Loading summary
Transcript45 lines
- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [00:22]
Commercial Announcer
of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for a 12 month plan. Required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms.
- [00:37]
Josh Hammer
So the big weekend is finally here. The United States of America is 250 years old. My goodness gracious. Has been a countdown for years now. And we're going to have a wide ranging and highly entertaining, I am sure conversation with someone who knows a thing or two about what it is that we are celebrating in this most glorious weekend. That is a dear friend of the show. That is Lee Habib. So Lee Habib is, among other things, the host of the wildly popular and national syndicated program Our American Stories. He is the founder and co creator of the Laura Ingraham show and he is also a great friend of the Josh Ammer Show. So Lee, we really appreciate you taking some time especially on this most important of weekends. I want to set the scene here. So for those who are just listening, you probably can see that Lee's actually sitting in front of a painting from the late 18th century, around the time of the American founding, the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which we are celebrating this weekend, the time of the ratification the Constitution. Constitution. But Lee, our story, and you are nothing if not a storyteller, our story actually begins quite a bit prior to 1776 or 1787, the date of the drafting of the Constitution. The story really begins with the crossing of the Atlantic on the Mayflower itself. Tell us a little bit about how you see the origins of this story that is now 250 years old.
- [01:54]
Lee Habib
Well, I would just ask people to read the Mayflower Compact on the day of over the celebration of this great document, the Declaration of Independence. There was one that preceded it and it's old sort of English language. You have to sort of deconstruct it but read it aloud. It's really beautiful. And moreover, when these pilgrims came here, what they were escaping in the end was not just religious persecution. They moved around and found some comfort. But in Amsterdam, it's still they were full fighting a culture that they didn't want to fight anymore. So they were accepted. But it's one thing to be accepted, but if you're accepted, but all around you are attacks on your faith, well, then you've had enough. And you need to start your own country, your own world, right. Your own religious experience. And that's actually what happened. Unfettered by the outside world, by the way, kind of amusing in some levels because, Josh, you're an Old Testament guy, I'm an old and New Testament guy. And no matter what we do, we can't run away from ourselves, right? I mean, in the end, we can't escape our own sinful nature. And what's interesting is as, as this experiment begins, they also experiment with what I call Christian utopianism. They decide on community property. And this, of course, has terrible consequences. And I, you know what I love doing? And we do this regularly on our show. It's not me speaking. It's some of the best scholars, writers, historians, and this guy in 1993. And every once in a while I'll read a thing OR 2. In 1993, in the Yale Law Journal, of all place, there was an article called Property in Land by Professor Robert Ellicson. And he noted that 65% of the 108 members of the initial party died within the first year because of socialism. Repeat that. That's a huge number. And during the winter of 1609, the colony's population, get this, Josh, it drops from 500 to 60.
- [03:53]
Josh Hammer
Wow.
- [03:53]
Lee Habib
Socialism really didn't work. And he added to this, he said to the puzzlement, I'm quoting him, to the puzzlement of the starving settlers shirked their duties of catching fish and growing food. The most enduring image, he said, of both Plymouth and Jamestown was when. When. When the inhabitants were found bowling on the daily ground rather than working. So what it instilled in these colonists, and this is both Plymouth and Jamestown, by the way, because they tried this experiment too, was idleness. Socialism created idleness. What a news flash, right, Josh? And so this is the reality. And then when Branford instates private property, this is what Bradford writes in his memoir. He says, this has been a very good success for it made all hands industrious. How about that? And then, I love the language at the end. This experience was had in this common course and condition tried sundry years. And then amongst the godly and sober men may well convince of the vanity and conceit of Plato's and other ancients that to taking away of Property and bringing into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing. So he's ripping at Plato, he's ripping at all the people who've ever authored that private property is bad. And he closes this as if these men were wiser than God. For this community was found to breed confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to the benefit of the community and themselves. And this was his final critique of socialism. And so, you know, we should write this little letter to Mandami and send that over to all of his friends and let him know we've tried this before in its purest form. I mean, in its purest unadulterated form, with new idealists who crossed an ocean. Josh, that's the amazing thing. These weren't lazy folks. They crossed an ocean. But once there was no private property, there was no self interest. Everything eviscerated, all that great utopianism, shattered death. And even while people were dying, they were bowling.
- [06:05]
Josh Hammer
You know, there's so much to unpack there. And again, folks, LE Habib is the host of, among other things, the wildly popular Tinder program, Our American Stories. You know, Lee, on this program we actually talk about the Pilgrims, probably more than virtually any other program out there for a few reasons, one of which you mentioned William Bradford. He was the captain of the Mayflower and one of the earliest governors of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Once the Pilgrims landed ashore. William Bradford was a great student and admirer of the ancient Hebrews, of the ancient Israelites. He actually spoke about a thousand words of Hebrew himself. He was a student of an Old English Hebraicist, which is kind of an outdated term, referred to a Christian scholar who was a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew language and the Bible more generally. And there was some chatter in the Mayflower even about actually adopting Hebrew as the language upon landing in Massachusetts, it didn't happen. To be clear, you and I are speaking English today, not speaking Hebrew. But they envision themselves in many ways as the modern day equivalent of the Israelites fleeing oppression from, from Pharaoh in Egypt. They envision the Atlantic Ocean as being a bit of a wider Red Sea, if you will. And I say all that because the notion of the Mayflower compact, this compact, while clearly a lot of it was, was based in utopianism and a lot of horrific economic theory that has never worked anywhere it's ever been tried. There is something there about this notion of a covenant, which is a very distinct Hebrew Bible Old Testament concept. And we see that certainly in the Declaration of Independence, which we're Celebrating this weekend. This notion of all these men signing their lives, their fortune, their sacred honor, that's definitely a covenant with posterity, with previous generations, and certainly the Constitution itself. This notion of we the people, the very first three words of the preambled Constitution, this Mayflower compact notion of covenant is a bit deeper. I'm kind of hoping maybe if you, if you could just elaborate perhaps on that a little bit.
- [07:55]
Lee Habib
Well, no, I mean this is, this is the core of the American spirit. You know, Tocqueville comes here and I believe that's what he sees. These mini covenants, right? He marvels at these mini covenants. What's a little local church but a mini covenant? What's the VFW hall but a mini covenant? And how we organized it stems from that original idea of how to organize. Of course they experimented, but that's what small groups do, they experiment. That's what the thirteen colonies did when they became thirteen states. They experimented. That's why the, that's why we wanted all federal power to devolve down to that smaller entity. Because in the end that sovereign, that individual sovereign and the contract, and I really believe these are quasi contracts we make as a community. How are we going to educate our kids? Who's responsible for what? And we organize. Each state formed a constitution. So this idea of covenantal America, I think cuts right to the core. And even till today, I mean, we know about contract rights. You and I are both law geeks. And the importance of the right of contract and the ability to honor and enforce contracts. I think this distinguishes us from half the world. I mean, you can't do business in a place where the right to contract means nothing. I had a bunch of friends when the wall fell who raced to the Soviet Union thinking the world's my oyster. We're going to do business, we're going to sell cars. They were in the car business. And then they realized that the contract meant nothing. It meant nothing. They talked about the contract as the investors, their co investors in Russia. Their partners stole their money. And I mean, didn't steal a little bit. Joss stole a lot. So there's both covenantial nature of this country, plus the idea of rule of law and the respectful law as long as it's in comportment with God's law. Because that's another overriding feature is, well, what happens when man's law is not in comportment with God's law? And we learned about that and I think the finest essay of the 20th century let us from a Birmingham jail, where Martin Luther King addresses the white Southern Baptist Church leaders who are telling Martin, slow down. But moreover, they were telling him, how dare you break the law? What kind of an example are you setting? Render unto Caesar's. What is Caesar's and what God was. God's. What part of this don't you understand? And Martin Luther King's reply was, I'm here to follow man's law, God's law, not man's. And when man's comes in violation of God's, I'm going to violate it. So both these covenantal people, these contract rights people, the property rights people, and then on top of that rule of law, I think these are the killer apps of America, of American life, that have made America America. And I might add, free speech is a killer app. And I think these, these killer applications have, have done this country well. And there have been attacks from the Progressives during the Wilsonian era, Teddy Roosevelt. So these attacks have been among us early. And as I just alluded to all the way back to the Mayflower Compact, people have been trying to come up with their own killer apps. And boy, socialism is a literal killer app. It's a literal killer app.
- [11:04]
Josh Hammer
You know, Lee, it seems to me that a lot of folks think of the Declaration, think of the American founding, and they have this image of it as being conceived in pure European Enlightenment theory. They see the natural rights theory, which is clearly right there in the Declaration. They see some of the other Founders writings and they think that this is basically just the full experiment of Lockean liberalism or perhaps Continental European philosophy. And I'm not trying to downplay that. I'm definitely not trying to downplay that. Undoubtedly Locke's ideas inspired Jefferson in the Declaration, undoubtedly you had Montesquieu, perhaps more than anyone of the French lineman thinkers who clearly, clearly deeply inspired the writers of the Federalist Papers, Madison, Jay and Hamilton, many of the Scotch Lima thinkers too, folks like Hume. So I'm not downplaying that, but to kind of build up a bit of a zenith of our opening conversation here. It seems to me that what made the United States different than all the other European era contemporaneous projects that tried to reinvent themselves in the name of the Zeitgeist Enlightenment, what made America different was that it was not just that, it was also grounded in the Bible, it was truly grounded in Scripture, it was truly grounded in covenant and all of these concepts that you and I have been talking about here, private property as well. By the way, a lot of folks think that Private property was essentially created by Adam Smith. Nonsense. There are entire tractates of the Talmud, the oral Torah. In Judaism. There are entire tractates about divvying up private property. Anyway, you and I could go on. And we are going to go on after a very short commercial break. We're going to bring back Lehabib after a very short break. Folks. Stay with us. We will be right back with much more with Lehab, host of Our American Stories.
- [12:42]
Commercial Announcer
When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there is no room for slowdowns. With Grainger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place. So nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [13:16]
Josh Hammer
Welcome back and Happy America 250 to all of you. We are thrilled to welcome back the program Lee Habib, dear friend of the Josh Hammer show and host of our American Stories, which you can hear from sea to shining sea. So Lee, right before the break, I just threw a lot out there. Essentially our that what makes America different is not necessarily the fact that we have enlightenment European philosophy because I think a lot of other countries had that. I think what really makes America different, dare I say unique, dare I say exceptional, at the risk of incurring the wrath of those who hate this country. I think what makes us really unique and exceptional is that we have this biblical spine. And I'm curious for your take on that.
- [13:49]
Lee Habib
Well, I think that's true and I think it's in a deepest sense still true, actually. I mean, if you think about the core of the American experience. Look, I love the idea of the establishment clause. This means that no one religion or one sect of a religion should dominate. And I think we who love the Lord and love God always have to remember that establishment clause is important. But the free exercise clause, dear goodness, it's the heart of self governance. I mean, how do a people self govern, Josh, if they don't have a governor? And that is, that's God. And it doesn't mean that there aren't good atheists amongst us and it doesn't mean there aren't good agnostics among us. But what it does mean is you go all the way back to the literature. You can watch the Great Awakening, which is a part of a terrific book called the Master and the Printer. And we Saw what, what even Ben Franklin saw and understood, which was that. And, and many of our deistic founders knew that without God and without the, the Bible, this country had no shot. Because how do you, how do you have a moral people? What's the moral framework for self governance? And the key word in self governance is the word self. So it's, it's hard to self govern without answerable and accountable nature or God of nature and a God bigger than nature, our God, and an actual God, a creator to hold accountable to, to answer to. And this happens, of course, in our churches and our synagogues. And without that, this populace, and particularly early Americans, this was the foundation of their life. All of the colleges were started as divinity schools. Harvard was a divinity school, Yale was a divinity school, King's College. Columbia was a divin, a divinity school. And why Georgetown a divinity school? Why? To train up the real leaders of the country, the future leaders. You know, Josh, we both share a friend in Dennis Prager, and we pray for him all the time that a miracle will happen in Dennis's life. But in large measure, Dennis is experiencing remarkable things, even in his current state of mostly real paralysis. But I told him a story once about, and I always like to see if I can make Dennis Prager laugh. And I said, you know, I heard from a Rabb once that he said, tell Dennis this story. Up until the 1920s, every Catholic family and every Jewish family had seven, eight, 10 kids. That was just normal. Be fruitful and multiply was a command. Right. You just did it. You didn't say, can I afford the next kid? Can I afford the third kid? You just kept multiplying and God would provide. This was just understood, right? And so, and so he said, something strange happened as materialism took, took it took foot in America by the 30s and the 40s, 1930s, and then you started to hear Jewish families being a rabbi used to be the highest status, but by the 1930s or 40s, it was, my son's a doctor, my son's a lawyer. And he said, you tell Dennis when the, when, when the, when the rabbis became doctors, the Jews got sick.
- [16:52]
Josh Hammer
Wow.
- [16:53]
Lee Habib
And I think this is what America grapples with. Thank goodness. There's a part of us always going against the worst instincts of capitalism, which is that we numbers that were just digits and were not. And this can be the crushing effect of capitalism on the human soul. Solzhenitsyn wrote about this. But what gives heart and life to capitalism is goodness, is human decency. And that goodness and decency springs from the Torah and from the New Testament. That puts that at the heart of the matter. How we treat our people, how we treat our neighbors, and how we love God by loving each other other. And love is at the heart of the Old and the New Testament. And this is the part everyone forgets. These are rules to protect us, not rules to inhibit us. And these rules give us freedom and the property.
- [17:43]
Ryan Reynolds
Right.
- [17:43]
Lee Habib
Oh my goodness. Thou shall not steal.
- [17:45]
Josh Hammer
Right, Exactly.
- [17:46]
Lee Habib
The implicit part of that is that private property is allowed. And in the New Testament we have the parable of the tenants. And who are the bad guys in that parable? Not the landlord. The tenants were the bad guy. They wanted to kill the landlord and steal his property. And Jesus was saying, hey you renters, be good renters. Hey you owners, be good owners. And I think good capitalists win over time. The people who treat their employees well, the people who treat their customers well, and the capitalists who try and steal their way to greatness, they don't win. The great capitalists serve. And in the end, a Christian nation and a Judeo Christian nation rewards and thinks about constantly this idea of being good and what is evil. And this occupied Dennis Prager's mind, as he told me, from the time he was like eight. And it occupies a lot of Americans minds because we're in church on Sundays, we're in synagogues on Saturday. And what is the rabbi and the priest or the pastor supposed to do? Challenge us. Challenge us to be better representatives of God. No small thing to do. And only in America is this religious spirit. Well, maybe Africa. I mean Africa is exploding. It is right now. So you're seeing something happening in Africa. By the way, I have friends who are missionaries in China and they said it's exploding in China. You just can't see it. It's in basements everywhere. And in amidst persecution is when you see some of the greatest rises. Look, I'm telling a Jewish person about Persecut and how it brings you closer to your God. Of course it does. And this is the point of so many stories. We wander from God and then through the suffering we get closer to God. And, and, and so this is the story of America. And this is what astonished Tocqueville when he came here. He was astonished at the way we did church. It wasn't top down Anglican. Sit down you supplicants. It was all these different denominations forming just as the pilgrims did as a sect. We want to do it our way and we want to worship our way. And God bless the other Guys who are worshiping their way, we'll leave them alone. We want to do it our way. And the degree to which we did this spontaneously, voluntarily, and the energy and the activity that this occupied in our lives, this wasn't a little like appetizer in American life. Tocqueville saw us actually trying to live it. And by the way, we all fall short. We're all, in the end, hypocrites of the standard, but trying to live up to the promise of God. Look, Moses failed, right? He killed the guy and he looked around first, right? He looked around before he killed a guy. And so even our best have fallen. But yet that's who we are. We want to try and be our best. That's why we go into the Torah. That's why we go into the New Testament. We see ourselves the good, the bad, the ugly, forever stories relevant 2000 years ago, relevant 2000 years from now. And it's still the best selling book in America every year. I promise you. It's not the bestselling book in France, it's not the Bible's not a bestseller there, but it is here and it is in Africa. And that gives me hope for Africa, if they can get their secular institutions to align with their Christian. And this is what was really remarkable about America, that the Constitution, which is a secular document, it has some sacred elements in it, but it lined up with Judeo Christian values all the way. All the way, yeah.
- [21:20]
Josh Hammer
The Constitution fundamentally aligns with human nature. It aligns with the notion that we understand, as Madison put it in federalist number 51, that men are not angels, and therefore we need this separation of powers, constructs. Whereas Madison puts it in the same essay, ambition shall be made to counteract ambition. So there are all these keen insights about human nature and about man's instincts, man's instincts which go all the way back to the Garden of Eden. All of this is reflected in the Constitution itself. But you're right that it's not explicitly there. Another thing that you said there that just struck out to me, our mutual friend Dennis. I actually believe it was Dennis who I learned this from. It's a very keen insight. It's actually not just thou shalt not steal that socialism violates, it's also the tenth commandment, thou shalt not covet. Because I think covetousness is actually right there, also implicit in socialism as well. And even if capitalism is, let's say it's not explicitly delineated in Adam Smith like terms in Scripture, it is heavily, heavily intimated at. And among the other things, I think that is implicit in later capitalist thinking. Let's think about Hayek, Hayek's notion of price theory. Price theory is predicated upon a series of arm's length transactions that are not regulated there. Well, to have these arms length transactions you need a people, you need a polity that believe at some basic level in the interdependent mutual bonds of loyalty that consists and cohere into a nation in the first place. There, what is that? Oh yeah, there's that concept of covenant again. So this entire notion of society, of the common wheel of covenant, you need that. It is absolutely indispensable in order for capitalism to succeed. This is the entire reason that biblical values and the free market, they go hand in hand. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Dennis Prager, all these great minds have said so many times over the years. Folks, unfortunately we'll have to go to another quick break, but on the other side of this other quick break, we're going to be joined once again by our friend Lee Habib to continue this conversation. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
- [23:18]
Grainger Commercial Announcer
Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24, 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [23:52]
Josh Hammer
Welcome back. And we are joined by Lee Habib, our friend here on the Josh Hammers Show. Lee is host of Our American Stories, which you can hear from C to Shining Sea. So Lee, above all, this is Declaration weekend. That is why it is July 4th. After all, we are celebrating the founding more generally, but perhaps Declaration in particular. Jefferson is the lead author of the Declaration. There are a lot of other great men who signed their names, their fortune, their sacred honor to that document. Tell us about some of the other lesser known figures from the Declaration era. There a name that perhaps the median listener, viewer of the show might not be familiar with. But you're nothing if not storyteller, Lee. I'm sure you have some insights as to some of the other lesser known figures and what they were doing around that time.
- [24:35]
Lee Habib
Well, you know, there's look, I think that Whitefield is now a known figure and that's the pastor who was running around the country talking about human freedom, but he was doing something much more important. And it wasn't just him. There were several other pastors who had given sermons about this ability to disobey with the crown. You see what was happening in religious circles prior to this ferment around the Declaration was religious people, the congregants were basically taught, look, you may not like the British, but God says you gotta just obey. Sorry you don't always have good rulers. And so it took a guy named Mayhew his couple of his sermons and people don't know it, but when you'll read about his sermons on subservience and who to be subservient to. And really as I talked about with Martin Luther King, that when the government collides with, with God's rule, and if we have to now pray to a king, not to a God, then we're allowed to go into rebellion against the government. And so without that preaching of Whitfield and Mayo, I don't think the Declaration is possible because you would have had a bunch of. Look, as it was, only a third of Americans really in the beginning wanted to be members of the, of the cause, take up arms. A third were with the British, a third were with the Americans. And I think a third were, as always, hiding under their table, hoping for things to pass and real proof of this war inside America. Was the war inside Ben Franklin's house. His adopted son, his, his illegitimate son. And by the way, men didn't raise illegitimate children then, but Ben Franklin did. That picture of Franklin with the kite, that's William. He took William to England. He was trying to stop the war. He was trying to find some compromise. Finally, he sided with the Patriots. But he wrote to his son who was the royal governor of New Jersey, and he said, son, son, you have to resign your commission. You've got to come and join the Patriots cause or I can't help you. And the son writes to the father and goes, look, you better not sign the Declaration. It's an act of treason and the British are going to kill you and I'm going to be leading the charge. These two men never spoke again. Franklin had his son thrown into the Litchfield gal, the worst prison in America, for two years. His son went back to New York to try and lead a rebellion. Ended up exiling to London. The father and son would never speak again. Benjamin Franklin disowned William. So when people tell me that America's never been more divided, well, that was Our first Civil War. Because, let's go. To face reality, New York, if you were a patriot, was not an easy place to live, right? And families got divided over this. Soldiers got divided over this, just as they did in the second Civil War. But I've always told people the first Civil War was also our Revolutionary War because boy, did it pit American family against American family. And even inside the family, a father against a son, as in Ben Franklin's case.
- [27:32]
Josh Hammer
You know, yet another parallel, by the way, to the Bible. I couldn't help but think of it as you were speaking there, Lee. So this notion that roughly 1/3 of Americans back then side with the Patriots, One third, The Brits, one third were just ducking and cowering, essentially. It reminds me of what Jewish tradition teaches about the exodus from Egypt, which is that roughly only 20% of Jews actually left with Moses. Roughly 80% actually stayed behind. It makes you wonder, what the heck are they possibly thinking? I mean, you have this guy here who is literally working with God to induce miracles and the 10 plagues and all this. So it makes you think what they're thinking. I oftentimes think, actually, would I have had the courage or my convictions to actually side with the Patriots?
- [28:11]
Lee Habib
It's easy for us to wonder, but we have to look at parallels in our life and see what we were willing, what price we were willing to pay for freedom. On the Christian side, Bonhoeffer termed the coin or the phrase cheap grace. To do real things that God demands of us requires not only great faith, but a cost. And by the way, Dennis Prager always reminded me, freedom isn't natural. Freedom's unnatural. Slavery's natural. And even the 20% that left were whining and complaining and thinking about coming back to three hots and a cot. Right? Three square meals. I know what I got. The devil I know is better than the devil. I don't. Again, human nature. Freedom is hard. It's hard. So everybody says, I want to be free. Nah, I don't know. I think most. A lot of people don't want to be free. They claim to want to be free. But the price of freedom and the price of obedience to God all through the Bible, Old and New Testament is powerful. And look, you know how the disciples ended up murdered for preaching the gospel. So it doesn't end well all through the Old and New Testament for people who are not fully obedient to God. And even again, Moses didn't get to see the promised land.
- [29:25]
Josh Hammer
That's right.
- [29:26]
Lee Habib
Right, because of a. Because he just. He wasn't fully obedient. That murder cost him, Cost him a lot.
- [29:32]
Josh Hammer
Yeah. He also didn't listen to God when God told him to tap the rock for the water. It's hotly debated, as you can imagine, by the rabbis for millennia as to whether or not this was the right decision. But it's God. So who are we ultimately to judge?
- [29:43]
Lee Habib
Right?
- [29:43]
Josh Hammer
But you're totally right. I mean, in our annual cycle of the, of the reading of the Torah, we are now well into the book of Numbers. So we had Parsha Korach a few weeks ago, which is the uprising, the rebellion of Korach against Moses leadership. And Korach famously refers to Egypt as the land of milk and honey, which is just a mind blowing thing to say there. But you can imagine easily how a lot of folks, they would have seen Thomas Paine running around in the Philadelphia Commons, passing around common sense, being and saying, what the heck are you doing, bro? What are you thinking? Here we have it pretty good here. We're part of the British Empire. So it's one of these just amazing quandaries that you have to try to, as to what you would have done. And I'll be very candid and honest with the listener. Viewers, I don't know. And I think frankly that if you know what you would have done, if you're listening, viewing, then you're probably not being honest with yourself, because you're not. It's a very, very difficult thing. Lee, I want to ask you a related question. We were talking about some of the lesser known signees of the Declaration of Independence. I want to ask you just about the American founding generation more generally, which you and I could talk about for literally days or weeks. But give us one underappreciated founding father, not necessarily a signing of declaration, someone who there in 1787, who was there in the first second Congress, one of the early statesmen who is underappreciated and who at this time, 250 years into this great experiment probably should get a little bit more of the credit that he or she deserves.
- [31:10]
Lee Habib
You know, I would do more than just the person because I think everyone knows his name. But there was a thing he did, there was an act he performed, and I think it set in motion the definition of who we'd become. You know, the young John Adams grew up in Banetree, Massachusetts, small town. His father was a farmer, no man of means, but he gets a scholarship to Harvard and he finds out that he's probably not going to make a good pastor, but he is going to make a good lawyer. And back in that day, you didn't finish college and go to law school because there were no law schools. So he goes to Boston, the apprentices for years. Then he finally passes the bar and he's building up a pretty good legal practice. And then the Boston massacre happens. And nobody would defend the redcoats. Nobody. And so Adams, who was a highfalutin orator, always talking about due process and civil rights long before there were such notions really around the world. But the right to self defense was a British notion. And he said, we, if we are to be the country we're going to become, we can't do trial by mob. I'll defend the redcoats. And he did, at great cost. His wife had to move out of the house, he lost half his law practice. But here's what he did. He not only defended the redcoats, it turns out that Paul Revere painting of the British opening fire on the, on the, the poor patrons of bars. Not what happened. The patrons came out of a bar because they heard a fire sign, a signal. They rushed out and they were drunk and there were some sentries there and they started pelting with ice and started charging him. The British acted in self defense. And John Adams, I mean what he, what he said in the beginning of his opening statement is so powerful, I'm going to read it. Because he says to the, the, the, the American jurors in Boston. So imagine he's, he's in Boston. They all want to see these guys hang, even the jurors. Who knows what voir dire was like, right? I don't even want to know. But here's what he says. He opens up by saying facts are stubborn things. And whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. Nor is the law less stable than the fact. If an assault was made to endanger these men's lives, the law is clear. They had a right to kill in their own self defense. He went on to later lecture them saying, he says the sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers to dry up, because there was a mob in Boston on 5 March that attacked a party of soldiers. He said no. Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservatives of peace. So he attacked the redcoats for what their task was.
- [33:58]
Josh Hammer
So I wanted to go to a quick break here, but folks, we're gonna come back with much more with Lee Habib and continue this story of John Adams and Boss Massacre as well. Stay with us for much more with Lee Habib. Welcome back. And we continue our conversation with Lee Habib, host of our American stories. So, Lee, before the break, I had to cut you off. You were finishing telling us a story of John Adams and his robust defense of due process, among other things, in his defense of the Boston Massacre, the British soldiers therein. So continue that story if you want.
- [34:27]
Lee Habib
Yeah. He essentially is telling the American jurors, not just in Boston, but through the whole country, that we don't do mob rules, rule that we do trial by facts and evidence. And he risked everything to do it. And that to me was the heart and soul of the American Revolution because it would have been so easy for us to send into French Revolution French revolutionary style and rhetoric. And these were reasoned men who understood and he quotes, by the way, when he leaves his closing statement, he actually quotes Algernon Sitting Sidney, who's the great English political and legal theorist. So there he is, paying tribute to the British past, which of course, we bring a lot of British features to our country. So it's not as if we abandoned everything. We just had our own version, especially the independent executive branch. Right. And the Senate, which is not honorific and a true court, that's a lifetime court appointment. And so we just tweaked the British system so it wasn't as if we were punching the British in the face and saying, well, screw off. It's we're going to adopt many of your features, but we're going to make some our own. And this to me was John Adams at his best, John Adams at his most dangerous, but also at his most beautiful because he risked every he risked, literally risked his law practice and his reputation to defend liberty. And I have a feeling that had a lot to do with his high his regard with many because he was a tough guy to deal with as a personality. But if you can do things like this, you can get away with stuff. Stuff.
- [35:59]
Josh Hammer
You know, I'm a lawyer by background, Lee, much like you, and not a historian. But on that note, I will say that my reading of the American founding has always been that this was not a radical, naked, heaven forbid, French Revolution esque activity. They were not starting from nothing. They were trying to improve upon that which they inherited. And even more specifically, if you actually read the text of declaration, and by the way, this is a great weekend to do it, actually read the entire thing, not just those iconic first three or four paragraphs actually read the entire thing. What they're actually complaining about is that the Crown has infringed upon their rights as Englishmen. So this is actually a compelling argument that Adams, J. Hamilton, especially the men who would emerge as the Federalist Party, the Jeffersonian wings, a little different, but at least this Adams, Hamilton, J. Washington founding really thought of themselves, I think as trying to restore their common law, indeed natural law rights under the English Bill of Rights of 1688. The Natural Law tradition, the English common law law, and ultimately of course objective truth and Scripture itself there. So that's been my understanding of the American Founding. I think of that as being more historically accurate than this notion this was just a revolution out of nothing or anything of that nature as well. Is that more or less how you see it?
- [37:18]
Lee Habib
Look, read the documents and read the Federalist Papers. You read the Federalist Papers and that notion is completely disabused, as you know. And these are not radicals at all all. In fact, if anything, they were radical in the sense that they wanted to just really figure out how to disperse power, how to make a government that had the people be sovereign but yet have a government that functioned because the Articles of Confederation did not. So they were also trying to cure a problem, right? The Articles of Confederation were not going to last. They didn't last. They couldn't even pay off the soldiers. Right. So we needed some mechanism. And this is what the Constitution did. It solved the problem. It was filled with compromises. It's not some, some, it's not some document from a mountaintop. It's just turned out that those compromises, many of them, particularly the big one about state power and two senators per state, have ended up being a terrific redeeming feature. And I think that's an accident, right? Because you couldn't have known. I don't think they knew 50 states. That two state solution was a comp. Was a New Jersey compromise. It wouldn't have gotten it passed without it. But thank goodness that compromise has kept this country together. It was a wonderful compromise and I don't think it was planned from the beginning. Right. It was the result of negotiations between rural and urban and between small states and big states. By the way, does that sound like a fight we're still having? Of course it does. And that's why some in the big cities, they want the end of federalism and they want the end of, you know, proportional representation in the Senate and why they want to court back, because they don't like the Constitution. And the compromises. So, you know, you either love the Constitution, and if you want to change it, we've done it 17 times, we can do it in 18th, or, you know, you can just, you know, throw in six more justices and change the country forever. And I can't believe that we're even talking about something like that. And the only time it's ever happened before was during Roosevelt's administration. Right. And he served four terms. Washington only served two. And I think FDR would have said served 10 terms if he could have. And what did he do when the New Deal policies didn't go through? Well, Roosevelt wanted to pack the court. He thought this court was a nuisance. Right. And so what we learn when we celebrate the fourth is, you know, the Declaration is what we celebrate. In two years, we'll have another big party for the Constitution. And one day, I'd love to talk to you about the Declaration of Cultural Independence, because Ralph Waldo Emerson writes an essay in 1837 saying, we have this great vibrant country, but our army, it. We're relying on the muses of Europe. Where are our voices? And from that would spring Melville and Mark Twain and rock and roll and blues and country music, and not soccer, but football and not cricket, but baseball and this thing called basketball, which is American jazz. And so America then learned to have its own voice. We got our own politics, but then we had to develop our own voice. And that's one of my favorite stories we've ever done. This critic in Europe had said, who would ever go to an American play or an American music hall? Who would think of such. They saw us as vile rubble. And now they're exporting our move. They're importing our movies, our music, and our sports. And that's the true dynamism of this great country. The Declaration of Independence and intellectual property rights allowed our artists, our athletes, and our culture to move into extended territories and connect directly to the people, because our art and our culture comes from the people. This is very powerful. Part of the story of our Declaration of Independence is it allowed us to be free in all respects, to say and write and sing what we want without recourse, and to own the intellectual property rights of whatever we do and pass them along to someone else so that the great writer of Georgia on My Mind, Hoagie Carmichael, could pass that song along to a black guy from the south named Ray Charles who was blind and turned it into a. A hit like only in America are those kinds of things possible. That kind of not only transfer of intellectual Property, but making the world a more beautiful and better place because of those intellectual property rights. That all comes from that founding document. That discussion that started with that document led to the Constitution. And there's the patent right, right in Article 1.
- [41:31]
Josh Hammer
Oh, yeah, there it is.
- [41:32]
Lee Habib
And there's the Fifth Amendment with that right to property. And it's easy to impute property rights from right to property and intellectual property rights. So. And this, I mean, my goodness, intellectual property rights on software, on all the amazing developments. This is why we're the greatest country in the world. We really care about these things differently. And we get back to thou shall not steal. Why create something? Why write a song if someone's gonna steal it?
- [42:00]
Josh Hammer
You know, intellectual property is right there in Article 1, Section 8, as you say, it is an enumerated power of Congress to make those laws. This, yet again, Lee, is the genius of our founders. I want to ask you one question as we unfortunately get ready to have to close our conversation. I want to ask you this question, Lee. I think I know my answer, but I'm not going to give it away, because I want to hear your answer. Do you think that the men who signed the declaration and 11 years later signed the Constitution after it was drafted in Philadelphia, do you think that we would be here a quarter. Do you think that they thought that we'd be here a quarter of a millennium later? Peter, talking about this, I have my answer. I'm curious for yours.
- [42:37]
Lee Habib
No, I actually think, you know, I. I don't have the quote in front of me. I would read it, but John Adams wrote, like, on his 50th, you know, on the. On the 50th anniversary of the. Of this country. You know, that year is the year that Jefferson and Adams die.
- [42:50]
Grainger Commercial Announcer
That's right.
- [42:50]
Lee Habib
And he wrote about and talked about one day this country being like a country from coast to coast, and that there'd be millions celebrating. And so I think these guys were visionaries, but they also weren't pie in the sky folks. But I don't think this would have surprised them. I think the nature of our government might have surprised them, but the size and scale of American power, I don't think it would have surprised them. I think they would have been if America stayed true to what they did. I think this would be a natural consequence of what they did.
- [43:20]
Josh Hammer
Well, I hate to say it, but I think they probably thought it would last a little short. Beyonce, Jefferson has that famous quote about the blood of liberty. We need to replenish the trep. I'm butchering the quote buddy he spoke of every 20 years in revolution. There's I think Adams probably did take a different view. You're right that Adams came from this more incrementalist restoration mentality there. So like many things, Lee, the founders disagreed in a lot. They probably disagreed on this exact question as well.
- [43:46]
Lee Habib
Thank goodness.
- [43:47]
Josh Hammer
Thank goodness for a lot of things including thank goodness for America and for today's purposes at least, thank goodness for Lee Habib who again is a great friend of the program is the host of our American Stories here from Coast Coast. Lee, we're really grateful for stopping by on this America 250 weekend to share some of your knowledge, insights and your stories. So wishing you a happy Independence Day. Stop by anytime, my friend.
- [44:07]
Lee Habib
You bet. Thank you folks.
- [44:09]
Josh Hammer
Wishing all of you a happy America 250 as well. And we'll be right back of course with much more.