two feebly hand. he literally had been born. analysis of what was going in is that americans have become unruly. basically the founders leave that the revolution has started out great if it had gotten out of hand. there is a real sense in which this was an effort to push this back in the bottle. what specifically went on? all of the power. these were collect it. votingnow how they were in the state legislature. and we got an election tomorrow. all but two states. they were elected every single year. in connecticut they are elected every six months. these see all introductions. accountability. we had the state legislatures with all this power. dates, the governor was not able to veto laws. really overturn it. in most places he couldn't. it was like then to say that what we have was in excess. the transfer then to the level. they create this new national government. i focused on two duties in particular. one is the control over money supply. before this was adopted, each of the 13 states have their own seven. the control of the money supply and the giving of taxes for the federal government. before the constitution, the federal government had no power. it had to get any money that it got from the state. these two powers and others and transfer them from the states to this new national lessnment that was much sensitive to popular pressure than any of the state governments. stop laws that he could stop the law of the house. it could overturn state laws. look at all these ranches. the senate is elected for six years. the president for four. the supreme court justices are in the light. -- are in for life. the framers designed this to be independent of the will that is the state-- chosen by legislature. it was not an accident they created a much less democratic government. take it back on the hands of ordinary citizens and put it in the hands of those they could roll better. i think the most important way the constitution did that was simply by shifting power from the state level to the level of the federal government. most people knew their state legislator personally. that is not true generally with your congressman or some -- or senator today. it asmadison defined extending this fear of government. what that says is shifting this to the national level and it makes it harder for the effort for people to put pressure on the federal government. ups is what they were coming again and again. it was in concert. the wanted to make it harder and harder for ordinary people who had grievances to get together and to concert their measures to put united pressure on the government. he said he ask them of tyranny is the only policy by which a republic can be administered on these principles. it is latin for divide and conquer. this was not divide and conquer the people because we hate them and we want to prevent them from having a say in government. when you let them run things you had an excess of democracy. they wanted to stop that. horsemen waseatest also the commander of the continental army. he put it this way in a letter he wrote. of government the raced in time and held with a steady hand. that was the purpose of the on situation. it was pretty much the opposite of that. that leads to the second method i want to talk about. a lot of stories have said what i just said. the same forsay democracy was something they got from the book they read. they said a child of the revolution reaches it. of hamiltone out and j and washington and clinton all of these guys reading books? i also want to stress what i ain't was the more profound motive. believed thathole in the time after the reverend missionary war the united states have become a bad credit risk are not just the government people themselves. the result is that was the country had become unattractive. they ruled the constitution. it a more safe place for transact ors. it was not just for their own economic benefit but for everybody. in article one, section two of the constitution. it prevents them from doing all afterings they have done the revolutionary war. they printed paper money. it will make it easier to pay your taxes. i can give him an old horse. that is probably worth a hundred dollars. your taking care of. was the country that was what theyder are trying to stop. not because they hated farmers. they thought if we can stop oppressing creditors, if we can let them collect their debts then they will be willing to lend money in the future. who is trying to embody this is james madison. when madison started writing for the constitution, he was 36 years old here he was still living with his parents. he was hoping to get out of the house of some point soon. he devised one of the classic great american get rich quick schemes. that was speculating indian land. in the fall of 1784, they went from the treaty. he saw how fertile the land was. they bought a few thousand acres that they wanted to buy a lot more. they needed to borrow money to invest in land and then sell it for hundred pounds more than they paid for. it would be easy to pay back their creditors. nobody with lyndon the money. they had to cut back the scale of their ambitions. americans will not lend us money. maybe people in france will. jefferson whos was over there as an american representative to this court of gog louis the 16th and said and see if you cannot borrow a bunch of money. he immediately ran back to say jefferson immediately wrote back "nothing doing." they were afraid if they lent money to madison and monroe and somehow the deal went at, they would not be able to go into a virginia court and sue them to get the money back. bad. the deal went that is really the problem with the framers of the constitution. lots of other problems, of course, but the fundamental problem they were trying to solve was to make it impossible for state legislatures to protect debtors. there was a real sense in which the madison wrote off fundamental rights for which he was contending was the right to be sued. if you can be sued, you can borrow money. that is a short version of the interpretationic , but it brings up another myth about the constitution, and that is the myth that the framers were right, and that is one i want to challenge today because so many historians have sort of gone along with the idea that sure enough, the american revolution originally went too far. many people thought that the american revolution had also gone too far, and they have gotten a lot of endorsements from modern historians. if i just go across the charles river here to harvard, the reported on the 1780's, the time leading up to the constitution, "again and again, minority property rights had been overwhelmed by populist majorities." the next thing i want to do today is to try to disagree with all these historians who support that and say actually, there were two sides to this story. that, yes, there is a case to be made for "the big problem here is we are not attracting enough investment," that there is a case to be made for the farmers as well, so let's look at it from their standpoint. one of the main motives for the american revolution was to get out from under that british taxation without representation. well, they rebelled in 1776 and succeeded with the peace treaty of 1783 in winning independence, and then what happened? the representatives, now that we have our own representatives, levied taxes on them that were four times higher on average than they had ever been asked to pay as british colonies. these were taxes to pay off the war debt. you can see why they were levied, but i want you to look at it from the standpoint of the farmers. you not only have these incredibly high taxes, but they are much higher even than they seem on paper because there was almost no money in circulation in the economy. "weine if i told you guys, are going to have a new federal tax of $1000." you would all go home going, "that's no good." suppose i said that you have to pay in green stamps. those of you who remember what they are, do any of you still have any? i would expect peter is still have green stamps, but even he doesn't. if there was one person in the room who did have green stamps, we would all be going to her or please."aying, "gimme, that's what it was like with gold and silver in this economy. so little was circulating in the economy that when a tax was levied that had to be paid in gold and silver, to get somebody to had -- who had some to part with that, you had to give them four or five horses when it had to be -- it used to be you only had to give them one or two. massive deflation, and one of the phrases that got used up and down -- i have read petitions for legislatures and newspaper essays and also to of other documents up and down from new hampshire to georgia over 13 thats, and the phrase keeps popping up is that when a legislature levies these taxes four times higher than we paid before and does not put money in circulation to pay those taxes with, it is making the same maded of us that pharaoh of the ancient israelites, and that is to make bricks without straw. people just could not do it, and people were having the sheriff take away their cattle, sometimes even their pots and pans to pay these taxes because they just did not have the money to pay. -- you canthe white see why somebody would support something like paper money because that gives them a medium with which to pay these taxes. i mentioned briefly that the main purpose of these taxes levied in the 17 80's was to pay off the revolutionary war debt. if the debt had remained in the hands of the people who bonds,ly got these war the soldiers who fought the revolutionary war and had been paid off many times with bonds, -- you know, the army comes through your town and says, "everybody, give us your cattle, and we do not have cash to pay you, so we are going to give you i owe you -- iou's." initially, the bonds of gone to ordinary people, many of them, but they were quickly bought up , who couldculators see that the soldiers -- you cannot eat a bond. if you have been paid off with a bond and you are hungry, you have to turn that into gold and silver so you can use that to go by bread. soldiers who had initially gotten the bonds had to dump threet as little as dollars for a bond that was marked $100. the vast majority of the bonds quickly ended up in the hands of the speculators. i have to tell you guys -- that was a major part of the research i did here into the whole land speculation business because i could see that was a critical engine of the constitution. bond speculators demand these really high taxes, and those the farmers to demand policies like paper like paperpolicies money freak out guys like madison because they can see what it is doing to the investment climate -- chasing away investors. people like madison write the constitution to prohibit things like paper money. i knew bond speculation was really important, but as i would start to talk about it, i could see people's eyes kind of glaze over. somehow there are people out there who do not get excited about government finance. i do not know how that is. i'm working on bond speculators, i was trying to find one guy that i could use to put a face on all the others, and i would find a letter by this one guy talking about speculation, but it was one list, and someone else would mention the account book, and it would reduce these scattered pieces, and i was not finding what i really wanted. bond speculators who had left enough documentation that i could use him to really put a face on all the others. so one day here at the massachusetts historical society, i finally found my bond speculator, and it turns out the he i had been looking for all this time was a she. it was abigail adams. 1777, 20 years before her husband became president, she began the process that she would continue all through those 20 years of fighting these -- by getting these soldiers' and farmers' and other people's bonds from them at a fraction of their face value and then holding them with the hope that the price would go up. she was ultimately very successful at it. there was one series of bonds she bought at $15 -- she would pay $15 for a 100 dollar bond, and she cashed out when they had risen from $15 to $90, so she made a profit six times her initial investment. but it took her a while to get going as a speculator because she initially had to overcome the objections of her husband, john. john adams hated on speculators. parasitesm as these who redistribute wealth without actually producing anything, and they are also a threat to the government, he believed. that is, that they are a small clique of people with power to influence the government and incentive to influence the government in their own favor. so she had to persuade her husband to stop investing in land, which he thought was a much safer investment -- safer for the person because, you know, you cannot burn down 40 acres of land, but you can burn the stuff on it, but the land will still be there. it was a safer investment for the person but also safer for the country because bond speculators were such a threat to the government, whereas farmers, those were the real people. as you know, he was a lawyer and had all sorts of public jobs, but he saw himself as first and foremost a farmer, and like thomas jefferson, he believed that the only truly virtuous were farmers. and abigail would say to him, "that's all great, and i believe in that, too, but our land is making 1% a year, and i can make you 18% a year just on the interest on these bonds, and that is not counting when we actually redeem the bonds and cash out." as i said, on one of these bonds, she sex couples -- she sextupled, if that is the word, her investment. she took about educating john about the value of these bonds. togetherime, they were in europe, and she had been his business agent throughout the revolutionary war while he was off being a congressman and diplomat, but she was with him on april 20 4, 1785, over in a letterhen he started andis new business agent, there was a farm he wanted to buy. he was sending along 200 pounds sterling. he starts off this letter by going, "ok, i want you to drop on me for 200 pounds and use it ." buy these bonds that's on the front of this letter. if you flip over to the back of the letter where he continued, john adams says, "showing what i have written to madame, she has of purchasing. instead of that, you may draw upon me for 200 pounds in as good exchange rate as you may obtain and lay it out at most you judge for my interest." i imagine him writing on his , and abigail walking by and literally changing his mind right in the course of the letter. a case can be made for bond speculators. sold theirers who bonds to speculators like abigail adams, if the speculators had not been there, they might not have gotten anything at all for the bonds, so at least they got their three dollars out of $100, or whatever they got, but you can also understand the anger of the farmers at having to pay taxes , higher taxes than they had ever paid as british colonists, without a money supply in most states to pay those taxes with in order to bond speculators like abigail adams. not that they knew that she -- she used very clever techniques to prevent anyone from knowing she was speculating, but they knew about the bomb speculating class, and it is really galling to watch your only horse which you need to pull your plow being led away to pay your taxes and knowing where that money is going. after the sheriff has auctioned off your horse to further enrich some bond speculators. i think you can further see their side to the argument. to help with this last thing, i will say today i want to introduce you to one more character from the revolutionary is hermanis name husband. he was born in north carolina, but as a young man -- i'm sorry, was born in maryland but moved to north carolina as a young man and got caught up in the regulator rebellion when farmers were rebelling against the extortions of lawyers and merchants and judges and clerks. there is a great book on the regulator rebellion. he got involved in that and was crushed by the establishment. they put him in jail three times. they tossed him out of the legislature. an army came out and destroyed his farm. so he fled north carolina and moved to pennsylvania. he actually took a pseudonym for . while, and alias tuscape death. you can see that on land deeds and stuff. he had gone through several different religions. by this time, he sort of was inventing his own religion. he became a christian millennial and wrotellennialist a bunch of pamphlets making the case that farmers deserve things like paper money. if they're going to levy taxes, they have to give paper money with which to pay them off and so forth. he wrote in one of those pamphlets that the same then who refused to allow british tyrants to oppress them were now willing to tyrannize over others. you might not remember my saying at the beginning that people like james madison thought that we need to extend the sphere of government, shift some key powers from the state to the theral government because state representatives are too accountable -- remember i said that? representatives are too accountable to their constituents. hudson believed just the opposite. he lived in pennsylvania, and in pennsylvania, the election districts were contiguous with the county. pennsylvania has very large counties, and that means that most people did not know their state representatives. "aman hudson believed," him, county is too large a bound, and the reason is only a few men in the county are generally known throughout the whole of it, and most are generally the unsuitable, they being chiefly tavern keepers, merchants in the country town, and the officers of the revolutionary war, awyers, etc." at the same time medicine was saying we had too many ordinary farmers with dirt under their fingernails getting into power, hudson was saying just the opposite. we were ruled by the office it's am -- officers and merchants and lawyers, and we need to empower ordinary farmers. his solution was to set up county legislatures in every county in pennsylvania, and so the representatives to county legislatures would be chosen in the townships. pennsylvania has very small townships, so everyone would know their township representative, and they could hold him accountable, and they would choose the state assemblyman. it's fascinating that at the same time as medicine was trying to make election districts a bigger so you would have less accountability, you had people like herman hudson saying, "let's make them smaller so that we make representatives more accountable to the voters." if that was not enough, he also said that anytime you had a major lobbying decided on such as paper money, which he ordinary farmers should actually have a chance to vote on it. i bring up people liked this not to say that i think they were right and the framers of the constitution were wrong, but just to say that there were two sides to this argument, and i think if i became convinced of one thing when i was writing the it's lesson, something about the constitution -- the authors of the constitution but the main thought that i have is about historians, and that is that these comp >> struggles that led to the adoption of the constitution do not prove what the founding fathers and their historians had taken them to isieve to prove, and that that the reins of government reside most faithfully in the hands of a few. so let me sit down, and let's have a discussion. open for questions, so let me start off with one. the constitution was famously written behind closed doors. you are skeptical, shall we say, of the people who wrote the constitution. to what extent does the term "conspiracy" apply to the constitution? >> similar to the conspiracies that my wife and i engineer against our 16 month old daughter in that we are conspiring against her with reference, and we took her trick-or-treating dressed as a duck, and she is a very good you, buti might tell the chocolate that she was collecting would disappear. that was a conspiracy for her own good because she is 16 months, and she should not be eating, and our opinion -- nature nuts at we are -- a lot of chocolate and nuts and sugar. people would put chocolate into her plastic pumpkin, and then it would be empty again. where did that chocolate and sugar go? we also benefited. [laughter] i think theythat literally believed was for the benefit of the people, but it was a pretty sweet deal for some of the framers as well. >> you started your discussions today asking for impressions about the constitution. most of the responses you got work not the cut -- were not the constitution itself but the , particularly the first 10 amendments. how long do you think the constitution would have lasted without the amendments? >> that is a drifter question, and i think my answer to that is two things -- one, not long. two, i think it would not have even been adopted. this state of massachusetts was one of the most important. my state of virginia, which was one of the most populous of all time as well as new york, would not have ratified the if supporters of the constitution had not said, "ok, let's make a deal. you give us the constitution, we will give you what people were demanding in every state, which was a bill of rights." i start off by saying that the authors of constitution were not that interested in the bill of rights. they got into this position nineg the efforts to get out of 13 states to ratify. during the ratification campaign, they were in this awful position of opposing a bill of rights because they saw it as a trick, a conspiracy on the part of opponents of the constitution because the opponents of the constitution said it was not necessarily a bad idea, but it needed a bill of rights. people like madison, who were strong supporters of the constitution said, "no, no, we do not need a bill of rights." there were arguments against it because if you protect some rights then you are not protecting others and so forth. it is ironic to think madison ended up being the author of the bill of rights because he was one of its most fervent opponents during the heification struggle, but and other supporters of the constitution came around to the idea that "we are going to have to make a deal here in order to get what we want, which is a .apitalist constitution we also have to make it what they want, which is an underdog constitution, one that protects freedom of speech, freedom of religion, even for minority religions, and protect people accused of crimes and so forth." to important point i want make is that if we really cherish those freedoms that you guys mentioned when i asked that question, the people that we should be thanking are not the authors of the constitution but the opponents of the constitution. reallye the ones that we -- because if people had just sort of sat down meekly like sheep when the constitution was written and when it was put out , thentember 17, 1787 there would have been no incentive for the framers of the constitution to include the bill of rights. you can look at it from the framers' standpoint as a strategic concession. "we got to give the people a bill of rights in order to get the original seven articles, which attract capital to this country." or you can look at it from the stamp one of ordinary americans -- they are really the ones who deserve the pat on the back for cherisht of us most about the constitution, which is the bill of rights -- you can look at it from the standpoint of ordinary americans. it was ordinary citizens who turned the constitution into an underdog's constitution. that is something that has continued, with the possible exception of prohibition, which was almost immediately repealed. there has never been an amendment to the constitution that has restricted freedom. they have all moved more in the direction of being an underdog's constitution. massachusetts was the first state to allow people to marry, despite whether they are heterosexual or homosexual -- there are efforts afoot because of what you guys have done in massachusetts to add an amended to the constitution prohibiting a state from doing that. if they do that, it would be the first time in the history of the constitution that it has been restrictive in a way that makes free, makes it less of an underdog's constitution, so i hope we do not do that. [inaudible] past town meetings. they are described as democracy in action. the parts of the rest of country do not have quite the same opening. i wonder whether in your state, virginia, whether it would differ from ours and his feelings towards democracy in action -- and its feelings towards democracy in action. there was one guy in this state fortune outpublic , ande revolutionary debt that is dexter. did you ever run across him in your studies? >> i did not ever him across that name, but there was a good large class of them, so i will have to look into him. >> they called him lord timothy dexter. .ack to the town meetings >> obviously, that is something you cannot do beyond the local level, so i have been to some new england town meetings, and they can, of course, be rights, but generally, my sense is they work pretty well. the success of the new england town meeting reinforces the point i tried to make in the book that these are real -- there's a real sense in which ordinary people have gotten a bad rap. the constitution is predicated on the notion that we let ordinary farmers run the government, and look what happened -- they ruined everything. i wase people like talking about today were saying, yes, there were economic problems in 1780, but in their view, they're what -- that was a matter not of popular misrule, but of elite misrule, so i think what you are saying totally fits with what i am saying. >> [inaudible] discussion of the bill of rights, is that not at cross purposes? where the argument you are making is about a broader, popular support for a constitution, whereas the bill of rights seems to me to be launched directly for the protection of individual liberties. it does not advance the idea of popular participation, does it? i think so. i think enough people in the -- couldre interested see themselves as potentially one of those minorities who could be oppressed. for instance, in my state, we had a real upsurge of evangelical christianity before the revolution that ran through the revolutionary war. , and in been oppressed connecticut, two, the new light had been oppressed by the standing order, the puritan establishment there. so there was a real, i think, popular desire to protect civil liberties, people who could see themselves as potentially accused of a crime they have not committed, and desiring that, but then i also think you are to look good point that at only the struggle that happened after september 17, 17 87 when the constitution was , if youd and signed only start there and look at the struggle between the people who wanted the constitution as it was and the other people who basically said -- there were some people who said, basically, "give us a bill of rights and we will be happy -- that is not the whole struggle because there was , andrd group of people what they would say was, "this is not the fundamental argument. yes, civil liberties are important, so we certainly support that, but in a sense, both parties to the debate over ratification were missing the fundamental things because neither of those sides was saying, "we need to make the country more democratic." by -- that voice by that time, was just a clips and not present. it's kind of sad we kind of lost it. there's a lot of ways people can influence the government that are gone. obviously, so many more ways in which we are more democratic now. the vast majority of people then could not vote, but among voters, there's many ways in which we are less democratic. for instance, annual elections. john adams was quoting a very common axiom when he said where annual elections and, their charity begins, and we have with six-yearors terms, supreme court justices with terms for life. people on the federal reserve -- they are the ones who determine the money -- i think they have 12 years or something like that. these long terms. if they were to walk among us, they would be appalled at some of the things we settled for, not being able to instruct our representatives, having these really long terms, having a money supply determined by the federal open market committee, which is a branch of the federal by members chosen basically by private banks. privatized the money supply theer than letting democratic process work that out. you can see the case for that because maybe there are people who feel that if we let them, the legislature or congress determine the money supply, it's not really a good idea, but no matter how you feel about civic ologies, we have settled for some steps back from democracy. >> "unruly americans" is not your first book, but you have written previously pertaining to .he revolution one gets the feeling looking at the first book that the founding fathers had to run as fast as they could to keep themselves from the people lower in virginia society who were pressing for a more populist kind of outcome. why didn't you try tying your present book to earlier things you had written on the revolution itself? >> right, that's a great question. certainly one thing the two books have in common, and i'm happy to be part of the whole group of historians who are writing this kind of history -- i have a friend in australia who just started a book called "politics of war" about virginia and focused on the military." -- the military. we have this notion of the minutemen grabbing their muskets at a minutes notice and rushing happened, but there was massive draft resistance during the revolutionary war, and because it hady people could see really become a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and they fair that younot are putting it on us rather than taking the burden yourself." in general, they could hire substitutes or pay their way out of fighting, so there was a lot of internal conflict. as mcdonald says, americans were at war with britain but also at so i showhemselves, in my first book, yes, you have pressure on at least jefferson and washington from below. mcdonald continues that from the war, and i say it is continued after the war as well. there is a classic phrase that , andbecker coined in 1909 he said that the american revolution was a struggle for home rule but also a struggle over who ruled at home. that is what i think my books and the others i mentioned have in common. i think that's the biggest thing that most people in this room do , but thatainly you do most people do not know, about this continuing internal conflict. in the case of my first book, i argued that the gentry sort of got forced into the revolution by these pressures from below. and they kind of lost control of the revolution, and that is what "unruly americans" is about as well, and the constitution was there effort to regain control. as i said before, to put the democratic union back in the bottle. >> [inaudible] of the colonies, keeping in mind that in virginia , there was greater disparity between the very wealthy and the rest of the population. and there were many others in the american colonies in rhode island or connecticut, for that matter, or massachusetts. >> it absolutely does, and i would say that the revolution .as a real different thing you cannot just take too colonies and say that it was basically the same in these two places. economic motives were different, say, in new england. once the main thing they were angry about was not being able to smuggle. which was not an issue in virginia. as you say, the social situation, you did not have quite the same extremes of wealth and poverty in massachusetts that you had in virginia. of course, you had slavery and .ll 13 states this was one of the things that was happening during the revolution, that you were going from 13 colonies in 13 states that each have to be considered separately, but i do think by the 1780's there were enough in common to write a book, as i did. and that you could start to talk about an american even before they molded together in a single nation with the constitution, you could begin to talk about the united states. you and i have totally different perspectives, you and the but weionary generation, both kind of are able to talk about the united states in a way that we might not, if we were talking even 20 years earlier. >> i guess i never realized the great influence. capitalism had on the creation of the constitution. i'm wondering if you think that as the years went on in the constitution changed and how was interpreted, was there still that sort of direct influence? maybe i'm not saying it right. i think i am fascinated by how it is almost -- i'm not saying it right. but the influence is so obvious and seems obvious and direct that it is not clouded at all. >> right. right. going to say, i'm not a 19th-century or 20th century person. maybe someone else has thoughts about that. i would certainly say the struggle is always -- you you should read charles and mary beard on the civil war. obviously, the civil war was about slavery, but it was also about tariffs, so some of those economic issues were important. >> do you feel like you are a grandchild of the beards? >> i do, but with a different, charles beardat believed the people who wrote the constitution, to say it crudely, and he sometimes did, were creditors. that is, they were people who were getting defrauded during the 1780's by all these policies i told you about. a hundred dollar debt with a hundred dollar horse. they were private creditors, and they were tired of being paid with paper money. they wanted gold and silver. they were also public creditors. that is, people like abigail adams who own bonds. he found that a lot of people who wrote the constitution had ands in their back pocket wanted to give the federal government is untaxed money in order to pay them off. had that interpret -- economic interpretation. i'm in the ironic position of agreeing with beard that the motives were economic, but saying that they were not creditors, they were debtors. i shouldbe debtors, say, people like madison who wanted to be able to borrow money, but because creditors were "reading defrauded" during that time after the revolutionary war and before the constitution -- because creditors were "being defrauded ," and felt like they were being defrauded -- that was their sincere belief -- they were unwilling to lend money to people like james madison. people like madison who wanted to be able to borrow money, i economict was the group that really was the engine of the constitution. actual creditors -- like i'm going to look into mr. dexter -- and others, they also benefited from the constitution, so you had a strange coalition. public creditors and private creditors were big supporters of the constitution, but what is new in my book -- two things, one is that there were also would be debtors who wanted the constitution, and the other thing i'm really pushing that is new in the book is that there was this other side of the story that said, "what are you talking about? you creditors feel defrauded, but we farmers are the one cattle to pay off speculators." so there were two sides to the story. >> i would like to say that there aren't too many differences between the russian constitution and the american one. are two main differences between the russian constitution and the american one. would you like to change anything nowadays? i see my friend sitting right and i think ofe, one change immediately that i'm very excited about, and that is -- as you know, we have had several elections, including the election of 2000 where the loser one, the person who received less votes than the other guy w on because of the electoral college. i think it would be -- and this answers your other question -- almost impossible to get rid of the electoral college because that would require a constitutional amendment, and the state to benefit from that -- wyoming and alaska and the other time he states who get these two bonus votes from the senators -- are never going to go for that. --re is a proposal of foot am i describing it correctly? that you would get at least half the states representing half the electoral votes to commit that those electoral votes would go to the candidate who receives the most votes in the popular tally so that we actually get the person who got the most votes being elected president. if that is the key -- janet will not like hearing me say this -- that would be a direct violation of the intent of the framers of the constitution because the framers of the constitution did not want a democracy. they thought democracy had failed, that the revolutionary war had created too much democracy. it will be against the intent of the framers but with my content because it would be a great idea, so this one suggestion i would make. >> thanks very much, woody. this has been a lively conversation. thepreciate having opportunity to talk to you about your new book. [applause] >> you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter @c spanhistory for information on our programs and to keep up with the latest history news. >> all weekend long, american history tv is joining our charter cable partners to showcase the history of st. louis, missouri. to learn more about the cities on our 2014 tour, visit /localcontent. we continue now with our look at the history of st. louis. this is american history tv on c-span3. >> we are in the museum of westwood expansion, which is the main museum here at jefferson national expansion memorial. it basically tells the story of the settlement of the american west during the 19th century. we are actually underground, directly below the 630-foot stainless steel arch. originally, there were going to be surface buildings that would have house museums and restaurant complexes and things like that, but the national parks service, which runs the architect both thought the arch would be better served to stand alone, to be unrivaled by anything else, so they decided to put everything underground, all the .nfrastructure to run the arch all of the visitor facilities would be beneath the ground. that is how this museum came to be located where it is. is.ath where the arch in terms of what this museum has to offer, our current museum, it tells a capsule story of westwood expansion during the 19th century. it is actually laid out with above ourime that are heads. concentric rings that are almost like ripples in time, as though you have dropped a stone into a pond, and the ripples emanate outward. that is the same thing that has .appened here the first time reading is 1800. the last one is 1900. our current museum is not going to be here very much longer. in the next couple of years, we are going to be reconfiguring the museum so that it will probably tell a slightly different story than this one tells. right now, our museum tells a tory that is pretty common telling a general overview of westwardexpansion -- a expansion. what we wanted to do was focus more on the role of st. louis, particularly in westward expansion, so there will be a shift. another shift will be when this 1976, was created that in it was more telling the story of kind of anglo white males going from the eastern part of the continent to the western part, in the way historians have looked at the westward expansion era, it has been looked out -- looked at in a different way, and we see that is definitely telling part of the story. we want to see the story of other cultural groups who went into the west. native americans who were already living there, of hispanic people who were already there, and essentially, the story of st. louis, which already had existed for 40 years by the time the louisiana purchase was made

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