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Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
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B
We are a very complicated country with a very complicated relationship to family, community. I think all Americans kind of wrestle with that, celebrate that, wrestle with it. Wonder whether we have lived up to the nation's ideals. These are questions maybe more at this moment than in any other as we're on the eve of the nation's 250th anniversary.
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Jill Le Paul, Pulitzer Prize winning historian of the United States I think from your voice I feel that this, this weighs very heavily on you, this moment in time.
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B
I think it weighs heavily on everyone, whether it's their job to think about it all day or not. We are in free fall off a cliff here. I don't know when we land.
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A
From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain. America's big birthday is upon us. It was on the 4th of July, 1776, that a relatively short text, the Declaration of Independence, was formally adopted in Philadelphia. A final departure of British troops from the United States was still some years away. And so was the other key foundational document of the country, the Constitution, which wasn't even drafted until 1787. And that's the text that's our root into America's story. This July 4th, the Harvard historian Jill Lepore joins me to take us through her monumental work, we the People. It's a book on how the Constitution came about and, crucially, how there was an expectation that it would likely change over time. This is not, however, an episode entirely set in the past, because Gillaport is acutely alive to the pressures of our time, to a contested sense of what America is or what it should be. She's also unusual in her background, and we'll talk about this early on, she's very far from an ivory tower type historian. She's served in the US military and her route into teaching history at Harvard is a sideways one. Plus, she's prolific articles, a podcast series on Elon Musk and many books. We the People has just won her a Pulitzer Prize. And her next book, the Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which is about technology and democracy, is out next month. So here is Jill Lepore on America, past and present. Oh, hello.
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B
Thanks so much for having me.
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A
Anything in particular on your mind today that you're particularly thinking about, or State of the world?
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B
Yeah, you try to think about lunch just to get through the day, really. I mean, that's my plan.
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A
I'd love to begin with a sense of you before we move on to your work, particularly because I was struck by the fact that you are one of the foremost scholars and writers on American history, and yet you have an unusual background as a professor of history because neither of your first two degrees are in history.
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B
None of my degrees are in history. Yeah, I always wanted to just be a writer and graduated early with a degree in English as I couldn't afford to stay in college. I worked as a secretary, actually here at Harvard for a while and wrote novels during the workday and sat in on classes. I was a high school athlete, you know, Girl Scout person with a great sense of civic duty. Had no money for college and I got an ROTC scholarship to go to college.
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A
So which is the system by which your tuition fees and other expenses are paid for in exchange for agreeing to serve in the military afterwards?
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B
And agreeing. Agreeing to serve. Yeah. Yeah.
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A
So then what happened? What changed you're talking to us now about your books on constitutional and other history, but you could have been sitting in the Pentagon listening to Pete Hegseth speak.
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B
I do sometimes think about that. Yeah. And all my friends in college were ROTC kids. You know, you incur a service obligation when you enter your sophomore year. And I actually loved rotc. But at the time, Reagan's foreign policy was really interventionist. For instance, in Haiti, and in particular, Reagan was exploring what was colloquially known as the Star Wars Program, the Strategic Defense Initiative. He was going to build a missile shield, something like the Israeli Iron Dome, right around the planet, to end the Cold War. And so all the students were engineers, and everyone thought the Star wars plan was completely nonsensical as an engineering design. And I thought politically it was also nonsensical. And I went and had a meeting with my commanding officer, and I said, I don't think I could work on that. And he said, you know, cadet, and you can't be in the military. You don't get to choose. This is not going to be for you if you're going to be evaluating the projects that are coming out of the Pentagon as to whether or not you're ethically willing to comply with them. He was a lovely person, and he was a very wise man.
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A
So it was a fork in the road moment. So how did history come into it then? Did it happen while you were working at Harvard as a secretary?
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B
I don't think that my interest in history is necessarily the same as that of many of my wonderful and distinguished colleagues, who I think often are interested in the debates among historians about how to interpret moments or forces of change. I am interested in the relationship between the past and the present in a very vernacular way. Right. In the sense of. I think we all walk through our lives wondering how we got to where we are, how the institutions we work for or the companies we work for or the farms on which we work got to be where they are. I'm just really interested in inquiring into the relationship between the past and the present and finding explanations that in my mind, often offer a way for me to think about how to escape sometimes what feels like difficult present moments.
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A
I'm also wondering to what extent the past and your relation with America's past was there in your family life because you're the grandchild of immigrants, aren't you? Italian immigrants. Is it true that your grandmother never spoke any English? You could never actually communicate with her?
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Yeah.
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B
No, she. She didn't. And as far as her Italian we were always told mainly she was swearing. She was hilarious, very earthy woman.
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A
But do you remember thinking about America's past in this. In this very real way? It was a country that your grandparents chose?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my father was born here in 1924 and was given the middle name Amerigo after Vespucci. But because he was born in the United States in 1924 is also the year that Congress passed the Immigration act that essentially closed the doors of the United States to immigrants, certainly from Eastern Europe and to a significant degree from Western Europe as well. I don't know. I remember my dad telling me about that. He, when he was confirmed, he changed his middle name to Edward. That was his confirmation name. And there was a real kind of erasure. He was one of those second generation immigrants who. He was completely fluent in Italian, but never spoke it with us. He didn't want us to learn to speak Italian.
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A
You mean because he was embarrassed?
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B
I don't know. I think most. I think most Americans grow up with some version of, you know, their account of the nation's history as a version of their family story. Whether you yourself are an immigrant or, you know, your family has been in this country for generations upon generations.
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A
Do you think your father changing his middle name was a deliberate act of integration to try and be like everyone else?
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D
Maybe.
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B
I think he was maybe a little bit embarrassed by it, but I once wrote an article called the Everyman Library about my father's books, because when he died, I introduced, inherited these books that he had, which are basically his college textbooks. And he had a copy of the Aeneid that he had really marked up, you know, which is a journey about trying to get home, much like the Odyssey. And I think my father had a very complicated relationship with the idea that he had come from someplace else. He was so rooted in the United States. I think for anyone also in Italian American fighting in the Second World War, fighting against the Axis powers that included Italy was really complicated. My mother was descended from Germans and her father had worked for the Navy during the First World War, but was a German American who was essentially pushed out of that kind of work. He had been at mit, and German Americans were considered a security risk during the First World War. So I don't think there's anything unusual in my story. I do think we are a very complicated country with a very complicated relationship to family, community. The idea of the nation state, the tension between the universal and the particular. What makes America both distinctive and the fountainhead of universal ideas or ideas. That have been embraced around the world.
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D
Yeah.
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I think all Americans kind of wrestle with that, celebrate that, wrestle with it. Wonder whether we have lived up to the nation's ideals. I think these are questions maybe more at this moment than in any other. As we're on the eve of the nation's 250th anniversary, we're swimming in our history right now. The question is really whether we're drowning in it.
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A
Yes. So let's come right up to the present day then. And your book, which is heavy in its subject matter and physically heavy as well, because it's a big work and it's about the U.S. constitution. We, the people tell us about it. Particularly the fact that you focused on how it was intended to be a living document, not a tablet of stone.
- [11:56]
B
Yeah. I think we have to the degree that Americans kind of carry around with them any sense of the Constitution as having a history, as opposed to just being a piece of parchment that you could go see at the National Shrine in the National Archives or something, that members of Congress will wave these kind of pocket editions at one another. To the extent that we have idea that has a history that we could trace it over time, that idea really relies on the Supreme Court. So, like in law schools, I'm speaking now from the Harvard Law School, law students are really taught to learn a series of Supreme Court decisions. And that's how lawyers and judges are going to argue about the meaning of the Constitution. This is in reference to earlier decisions of the Supreme Court. And as an American historian interested in the story of the people as a whole, that always seemed to me something of a problem because presumes that the Court itself has created a fiction about which is that the Supreme Court is the only authority on the Constitution. And the only mode of constitutional change that is possible is seeking change by way of the Supreme Court. When in fact, that is absolutely a crucial way that the Constitution changes. And the Supreme Court has an unparalleled role in changing the Constitution. But if we think about the history of the Constitutions only that way we miss that the Constitution was written in an age that celebrated what I call the philosophy of amendment. The idea, very Enlightenment idea, kind of almost Panglossian, like the world is getting better every day in every way. The idea that if you're going to write down a Constitution which was new, which was a new idea in the 18th century, if you're going to write down a Constitution, and it's an ingenious thing because then it's going to be transparent. The Powers that government has the limits to, the powers of government, the rights of the people. All those things are going to be written down. We can inspect them. We can hold the government accountable to those things. We can insist on those limits. We can insist on those rights. This is a genius idea. But if you're gonna write something down, there has to be a way for it to change over time, and it can't be changed by the forces of tyranny, which will be the inevitable mode of change that all of human history explained to the framers of the US Constitution that humans, for almost the entirety of human history, have been ruled by tyrants, been ruled by force and violence. So you have to have a mechanism for change, and that mechanism is amendment.
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A
And it's within the document, because I'm holding one of those pocket versions, and it's there. Article five, setting out the way that the Constitution can be amended, which was essentially a key part of how it ended up getting passed in that agreed to in the summer of 1787, because without was the way to bridge the disagreements, to say, this is what we're going to. This is the document we're agreeing to right now.
- [14:37]
B
Yeah, I mean, it was necessary at the convention in the summer of 1787, where there was a tremendous disagreement. And the entire Constitution is the subject of very strenuously fought compromise. But everyone understood there was going to be an amendment provision, because that's why they were there in the first place. Because the previous frame of government was essentially unamendable. It required unanimity to amend what was essentially the treaty that united the 13 states, the articles of Confederation. So they were there to come up with a new Constitution because the other version couldn't be amended. So they knew they were going to have to make it amendable, and they did, but it would not have been ratified. So In September of 1787, the Constitution is sent to the 13 states, at least nine of which have to approve it in order for it to become law. But in practical terms, all 13 states have to approve it, because what's going to happen to the other four? They're just going to walk away. So there's a. It's a very close call. People have a lot of problems with the Constitution. They have a lot. The states propose some 200amendments to it even before they were willing to ratify it. And so the Federalists, who are the proponents of the Constitution, say, look, it's okay. We know it's not perfect. We did our best. None of us are really entirely happy with it either everyone had a problem with something in the Constitution or something that wasn't in the Constitution. And so their whole kind of slogan was, if it was a bumper sticker, it's ratify now, amend later. Just let's ratify it. We're in chaos here as a country. We have to have a Constitution. Please just ratify that. We promise the first thing we'll do when Congress sits for the inaugural Congress is we will send amendments to the states. And in fact, they did. That's what the Bill of Rights is.
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A
But over time, over the sweep of these 250 years since, since independence, not since the Constitution, it has been amended very little. Why is that the case?
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B
Yeah, there's a whole field of political science that studies amendments, amendability, amendment rates, amendment difficulty. The US Constitution, while undoubtedly the most influential Constitution in the world, is one of the least amended and one of the most difficult to amend. It's not at the top of that list, but it's very, very high up in both of those counts. It has been amended really only 17 times. It has proven to be the case that for most of American history, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to amend the Constitution. And then something pushes that door open and then a flood of amendments come in, then the door slams shut again. And then for decades and decades and decades, it's impossible to amend the Constitution. We are in a period now where it's effectively impossible to amend the Constitution. It requires a 2/3 super majority in both houses of Congress and then a 3/4 ratification, ratification of 3, 4 of the states. And the degree of polarization in the country today just effectively makes that impossible. I mean, think about 2/3 is also the necessary bar in the Senate for impeaching a president.
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A
Yeah. So in your view, is that a good or a bad thing? Do you dislike the idea of it being amended, or do you think it's an important and necessary function of democracy and we should be able to get there?
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B
I don't honestly have a prescription. I do think it's important to recognize that the Constitution hasn't been meaningfully amended since 1971. That means that because change is going to happen, you know, like a river is gonna find you can put a dam in, but the water's gonna go somewhere. The water runs to the Supreme Court, and then the Supreme Court has far more power than it was intended to have, which is a deformity of our politics. Then Supreme Court nominations become hugely controversial. The public is really engaged in them. The Supreme Court justices have become really celebrities, personalities, characters, people know about them, their lives. They write memoirs, they go on book tours. That's not how the Supreme Court was meant to function. And I think it has contributed to presidentialism, that is to say, the celebrityification and magnification, exaggeration, amplification of the role of the executive, who in this instance, in this iteration of effectively an amendment drought. This president's view is that whatever he says in the Constitution is in it, and what he says is not in it is not. I think that's actually essentially a continuation of the kind of deformity of the separation of powers that has been out of whack since the Constitution became unamendable. So there's another argument why it would be good to amend the Constitution more often, and that is that I would suspect most Americans don't know the US Constitution is amendable, for one thing, and we don't feel ourselves to be the authors of our own Constitution. And that is the principle on which the nation was founded and arguably is crucial to the legitimacy of the Constitution. So a lot of the political instability, constitutional instability we see now I think we would describe as insurrectionary and amendment was the mechanism that was meant to prevent insurrection. If you as a people wanted to fundamentally change the government, adjust something significantly, like impose term limits on Congress, for instance, you ought to be able to do it peaceably. You ought not to need to use political violence to secure that result. That was the genius of the amendment provision in the first place.
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A
I suspect that we're going to go back and forth in time, founding fathers, present day, quite a lot in this conversation, because those are the threads you're already touching on. But let's hear then from President Trump. I'd like to play you these words from him when he was being questioned by NBC News about the deportation of Kilmar Abrego GARCIA wrongly, as U.S. government officials acknowledged to El Salvador, your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens
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B
and noncitizens, deserve due process. Do you agree? Mr.
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C
I don't know.
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B
I'm not, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know. Well, the Fifth Amendment, I don't know. It seems, it seems it might say that, but if you're talking about that, then we'd have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.
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A
Don't you need to uphold the Constitution
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B
of the United States as president? I don't know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said, what you said is not what I heard. The Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.
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A
So when you heard those words, as I'm sure you did at the time, what did you think?
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B
He can't not know that it is his duty to uphold the Constitution. That is the oath that he swore when taking office. I think the overwhelming majority of the legal scholars consulted across the political spectrum are now convinced that we are in a considerable cris regarding the rule of law in this country, because Trump's behavior has been entirely different in this administration in this second term, which is to do whatever he wishes to do and hope that the court blinks without regard to its constitutionality or its legality to just proceed and do it and see what happens.
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A
I think from your voice, I feel that this, this weighs very heavily on you, this moment in time.
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B
I think it weighs heavily on everyone, whether it's their job to think about it all day or not. We are in free fall off a cliff here. I don't know when we land.
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A
Can you explain, though, what you mean by free fall and what it is that you see that leads you to believe that it is so serious and indeed unconstitutional? Is that what you're saying, that the President is acting unconstitutionally?
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B
I think that many of this administration's actions that many federal courts have declared to be unconstitutional. It's not my personal view as a citizen. I may have my own evaluations of it, but the courts have declared much of it to be so.
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A
Is the central position in all of that the use of the executive order or the use of emergency powers?
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B
I think that has been an engine for Trump, characterized by an extraordinary number, not only of executive orders, a record breaking number, but a record breaking number of declarations of emergencies. An immigration emergency, an energy emergency, which gave the executive new powers to take action. And he was not the first to do that. In fact, the Democrats were the first to really use declarations of emergency for these purposes.
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A
Which Democrat would that have been?
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B
You see a lot of the use of the emergency powers by Bill Clinton, for instance, and there's, you know, there are a lot of declarations of emergency during what George W. Bush called the global war on terror. There are circumstances that to some degree or others, would seem to necessitate declarations of emergency. Those that Trump offered up seemed, I think, to most observers, far more opportunistic. But, you know, there's a larger story about the impotence of Congress, the relinquishment on the part of Congress of its powers to the presidency that has been happening for decades. The press's fascination with the office of the presidency has been a real contribution to its exaggerated powers. I think Americans believe the president is far more powerful than the president is constitutionally meant to be because the press has become fascinated with the presidency. That really started in the 1990s at a time when Trump himself was becoming a celebrity, right? This sort of lifestyles of the rich and famous was something that Bill Clinton really participated in, Obama really participated in. There are larger historical forces at play here that make Trump's presidency possible that have to do with distortions of the separation of powers and have to do with the cult of presidentialism. So I guess what I mean about falling off a cliff to get back to this isn't I feel like I veered too far away from your question, as if I'm in a presidential debate and I have actually completely failed to answer your question. But it's an important question, so I will go back to it and dutifully attempt to answer it. I One of the things that I will confess annoying as an American political historian is being asked all the time, is this unprecedented? Really? Every query I have gotten from every journalist has been is this unprecedented? Is there a precedent for this? And I have recently decided I simply refused to engage in that conversation. This is entirely without precedent. The kind of authority that this administration has claimed for itself and exercised over Congress, the Supreme Court, the states, the American people, citizens, immigrants, aliens alike is without precedent in American history. The end is with precedent in the histories of other nations. There is no precedent for this presidency in the history of the United States. American history is not a map that you can go to to see what's going to happen next. It's just not. We are off that map.
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- [28:15]
A
I'm really interested in what you said about the cult of the presidency and how recent it is. So I mean, obviously the office of the Presidency is in the Constitution, as is, as is the Supreme Court, as is Congress, crucially, right at the beginning. What happened in the 1990s? What do you ascribe this to? This where the office of the Presidency becomes bigger than you think it should be?
- [28:41]
B
Well, presidential power really begins to increase with FDR in the 1930s significantly, but by no means continuously. And one of the things that amplifies presidential power are new technologies of communication. So of course FDR is the radio. President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s becomes known as the television. President John F. Kennedy commissions for the first time Air Force One and is able to travel in a new way and with greater frequency and be more visible. But It's. By the 1980s, it turns out that Americans are just not that fascinated by the presidency. And the president does have quite limited powers in the United States. The framers were extremely ambivalent about even having a president. And Reagan, who was often called the six o' clock President or the primetime president because he gave these speeches on primetime news, was really the last American president to speak to a national audience. Routinely. Broadcast news began its decline, was replaced by cable news, then by the Internet and social media and the media landscape that we have now. And in competing for viewers and for attention, that new media landscape treated the office of the Presidency with the same attention with which it treated Hollywood stars. And some. Many presidents were very interested in contributing to that. So Bill Clinton famously went on mtv, talked about what kind of underwear he preferred. He played his saxophone on Arsenio Hall. He was everywhere. Political scientists talk about Clinton as inaugurating what's known as the ubiquitous presidency, that the president was somehow suddenly everywhere. On the Merv Griffin show and now, you know, on a podcast. Trump's presence is of a different scale altogether. So there's a continuum. But I do think that Trump's presidency in this regard is without precedent. But you don't get there out of nowhere. Right. So the cable television, which has all these hours to fill, fills a lot of it with just nonsense detail about the president and the president. The White House becomes kind of complicit in that. The more attention the president has, the more able the president will be to enact his agenda.
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A
Yeah. And then our technological era, which is one not just of social media, but of AI and algorithms, like, driving us in directions we're not even necessarily aware of. What does that mean for democracy and for the exercise of politics? I know you wrote about your worry or fear, even about how you repair the fabric of democracy when the technology is built to polarize us.
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B
Yeah. I spent the summer in something of a fugue state writing this short book called the Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. That advances an argument I had made in a. In a shorter essay in which I argue that because our public discourse is no longer public, but in fact is entirely owned by multinational corporations and overwhelmingly populated not by humans, but by robots. Right. So all these platforms have become inverted where there are more bots than humans participating in our public discourse. You know, X is owned by Musk, the richest man in the world. Facebook and Instagram owned By Zuckerberg. These are a primary means through which in the United States and in much of the world, people acquire their information as citizens about what's going on in their countries. That is not a liberal nation state anymore. That is an artificial state, one in which public discourse is, is automated by private corporations to ensure political outcomes that are preferred by those corporations to maximize the profits of those corporations. When I say artificial state, I sometimes think people think it sounds like a, like a tin hat conspiracy theory, like the deep state. I don't mean that at all. It's not, it's, it's, it's not secret at all. I think we all know when you're getting your news from X, that you are. You are getting curated news that is coming to, to make it impossible for you to find common ground with people with whom you disagree or believe, you disagree. What you actually believe anymore, I think, is harder to say.
- [32:44]
A
I'm gonna go back in a moment right back to the Founding Fathers, but before I do that, I want to bring in what you've also said about how part of what is happening with the President and the administration is a reaction to what went before and the deficiencies or the wrong in some cases, that you see with liberal left and some of the positions of the years that came before the Trump administration, which might be surprising to people because they might well be listening to you and thinking, well, she's clearly an anti Trump person. She's clearly from the liberal left. You have found fault with positions of liberal America as well.
- [33:25]
B
You know, this may be a fine distinction at this point, but I think there really is a distinction still to be made between liberalism and progressivism. So I think that when we think about the excesses of the left, I think it's worth understanding them and admitting to them. And yet, at the same time, I understand the inclination of many people on the left to say, there is such a crisis right now. The last thing we should do is admit some of the critiques of liberal institutions are fair. This is not a time to conduct an own goal. And I'm sympathetic with that position. I get it. I really do get it. But the long history of the rise of the modern conservative movement in the United States, you know, that really begins in the 1930s in opposition to the New Deal. And, you know, a lot of what the Trump administration wants to do is, is return the United States to an era before the New Deal, right? To essentially unwind all of American history, to go back to a different Gilded Age than the one we're in now. But that opposition, you know, looked at what its challenges were to come to power, and it identified three big sources of opposition. One was the press, which did not really celebrate conservative voices in the middle decades of the 20th century. Another was the courts. And the other was. Was higher education, was the university. And conservatives were in this for a long game. And what they attempted to do was defeat these institutions that arbitrate knowledge. That's what all these institutions do, right? The journalism universities and the courts. Right. They decide what's true. They advance knowledge. They arbitrate questions of truth and falsity. And conservatives wanted to defeat all of them. And their success with the courts was phenomenal. They essentially took over the federal judiciary and have very successfully done so, both in terms of personnel, in terms of ideology, journalism. They found it an alternative journalism. They find it an alternative press, and then just attempted to discredit what is now people agree to call the mainstream media, which is, in fact, the press, as I understand it. And what was hardest of all was to topple higher education because higher education has been such a vehicle for mobilization for economic growth and for social mobility in the United States and has been so democratized in the wake of the Second World War.
- [35:43]
A
And do you feel that because you're speaking to us from Harvard, which is the institution, the educational institution more than any other in the. In the president's sights, do I feel
- [35:55]
B
that higher education was the hardest nut to crack? It just. I think that has taken the longest.
- [35:59]
A
Does it feel like the front line where you are right now?
- [36:02]
B
You absolutely are. But, you know, I think there's something worth keeping in perspective. The people on the front line are the people who are being rounded up by masked agents on the streets of these. Of our country and thrown into vans and deported. This university is struggling, for sure, and is being unfairly targeted, and it's contemptible and must be condemned at every turn. But the actual suffering in this country. I'm very sorry for international students who aren't able to be here. It's tragic that labs that are doing essential medical research are shutting down. We're not admitting students to do basic research in the sciences. These are horrible things and real things.
- [36:40]
A
I guess I'm keen to understand how it feels on campus.
- [36:43]
B
How it feels on campus?
- [36:44]
A
Yeah.
- [36:45]
B
How it feels on campus is surprising that our students are not out there protesting every day.
- [36:51]
A
Why do you think that is?
- [36:53]
B
I don't know. Why do you think that is? I am baffled. This baffles me.
- [36:56]
A
Fear, exhaustion, overload.
- [37:04]
B
I don't have. I don't. I honestly don't have an answer. I have no answer to this question. Every day I walk across the yard and I say, where is everybody?
- [37:15]
A
And maybe the reason it's not happening is that so much is most of those people do not have the vehicles that you and I do. To call people, to pull strings, to make voices heard.
- [37:33]
B
I think that's too easy of an answer. We're not going to get to the bottom of that.
- [37:37]
A
Okay, well, let's go. Let's go right back then, because I've been promising this for a while to the period you spent so much time thinking about the Founding Fathers. And I do want to tell you that through, of all things, a celebrity TV ancestry program, I found out that I have a connection to Massachusetts, your home state, and that I've got ancestors who were at the forefront of the beginning of the revolution in Boston, and, you know, were riding out from Boston, defending Boston against the British. And it makes me feel suddenly connected to that period in American history in a way I never would have before. But when you think back to that time and with your knowledge, obviously, of the present, what do you think the Founding Fathers would have made of America at 250?
- [38:23]
B
So I'm going to object to the question very respectfully. Calling the framers of the Constitution the Founding Fathers was an invention and a coinage of Warren g. Harding in 1916, I believe, at a time when the Constitution was being speedily amended by the Progressives of that era. The Progressive era, there are four constitutional amendments ratified between 1913 and 1920. And constitutional conservatives of the day were outraged by this. They opposed every single one from the 16th Amendment, which granted Congress the power to tax income, to the 20th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Harding was among those who opposed amending the Constitution and was part of Founding. What is really the ancestor of today's originalism, which was the constitutional conservatism of the day. And one of the ways he did that was by talking about the Founding Fathers as our personal ancestors, whom we should worship and whose work was divinely inspired. And they wrote a document that should be considered scripture. And I. It's like the question is this unprecedented? It's one of those questions that I'm always like, don't ask me this question.
- [39:34]
A
Can I point out, I did not say the words, is this unprecedented? You didn't.
- [39:38]
B
And I'm not. I'm not trying to be a bombstroke.
- [39:42]
A
I take the wider point completely.
- [39:43]
B
I just really think, like, I have been Asked on national television, who's your favorite founding father or which founding father would you like to have dinner with? I don't want to have dinner with these people. They're dead. They've been dead for a very long time. They lived in a different era. They, they lived in an era where women died in childbirth. Your children all died of disease and malaria. I don't want to go back to that time. I don't worship that time. I thank them for the Constitution that we have, for the sacrifices of the revolutionary generation in fighting a perilous extraordinary war. Fealty, fidelity, worship, veneration for me seemed to be antithetical to the spirit of Americanism. So I don't have that. And I just drives me a little batty the way historians get kind of corralled into it by questions that have become the go to questions to ask historians.
- [40:31]
A
But is it even broader than that? I wonder, are you saying you don't, you, you don't like the term Founding Fathers at all? Are there shades of the cult of the presidency or generally a sort of over elevation? They were exclusionary people. Right. You've got, I mean, not just Native Americans, people of color, largely women. Often you've got this brilliant bit in we the People where you detail Abigail Adams writing to her husband and saying, remember the ladies, if you don't put us in the picture, and you need to, because all men are tyrants, we will ferment a rebellion.
- [41:09]
B
Yeah, I mean, I do think the reason I wrote this particular book was I just think we need a better constitutional history that accounts for, as best one can, between the pages of, okay, it's a big book, but it could have been a lot longer. The views of ordinary people who do have constitutional opinions, and most of whom have been disenfranchised for much of American history and yet have engaged in constitutional debate, have gathered in de facto constitutional conventions. Black Americans did so. Native Americans have and continue to hold, of course, constitutional conventions. Women held constitutional conventions in the 19th century. The there are the fundamental tools of democratic self governments or representation, participation and deliberation. And people who couldn't be necessarily represented or participated nevertheless deliberated. And their deliberations have never been quoted by the Supreme Court as having any implication for our understanding of the Constitution. And they lie entirely outside the realm of how the law thinks about the Constitution. But they don't lie outside the realm of how history accounts for the history of the Constitution. So I really wanted to write a book, really taking seriously we the People. What have people wanted from the Constitution. Have people understood its merits and its weaknesses, what they thought had needed changing, how they failed or succeeded in changing it? Conservatives, liberals, progressives all over the place. Some of the people in this book that I think have been least attended to not only by the courts but also by history are conservatives who have had extraordinary effect on the Constitution outside formal amendment that is worth chronicling and paying attention to.
- [42:47]
A
I'm going to bring it back to one person to end, and that's you. This is the Bloomberg Weekend interview. Where does your mind go at the weekend? Because I get the impression that you move between the present and the past all the time in your mind. What's your safe place that you can retreat to, physical or metaphorical?
- [43:08]
B
I raise sheep. I spend a lot of time on the farm and I read a lot of poetry. I really believe in the importance of experiencing oneself as fully human and disconnecting. I am a person who has not and has never been on social media. I do not intend to spend a minute of my life engaging with a medium that I think has been catastrophic for humanity. I mean, I would go so far as to say that it has certainly been destructive of democracy and of liberal nation states around the world. So, yeah, poetry's good.
- [43:43]
A
What poetry do you return to? Is it Walt Whitman?
- [43:47]
B
I will read anything we want.
- [43:48]
A
Great Americans.
- [43:49]
B
Yeah, we have a fairly big library of poetry. My husband is a big reader of poetry. In the first hundred days of Trump's presidency, I read the first hundred of the Penguin little black classics, one a day. And there's a new Penguin, Penguin set. I think it's called the Penguin Archive that I am just about to embark on. One a day, Jillette.
- [44:09]
A
Paul, we let you get back to the sheep or the poetry or the students, whatever's next. Thank you so much.
- [44:15]
B
Thank you.
- [44:21]
A
And that's where we wrapped things up. Jill joined us from the Harvard studio and thus thank you, Nicole Egidio at Harvard for making it Happen happen here. The producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martlew. The video producer is Andy Haywood. Social media is by Alex Morgan. And our music is by Bart Warshaw. The executive producer is Louisa Lewis. And at Bloomberg Weekend, thanks to Brendan Francis Newnham and our executive editor, Katherine Bell. Finally, a reminder of our email michelle show@bloomberg.net we do always write back until next time. Goodbye.
- [45:14]
D
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