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
Wilfred McClay & the politicization of history
This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy interviews historian Wilfred McClay about his best-selling book Land of Hope, which offers a more balanced view of American history than the hypercritical perspective popular today. Wilfred expands on the importance of teaching history accessibly and free of academic jargon, the selective application of criticism to historical figures, what the adoption of technology says about the adaptability of American culture, the “unsettlement of Europe,” and his experiences as a member of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission and the challenges it has faced.
Center for Civil Society's YouTube Channel
This week on Givers, doers and Thinkers. We talk to Hillsdale professor Bill McClay about his explosively popular book Land of Hope. We talk about how to achieve a genuinely balanced perspective when doing history and the need to avoid reducing history to a morality play. We talk about what Bill thinks we most often get wrong about American history and we speak about his experience on the American Semi-Quincentennial Commission. Let's go Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers a podcast on philanthropy and civil society. I'm Jeremy Beard. It's great to have you with us. We are recording on April Fool's Day, april 1st 2025.
Speaker 1:This is not a joke. Bill maybe will have some jokes for us, I don't know. But I'm pleased to have as our guest historian Wilfred McClay, the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. 30 years ago, bill published his award-winning book the Masterless Self and Society in Modern America and most recently he is the author of the bestselling book Land of Hope, an invitation to the great American story. Aside from his writing and teaching, which have won too many awards for me to mention here, bill has served and still serves on a number of boards. He is the chairman of the board at the National Association of Scholars on the board of the Jack Miller Center as well and, most importantly and appropriately for what we're doing this season on this podcast, he is also a member of the official US Semi-Quincentennial Commission, so we're very glad to have him with us here today. Bill, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm fine, you may be tired just thinking about these things, these responsibilities that I don't always adequately discharge.
Speaker 1:I didn't even mention all of them. I tried to lighten your load a little bit, it's okay. Yeah, well, I have Land of Hope. By the way, for those who haven't seen it over my shoulder here, it's sold many, many, many copies. Really, I don't know if you're shocked by it.
Speaker 2:I was and am. Yeah, by the way, I want to mention the other great thing you have over your shoulder is some kind of representation of the state of Indiana.
Speaker 1:That is true. Thank you for noticing. Really really nice.
Speaker 2:A friend of mine, Richard Ryan Shue, you probably know, refers to Indiana as the virtuous state.
Speaker 1:Well, he couldn't be more correct. Yeah Well, but Land of Hope. I want to make sure I encourage people to. If you haven't bought this book or you're one of the few at this point, because so many people have it, so get it for yourself, for your kids, for your school, for anybody you think needs to sort of understand or would profit from understanding American history better. It's very. It's written very accessibly. It's not too long. What is it? 350 pages maybe, or so. Yeah, yeah, so it's meant to be read. It's meant to be read. It's meant to be read. That's right, it's actually meant to be read. One of those books is meant to be read. Tell me why, like what led you to write another general history of America and to what extent. Was like the 1619 project in your mind as you're doing this, or was it written completely independently of that phenomenon?
Speaker 2:It was written independently of that, and actually the 1619 Project was released after the book had come out. Okay, but the 1619 Project didn't occur in a vacuum. It reflected some trends of scholarship over the last 30 years or so, and so I have to say, even though it was a bit of a shock to me that the New York Times put its institutional weight behind something that was as mendacious and really inaccurate as the 1869 Project was the general drift of it, wasn't that surprising?
Speaker 1:Yeah so that wasn't.
Speaker 2:No, what led me to do this? That's a very good question, because it's not anything I ever thought I wanted to do. There's a long version of this story. I'll skip that, but basically, well, I'll give you a little version of this story. I'll skip that, but basically, well, I'll give you a little bit of it. What precipitated it was when the College Board, which is the organization that does advanced placement testing and offers accreditation for courses accreditation for courses they came out with a revised version of their American history, ap US history test, and it was quite shocking, shockingly revisionist, so to speak, in leaving out a lot of things having to do with constitutional history. Diplomatic history and intellectual history is my field, and even political history and emphasizing, you know, the economics of the slave trade and things like that much more prominently than say something like the ratification debates over the Constitution Right Appeared entirely, that's where the.
Speaker 2:Federalist Papers appear, yeah. So there were a number of us that were really very concerned about this and we got together and produced a letter, an open letter to the college board, sort of entreating them to back off from these changes, which were damaging and false, for reasons that we provided in the letter. It's actually a really respectful letter under the circumstances and what they did. They actually did back off for the time being from a lot of the changes that they made. But it was soon brought to our attention that the big textbook manufacturers, like Pearson, mcgraw-hill they had already revised their American history text in line with what they anticipated to be coming out of the changes at the AP test.
Speaker 2:So and I think they figured well. It may have a little setback, but eventually, because the march of progress only leads in one direction. So people started saying well. People in our group started saying well, we need an alternative text.
Speaker 1:We've needed one for a long time actually, and there was no extent, no sort of unpoliticized text, not really. There was no extent, no sort of unpoliticized, not really.
Speaker 2:Well, there were some that were not as politicized, but they were also unintelligible. They, literally, they could be unreadable. I couldn't read them, and I discovered this when I started working on Land of Hope. But at any rate, I finally was talked into doing it, and I that somebody needed to write such a book At first.
Speaker 2:I said you know, I absolutely agree with you. I hope you'll find somebody, and I thought that would take care of the problem. But no people kept coming back and so, um, in some ways I, I, um, I won't say my popular demand, but by the demand of a number of well-placed people whom I greatly respect, I, I was cajoled into doing it once. I was about and, and really, jeremy, at first it was just the hardest thing to do because I wasn't used to writing that way. I wasn't used to I. I'd like to think my writing was intelligible but this was I wanted to.
Speaker 2:I knew that what I had to do was to break through to a much more limpid, much more accessible style. And I know, uh, academicism Right right.
Speaker 2:And no references to varying interpretations. No, you had to. Yeah, plus, my publisher kept saying oh, you know, we're really hoping this will be the antidote to Howard Zinn Howard Zinn, for your viewers and listeners, being the political scientist, not a historian, who wrote A People's History of the United States, which is a fairly egregious work. I can't think of any historians no reputable historians that have ever said oh, Howard Zinn did a good, reliable history.
Speaker 1:They like it.
Speaker 2:There's left, but they won't, they won't, they won't.
Speaker 2:They won't accept the idea that they won't go that low. It's the same with history, anyway. And Howard Zinn, I think, has sold five or six million copies. It's a lot of copies. And you know I find friends who are big fans of Len Oak. They say, gosh, you know, my kid is using Howard's in his school, public schools, private schools, it's still out there.
Speaker 2:So anyway, I came to the conclusion yes, there had to be something better. So I started in on it and once I it took me a month to write the first chapter, um. And but once I got it, once I got a handle on the right diction, the right tone, the right pitch, um, it flowed pretty well because I'd been teaching American History Survey courses for umpteen years and you know, in many ways my notes from those years reflected I couldn't use the notes directly, but they reflected the outlook on American history that I had and I brought to bear in the book. So by the time I finished I was really liking it, I was enjoying myself and I often wonder if that's evident now to readers that hey, he's really getting into this.
Speaker 1:It does read very, very well. You're right, you've sort of stripped away the academicisms and the sort of throat clearing and the references to the literature and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:There's only two or three places where I say well, look, historians differ about this issue. The Great Depression, for example, I wasn't going to go out with. You have to mention the Keynesian interpretation, which I personally think is mostly wrong. But I'm not an economist. You have to give some sway to it because that's still the dominant view. But I also gave the monetarist, bill Friedman, that view and I hit it some others. I think it's right to say that we don't have a settled interpretation of the Great Depression and in those instances I felt I had to have a settled interpretation of the Great Depression and in those instances I felt I had to do a little bit of academic argo-waggo. But in the beginning of the First World War, I think that's definitely still contested and it's something you have to have within the scope of the American history text, even though we had nothing to do with starting the thing. But otherwise, yeah, it's plain language. I wanted to and I've been very gratified by letters that I get from people those ordinary people.
Speaker 2:Sometimes they don't identify where they're from, which bothers me. I get a letter from somebody that says Joe Schmoe at Googlecom or Gmailcom. But it's very gratifying to get these people who say finally, history books I enjoy reading, that's intelligible, that doesn't go into too much detail, and that was part of the mission too is to make it short, as you said. But you also have to have a point of view, and the view of American history is, even though I have many reservations about things that we have done, things we are doing. Catch me on a Tuesday or a Thursday. I'm very down on the present condition of our culture, but there's an ultimate affirmation and a sense of hope about the future. Right, and when I was writing it that almost seemed like TS Eliot's famous line about gathering up, shoring up our fragments against our ruin. I don't think that's right, but it doesn't seem quite as desperate now as it does.
Speaker 2:But I thought about I mean, I've raised children and we homeschooled our children, so I thought they studied history with my wife and me. But how do I want to teach this stuff? And I don't want to teach it as one long parade of Confederate flags and Klansman hoods. That's not America. In my experience that's not so. I think the hyper, almost pathologically critical view of American history that is so much the norm in the academic profession. I'm not exaggerating at all when I put it that way. Right, it's not only false but it's unhealthy. It's unhealthy for young people to grow up with the sense that they're living under a really evil regime which they should nevertheless never let you behave themselves and follow the laws.
Speaker 2:What logic comes from that? I think, at least at some point I had dinner with a friend, a new friend. I didn't know him very well and it was very interesting what I was doing. And he said you know, I believe if young people grow up believing that they live under a bad regime, it affects their soul in a way that is very difficult to heal, very difficult to change. And you know I had not thought about what I was doing in that way that this is about.
Speaker 2:You know, the study of history, especially one's own history, is partly an act of moral formation, the country at which, to the extent we are still a republic or aspiring to be one, we expect them to participate in. So I do try to give weight and I think sufficient weight to the negative side of American history. So there are those for whom you can never get enough of the negative side. But I've gotten remarkably little criticism. I'm almost none about my treatment of slavery and racial, you know, white supremacy, racial discrimination, jim Crow, etc. I have gotten a bit of criticism that I don't do more with Native Americans. I think that's actually a valid criticism. We are in the middle I want your audience to know of doing a second edition and giving me the opportunity to beef up some parts and also to take out some of the academicisms that just somehow crept in. So I'm having a lot of pleasure taking those out. So, yeah, I think I could do better in that department.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's very it's hard to compress an entire American history into 350 pages, definitely.
Speaker 2:To say the least. It's constant issue of trade-offs or triage. It's my favorite image because the triage is a life boat. You put too much detail in that the boat will sink, so you've got to know what to throw out. Sometimes you throw out the saying I forget who the British poet who said you must kill your darling. And in the process of editing your work you have to think of that image, that comparison, that name or whatever that you just thought. Oh, that's so brilliant of me, you've got to take it out. More often than not you fall in love with your own image.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of that, but the end result I've been very pleased, not just by the sales but the reception of it has been so positive.
Speaker 1:But, as you say, the contrast with these sort of unremittingly, pathologically critical is exactly the right phrase to use in the way that American history is not just presented at the sort of elite colleges or universities, but I think all the way down now, all the way down to the first time American history is presented and you think sane public school that you send your kids to, you know that's it's all, permeates the curriculum, does it not? It is sort of all mid-shaping.
Speaker 2:You know, I think, and I think there's an assumption, even by my colleagues on the left, which is to say most of my colleagues around the country. There's an assumption that somewhere out there somebody Miss Marple somewhere is teaching the sort of basic account of American history that we get to counterpunch against account of American history that we get to counterpunch against Right, nobody's home. Miss Marple has become Mr Marple or whatever she said, and gone to California. But there is no, there is nobody.
Speaker 1:It's all a counterpunch. There's no, there's no. They're punching, and counterpunching against a punch that doesn't exist. Yes, even in Texas.
Speaker 2:So I think yeah, that said, I feel obliged to be as balanced as I can and not a sugar-coated view of our history, but I think what people and actually a lot of the work that's being done has, within a limited frame, validity. I know these people are careful. Some of them are not careful. A lot of careful scholars do work which I want to ask them what did you think you were doing?
Speaker 2:People are still writing books against George Washington, which, to me, is not just sort of patriotic sacrilege. It's not just sort of patriotic sacrilege, it's stupid. What kind of heroes do you think the human race has to offer if George Washington is not a hero? So I think the perspective of the book is as important as anything else. When I look at someone like Jefferson and Jefferson's a great example, actually, because he's obviously a great man with what are, by our standards today, great faults and they were actually faults by his standards, he was utterly convinced of the moral wrongness of slavery. You know, he famously said I tremble when I consider that my God is just and his justice will not sleep forever. He's talking about slavery when he does that.
Speaker 2:That's at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. Those words. It actually shows that Jefferson would talk about God from time to time if he felt so moved. That's another issue, but I think you know to acknowledge the greatness of Jefferson, particularly in his support of religious liberty, support and the Declaration, maybe above all else, is not to deny that he had other faults and actually he wasn't that great a president. He was smart enough to do the Louisiana Purchase and I give him high marks for violating his own constitutional principles to do that.
Speaker 2:You know, as the saying goes, sometimes you have to rise above principle, and Jefferson did that. In that case, you couldn't pass that up. Where would we be without Louisiana? So where would the chicory in our coffee come from? But seriously, I think learning. There's a lack of maturity in the way our history is taught. When you find some flaw in someone's makeup, well, that's it for them. You know they're gone.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And I mean the standard has become so ridiculously high. You know, back when statues were coming down in 2020 and 2021, they were tearing down statues not just of Robert E Lee or Frederick Douglass.
Speaker 1:is that a call, correctly, frederick Douglass?
Speaker 2:Yes, lincoln, because. Lincoln, of course was not really clearly in favor of racial equality in all senses, social equality. He was a man of his times, at least then, and it's interesting to me that Martin Luther King Jr has not been cancelled because of his what his FBI files show about his feelings with women. I'm glad he hasn't been. I think he's an admirable figure and deserves place in the American political pantheon, but it's the selective application.
Speaker 1:The selective application yes it's, yeah, the selective application. It's selective application, yes. What's the what's the aspect of the politicization of history that seems to have really metastasized in the last I don't know 20 or 30 years. It seems to me even more than before. What's a, what's one or two things that irritate you the most, like well, I can't believe all this uh uh land grant business where you have to say you know whatever they call it. Yeah, Explain to people what that is. They may not have encountered that yet in the world.
Speaker 2:You go to a concert, let's say in, oh I don't know. Somewhere in New Mexico, let's say, and I won't do Arizona, we'll say New Mexico. And someone comes out and says well, before we do this, we want to acknowledge this land that once belonged to the Choctaw or whatever.
Speaker 1:The Pueblo Indians, you might say.
Speaker 2:It's this sort of of let's have our moment of our vitamin G guilt and then we go ahead with things to sins that we had no role in committing, and probably our forebears back as far as we remember had no role in in, and actually the history is often very bad, I mean badly done.
Speaker 1:That's what bothers me the most. I would say, like the land originally occupied, let's say, by Navajo or something. Well, the Navajo weren't here till 1300 or 1400 or wherever we might be standing. They took it from somebody else, who probably took it from somebody else, who took it from somebody else. It's a sort of ahistorical view that goes all the way down. That's so irritating. Like you said, I agree, the land payment thing is so meaningless and self-righteous at one and the same time. The end payment thing is so meaningless and self-righteous at one and the same time, but it's a way of saying the regime under which we live is not entirely legitimate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's corrosive, although it also makes people a lot of people say, well, I don't care about anything that came before me. They have the opposite reaction. It's sort of like deciding you're tired of hearing feminists rattle on about things, so you become Jeremy Tate. I mean, those are extremes. You're right, One kind of produces the other yes indeed, and so, I think, a balanced perspective that recognizes that there's a tragic element. Particularly, one of the best people on this is Tocqueville, as he is so good on so many things.
Speaker 2:He describes in the last chapter of volume one of Democracy in America. He describes when he's traveling, you know. He ends up at Memphis and he sees a part of the Trail of Tears. He sees this, actually the Chalk Claws. But he sees this miserable group of people, ill-clad, freezing and barefoot in many cases, this ordeal of their being removed to Indian Territory, what became Oklahoma, and there's no element of. Well, these people deserved it. They're lesser beings. No, his Christian impulses kick in. Well, these people deserved it. They're lesser beings. No, he, his Christian impulses kick in and he describes it with great compassion. They knew that their ills were long standing and irremediable. And he ends up sort of saying this is a great tragedy because nothing was going to stop the growth of modern European civilization, the Western growth, nothing was going to be able to preserve their way of life.
Speaker 1:It's really not any sort of culture of democracy that he identifies in America. This is somehow symptomatic of that.
Speaker 2:And. I think we still don't know quite how to. I mean I think it's still a problem this is one of the reasons that I think I need to give more attention to it. It's still a problem in a way that raises not as much of a problem, even though it's all we hear about. I think you don't hear a lot about the issue of Native Americans. They're indigenous people and I think there were treaties broken A few Left and right. So there were treaties broken, a few left and right so more than a few.
Speaker 1:There is a sense of inevitability to it, though, isn't there of this sort of just wave the power and dynamism? As you point out, a lot of the dynamism of American society kind of makes it so hard to stop.
Speaker 2:I think it's really important that history not evolve into a kind of morality play, that's not to say history has no moral dimension, and certainly those of us who are Christians or Jews do think history has a moral dimension. God is in some way involved in history, although whether we can tell exactly what he's up to but the morality play.
Speaker 2:I just saw a book the other day about another book about slavery, about how we should think about slavery. I should have thought that everything that could be said on the subject had been said, but getting all this rolled out published it's not the only and of course, his position the author's position appears to be where it's the question at the heart of American civilization. And that's just ridiculous. And I say that without any desire to say it's not important, minimize.
Speaker 1:I say that without any desire to say it's not important. Minimize.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, by the way, you know, when I was growing up, we were taught American history Slavery was very important, it was a cause of the civil war, even in Maryland they were. They were yeah, and it's not as if this has all been neglected. And yet this sort of started crashing in on the scene and making slavery the sort of new capitalism theorists who basically see capitalism as the map for slavery. I think there needs to be a reset, and I was never so crazy as to think Land of Hope could be the beginning of that, but I feel, as if it is, it is. It's a success way beyond anything I expected or dared to hope for has given me hope.
Speaker 1:It can't be a retent.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, I mean I should talk a little bit for your audience about what I mean by using the term land of hope. It's not just a sort of sugar-coated America is the candy land of human history, it's not like that. But it is first of all, the place to which most Everybody that is here came here from somewhere else, his or her lineage. Most of us came willingly, some came in chains, but even they have, in their beautiful liturgy, the liturgy of songs, are full of hope, full of the biblically inspired hope, but more generally it's it's a land of hope in the sense that, that a place people have come because they thought it was possible to move beyond the conditions into which they were born, um, yeah, and. Or they had a sense of adventure or pioneering spirit or whatever. But it's that sense. Things can be different, things can be better.
Speaker 1:And there's something deeply Christian and deeply progressive in that sense both right?
Speaker 2:Yes, and it's yes, and I think both of those things can become too involved in our definition of ourselves. That is to say, as Christians and I'll speak as one this world is not our home. This country is not our home. It's a pretty grand place to be for a time being, but it should never be the eschaton. No, that's something entirely else, and progressive.
Speaker 2:Need I say the notion that being a land of hope means that everything is constantly in need of improvement? It's a world of orange cones. Everywhere you look, everything is under construction. No, that's not a civilized way to live. We actually, I think and this is something I'm probably going to have a little more of this in the second edition of the book. I think we really need to rethink our notions of progress. This technology is wrecking American youth, wrecking the art of conversation, wrecking many of the things that are dearest to us as part of our human endowment, and so these, and, of course, the technology that we're using to talk here, is wonderful but we don't have a sense of proportion about the use of it, especially younger people who are unsupervised.
Speaker 1:Has that been a typically American trait to not have a sense of proportion about technology?
Speaker 2:I think so. I mean, there's a term a historian has devised I can't think who it is but the technological sublime, which is a kind of very high, high version of what we mean when we say that an app is cool. Cool Because the coolness in that sense like I had somebody singing the praises of a Cybertruck to me the other day you know it could be self-driving if you want to. I don't want to have a self-driving vehicle. Well, you can have. Let's say, you live in Michigan, it's a cold day, it's snowing. You can have. Let's say, you live in Michigan, it's a cold day, it's snowing. You can call your car out of the garage across the street, come up the front door, get the heat up to a certain temperature, keep the seats, all while you're sitting in the comfort of your home. And I thought to myself now that would be, and more. But there is that aspect of a technological fix, something that requires many different steps. For us, all you have to do is push a button, step.
Speaker 2:I do think we're. Also. It's amazing how quickly we pick things up. I mean, I reflect on how, every now and then, I'm going through my files and I find letters that I used to write. I used to write letters and keep copies of them because it was one of the ways I augmented my poor memory. I would make carbons. I've got files and files of these green carbons for all the letters I wrote going back to before I was a graduate and, of course, at some point they just stop because email comes in and it's just amazing how the most ordinary people in American life are all you know. They know what a QR code is.
Speaker 2:They know how to operate their phone better than I do because I'm not that curious about all the apps. So we are very adaptable. I won't say I hate the expression in our DNA, but it's in our blood, it's in our deeply embedded culture.
Speaker 1:Yeah, is it true, would you say too as well, this hope. I like the key note here of the key motif of hope, that kind of what lies at the base, too, of, to some extent, of Americans' penchant for forming, this Tocquevillian penchant for forming voluntary associations. There's a sense that there's hope for something to be better, either at a small scale or at a large scale. Yeah, not a fatalism, in other words.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And again, tocqueville says this, that he doesn't only attribute this to Americans, but he thinks that's really one of the most debilitating things about modern thought and I don't know who exactly he has in mind. He's right about any number of modern things is the sense of determinism and reductionism, so that all class relations are a function of the means of production, and everything else, the ideas that people propound, and all that it's all a function of the organization of the means of production. Or Freud, darwin, all of the great modern systems of thought are in some way efforts to rob us of our freedom, of the freedom of our will. And Tocqueville said no, that is the one thing, liberty. He's a great proponent of liberty in the sense of freedom, of the will that we are free to make our world. And he admired that about the Americans. They didn't just sit around and say, oh well, it's broken, I'll wait for the government to send a plumber. No, we'll try to do it ourselves if we have to. But um, and and yes, this a voluntary association.
Speaker 2:You don't see that anywhere. I mean, I I haven't lived that much of my life abroad, but what I have, um, admittedly was in italy, which is not a place known for its organizational talents, but you don't see anything like it and people can't conceive. Why would you start a school? Don't you have schools already? And the church would have schools? Okay, right, right. Although in a place like France, the Republican regimes did everything they could to drive the Catholic schools out of business about, because it's your line of work. Is that that? Um in on the continent, you hardly see any? Um philanthropic foundations, right, they're alien to the experience of the of the french.
Speaker 2:Just pick on the french yeah um, I, I went to a a talk once by a french, uh, admirer of American foundations. He just went on and on about how difficult it was to do anything with the legal structure as opposed to, but so is the cultural structure. Interesting point, when you know, the great Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was redone and reopened, magnificently, done, done, um, well, when the fire first happened and they, they decided that they were going to rebuild it and not rebuild some kind of itchy pompadour center as it had been. Um, uh, the one good thing that emmanuel macron has done, one good thing that Emmanuel Macron has done the offers of money flooded in from Americans, wealthy Americans, not all of them Catholics or even believers, and people were deeply suspicious of them and in the end, I think they did accept some of the money, but not much. The French people prefer something like this to be built with public money. They prefer that, yeah, and that's something very, very different from us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is not in our DNA. To use a phrase you don't like Well, it's okay when you use it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the idea of a philanthropic foundation in some way violates their notions of public that if you have, even if the rich people are doing good it's much better than it come out of the public purse, go figure.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you about one more concept that you bring up, because I wanted to make sure we touch on this before we go. I think one of the powerful themes you introduce is that of unsettlement. The history of the US, for good and ill, is one of unsettling individuals, communities, people, seemingly everything. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's a. It starts with this wonderful sentence from Lewis Mumford that I just have. I repeat it with every class I teach about American history that the settlement of America began with the unsettlement of Europe, and I think it captures the ways in which to put it in a somewhat less clear way America is a province of Europe. We are we're not a child of Europe or the offspring exactly, but we are maybe in some ways a province that are an offshoot, a byproduct.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure that there's any one phrase that quite captures, but I love Mumford's phrase and so I do follow that through. Through that there's. There are ways in which, um, yeah, unsettlement uh is and I speak as a very conservative person, I prefer settlement to unsettled, yeah, but that unsettlement can serve, um, uh, larger purposes, um, let's shake things up.
Speaker 2:It can help to reorient, to liberate the energies of people that have not found proper outlet. There's some way in which one of the strengths of American life and I find a lot of times foreigners we've had a Romanian guy visit here and he says you know what I miss in America? It's not enough of the Tom Sawyer spirit, and I wonder, what do you mean by that? And what he's really talking about is our willingness to operate outside of institutions, got it? Yeah, our willingness to operate outside of institutions.
Speaker 2:To just float a raft down the river, you know, or make things ourselves to, not to paint by numbers, but to refuse to be regimented.
Speaker 2:And I told him one of my favorite sayings of GK Chesterton I'm sure you know it is that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. It's such a profound thing because and yet we are in this culture that honors, way beyond its deserts, credentialism, people in the white coats with lots of letters after their name, that's what he was talking about, the top lawyerism. You know, there's a creativity in America that comes out of the farm boy tinkers that developed the automobile industry, that sort of, um, unstructured, uh, uh, uh, boundlessness, that sense of, uh, of the human energy without, uh, without, without constraints, uh, that um, it's a big part of what makes America so special and exciting, and I think that's one of the reasons a lot of people are excited more excited than I am about the fact that we're now out in space again, we're exploring the universe, that. You know. There's something to the idea that Americans need a frontier. Yeah, frederick Jackson Turner and that's what Jack Kennedy ran for president on the idea that we need, yeah, that space, was it? So maybe he was right.
Speaker 1:So let's end then. Here we are. You remember the bicentennial in 1976. Here we are coming up on the semi-quincentennial, which I keep saying, so I can remind myself how to say it and maybe pick this up. You don't hear it out in the world. We use it.
Speaker 2:We say America 250 now.
Speaker 1:America 250, but even America 250, we really don't, which is why we're doing this season. Here we are March 2025 or April 2025. Here we are it's March 2025, um, or April 2025. Uh, you don't. If, if most normal people you mentioned this is coming up like, oh wow, you're right, that's amazing, what? What's your feeling as a member of the commission? What are you hoping might get accomplished? Now? Here's the third administration. Uh, this commission's been under um. What are you are you hoping might happen over the next several years?
Speaker 2:Well, I will tell you off the bat. There's no secret that I've been very disappointed in the commission so far, and until fairly recent, things have really started to turn around. It came into being in the I guess it came to be in the first Trump administration, and I was not one of the original members, but I was added soon after the beginning. Paul Ryan was speaker.
Speaker 2:He was the one who nominated me on it. It was completely consumed by internal politics, and I won't go into that except to say it wasn't just ideological or partisan politics, it was. There were two different Philadelphia groups that each wanted to dominate the thing, and meanwhile, you know, there is a country out there beyond Philadelphia.
Speaker 1:It's always been hard for Philadelphians to understand, but yeah Well in the fullness of time.
Speaker 2:We started to run out of time and both sides are gone. You know, the people who were basically perpetuating this struggle are gone and things started to improve, believe it or not, when Joe Biden was elected, because it wasn't the monstrosity of the Trump administration for people to rail against. It wasn't the monstrosity of the Trump administration for people to rail against. And, strangely enough, trump's reelection has. Well, I think now people are realizing if we're not going to be doing something, he's just going to do it himself, and it won't necessarily be what everyone in the commission will like.
Speaker 2:You know, I won't say what it's going to be, but I think so we're getting going a bit more, and those of us who are really interested, for example, the element of civic education, really interested in, for example, the element of civic education, are really getting on. We don't have an executive director. He had one. He stepped down because of the politics. He hired another one. He quit after a month or two and we haven't had one since.
Speaker 2:The woman who basically runs the thing is a Democratic pal of sorts, not an elected official, but from California. She's done a wonderful job, rosie Rios I should mention her name. I think she's been even handed. We had a commission meeting in Alabama and she and I were about the only people to show up, but she talked to Alabamians like that. She was a, you know, a sister and it was great. So I'm I'm hopeful that we're going to. We have some programs that are just launching now and you know you don't want to peak too soon. So that's one way. On the other hand, it's time to start peaking. I will tell you this there's a a lot of people have forgotten that the bicentennial was a close-run thing, and then there was also a commission that was established well in advance and there was political turmoil. You know, you had Watergate, you had the debacle of the Vietnam War, all kinds of troubles and the country was very demoralized at the time. A lot of people always sort of celebrate.
Speaker 2:There was a people's bicentennial that was sort of reminding country of everything bad about america but at the last minute and I I it was later in the season than we are now two people came along that basically saved the Bison Senator John Warner of Virginia and Warren Berger, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and they said we can't have this, we can't blow this, Come on. And so they instituted all the programs that people who were yeah, you're probably too young to remember any of this, but I am man the bicentennial minutes were a staple on broadcast media, um, and a lot of people uh, remember them and and right, tell me that they
Speaker 2:learned a lot from it. We're probably going to do something like that and they also. The utter just out of the box genius thing that they did in the Bison was all ships that was. I mean, there were very few things in my lifetime that had been more, had more of an effect on the populace than that. And who'd have thought? Good, you know a bunch of old ships riding around new york harbor. The whole country is watching this on television. There are, I think, eight, ten million people lining the harbor. It's and um I I think we'd have to have a whole other show to talk about. Why were people so moved by?
Speaker 2:yeah but I'll tell you in a word. I think it had to do with beauty I think, there's a way in which something so beautiful, the old um uh three and four masted wooden ships, just reminded people that they weren't all, most of them, yeah that's great. I've been trying to come up with something similar it's a little late.
Speaker 1:10 year ideas to Bill McClay care of Hillsdale College.
Speaker 2:Yes, right Well please do I do get these. I got just sitting on my desk, I got a letter yesterday from somebody who wants to do a bicentennial mural.
Speaker 1:I mean semi-quincentennial, semi-quincentennial yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's one of the things you hear from people, but some of it's good and look, I don't discourage anybody from it.
Speaker 1:It's not something we have to wait for a government commission to do. No, exactly.
Speaker 2:That's one of the reasons I think our commission may succeed is because of the very fact we couldn't agree on anything politically. I mean the commission, this is a matter of public record. So I can tell you. The commission could not agree on whether to call this a celebration or an observance.
Speaker 1:Correct. We never had one which is worth repeating. Could not agree.
Speaker 2:This is one of the geniuses of federalism or subsidiarity or whatever you want to call it. So people in the locality say, well, we're not going to sit here in Indiana and do nothing just because you guys can't agree on what time of day it is. So they're doing things all over the country and, thank God for it, it's turning out to be a total effort.
Speaker 1:I should say yeah, your state I'm aware I believe at least last I heard 48 states at least had their own independent commissions. If you do want to be involved with this, you're listening to this at all. Your state has a commission. Yeah, we do, yeah.
Speaker 2:Virginia has, in my opinion, the best. It's terrific. It's not surprising, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, bill, thank you for doing this today. Really appreciate your time. Land of Hope is the book. It's out now, get it. You can get the second edition when that comes out sometime in the future.
Speaker 2:It's not far.
Speaker 1:Okay, very good, excellent. So thanks so much for being with us, bill. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Good to be with you, Jeremy.
Speaker 1:Take care, hey. 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.