← Old School with Shilo Brooks
Loading summary
Transcript116 lines
- [00:00]
Walter Isaacson
Hey, y'.
- [00:01]
Shiloh Brooks
All. Shiloh. Here listeners will know that I believe reading good books makes us better men. Likewise, having civilized debates and good faith discussions can make for a better democracy. That's why I want to recommend the chart topping podcast, you Might Be Right. Hosted by former Tennessee governors from the left and right, Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam, it's produced by the Baker School of Public Policy and Public affairs at the University of Tennessee. In fact, the show's named after Senator Howard Baker's principal. To always remember the other fellow might Be Right. At a time where mainstream news reverts to shouting matches and most political commentary generates more heat than light, you Might Be Right is a great place for even keel conversations about tough topics. If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode on whether there's too much money in politics. As we approach the midterms, this is a timely discussion featuring Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessing and former chair of the Federal Election Commission, Brad Smith. It's substantive, civil, and exactly the kind of debate worth having right now. So follow. You Might Be Right on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and tell them I sent you.
- [01:07]
Walter Isaacson
Hey, y'. All.
- [01:08]
Interviewer / Host
Recently at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, I sat down with the great American biographer Walter Isaacson to discuss his latest book, the Greatest Sentence ever written. That sentence is, of course, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 250 years after that sentence was written, it's still the source of some of our deepest debates. Today we're going to break it down. This is old school.
- [01:54]
Expedia/Visit Scotland Announcer
Expedia and visit Scotland. Invite you to come. Step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today@expedia.com visitscotland
- [02:24]
Walter Isaacson
please join me in welcoming Walter Isaacson and Shiloh Brooks. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Good to be here.
- [02:40]
Interviewer / Host
So thank y' all for being with us. We have a third guest on the stage, I suppose that you see and it is the Declaration of Independence, an 1830s printing of the Declaration. And we're really lucky to have that. That was loaned to us tonight by Harlan Crow. And so behold it. As you, as you, as you.
- [02:58]
Walter Isaacson
Well, thank you so Much. I'm a fan of yours, too, for having me. And of course, no, no, he'd written a book on Nietzsche, and he's written a book he's written about technology and society. So y' all are lucky to have Shiloh. And I do want to give my best to The President and Mrs. Bush, because being born and raised in New Orleans and loving that city, we think of people by what happened 21 years ago after the levees broke and Mrs. Bush, President Bush were there for us. I still get a lump in my throat thinking I remember Mrs. Bush saying, wait a minute, you got to get the electricity back on. And boom, things started to happen. So it was that empathy and that decisiveness that helped our city recover. Thank you.
- [03:50]
Interviewer / Host
Thank you. Let's turn to this document here next to you. When you look at that and its frame, I'm just curious, before we begin a conversation about the specifics, what strikes you about seeing these words in their original form? What's the first thought that enters your head when you look at that?
- [04:07]
Walter Isaacson
Well, I actually, being an old editor, love the five different versions, of which this is the last. And if you go to the basement of the Library of Congress, you see version number one, where the sentence there begins, we hold these truths to be. And then it says sacred. And then there's Franklin's printer's pen putting self evident. And then it goes on, they're saying, endowed with certain unalienable rights. There's John Adams putting in by their Creator. And so you see, this is a finished version, but it's really exciting to see it's a collaborative effort and how they balance the role of divine Providence in gracing our country and the role of rationality in giving us our rights. That type of balance we kind of lose sometimes. I think we've lost it a bit today. But then you look at this document, we can rally around the fact that we keep these principles in balance.
- [05:06]
Interviewer / Host
Can you take us back for somebody who doesn't think about the Declaration every day? Can you take us back in history to the environment which this thing was written? What kind of political, philosophic, emotional challenges were Jefferson, Franklin Adams confronting when they wrote this? Take us back for a moment into that.
- [05:27]
Walter Isaacson
Well, if you start in early 1776, right after Thomas Paine has written Common Sense, most people in the colonies were probably not in favor of revolution, but that pamphlet gets it started. And the Continental Congress then realizes they have to create a committee in order to explain and declare why we're going to do this. It may have been the last time Congress created a really great committee. They put Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams on the drafting committee. And it's a wonderful way to try to bring what were different states together, because you have Jefferson from a slaveholding state, Adams, very much an abolitionist. Franklin, somebody who had owned slaves, realized it was wrong, and then had become a president for the Society of Abolition. But they had to compromise and work together to put this Declaration.
- [06:23]
Interviewer / Host
So let me ask you about
- [06:26]
Walter Isaacson
a
- [06:27]
Interviewer / Host
remark Jefferson made in a letter, May 8, 1825. This is something that I share with my students when I talk about the Declaration and its meaning and purpose. And I suspect when I start reading, you'll be familiar with this. But he says this about the Declaration. This is Thomas Jefferson in 1825. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles or new arguments never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent. And to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take, neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet occupied from any particular and previous writing. It was intended to be an expression of the American mind and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. So I ask you this question. How is the Declaration an expression of the American mind?
- [07:27]
Walter Isaacson
Well, first of all, let's get to the dirty backstory on that sentence. He had just been criticized by John Adams, who was rather jealous because all of a sudden, July 4th is being celebrated. It's like, and John Adams wrote something and said, there's nothing in Jefferson's Declaration that was original. There was no new thoughts in it. And he meant it as a criticism. So Jefferson writes this to say, it was not meant to be original. It was meant to be these great thoughts that were bringing us together. So we have to remember these are humans. But a year later, on July 4, 1826, 50 years after they signed this, John Adams dies that day and says, but Thomas Jefferson still lives because they had reconciled. And what he didn't know was that Thomas Jefferson died that day as well. So that rivalry, that jealousy between the two, that leads to that letter where they're saying, you know, hey, you just plagiarized John Locke is what he's saying in that letter. But then they come together.
- [08:35]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah. So when you thought about writing a book on the Declaration, there's a lot of different ways to approach that. It's a big Document. You could have written a kind of treatise and a tome on this thing. That's not what you did. You took the second sentence. And in a moment, we'll go through that word by word. But before we do that, I want you to kind of explain why you thought, you know, the best approach to this particular document is just to look at every word in this single sentence versus, say, writing on every.
- [09:04]
Walter Isaacson
This sentence becomes our mission statement and what we aspire to be. Yeah. And as you know, it doesn't describe where we were in 1776. All men being created equal. This is. You know, it's. But it's used as a forcing mechanism. So four score and seven years after the sentence, Lincoln is standing there at Gettysburg saying, a nation conceived in liberty and founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. At Gettysburg, he's not just there to give a beautiful speech. He's there to consecrate a graveyard in which 7,056 young men are being buried for having made that sentence a little bit more true. Seneca Falls Declaration, where the women, they quote that sentence. Martin Luther King's last speech, he quotes that sentence. When LBJ signs the Civil Rights act, he quotes the sentence. So the sentence becomes, in a time of very troubled partisanship. Now, the mission statement, I think we can all agree on, and whether it was Meacham, Ken Burns, Rick Atkinson, many of us spoke two or three years ago about. For the 250th, let's just all focus on the basics and remind us why we're all American.
- [10:20]
Interviewer / Host
You know, Ken Burns told me to tell you, speaking of him, that the greatest sentence ever written is I love you. He. He told me to say that.
- [10:25]
Walter Isaacson
Yeah, I love Ken, too. So I think it's actually. You're right, dear. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's good. Pretty good. I like that. I like that.
- [10:40]
Interviewer / Host
So I want to crack open this sentence, but before we look at some of the words, because, you know, I should tell people the structure of your book is that Walter goes through word by word, and I want to do some of that tonight and get him to talk about why did they use the word self evident? Why did they use. But before we get to that, what about the title? The title is the Declaration of Independence. It's the most. The greatest title ever written. What always occurs to me about the Declaration of Independence, it's a declaration. It's not a Statement of independence. It's not a Treatise on Independence. It's a declaration.
- [11:11]
Walter Isaacson
Well, you know, Jefferson in the first sentence, talks about A decent respect for the opinions of mankind causes us to have to declare our causes. And partly it's a propaganda. We have to get France in our side. Are we going to lose this war? But mainly it's because around the world, this notion of liberty, fraternity, democracy, this enlightenment, is starting to happen, even in England with John Locke in Parliament. And so it's sort of a way to explain to the world we have a new type of nation based on values, not on the divine right of kings or the sword of conquerors.
- [11:55]
Interviewer / Host
Let's look at the sentence itself. We're going to have a graphic of that so people can follow along. But, you know, there are many important words in the book. You talk about we as being an important word. We can talk about that one in a moment because you've just highlighted a word for us. Self evident. Let's pick up on that. Why is self evidence so important? And what does it mean? How has that meaning evolved?
- [12:16]
Walter Isaacson
Well, as I said, Jefferson wrote, we hold these truths to be sacred, and it was mainly a flourish. He didn't believe that they were religious truths that were being handed down. Franklin had been over in Great Britain as our envoy to try to hold it together before the Revolution. But by late 1775, he realizes it's not going to happen. He goes up to Scotland and stays with David Hume, who, as you know, is the greatest philosopher of that period. And he's just written about how knowledge works. And he's come up with categories of truths, one of which is a truth by, you know, an empirical truth by facts. Like, Philadelphia is smaller than London, so you have to count the people in Philadelphia. But there's certain truths he calls self evident that are true by logic alone. Like all bachelors unmarried, you don't have to go around asking bachelors, do you have a wife? It's self evident that bachelors are unmarried. And he has to what Franklin wants to do because he knows this phrase, all men are created equal. Is that something where you go around this room and say, okay, is everybody? No. Some are taller, some are smarter, some are more free. But it's self evident since we all came together in this social contract, which is what the word we is about. Yes, John Locke's social contract. If we all came together in a social contract, it's self evident we're all equal under that social contract.
- [13:48]
Interviewer / Host
So before I get a little bit deeper into self evident, can you explain to people what you mean by social contract? Because you say we is the word that's a signifier, and there's social contract theory. For people who don't know John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau are the great social contract theorists who these people were reading. So what do you mean when you say social contract is embodied in the we who hold?
- [14:10]
Walter Isaacson
Yeah, and it's also the first sentence of the Constitution, we the people, the most profound, you know, concept there. Because there was no nation, really, leave aside maybe Plato's republic, but no nation in which the consent of the governed is how the rights derived. It was usually a king, divine rights, a king or conqueror, as I said. And so what Locke has done by the end of the 1600s is say, and then Hume and as you say, Rousseau, others pick it up. The Enlightenment theory that the real rights come from people who were sort of in a state of nature and there was no government. And as I think Thomas Hobbes says, life was nasty, brutish and short. And so if you want to overcome that, you form a social contract. And so that notion that government came because we wanted to form a social contract is something new. I mean, this is not why George III was the king of England. And so that's what they mean by we, and that's what they mean by the social contract.
- [15:21]
Interviewer / Host
So when you say self evident, I can't help but think about what you mentioned Lincoln had said at Gettysburg. When Lincoln says, four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He says the proposition, what he doesn't say is that it's self evident, a proposition in geometry. If we go back to Greek geometry, Euclid is something that you have to prove, a self evident thing you've just
- [15:52]
Walter Isaacson
articulated, you don't have too hard. But Euclid's, you know, not only propositions, but axioms are true by virtue of logic.
- [16:01]
Interviewer / Host
That's right. That's right.
- [16:02]
Walter Isaacson
And so is this. It's a truth that you don't have to go surveying triangles and say, let me count, does it add up to 180?
- [16:10]
Interviewer / Host
That's right.
- [16:10]
Walter Isaacson
And so these axioms are true just the way Euclid's axioms.
- [16:15]
Interviewer / Host
But a proposition has to be proven is what I mean. And so I wonder whether Lincoln is dialing back the self evidence and saying, look, we haven't proven it yet. You see what I'm saying?
- [16:24]
Walter Isaacson
That makes some sense. That really does, because he knows it's a journey and it's going to be a long journey. And if he could be with us today, he'd say, you're still on this journey.
- [16:33]
Interviewer / Host
You're still trying to prove it. We can't take that for granted, in a way. Well, let's turn to another key word, all men. How should we understand that phrase in the context of 1776? You know, it's a phrase that's sort of pregnant with meaning, controversial in a way, almost.
- [16:50]
Walter Isaacson
Yeah. I mean, I thought at first that they probably meant the way Plato would say the rights of man or Voltaire, that it meant humanity. But no, they actually had some discussion about whether women were going to be included. I hope you've had, before she died, Cokie Roberts here, who wrote wonderful book called Remember the Ladies, which was the 1776 letter that Abigail Adams writes to John when they're doing the Declaration, saying, remember the ladies and give us our rights, et cetera. And he writes back, he said, that is laughable. We're not going to give up our masculine rights. And they don't. Women is. We got a long time now, you know, 1920s, before women can have the right to vote. So if you look at the American narrative, I mean, I hate it when people denounce the founders and say they're bad, or they say everything's perfect. What it is, is a narrative. And over the course of generations, we take this sentence and expand it so more people are included, women are included, blacks are included, and others. And American history is a narrative. Dr. King, when he talked about it, quotes the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens and says, the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. I think what Lincoln would answer is not quite human. Hands have to bend it towards justice. But that's what this is about.
- [18:18]
Interviewer / Host
Do you see in that word all that? The Declaration is a universal document. We read it as an American document, and rightfully so. And yet I want to ask you, are they similar? All people everywhere in the world are created equal. That this is not a merely or simply an American phenomenon.
- [18:36]
Walter Isaacson
It's a good question. And you get around the world, we're going to get to, you know, but let's start with Europe and in France, they knew it was going to help be a founding document. That revolution didn't turn out so well. But Jefferson was supporting it and others that they would try. And even in England, you start seeing. So it's supposed to be somewhat universal, that we are going to have a type of government that, based on the consent of the governed, basically a democratic republic, and based on individual liberty, which sometimes conflicts. But you got to keep that in mind. You got to Say it starts with the individual, that in the state of nature, in this social contract, it's the individual, not the community, not the society, not the government that has rights. It's the individual. But then you have to figure out the notion of common ground so that we can all be part of this consent of the governed, this social contract.
- [19:41]
Interviewer / Host
So it is, in a way, I mean, a document for all the world insofar as it declares, it does push.
- [19:46]
Walter Isaacson
By the mid 20th century century, you have a tipping point where a majority of people around the world were governed by principles you find in the Declaration. Unfortunately, depending on how you define anything, from Russia to China to other things, we're not over 50% still. But it's still the shining aspiration, I think, of most people in this world.
- [20:14]
Interviewer / Host
So, created equal. This is a radical idea, and I want to ask you about their creator in a moment. But just the notion that they were created equal, in what does that equality consist? And what did the founders think they were claiming when they said created equal?
- [20:31]
Walter Isaacson
I think they mean it simply that each person is an individual. They have the rights of their life and their liberty and their pursuit of happiness, and all people equally share those rights. And then we try to find some common ground where we say, what else do we share, like police protection, fire protection, whatever it may be. But I do think that by saying they're created equal, if you have the Commons, it means everybody's entitled to certain things. The defense, the police, maybe good schools, whatever it may be, it does not mean everybody should have the same amount or everybody's going to end up equally. It just means that the rights you have under the government, the rights under the rule of law, nobody's favored.
- [21:25]
Interviewer / Host
So how do you think about the equality? And I have in mind both the notion you mentioned a moment ago that women weren't included, but also, of course, the elephant in the room in any discussion of this particular part is American slavery. So I'm curious how you interpret or think about the all men being created equal and how you make sense of that in the context of American slavery and how they made sense of that in the context.
- [21:50]
Walter Isaacson
Well, they didn't make sense of it. They knew it was an enormous problematic contradiction. Jefferson knew it. In that first draft. He denounces slavery over and over again. He denounces the king for permitting it, and yet he's enslaved 400 people and he doesn't free them, even most of them, when he dies. And so people say, well, how can that be? I say, well, read Shakespeare. People are Human. They're complicated. And the founders all knew, even John Adams, who was an abolitionist, when it comes to that moment where they have to make the compromises, he said, you know, slavery is abhorrent, but it's too hot to touch right now. And it's not as if they didn't get it. They knew this was this huge problem, but they also knew, perhaps incorrectly, that it couldn't have been solved right away. That's something historians have to debate. Did they have to compromise as much as they did? I think you could argue that if you need Jefferson and Virginia in, you have to compromise, and you don't have a United States without Virginia.
- [23:01]
Interviewer / Host
I mean, I like what you said because it lends complexity to an issue that it's fashionable today to dismiss. Namely, it's fashionable to say the Founders were simply hypocrites. And it seems to me as though you're saying, no, no, they were aware. We can say they were wrong, but what they weren't is hidden. They knew what was going on.
- [23:20]
Walter Isaacson
Right. I mean, it depends. You could say, well, they're hypocritical because they knew how bad it was, but they definitely knew what was going on. And what we don't do today very well, when we have to decide in 140 characters if somebody's a hero or a villain or you're on a shout show on Fox or MSNBC and everybody goes to their respective corners, we don't understand, as I said, Shakespeare teaches us that all of our heroes have dark strands to them. Yeah. Henry V killed all the prisoners, the French prisoners, and all of our villains have backstory. I mean, Iago, you know, Shylock, all have backstory. Shakespeare understood. And look, if you've written about Elon Musk, you kind of get it, too. Like, people say, is Elon Musk good or bad? And I go, if I could answer that quickly, it wouldn't have taken me 600 pages. And I think we do ourselves a disservice to forget that these people are human, that they got some things wrong and they knew that they weren't being perfect. And slavery is the big one.
- [24:32]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah. I often tell students that if you must learn from a perfect human being, you will not be learning much.
- [24:38]
Walter Isaacson
Well, yeah, we can. There are a couple, I'm sure, in history. But, yeah. If we try to say our founders were perfect or we try to say they are evil, we are missing what America's narrative is about.
- [24:52]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah. Do you think it's more extraordinary that a group of men who are slaveholders could write the Declaration and therefore appear to be hypocrites, or is it more extreme, extraordinary that a group of men who were slave holders wrote the most enduring document of freedom ever to be written? Do you see the difference? I mean, you can look at that in two different ways. That the miracle.
- [25:13]
Walter Isaacson
I think they knew they were writing an aspirational statement that was even a forcing mechanism that said, here's your mission, each new generation. And yes, they knew that about slavery. They knew. I mean, even the Declaration, even though they cut out some of Jefferson's denunciations in the Declaration, it's clear that they know that slavery is going to have to end.
- [25:38]
Interviewer / Host
And I suppose. Would you agree that this extends its way into the Constitution where the word slave doesn't appear and they cut off?
- [25:45]
Walter Isaacson
Yeah. But they have that compromise that's so discomforting to the modern age. Yeah. If they had gotten it right, we wouldn't have had to have a civil war.
- [25:54]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah. Yeah.
- [25:56]
Walter Isaacson
On the other hand, maybe that's part of the, you know, narratives have to have sometimes tragic events to make things happen. Yeah.
- [26:07]
Interviewer / Host
I asked this only because I was reading and teaching Frederick Douglass recently, and one of the things that he says in a speech about the Constitution is that that there is a cutoff date for the African slave trade in the Constitution is evidence. They knew it was wrong.
- [26:21]
Walter Isaacson
Right. And he. I know, you know, the spirit. And he's wrestling with, is it my Constitution? But he gets it. He knows that they know it's wrong. And he's a lot more subtle thinker than people you find on cable TV
- [26:35]
Interviewer / Host
these days, I'll say that. So let's turn to this phrase, another very rich one in your book, endowed by their Creator. Can you talk about how the framers navigate the religious escape, especially Jefferson, but others, Adams, the kind of religious language and how do they steal it?
- [26:58]
Walter Isaacson
Right, right. As I say, they take out the word sacred, But John Adams puts in the word by their creator, and they're making a balance between the role divine providence plays in our, you know, the grace of our founding, as I said, and rationality and reason. Sometimes he'll try to capture the founders as being, you know, evangelical Christian nation. Jefferson was a deist, and to some extent, Franklin was a deist in Adams, which meant that he believed in the notion of a creator, but not in a very personal God. You know, he could pray to and would intervene and dangle us over a fire like sinners. Or if you prayed hard enough, the saints would figure out how to get a quarterback or whatever. It might be. And instead it was this creator that got things launched. Jefferson's Bible. I mean, it freaks people out.
- [27:58]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah.
- [27:58]
Walter Isaacson
Tell about this is at Monticello, and he took a razor blade and cut out the mentions of the miracles performed by Jesus, but left in Jesus moral teachings because that was his form of deism. So their wrestling with religion is as complex as anything else they wrestle with.
- [28:20]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah. And who is it in your book? Who's asked about. Is it Franklin?
- [28:24]
Walter Isaacson
Franklin, yeah. Well, Franklin was also a deist, and he went to church. He donated to the church building fund of every church built in Philadelphia. At one point, they're building a whole Philadelphia. It's still right next to Independence Hall. It's called the New hall. And it was for visiting preachers of the Great Awakening. And he said he wrote the fundraising document that begins, even if the Mufti of Constantinople is to send somebody here to preach Islam to us and teach us about the Prophet Muhammad, we should offer a pulpit and we should listen, for we must learn something. On his deathbed, he's the largest individual contributor to the McVidreal congregation, the first synagogue in Philadelphia. So when he dies, instead of his minister accompanying him to the grave, all 35 ministers, preachers and priests link arms with the rabbi of the Jews and march with him to the grave. That's the unbelievably special thing they were creating there. There had never been a nation like that in which the right to worship as you saw fit was enshrined in our DNA. I think we sometimes underestimate the beauty of the pluralism and diversity that they wanted to enshrine in which you had a right to your free thoughts and religion, or even being like Franklin, not quite sure. And the quote you're referring to is right when he's dying and he's making all these contributions. Ezra Stiles, who some people here may know was president of Yale, so. But had other virtues. He was a minister, says to Franklin, who's quite religious, says, but do you accept the divinity of Jesus? And Franklin says, you know, throughout my life I've thought about it, and I have no evidence necessarily one way or the other. But now I've quit worrying about it because I'm going to find out soon enough with less effort. So they were not fire and brimstone founders.
- [30:36]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah. Yeah. So they're trying to navigate. You know, this is really interesting. They're trying to navigate reason and religion in a way. And so you'll find later in the Declaration, this notion of the laws of nature and nature's. So you get there, both the laws of nature, which are derived from reason. We're not having to bring God into the thing. And then nature is God too. We do need to bring God into the thing. And so it just seems to me at various places, you know, when I
- [31:01]
Walter Isaacson
was working at CNN and I was doing the Ben Franklin, I got to that part and I'm saying how beautiful it is that they're trying to get this in balance and trying to be inclusive. And then I go in one morning at the ungodly hour of 7am I don't ever believe those good ideas that happened at 7:00am but we had a CNN morning meeting, then we had Crossfire. And so somebody says, we have a great Crossfire tonight. I said, what's that? A Judge Roy Moore in Alabama has put the Ten Commandments on the steps of his courthouse. A federal judge has told him to take it off. He won't. They're going to send him. Everybody's going, great, we have a crossfire. Who are we going to get in favor of the Ten Commandments? Who are we going to get against it? Then I'm going to go back home that night and at night I'd go back to my place and Atlanta. And at 9pm I just turned off the TV and work because that's when Larry King came on. And you know, even for cash money, I was going to watch Larry King. And I'm saying, oh my God, look here. Our founders are using this balance to bring us together. And we as journalists and them as politicians are using the Ten Commandments to divide us. So that's where I truly appreciate the notion of balances. And let me say a word too about balances and what they require. They require a special trait which is humility. You actually have to believe that maybe the other person's opinions are worth listening to. The President gave an amazing speech on humility. And I thought about it in the current context where nobody on tv, nobody in Washington, it seems, has. Benjamin Franklin had a club that he started when he was about 21. It was for the young tradesmen in Philadelphia. It was called the Leather Apron Club for people who opened up their shops in the morning, put on the leather apron and they were middle class shops. And so they made a list of the virtues you need to have if we're going to have a democracy. Industry, honesty. You could read the autobiography and list them all. And he made a chart where he had all 12 of them. And he marked how well he did on each and One week, he sort of is showing it around proudly that he mastered all 12. And a friend at the club says, you know, Franklin, you're missing a virtue you might want to try. And Franklin says, what's that? And the friend says, humility. You might want to try that one for a change. And what I love about Franklin is he puts it on the list. He said, I was never very good at the virtue of humility. I never mastered it. He said, there's a letter to his sister Jane. He said, but I was very good at the pretense of humility. I could fake it very well. Yes, yes, but here's the genius, he said, and I learned that the pretense of humility was as useful to our democracy as the reality of it, because you had to listen to the person next to you and you had to try to find the common ground. And that was the essence of the middle class democracy we were trying to create.
- [34:13]
Interviewer / Host
Right. Yeah. Franklin's autobiography. I recommend it to everyone.
- [34:17]
Walter Isaacson
Yes. Right.
- [34:18]
Interviewer / Host
It's a beautiful book. If we have time at the end, we can discuss it, but let's. I want to move on into the sentence to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is one that's quoted quite often, and I think we could talk about. And I'd be eager to hear what you think life and liberty mean. But of course, the pursuit of happiness is the one that's the money.
- [34:35]
Walter Isaacson
Yeah. It's a wonderful flourish.
- [34:37]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah.
- [34:37]
Walter Isaacson
Well, as you know, it's life, liberty and property. Starting in the 1600s, Locke does life, liberty, and the right of property, that you're allowed to take things in the state of nature if you mix your labor with it, it's your property. And that's essential to a democracy, which is each person has autonomy and can have property if they work for it or whatever. And then George Mason, Jefferson's really close friend, does the Declaration of Rights in Virginia in June of 1776, three weeks before this. And he writes, life, liberty, and property. The question then is, why does Jefferson expand it? Yeah. First of all, what Jefferson is trying to say is that each of us has an individual right to define our purpose. And our mission here, however, fulfills us best. Now, by happiness, they didn't mean, you know, Mardi Gras party. They meant fulfillment the way Plato meant the good life.
- [35:40]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah.
- [35:41]
Walter Isaacson
And he's saying, you know, for some people, it might be accumulating property. Some it might be serving your community. Some it might be a mixture of both. Some it might be serving God. Whatever it may Be that we each have the individual right to define our fulfillment as best suits our inner conscience. And so I think he wanted to expand the pursuit of property just to be the pursuit of happiness, which for him meant the good life fulfillment.
- [36:14]
Interviewer / Host
It's interesting you bring that up because people who are critical of liberalism, I mean small L liberalism, often point to this part of the Declaration as kind of fuel for the fire that there's no limits to liberty. Elaborated. And so that could well mean slave holding.
- [36:30]
Walter Isaacson
You know, by the way, if you want to hear me get decimated by a very smart person, about three or four weeks ago at New Orleans Book Festival, David Brooks interviewed me and he said, I want to start by saying this sentence is the cause of a lot of our problems. And what he said was exactly what you did, which is it enshrines personal liberty as being the individual right. Well, first of all, I think that is true that it is the, you know, Locke explains it to us that you have to start with the autonomy of the individual. You're right. It doesn't make limits on exactly liberty and freedom of the individual, but it does enshrine the notion that I try to explore in the book called Common Ground and the Common Ground, when John Locke says you can take things out of the state of nature, you can take things out of nature, make sure labor with it becomes private property. And he says, you can do that as long as there is as good and enough left in common for others. When I went up to Boston for school, a school north of Yale, I saw the Cambridge Common, I saw Boston Common, I thought, man, that's a nice park. Not as nice as the parks in Dallas, but it's nice. Then I realized it wasn't just a park. It was the common is where the people who didn't have land, known as the commoners, that's how they get the word, can graze their herd, they can bury their dead, they can plant their garden. And so we put things in the common, which in some ways helps make sure everybody has buy in, make sure that individual liberty doesn't go totally running amok. And then we debate and we're having bad debates now. But if you frame the debates we should have, it's based on a simple premise that Franklin, Adams and Jefferson all did, which is what do we put in the common? Not just the land where you can graze. You start with the volunteer fire department in Franklin's case, and the militia, street sweeping corps, defense militia. Then they debate of all things like how much health care should be in the common right. And they have the hospital company of Philadelphia and they make it public, private. And it's kind of balanced where it's sort of some, but it has a private component. If we could frame our debates based on the notion that from John Locke to the present, the main thing that has everybody buy into democracy is that you want the system to survive because there's enough in common. And it's not just a. It's not just a utilitarian way to help democracy stay together. It's a moral premise that each new generation has the opportunity to do better. And so they put K through 8 education into the common. The Academy for the Education of Youth in Philadelphia. I mean, one of my favorite people, as Mrs. Bush knows, as Laura Spelling, who just totally understood the notion that that's key, that good public education has to be in common. Everybody has the opportunity. Those were the debates they had then. And now we're perverting those debates where we shut down the government because we can't figure out some provision in some health care thing. Instead of saying, okay, you may think a little bit more health care should be in the commons, I may think a little bit less. But we least understand there's a framework that's our common ground.
- [40:11]
Windows 11 College Deal Announcer
Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game. Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30 terms@ aka mscollegepc I don't
- [40:41]
Interviewer / Host
disagree with anything you've said, but I do want to get you to add some sharpness to the fact that they say the pursuit of happiness. What they leave out is the word virtue, you know, virtuous happiness. Tocqueville, who's the greatest in my view, commentator on America ever.
- [40:58]
Walter Isaacson
And by the way, you know my feeling on Tokyo.
- [41:00]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah, yeah, I do. He doesn't. Well, and it's justified. He doesn't mention the Declaration in all of democracy in America. But one of the things he says is that this country will have a problem as he's trying to see into the future because they have this notion of the pursuit of happiness, but they don't legislate moral law. So it's not like, you know, there's no. You have to believe this is good
- [41:20]
Walter Isaacson
but when David Brooks asked about that, I said, you want to? You want the government to.
- [41:24]
Interviewer / Host
No, I certainly don't. No.
- [41:26]
Walter Isaacson
Did David Brooks, who was like, well, no, we don't necessarily want the government to tell us our moral law.
- [41:31]
Interviewer / Host
No.
- [41:32]
Walter Isaacson
But here's where two things I think Tocqueville gets wrong, if you don't mind.
- [41:35]
Interviewer / Host
Sure, yeah. I love it.
- [41:36]
Walter Isaacson
One is that Tocqueville is the most quoted and least read person.
- [41:41]
Interviewer / Host
That's correct.
- [41:41]
Walter Isaacson
Nobody. Nobody's ever finished.
- [41:43]
Interviewer / Host
You are right. I know, I know.
- [41:45]
Walter Isaacson
Secondly, he says that there's a tension, a contradiction between the individual liberty, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that's ingrained. And the fact that they keep forming associations, that they come together. Well, Franklin would have argued that's not a contradiction. People who believe strongly in their individual freedoms, they come together for barn raising, for quilting bees, for, you know, creating an academy for the youth. This association building, civic association building is so ingrained in the character from the very beginning. So Tocqueville can't quite figure out, why is it all these rugged individualists keep forming associations to do good for the civic world. It starts with Cotton Mather essays to do good. And I just think Tocqueville doesn't have that feel that Franklin had when he created his Leather Apron Club and said, okay, we all own our shops, we all are trying to make money, but what are we going to form associations for? The association for the Fire Union, association for the Academy of the Education of Youth. I think that it's like a warp and woof of a fabric they weave together. They're not competing strands.
- [43:04]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. My only defense of Tocqueville is that he seems to to see that we don't have to legislate moral law in America precisely because the associations and churches will cultivate the habits without needing to put it in the law.
- [43:16]
Walter Isaacson
Yeah. And that's a problem because he could have been right. And as I guess, I don't know, Hemingway says at the end of Farewell to Arms, wouldn't it be pretty to think so? Yeah, it didn't quite happen that way. I mean, it happened, but we have lost our church.
- [43:33]
Interviewer / Host
That's right.
- [43:34]
Walter Isaacson
We have lost our road. I won't say lost, but the notion that we all go to churches, that my dad, my grandfather's in the Kiwanis Club, that they pledge allegiance, they figure out what they're going to do for the eye hospital. Those associations used to be very dominant when I was growing up. You couldn't ride into a town in Texas without seeing the Post, that tells you that the Kiwanis and the Elks met on Wednesday and Thursday. And I wish we could get back to Community association because that would make Tocqueville right again.
- [44:06]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah, let me. That's fine. I'm not going to. I'm not going to belabor it. We need to provide these people with a good experience.
- [44:14]
Walter Isaacson
Yeah. Yeah.
- [44:17]
Interviewer / Host
Let me turn to you. Turn away from the Declaration for just a moment and turn to you as a writer. You have written some really big books. That's a hard thing to do. I just want to get inside your head. I love asking authors this when they come to the Bush Center. What is your process? Your process for research and writing? Take us into your laboratory. What does that look like?
- [44:39]
Walter Isaacson
Well, President Bush, when we were chatting before, said, do you have researchers? I said, no. I mean, that's like having going fishing and having somebody bait your hook and cast your line. I mean that you lose the fun of it, but you also lose the control. Suddenly you're not reading the notebooks. You're depending on other people doing. So. I love the research. I am not the best historian when I love archival research, but I'm not up there with David McCullough who can just find gold nuggets and archives. And I'm probably not nearly as good of a reporter type journalist as a Woodward or whatever, but I am good at that combination where I can both go into the archives but also talk to people, especially, you know, if the person's still alive or near alive, meaning jobs. Doudna jobs that just died. But I was able to even Einstein. So my process when it comes to a living person is I say, I'm not going to do this book based on interviews. You can say, give me 20 interviews. You can say, give me 50 interviews. That's not what I want. I want to be by your side whenever I want, watching you in action at every meeting. I want to be at dinner. I want to be walking around the rocket factory, or I want to be in the Johnny I've design studio when you're doing the next iPhone. And so I'm a fly on the wall. One of the things we lack today in journalism is people who just want to be an observer and report and tell you the story. I had a mentor that you had a podcast about recently named Walker Percy, the novelist you had. And I never quite knew what we called Uncle Walker did because we go there and he's always drinking bourbon on the dock. And finally his daughter Said, well, he's a writer. I didn't know you could be a writer. And then when I was about 12, the moviegoer came out. I read it, and if I said, uncle Walker, what are you trying to preach? You got some message in this bottle? I don't get it. He said, look, son, there are two types of people come out of Louisiana, preachers and storytellers. He said, for heaven's sake, be a storyteller. This world's got far too many preachers. And so my process is, I'm going to go riding alongside Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna, Elon Musk, and I'm going to tell you the narrative story. And I try to make it storytelling. Yeah. I mean, so many writers these days try to make it their analysis, their opinions, their knee jerk, whatever. The best way to convey messages, to convey meanings, to convey values is let me tell you a story. Those are the six words I have above my computer. Whenever I'm stuck, it's like, let me tell you a story. So if I'm trying to figure out what self evident means, I'll tell you the story of him going and being with, you know, Hobbes. I mean, being with David Hume up in Scotland. So I think we need more storytellers in journalism instead of preachers. And so my role is I ride alongside people, I observe, and I try to tell you the story.
- [47:56]
Interviewer / Host
So we have about six, five and a half minutes left, and I've got two more questions for you. Yeah. So you have to be brief. You've selected some really interesting individuals. You talked about Doudna, Musk, Franklin, you've done the Declaration. You've done. You talked about Einstein. How do you go about thinking about who's next? Like, how do you select those subjects?
- [48:19]
Walter Isaacson
You know, a lot of people write about powerful people and presidents, a lot of people. And they say, oh, you write about genius, you write about smart people. Look, I learned a long time ago, right, when I went up to college that there are a lot of smart people and there are a dime a dozen, and they don't generally amount to much. What matters is being innovative, having some wisdom, and having some imagination. So I look for people who think out of the box and have some imagination, and they help make the leaps forward that are innovation.
- [48:50]
Interviewer / Host
And you're working on one now.
- [48:52]
Walter Isaacson
Well, Marie Curie. Okay, because. Enough. We can announce it. Yeah, well, it's. I don't think anybody's going to rush out and try to scoop me on. Marie Curie. You know, we kind of make her into this saint, like Saint Joan or something. But nobody knows what she actually did.
- [49:12]
Interviewer / Host
Yeah.
- [49:13]
Walter Isaacson
Fortunately, we have 70 volumes of her notebooks that used to be so radioactive you couldn't touch them, but now you can.
- [49:19]
Interviewer / Host
Literally radioactive.
- [49:20]
Walter Isaacson
Because they were in her lab. And she discovers induced radioactivity late in life. But it's.
- [49:27]
Interviewer / Host
Did you touch them?
- [49:29]
Walter Isaacson
You have gloves? You can wear a shield. Yeah, now you can. But I think that she is fascinating partly because. I'll just tell you a story. As I would say, November, real quick, November 1911. She's up in Brussels with her best friend Einstein and Paul Langevin, who was her late husband's favorite student. And she's now having an affair with Langevin. And the cable says, you've won your second Nobel Prize. Letter to follow. At that same day, the news of her affair with Langevin breaks because Madame Langevin found the letters in their love ness. It's all over the tabloids. Swedish Academy says it's best if you don't come accept the Nobel. And she says, if I were a man, you wouldn't have said that. My private life has nothing to do with my science. And she goes to Stockholm. Her science at that point is so unbelievably brilliant. She's discovered that the nucleus of the atomic radiates. She came up with the name radioactivity, does particles and stuff. The only thing she got wrong in that sentence is that her personal life and her professional life were really interwoven with the same traits. That's what biographers do. We try to show how the personal affects the work.
- [50:54]
Interviewer / Host
What do you want? You know, we talked a lot about the Declaration. It's America at 250. We were talking backstage about the. This. I'm curious what you think the folks in this room should carry with them about the meaning of the Declaration. They're not scholars on it. What is the. You know, what should the American people do?
- [51:09]
Walter Isaacson
It's our mission statement. We're at 250th, our birthday. I left home this morning. My wife says, please tell President Bush we miss him.
- [51:18]
Interviewer / Host
Okay.
- [51:18]
Walter Isaacson
It's because. And this is serious. I'm totally serious. I get choked up about this. There people who have both empathy, compassion, humility, but firmness and principle and do that to bring us together. And there are people all over the map, and I'm not making a big political statement here, but who seem to want to divide us and not bring us together. It's our 250th. Even if you've got an uncle from Bugaloosa that you can't stand or whatever. For the birthday party, you say, all right, we're all going to sit at the same table. We're going to remember what we're grateful for. We're going to try to heal. As a nation, we should use this birthday to remember our common values.
- [52:11]
Interviewer / Host
Walter Isaacson, thank you so much for joining us.
- [52:15]
Walter Isaacson
Thank you, Shiloh. Thank you.
- [52:17]
Interviewer / Host
Thank y'.
- [52:17]
Walter Isaacson
All.
- [52:19]
Columbia Omnishade Announcer
You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer@columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever.