Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Givers, Doers, and Thinkers introduces listeners to the fascinating people and important ideas at the heart of American civil society. We speak with philanthropists, foundation leaders, reformers, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit executives, religious believers, historians, sociologists, philosophers, journalists, and anyone else who will help us understand contemporary civil society’s achievements and failures. We also sprinkle in practical advice for nonprofit leaders and fundraisers. This is the podcast for anyone interested in that vital space where philanthropy and civil society intersect.
Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Walter McDougall & the invention of American exceptionalism
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Center for Civil Society's YouTube Channel
Introduction to Walter McDougall
Speaker 1This week on Givers , doers and Thinkers . I speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter McDougall about the coming semi-quincentennial , about the myth of American exceptionalism , the sources of American civil religion , why the creation of the United States is the central event of the last 400 years and about the surprising word that best describes the American character . Let's go Welcome to Givers , doers and Thinkers a podcast on philanthropy and civil society . I'm Jeremy Beer and it's great to have you with us . Today is March 28 , 2025 , and I am so pleased to have as our guest Dr Walter McDougall . Dr McDougall is one of America's most eminent historians . He's a perfect person for us to speak with as we , at least loosely , tie our discussions this season to the American semi-quincentennial , ie America 250 . Dr McDougall is professor of history and Alloy Anson professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania , and he lives , if I am not mistaken , in Bryn Mawr , pennsylvania .
Speaker 1His books include the Heavens and the Earth , a Political History of the Space Age , which won a little thing called the Pulitzer Prize , and many others as well . I will point out especially Let the Sea Make a Noise , a History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur . Freedom Just Around the Corner . A New American History 1585-1828 . That is the book over my left shoulder here . Throes of Democracy , the American Civil War , era 1829-1877 . Promised Land , crusader State , the American Encounter with the World Since 1776 . And the Tragedy of US Foreign Policy . He has a book coming out next month , in April , so it will already be out by the time you're listening to this , from Encounter Books called Gems of American History , the Lecturer's Art , and some months after that his book the Mighty Continent , a Candid History of Modern Europe , will be published . All of Dr McDougall's books are exceptionally readable and exceptionally wise , so if you aren't familiar with them , I urge you to buy one or two or three while you listen to this podcast . It can be done . How are you , dr McDougall ?
Speaker 2Wonderful . Thank you very much for having me on your program .
Speaker 1Thank you so much for doing this . Really appreciate getting some of your time , especially as , I say , we're sort of very loosely focusing our discussions on the American semi-quincentennial , which , am I right , doesn't seem to be the energy around America 250 , as there was in 1976 , around the 200th birthday of the nation . Is that correct ? First of all , we don't know yet .
Speaker 2Yeah , a lot will depend on the popularity of President Trump in 2026 . A lot of Americans half the country really might get turned off on the celebration if Trump does not manage it in an elegant way . But also I would say that 1976 was a very dark year in American history . The Vietnam War had just been lost , president Nixon had just resigned the presidency after the Watergate scandal and the genial Gerald Ford had come into the White House . I think he was a very decent man and did as well as he could during his short term as president .
Speaker 2But the country was in a terrible recession . The oil embargo had recently been imposed and the Arabs had jacked the price of oil . When they began exporting oil again , they jacked the price up fivefold , fivefold . And you may recall , there were gas lines , cars lined up around the block just hoping to buy a gallon of gas , and we were suffering from the combination which economists previously had thought impossible , which was inflation and recession at the same time , even though Ford , in his distinguished and kind of down-home , middle-western way , presided over the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence . But the mood of the country was very grim . So I would think that the 2026 celebration ought to be more exciting and more unified . However , just as in the 1970s , the American people have become hopelessly divided politically , and so it's hard to imagine any kind of common ground in which all Americans , whatever their political stance could , could rally together and salute the flag with pride and honor , the heritage of the founding fathers , which ought to be truly honored .
Speaker 1Yeah , well , that gets me to my first question . Then we'll go backwards from here . The very first sentence of your book Freedom Just Around the Corner again that's the book over my left shoulder here is the creation of the United States of America is the central event of the last 400 years , and you mean that in a global context . That's a remarkable claim . Is that one you wrestled with , or is that just obvious to you ?
Speaker 2I don't know where my inspiration comes from , other than Providence , and when I read books that I wrote 20 or 30 or 40 years ago , nowadays I marvel Wow , did I write that ? That's really a good phrase , that's really a good paragraph . And I can't remember how I was inspired to write the stuff that I did . Write the stuff that I did . But in the case of the US being the most central event , what I had in mind was this Imagine yourself a time traveler from , let's say , 16th century Europe , the age of exploration , and you come forward in time to the 21st century .
Speaker 2And you come forward in time to the 21st century and you kind of do what the French call a tour d'horizon , a tour of the horizon , and look at all the continents and civilizations around the world . Most of them would be rather familiar to you . You've got China . You have Japan , india , the Muslim Middle East , the rival kingdoms and empires of early modern Europe . You have Hispanic South America , the only continent , except for Australia , that would appear utterly novel to you , that you would have no clue about . Where did this continent come from ? Is North America . The peopling and the development of the North American continent is simply astounding .
Speaker 2No-transcript , extremely humble and extremely grateful . It's no wonder to me that American colonists no-transcript Now . And , of course , if you read the speeches of the founding fathers and the presidents , from Washington all the way down to Abraham Lincoln , you will find their inaugural addresses , in particular , dripping with language of humility , thanksgiving and a recognition of an overriding providence
America's Central Role in Global History
Speaker 2that seems to be looking out for Americans , and this is true not only for Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Baptists and other Protestant Americans . It was true for Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin , who were deists . It was true for Washington , who was a Freemason . Andrew Jackson was another Freemason . When he campaigned , he pretended to be a devout Presbyterian , but Andy Jackson was not a real churchgoer and he in fact placed his quote faith unquote , in Freemasonry , as did many other of the American founders .
Speaker 2Well , that might lead you to ask , mcdougallougall , are you suggesting that the there's a ? There's a great deal of content and legitimacy to the , to the phrase american exceptionalism ? No , absolutely not . I have , uh , I've researched , uh , the history of American exceptionalism and I've also , I also have benefited from the , from the , from the research , the books written by a Hillsdale College professor named Richard Gamble , and , and I have discovered , without any , absolutely any doubt whatsoever , that american exceptionalism as a phrase didn't even exist until the 20th century and it didn't become a kind of prominent uh motto , uh for , uh for for the united states until the cold war so it has nothing to do with the founding period at all in terms of how they saw themselves nothing at all to do with it .
Speaker 2yeah , uh , yes , america was certainly exceptional in its geographical location and in its uh climate and its natural resources . But to to say that america and alexis de tocqueville , the , the french , uh , the french political philosopher who visited the United States in the 1830s , did refer to the exceptionalism of American geography and climate and natural resources , but he didn't consider that the American people were exceptional . Not at all . Curiously , the two people who coined , who first used the phrase American exceptionalism , were the Pope in the 1890s . Really , yep , there were many Catholic immigrants who had come to the United States , and , and the pope at the time . I forgot which one it was .
Speaker 2I think it was Leo XIII , maybe around that time . Yes , that's right , thank you . Leo XIII issued a I don't know what you want to call it .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think itichrist may be here .
Speaker 2It wasn't the papal bull , but it was a statement of theological policy on the part of the Vatican Damning what he called American exceptionalism , Because many of these Catholic immigrants had come over to the States , they had assimilated in the Protestant capitalist society of America and their Catholic faith and or practice observance had lapsed . And the Pope was warning really he was warning future Catholic immigrants and the parents of children who came to America to be sure that their children were raised and the hedonism and the antinomianism of the larger American culture . The second person who actually first used the term American exceptionalism was a man named Jay Lovestone . Ever heard of him ?
Speaker 1No , I've never heard of Jay Lovestone .
Speaker 2Jay Lovestone was the leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s and early 30s , before Earl Browder . Yeah , and Jay Lovestone had to explain to the commenter , and particularly to his boss , joseph Stalin , why the American Communist Party didn't make more progress in agitating and propagandizing the American working class . You had huge factories , steel mills and automobile firms in places like Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Chicago , but the Communist Party didn't get anywhere . The American working class seemed to have been totally assimilated into the capitalist culture , and so Lovestone referred to this as American exceptionalism , and he used it to explain why the communist revolution would take much longer to develop in the United States than it was developing in Europe , now that American exceptionalism usage continued until the early 30s . Now we're in the Great Depression . Now the Communist Party imagines that it will have a new opportunity to proselytize among the American working class , and Stalin meanwhile explicitly denounced the love stone theory about American exceptionalism I think around 1932 or so and said that the Great Depression had destroyed forever the credibility of so-called American exceptionalism destroyed forever the credibility of so-called American exceptionalism .
Speaker 2It wasn't until the early Cold War that scholars and statesmen , beginning with Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower , began to turn American exceptionalism into a positive feature of American culture and to trumpet it forth as a justification for what ? For the American Cold War effort . The United States was now undertaking all kinds of global commitments , like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan . The American Congress and the American people had to be persuaded not to return to the traditional unilateralist foreign policy that had been pursued all the way back to George Washington and to engage in what Thomas Jefferson damned as entangling alliances , most fundamentally the NATO alliance which we're struggling with , entangled by to this day . And so historians such as Daniel Boorstin , the Librarian of Congress , and other very prominent American historians reached back to the founding era , to the colonial era . Really , and elevated people like John Winthrop , the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and a leading Puritan , of course , a 17th century Puritan Boorstin and others reached back to these initial American founders and spoke of them as if they had been kind of the authors of the keynote addresses of the American project .
Speaker 2Authors of the keynote addresses of the American project . And of course , john Winthrop had famously likened the Puritan colonies to a city on a hill , which was a phrase borrowed from the Sermon on the Mount by our Lord in the bible um and um , uh . And of course our lord was making a uh , and preachers who quoted that scripture were making a religious argument to a religious audience . They weren't talking about politics , but uh , the the uh . The idea got twisted around uh to the uh , to the effect that , uh , that john winthrop was really talking to the colonists about the political culture of this new country . To end the world over again , as Tom Paine would later write , and for the United States to have a great destiny under God , which not only was going to prosper the American people but eventually was going to be a model for the rest of the world . And so American exceptionalism went into our political culture in a kind of a very belated and a way that wasn't really merited , really an unmerited way .
Speaker 1Yeah , and you captured this kind of gets us as one of the major dichotomies that you put , or binaries you put forward in your historical work , which is America as a promised land . And then , but you , I think you characterize as one of the early ideas about America versus America as a crusader state , which is never said that way but is what it sort of becomes , in part because of this belated idea of American exceptionalism and this kind of twisting around of the idea of America as a city on a hill . Is that correct ?
Speaker 2Yes , it is . I became enamored one might even say obsessed . Enamored , one might even say obsessed with a concept called American Civil Religion . I didn't invent the phrase . It was invented by a UC Berkeley sociologist named Robert Bella . He was a very prominent 20th century sociologist and he wrote a seminal article in 1967 , which he published in the journal Daedalus called the American Civil Religion . And what Bella had noticed and begun to wonder about was the pervasiveness of religious rhetoric in American political dialogue . And at first he had assumed , as a young scholar , that all this rhetoric , all this God talk , as he called it , all this God talk in American political life was just a kind of a way to appeal to the Bible Belt .
Speaker 1Like a cynical political discourse . Basically .
Speaker 2Exactly , yeah . But then he was really quite shocked by the inaugural address of President John F Kennedy in 1961 . Now he heard a Catholic president say , a democratic president , an intellectual president , indeed a Harvard graduate , appealing very explicitly to the same kind of what biblical audience , as a Protestant politician would do , kind of as a matter of course . What's Catholic about this ? Why is Kennedy saying these things about the United States of America , as if the United States were a holy land blessed by heaven and pursuing a heavenly mission to reform the whole human race ? And he decided this isn't Christianity , it certainly isn't Catholicism
The Myth of American Exceptionalism
Speaker 2.
Speaker 2This is what I call civil religion , and I first discovered it when I was researching the book you have behind you Freedom Just Around the Corner . And when I studied the late colonial and early national periods in US history , I realized that everyone took this for granted , everyone spoke in this kind of language , everyone kind of made the same assumptions about the divinely blessed nature of America and its people , but nobody expressed it in explicit terms all the way on down until roughly the Cold War era , war era , uh and um . And then you have a whole , whole slew of episodes uh , that , uh that demonstrate that , uh , that , the , this , this faith in um , in uh , in america's uh civil religion and uh divine , uh destiny , was an expression of Cold War . What A Cold War ideology , in contrast with godless communism , right right and the rhetoric of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower . Eisenhower once famously said without religious faith , our system makes no sense and I don't care what faith it is .
Speaker 2The American civil religion is a voracious and shape-shifting beast . It doesn't express any specific religion or denomination . It embraces them all . We have freedom of religion under Constitution , but it devours them all . Or , if you're an American , you're free to go to whatever church or synagogue or mosque , for that matter , or to go to or not at all , so long as your specific faith does not contradict and indeed honors the civil faith . We're Americans first , and we're Catholics or Protestants or Jews second . That's an unspoken but very real truth about the United States . If you go through the history of American presidencies during and especially after the Cold War and look at the rhetoric of the presidents and the issues , of the social and cultural issues that have come up , you will find that the controversies over the content of the civil religion have become still muted , have become , they're still muted . People don't talk in explicit terms about the civil religion , but more and more of our social and cultural conflicts have involved civil religion . We talk about the gay rights and the feminist , and now we got .
Speaker 1It commands less unanimous support .
Speaker 2Now would you say Now we have transgender rights and scientific absurdities like there are not two sexes , but there are 24 genders . But all of this , all of this nonsense and Trump is trying to roll back . It's hilarious . Donald Trump is a phenomenon , there's no question . He's an extraordinary personality and he's extraordinarily flexible , like the civil religion itself , civil religion itself . I can't think of a less churched person than Donald Trump . Yet he has made himself a hero for more traditional , especially Christian Americans throughout the country .
Speaker 1It says a lot about what you were just talking about , right , the sort of the combination we have , unspoken combination , between Americanism and adherence to a particular faith , that he can straddle that line in a way that makes some kind of intuitive sense to people .
Speaker 2Trump is a fascinating phenomenon in another respect , with regard to the history books that I've written . In that Freedom Just Around the Corner . I was inspired in another respect with regard to my the history books that I've written . In that freedom just around the corner , I was inspired to imagine that Americans are hustlers hustlers in the in the best sense of that word , but and also in the worst sense of that word and also in the worst sense of that word . Americans are hustlers . Now , this should not surprise us because Americans created and certainly were shaped by such a free country , limitless possibilities , a whole continent to develop , and Americans were free to hustle . Free to hustle . And if you look at American political and economic and cultural history , you'll find that everything is a hustle . And nearly all of the most creative Americans have been hustlers , meaning game the system and try to get ahead by whatever means possible . Preachers have been hustlers . We live in a free market in religion , and so churches , inevitably , will develop in ways particularly Protestant churches develop in ways that lead to these mega , mega , mega parishes or mega congregations where some charismatic preacher will have thousands of congregants and , of course , a number of them are corrupt . So they're hustling in the worst sense of the word . And when I began , when I began the book Freedom , I thought to myself maybe I can introduce this concept to my readers through fiction . And so the first section of the book is simply an adumbration of four American novels great American novels . Four American novels , great American novels .
Speaker 2Herman Melville's excellent but little known novel called the Confidence man . The Confidence man . It's a book essentially telling the story of this con man who gets on a steamboat in the Mississippi River . It's the middle of the 19th century and he hustles everybody . He gets by , makes a living by essentially doing con jobs on everyone . Then there's Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court . A delightful novel , a satire really , about this yankee hustler from connecticut um , uh , connecticut , a yankee peddler really who gets transported uh , uh through a ? Uh , I guess . He gets hit on the head and he dreams that he's been transported back to king arthur's court , whereupon he realizes he's living now in a society of people who are extremely ignorant by modern standards , and so he just makes up his mind to take over . He takes over king arthur's kingdom . He leaves king arthur in power , but he takes over the entire society , begins to industrialize it and modernize it , and he wants to give himself a name and he says to himself what should I call myself the boss ? And then there's Willa Cather's Old Pioneers .
Speaker 2I love Willa Cather , she's one of my favorite authors . She wrote a beautiful novel about the death comes for the archbishop about New Mexico , I believe and she wrote a wonderful book about Quebec in colonial times Exactly right . And her book Old Pioneers is about land speculation in frontier Nebraska . It's all about hustling and the heroine of the book is a woman . The men in the book are all kind of ne'er-do-wells . They get in their own way Psychological problems or whatnot . But this dynamic woman is like a 19th century Donald Trump . She's a real estate investor . She owns a farm , but mostly she's investing in land and then selling it for a higher price on the market and making a huge fortune . And the fourth book is William Sapphire's Scandal Monk .
Speaker 1Yeah , I wasn't familiar with that until I read your book . It's interesting , it's a wonderful book . I loved William Sapphire back , scandal Monger . Yeah , I wasn't familiar with that until I read your book . It's right ,
American Civil Religion Explained
Speaker 1it's a wonderful book .
Speaker 2I loved William Sapphire back in the day and this book is about the formation of the first American political party system In the 1790s . George Washington wants to preside over a unified country . He doesn't . He doesn't believe in factions and especially hates political parties . But Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and many other Americans who oppose Washington's policies for one reason or another form the Democratic Republican Party , which becomes the opposition to Washington's and Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Party . And there's all kinds of hustling going on in the political realm . You know backroom deals , and the scandal monger refers to a ferocious and manipulating journalist who edits a Jeffersonian party journal and becomes kind of the prototype for all future journalists in America who are essentially hustlers , promoting their own agendas , whether it's political or economic or cultural and so forth and so on . I was interviewed on a program such as this one about the book , and when I described the hustler characteristics of the American people the moderator said oh , you mean people like Donald Trump ? This was way back in the 2000s .
Speaker 1And I said exactly .
Speaker 2Trump is a hustler and he now hustled his way to to uh , to to multiple huge fortunes in the real estate uh business and that , but now he's hustled his way into the white house . Yeah , he's a perfect , perfect um expression of uh , of the real American dream .
Speaker 1And hustling in both senses , as you say , and that seems to be what some people find attractive about him . Absolutely , there's something deeply American about what he's done .
Speaker 2Now in my next book , the sequel to Freedom , the book on the Civil War era , I also introduce the notion of the United States as a republic of pretense . The memoirs , but also the novels of many European visitors to America in the Jacksonian era , the 1830s especially , all of whom commented on the extreme pretense of these Americans . They all talk as if they're all equal and they live in a country where there's no class conflict . So hogwash , class conflict all around you . The blacks have been slaved . The poor Irish immigrants are shutted off to ghettos where they can have them starve to death , even to the point to the middle and upper middle classes , where one British observer I believe it was Trollope . She says the Philadelphians who live on Locust Street look their noses down at the Philadelphians who live on elm street , a block or two away . Why ? Because this neighborhood consists of old money , that neighborhood consists of new money . There are all these social distinctions , um , among americans . Uh , the fact that we're so free and the fact that Americans can express so many different political , economic , cultural , religious points of view and stances also means that we're all , we're constantly , often subconsciously , layering ourselves . We're above these people , but we're below these people , and so on and anyway , the reason I bring up this concept of pretense is that Donald Trump is very relevant for this phenomenon as well . He has absolutely no patience for pretense . He tells it like it is and doesn't care who's upset by it , and certainly his proclivity for using social media to put out presidential pronouncements on everything is an expression of this . Now , many people many Americans , especially Democrats , but even some Republicans loathe this characteristic in Donald Trump , but I love it , and no less an American political observer than Henry Kissinger wrote an op-ed piece in 2016 , the year or 2017 , the year the first Trump administration began . He observed Trump's proclivity for telling the truth or the truth , at least as he saw it on domestic issues and especially on foreign policy issues , and Henry Kissinger said that Donald Trump is an historical phenomenon who comes along every generation or two . He's a rare phenomenon , but he is a political leader who tells it like it is and who busts or bursts many of the pretenses that the rest of the country has been going along with for years about a foreign policy that pursues quote universal values and rules and norms instead of the national interests of the United States . I mean , all of these are pretenses .
Speaker 2Now , there happened to be an article by Arthur Herman in the Wall Street Journal the other day that made this point about Trump in a different way . He said that Donald Trump and Elon Musk Trump's right-hand man , right now they are founders , they're entrepreneurs , they're capitalists , but they're founders . They found new industries , they found new companies , are the original creators of a great uh , great institutions , as opposed to managers . Managers are people in in business or in politics who have essentially risen in a pre-existing hierarchy a mature industry or a mature corporation that's been around a long time and everyone kind of gets set in their ways and it's business as usual you go along to get along , and Trump being a founding personality , with the help of Elon Musk .
Speaker 2Such people always say to themselves why are we doing this ? How come we're making investments over here ? Or what is this agency for ? Is this agency or this sector of my corporation really pursuing the goals that it was set up to pursue , or are they just time-filling now ? Goals that it was set up to pursue , or are they just time-filling now and so a founder will shape things up , as opposed to a manager ? All the people whom Trump disparaged in the first set of Republican primaries , all of these senators and other career politicians who were bidding to become the Republican nominee . He disparaged them and put them down with silly nicknames , but basically what he was saying was you're all a bunch of establishment managers and I am running for office with some genuinely new ideas . I'm going to shake things up , which he certainly has , for better or for worse .
Speaker 1It's a very fruitful idea . I think this idea that impatience
Americans as Hustlers
Speaker 1with pretense or disdain for pretense is a central part of sort of the american personality , along with this sort of hustling idea , let me ask you , before we , as we sort of near our end here , to talk a little bit about philanthropy . I wonder if both of these ideas don't illuminate some part of why American philanthropy and the forming of associations forever , as Tocqueville talks about , is also a central part of what has happened here in the last 200 years .
Speaker 2It is indeed . You wrote a book a few years ago on philanthropy , right , Didn't I blurb that yeah ?
Speaker 1you blurbed it . Thank you very much . It's called the Philanthropic Revolution , that's right .
Speaker 2It's a gem of a book , as I recall . It was short but it was very dense , loaded with good ideas . Thank you . The American people , by all accounts , by all poll numbers , are becoming less and less religious , young people especially , and church attendance is down across the board .
Speaker 2But Americans have always had a passing familiarity with the Bible , even if they've never read it , they've heard certain phrases and concepts from the Bible , or the good book as Americans used to call it back in the 19th century . And one of the adages in the Bible it's from Luke , chapter 12 , as a matter of fact , reads as follows From those who have much , much will be expected . That adage is still extremely powerful in American culture , despite the fact that people maybe don't even know where it's from . And when you have a society as wealthy as ours and a society as extremely unequal as ours is , as extremely unequal as ours is , with huge discrepancies between the most wealthy and the most poor , there's a natural tendency for those who have much to feel responsibility , that much will be expected from them , and so the fact that American philanthropy has a history on a truly grand scale should not surprise us , I believe , in the least . I liken it to the superstition that led wealthy medieval noblemen , landowning aristocrats and dukes and earls and other nobility in the Middle Ages to make huge bequests to the church as they neared their own death . They neared their own death . You give large amounts of money or great works of art or an expansion on the cathedral to the church in exchange for which the priests promise to say masses for your soul after your death . I think that Americans , even those who are not religious , hope to make themselves immortal by endowing , for instance , university buildings or endowing the symphony orchestra in your city , or the art or a school , an elementary school or even a bridge . Everything's got somebody's name on it . Yeah , I've been interested in this phenomenon .
Speaker 2Being an academic , it's natural that you notice the rich alumni whose names are on all the buildings . One egregious example of that at the University of Pennsylvania is the hall which now houses the admissions department as well , as it has many classrooms in it . It used to be called Logan Hall on the Penn campus in West Philly . It was named Logan Hall after James Logan , who was the executor for William Penn . William Penn was the proprietor who had been given , who had been granted Pennsylvania Penn's Woods as a colony under his own ownership , and Penn , who spent most of his time in England , kind of put in command here in Pennsylvania his trusted agent , james Logan . So James Logan really presided over the early growth of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania colony generally , and Penn had in its wisdom , in my opinion I'm an historian named this important building after James Logan .
Speaker 2About 15 years ago it ceased to be Logan Hall . It's now called Cohen Cohen , after a wealthy Jewish alumni . I think it might have been even an alumna , I don't know if it was a female or a male . Many of the philanthropic gifts in America , as you know , are donated by widows , and so , anyway , logan Hall was renovated and he or she paid for it , and so the university , in its ill unwisdom , changed the name to Cohen Hall , which means nothing to anybody , whereas Logan Hall had a real historical ring to it .
Speaker 2By the way , I mentioned Cohen Hall , which brings to mind philanthropy among Christians as opposed to Jews . Now , the Jews , as you know , have a kind of a calling of their own , whether or not they're observant , called Tikkun Ola . Tikkun Ola , which means to repair the world . I think it was coined by rabbis in the 1890s , and so Jews feel a particular responsibility , again , whether or not , they're observant in their faith to give something back , to help repair the world , to make the world a better place , and of course , this dovetails perfectly with
Philanthropy and the American Character
Speaker 2the american uh ethic or the american creed yeah , interesting .
Speaker 1Well , I think , um again this , the concept of hustling the pretense . There's just such rich , uh , concepts to consider as we hurdle towards the semi-quincentennial and I do hope it ends up being somehow , um , not as grim in time let's put it that way as 1976 was .
Speaker 1I agree , I have that same hope okay , thank you , uh , dr mcdougall , for joining us here today . And again , I want to really encourage people to pick up your latest book , gems of american history . The lecturers are to keep an eye out . Oh there it is . Oh , you already have a copy . Good . And again , I want to really encourage people to pick up your latest book , gems of American History . The lecturers are to keep an eye out . Oh there it is . Oh , you already have a copy . Good , all right , it's real . So it's fun to have it actually in your hands , right .
Speaker 2By the way , Jeremy , do we have another minute or so ?
Speaker 1Yeah , absolutely yeah .
Speaker 2There's a quotation from this book that I that I wanted to read to you . Okay , please do Uh , uh . You indicated uh in an email a couple of weeks ago that you ? Uh that one of the things you wanted to ask me about was American exceptionalism .
Speaker 1Yes .
Speaker 2And um , and of course I uh , if you , as you've heard , I I uh this uh . This morning I replied that replied that I don't believe in American exceptionalism . Right , but here is a quotation which makes the point perfectly . So what if the or historical claims made for American exceptionalism are a civil , religious myth ? Don't the truths they symbolize about the nation's new world character remain valid ? Not really , because common sense tells us , new worlds cannot baptize themselves . Only people from a self-conscious old world can conjure a new world , which is exactly what happened in the centuries since 1492 .
Speaker 2As a British skeptic has observed , quote not even the Puritans were impelled by a unique or exceptional American impulse . On the contrary , they were products of European education , european culture , european piety and were engaged in a great European quarrel the Protestant Reformation . Some 140 years later , the 13 colonies' representatives did gather in Philadelphia to reject European rule , but the principles they invoked included the beliefs of the English Revolution and the Whig tradition in the English-Scottish and French Enlightenments and in the ancient principles of English common law . In short , the core beliefs of a European civilization .
Speaker 1Very good , and that's a great segue into why people should also keep an eye out for your history of modern Europe , which will come out in some months . Down the road . It's called the Mighty Continent . Yeah , anovus Ordo Seclorum . Not so much , not so much . Thank you , dr McDougall , really appreciate your time .
Speaker 2You're very welcome , Jeremy . Thanks so much for having me .
Speaker 1Hey , thanks for joining us for today's podcast . If you enjoyed it , we invite you to subscribe and or rate and or review us on YouTube , apple , spotify or wherever you listen to our podcasts . Thanks a lot .