← The World and Everything In It
The World and Everything In It
4.13. 26 Supreme Court weighs asylum qualification, David Bahnsen on inflation and geopolitical risk, and memories of the last Revolutionary War veterans
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- [00:06]
Jenny Ruff
Good morning. The Supreme Court tries to find the deciding factor that qualifies someone for asylum.
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Justice Amy Coney Barrett
How do you know under your theory when the person is close enough, if it's not crossing the physical border, what is the magic thing or the dispositive thing that we're looking for?
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Nick Eicher
That's ahead on Legal docket. Also today, the Monday Money beat. David Bonson is standing by. And the world history book, the story behind some of the first photographs of Revolutionary War veterans.
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Don Haggist
They're captivating because they bring us a sense of an era that we don't have visual ways to connect with.
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Jenny Ruff
It's Monday, April 13th. This is the world and everything in it. From listener supported World Radio, I'm Jenny Ruff.
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Nick Eicher
And I'm Nick Eicher. Good morning.
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Jenny Ruff
Up next, Kent Covington with today's news.
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Kent Covington
President Trump said he still predicts that a peace deal will come together with Iran even after weekend peace talks ended in Pakistan without a deal. Vice President J.D. vance led a U.S. delegation as negotiators met face to face in Islamabad for more than 21 hours.
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David Bonson
We had a very intensive negotiation and toward the end it got very friendly and we got just about every point we needed, except for the fact that they refused to give up their nuclear ambition. And that's the only point, frankly, to me, that was the most important point by far.
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Kent Covington
Iranian officials blamed the breakdown of talks on what they called American overreach. But Trump insisted that Iran, his words, has not left the bargaining table. And he added, I predict they come back and they give us everything we want. The current ceasefire expires on April 22, and neither side has said what comes next. Pakistan has offered to host more talks in the coming days. Meantime, the president says that with or without Iran's cooperation, the Strait of Hormuz will be open for business.
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David Bonson
We have minesweepers there now. We have highly sophisticated underwater minesweepers, which are the latest and the greatest. But we're also bringing in more traditional minesweepers. And so I understand is the UK And a couple of other countries are sending mineswavers.
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Kent Covington
But Trump also said that any ship that has since paid Iran a toll to pass through the strait would forfeit safe passage. Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired back, insisting that the strait remains under Tehran's full control. The Artemis 2 astronauts received a thunderous welcome home over the weekend after splashing down off the coast of San Diego on Friday, they arrived in the Houston area a day later, greeted by NASA workers, military officers and the crew returned from a nearly 10 day mission that broke the record for deep space travel. As they circled around the moon, they flew farther from Earth than any humans had ever traveled before, more than 250,000 miles into space, and captured views of the lunar far side never before seen by human eyes. Mission commander Reid Wiseman said of his
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Don Haggist
crewmates, we are bonded forever and no one down here is ever going to know what the four of us just went through, and it was the most
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Kent Covington
special thing that will ever happen in my life. He shared the Orion space capsule with pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen. NASA is already eyeing the next milestone Artemis 3 next year and a planned moon landing in 2028. Prominent supporters of California Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell's bid for governor are pulling their support in a stunning political reversal that comes after the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a former staffer claims the congressman sexually assaulted her twice. The woman reportedly said the incidents happened in 2019 when she worked for Swalwell and then again in 2024 at a charity event. But the congressman forcefully pushed back over the weekend. These allegations of sexual assault are flat false. They are absolutely false. They did not happen, they have never
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Vivek Suri
happened, and I will fight them with
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Kent Covington
everything that I have. Top Democrats dropping their support include California Senator Adam Schiff, who called on Swalwell to drop out of the race, and several California labor unions followed suit. And the Manhattan district attorney's office says it is now investigating the alleged 2024 incident. Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orban conceded defeat Sunday after a weekend election ending 16 years in power. The prime minister told supporters that while some ballots had yet to be counted, the outcome was clear. He said his words the responsibility and possibility of governing was not given to us. Orban is a political ally of President Trump and Vice President J.D. vance even traveled to Hungary last week in a show of support ahead of the election. Orban has also been a vocal critic of Western involvement in the war in Ukraine. Supporters of his challenger, Petar Madhyar, celebrated in the streets. Magyar's Tisa political party took more than 53% of the vote. That's a margin big enough for a powerful super majority in parliament. Struggling movie theaters starving for a blockbuster have not one but two hits right now filling seats. The Super Mario Galaxy movie topped the weekend box office.
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Nick Eicher
My Koopas, your king has returned.
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David Bonson
Long live the king. The Bowser name shall be feared once more.
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Kent Covington
The PG rated animated flick hauled in another $69 million in ticket sales. It has now earned more than 300 million stateside and more than $600 million globally. In second place, the PG13 rated sci fi film project Hail Mary took in another 25 million. It has now earned more than a quarter of a billion dollars domestically and more than a half billion worldwide. I'm Kent Covington. And straight ahead, the Supreme Court tries to find the deciding factor that qualifies someone for asylum. Plus, the Monday Money beat with David Bonson. THIS IS THE WORLD and EVERYTHING in it.
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Jenny Ruff
It's Monday, 13th April. Glad to have you along for today's edition of THE WORLD and Everything In It. Good morning. I'm Jenny Ruff.
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Nick Eicher
And I'm Nick Iker. Time now for legal docket. Our case today is Mullen v. Alotro Lado, a case about asylum law asking a narrow question of application when exactly someone, quote, unquote, arrives in the United States. That might sound technical, but the answer has real world consequences. Immigration courts already face a backlog of more than 3 million cases, and in many places, asylum hearings are scheduled years into the future. The government says that reality is part of why it needs flexibility at the border to control how many people enter the system in the first place.
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Jenny Ruff
But the challengers say that cannot justify ignoring the law Congress wrote because under federal statute, an alien who is present in or who arrives in the United States may apply for asylum and must be inspected. So here's the question. Can the government avoid that obligation by stopping people just short of the line before they count as having arrived? The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case late last month. The dispute grew out of a policy to slow down the number of migrants entering. Back in 2016, ports of entry along the southern border were overwhelmed. Here's Vivek Suri arguing for the government.
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Vivek Suri
The policy was put in place in 2016 when ports, which might have a holding capacity of 50 to 100 people, were facing lines of aliens far larger than that, and those individuals were demanding entry at that particular time. And ports were overwhelmed.
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Jenny Ruff
The policy is called metering. It limited how many asylum seekers would be processed at ports of entry each day, turning others back to wait, often on the Mexican side of the border. It did so by placing agents on the border to stop those without valid travel papers from crossing.
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Vivek Suri
Sometimes they didn't have enough food to feed people arriving in the United States. Sometimes they didn't have beds in which they could sleep. They didn't have places where they could hold them. So it was necessary for the ports to say, sorry, we're at capacity, try again some other time.
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Nick Eicher
The policy was eventually extended to all ports of entry along the southern border. The immigrant advocacy organization Al otro Lado and 13 asylum seekers filed suit. They claimed the metering policy violated the Immigration and Nationality act that says any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States may apply for asylum and must be inspected by an immigration officer.
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Jenny Ruff
For our purposes, there are two key phrases to remember. First, present in second, arrives in. The asylum seekers argued that the second phrase arrives in the United States should be read to include those who are in the process of arrival, even if they're still on the Mexican side. But the government argued to read it that way goes too far.
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Vivek Suri
You can't arrive in the United States while you're still standing in Mexico. That should be the end of this case.
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Nick Eicher
The justices weren't so sure. Cases typically wind up in court because there are good arguments on both sides. The asylum seekers argue the government's reading would make part of the statute superfluous, basically redundant. Justice Elena Kagan pressed, you know, I totally get that.
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Justice Elena Kagan
If you just look at the language, who arrives in the United States, it sort of suggests, well, you have to be in the United States, so totally get that. It does seem to me that this statute. You don't have to be a superfluity hawk to think that this statute has a massive superfluity argument problem. Because the way you're understanding that second
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Nick Eicher
phrase, the phrase arrives in the statute
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Justice Elena Kagan
ends up saying essentially any alien who was in the United States or who was in the United States. If you just. You can't mean that. So the. In the United States. States must mean something else. I mean, these phrases are like right next to each other. And they.
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Jenny Ruff
The government said the phrases can overlap but still serve different functions. For example, distinguishing between those already there and those newly arriving. Just as Sonia Sotomayor took things back to the spring of 1939, that's when over 900 Jewish refugees boarded a ship to escape Nazi Germany. First, the Ms. St. Louis tried to dock in Cuba.
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Justice Elena Kagan
The refugees weren't permitted to unload themselves. It then came to the coast of Saint of Florida, and the US Wouldn't let it dock at all. All right. And turned it back. And it did the same in Canada. Canada wouldn't let it dock.
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Nick Eicher
The ship had to return to Europe, and more than 250 of its passengers would die in the Holocaust. Sotomayor used that example to press the government on its obligations, arguing that people who reached the BO and ask for protection should at least be heard. Here is part of that exchange.
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Justice Elena Kagan
They're not permitting the people who come to the line to the door and knock on it who want to claim refugee status. You're saying, we're not going to inspect you. How does that not violate the Refugee Treaty act or the spirit of the St. Louis UN convention to start with the statute?
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Vivek Suri
The statute doesn't say arrive at the door.
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Justice Elena Kagan
No, but it says arriving in the U.S. they're arriving, they're knocking on the door.
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Vivek Suri
I do not deny the moral weight of claims made by refugees, but that is not the question before the court. The question before the court is what obligations did Congress impose in the asylum and in inspection statutes, and those refer only to aliens who arrive in the United States.
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Justice Elena Kagan
May I ask you a question?
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Jenny Ruff
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson raised another concern.
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Justice Elena Kagan
So imagine a polite asylum seeker who wants to do everything by the book. He approaches the border but does not cross precisely because the law says you are not supposed to enter the United States without authority. Why on earth would Congress have intended or meant for his asylum request to be discarded, not taken seriously, not entertained? But someone who manages to enter the United States unlawfully when the law says you're not supposed to do it and requests asylum, gets their application entertained?
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Jenny Ruff
Suri pointed out there's a separate statute that addresses protections for aliens outside the U.S. also, the responsibility of the world's refugee problem is a shared one among nations.
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Vivek Suri
Congress could reasonably determine that if a refugee is in Mexico, then the Mexican government is primarily responsible for processing his claim. Once the refugee is in the United States, whether legally or illegally, then the United States has greater responsibility toward.
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Justice Elena Kagan
Right about this point, Think about the statute at issue. It says arriving in.
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Jenny Ruff
Oral argument got tense. Chief Justice John Roberts had to step in.
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David Bonson
Counsel, the statutory language.
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Vivek Suri
Is it arriving in or is it arrives in? It arrives in.
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Nick Eicher
Okay, thank you. The metering or turnback policy is not currently in place in the same form. That raised a threshold question. Is the case moot? The government says no, it isn't. And officials still need the option to use similar tools going forward. Lawyer Kelsey Corcoran argued for the asylum seekers. She says the government's approach breaks with decades of practice at ports of entry, where people arriving to seek asylum were at least processed, which have recognized for
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Justice Amy Coney Barrett
nearly 30 years that the act's inspection and processing duties apply to non citizens, quote, coming or attempting to come into the United States at a port of entry.
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Jenny Ruff
In other words, Corcoran argued, the statute applies even to people in the process of arrival. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett wanted to know where exactly the line would be drawn.
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Justice Amy Coney Barrett
How do you know under your theory, when the person is close enough that we could say they have arrived Zen or arrived in the destination? I mean, what if there's a queue and they're far back? Or what if it's not crossing the physical border? What is the magic thing or the dispositive thing that we're looking for where we say, ah, now that person we can say arrives in the United States? Yes. So a person arrives in the United States at a port of entry when they are at the threshold of the port's entrance about to step over, so they are arriving there. I think that's consistent with ordinary meaning I arrive.
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Nick Eicher
The ports have turnstiles. So Corcoran later said, think of it as a stadium entrance. But what about those who approach the border outside a port of entry, meaning an illegal location, the borderline between ports of entry?
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Justice Amy Coney Barrett
I think you would have to be at a place where you could in fact cross.
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Jenny Ruff
Justice Neil Gorsuch tested the line.
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Justice Amy Coney Barrett
Right. Have you made it to the threshold and you're about to step over.
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Vivek Suri
Anybody at the water's edge of the Rio Grande on the Mexican side has arrived in.
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Justice Amy Coney Barrett
No, the border is halfway through the water.
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Nick Eicher
All right, so they've got one step
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Vivek Suri
short of halfway through. They've arrived. But somebody who's on the water's edge has not arrived.
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Justice Amy Coney Barrett
I think that's right. So you're looking at being at the threshold of when you're going to.
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Jenny Ruff
Justice Brett Kavanaugh failed to see how these distinctions helped the problem at all.
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Don Haggist
This seems very artificial, trying to figure out at the threshold on the line in the middle of the river, because wherever the line is, the government's presumably going to stop you on the other side of that line.
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Jenny Ruff
He said, the real question is, can the government block people no matter where exactly the line is drawn?
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Nick Eicher
Well, before we wrap up, I'd like to circle back to something I said about a week and a half ago when we first talked about the Supreme Court's decision in Chiles v. Salazar. That is the case, if you remember, about whether the state of Colorado can restrict what counselors say to minors who are seeking help with unwanted same sex attraction or gender confusion. I said the court called Colorado's law a clear violation of the First Amendment, which overstates what the Court actually, actually did, and clearly I misread it. What the Court said is that the law regulates speech, specifically speech based on viewpoint, and that means it has to face the toughest legal test courts apply. But under that test, laws like this are usually on very shaky ground.
- [17:28]
Jenny Ruff
Yes, and that's the key distinction. The court said the law is presumptively unconstitutional, but it said the lower courts used the wrong test. So it sent the case back so the lower court could reassess the law under the proper First Amendment test, a rigorous evaluation known as strict scrutiny. That doesn't guarantee the outcome, but it does put the burden squarely on the state to justify the law. And the writing is on the wall. And that's this week's Legal Docker.
- [18:13]
Kent Covington
Additional support comes from Boyce College, where truth comes first. Every class begins with Scripture and prepares students to live with wisdom, conviction and Christlike faithfulness. Boycecollege.com from the Joshua program at St. Dunstan's Academy in Virginia, a gap year shaping young men through trades, farming, prayer, St. Dunstansacademy.org and from Water's Edge, strengthening ministry one investment at a time, 4.55% APY on a 13 month term. Watersedge.com invest.
- [19:00]
Jenny Ruff
Coming up next on THE WORLD and everything in it, the Monday MONEY beat.
- [19:06]
Nick Eicher
Time now to talk business markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bonson. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bonson Group, and he is here now. Good morning, David.
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David Bonson
Well, good morning. Good to be with you.
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Nick Eicher
Well, David, the new inflation report for the month of March came in. The headline number was hot. No big surprise given roughly three quarters of the increase driven by energy. That's my quick look under the hood of this report. But when you step back, David, and look at the broader picture, the core, the trend, everything we've been seeing over the past year, what do you think this report is actually telling us?
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David Bonson
Well, that's what the point of core inflation, core CPI versus headline is. Headline includes food and energy. And that's a perpetual dynamic that food and energy have more lumpiness and more idiosyncratic things that affect them. And that's why it's not always as idiosyncratic as the March oil spike caused by the Iran war and Strait of Hormuz closing. But we look at core to try to get a feel for what things are like outside of energy. And I think even in core, you're still looking at 2.6% versus a year ago, just higher than it was at the end of 2024. It increased 0.2 in March. So I've always said this, Nick, that you have to look at it with the political inflation and the monetary inflation. What I'm about to say about the Monetary side is irrelevant to the political side. On the political side, all people care about is if they're paying more and if gas prices are higher, they're going to call it inflation, they're going to say 3.3%. It's going to have an impact because prices are higher. But we do have to look economically at what is actually related to the overall price level. And in this case there is such an easy cause and effect to find that indicates to me it is not from an increase in money supply or excessive monetary policy or government activity. There is certain goods that have seen price increases that have had tariffs applied and then there is this energy factor. And so that's happening and can be thought of in the realm of public policy, but I don't think it's relevant to the realm of monetary policy.
- [21:35]
Nick Eicher
David, I want to switch to Dividend Cafe, something you wrote there. We had a lot of volatility tied to Iran over the past month, easily. Big moves in oil, sharp swings in markets.
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Jenny Ruff
But.
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Nick Eicher
But your point is a lot of it is simply reaction, not necessarily lasting signals. So when people see these day to day moves, stocks down hard one day, bouncing back the next, and sometimes it just happens intraday, what should be taken seriously and what should be just tuned out?
- [22:07]
David Bonson
Well, look, I mean, I want to say it specifically to our listeners right now. The overall issues with Iran may very well get a little worse before they get better. They may get better before they get worse. There is not any way to really assess where things exactly are. I find it very uncomfortable that there are people rooting against it going well to a point where that affects their reporting. And I find it bothersome that people do the opposite, that they are so determined to declare a victory that they ignore things that are quite relevant that should give us pause. And I don't find it contradictory to objectively say that there's been some really big victories, obtained some really good progress. But there's a whole lot of things that if they don't get better, then it's going to be really hard for people to call it the victory we're after with a straight face. But I think from a market standpoint, what I wrote in Divin Cafe is almost indisputable no matter who people like politically and what they're rooting for. In this particular military exercise, the President wants this thing to be over and we may get a outcome. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best, that ends up being an 8, I doubt you get a 10. Most things in life don't go that way and it may be less than an eight, I don't know. But what I do know is regardless of the number, he wants it over. And I think markets are beginning to feel that it is better to price something on the other side of it than assuming it stays on for good. My question would be oil prices at some point, strait of Hormuz experiencing some form of reopening, Are we going to see oil prices come back down to 65, 70? I'm very skeptical. But at what point do they dip back at least below 95 into the 80s? Because markets recovered a little bit last week, Nick, and oil prices came from 113 to 100. But the markets really should not be rallying much on 95 to $100 oil. What they're rallying on is that some of the tail risk has come off that we might see 150. So this remains volatile, it remains unpredictable. And I'm going to be pretty committed in the weeks ahead to separating in my analysis what it is I hope happens geopolitically versus what is happening economically and for markets because those are two different stories. You could end up getting an outcome that markets like that is not necessarily a total victory for our geopolitical objectives.
- [24:51]
Vivek Suri
Wow.
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Nick Eicher
I'm curious about that, David. Wouldn't it seem that a best case geopolitical outcome in Iran that's no longer a nuclear threat and Iran no longer a major destabilizing force exporter of terror, wouldn't that also be clearly a positive economic outcome?
- [25:10]
David Bonson
Oh, it is. That would be. I totally agree with you. That outcome would not only be great for markets, it would be great geopolitically. But it's the idea that we may end up having a less than satisfactory geopolitical outcome, but that still does result in oil flows resuming. Let's put it this way, markets are probably less concerned with Iran's uranium right now than they are the straight of Hormuzzi. And I think that the overall military objectives. One of the problems of this whole discussion is that very few people are discussing it in good faith. So many are discussing it wanting to give a premature victory to the president or wanting to dunk on him and troll him and say he didn't succeed here. I'm suggesting that we don't know exactly what the outcome is going to be, but it's probably not going to be binary. It's going to have some sort of gradation to the way we report card it. But with markets, the main issue of course, for those who Read Dividend Cafe or read it. I'm getting to a point of saying let's assume everything around is over and exactly, how you say, a really great end outcome. Well, what does that mean? We still go back to where we were before, which is an expensive market in a questionable economy with an AI vulnerability link. So even that may not necessarily mean, okay, Iran is done. We're now full steam ahead. The S and P is about to go up 20%. I don't believe that at all, David.
- [26:40]
Nick Eicher
I want to end by talking about a regulatory shift that caught my attention this week. And the only place I saw it reported was in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. Federal banking regulators are now saying that supervising banks for so called reputational risk is too subjective and open to abuse. And they're moving to prohibit examiners to from pressuring banks to drop customers based on political or social or even lawful but disfavored activity. Banks have said for years that they have felt that pressure. What do you make of that change, David, and how significant is it?
- [27:19]
David Bonson
Yeah, well, I follow it very closely, Nick. I've been involved with it for a long time and there's sort of two different things. I agree that the language that exists now about reputational risk is too subjective. I do believe that there ought to be the right for financial firms to choose who they want to work with in terms of reputational risk. I recall when I was managing director at Morgan Stanley, we made a decision to fire a very large client who had been involved in what would amount to, you know, some very high profile pornographic video content. And I didn't. I wanted the firm to get rid of the client. And not because I found, merely because I found what he did personally offensive, but also because I thought it was damaging and beneath us as an institution to work with someone so unreputable. And then the problem with that is, is there a slippery slope to saying they don't want to work with gun owners or this or that? Look, banks and financial wealth management firms are different. We might need to have a conversation on this, distinguishing between banks and wealth management firms, depository institutions that are providing something more commoditized versus a more relational and advisory business. I want to be able to say that I'm not going to work with certain organizations. And that means that a left wing person can say I don't want to work with a pro life cause. But I don't think that's the same in banking as it is in relational wealth management. They need to have clear lines. There will always be some need for interpretation around the lines. But what was happening before was clearly just firms being afraid of the woke police coming after them. And I think that's what they're putting an end to. And even before trying to fine tune the rules, my consultant Jerry Boyer and I have been working on this for years and I can assure you that the companies have been coming the right direction for a number of years now. They did not like the negative press and they want to work with most organizations and they don't want someone else telling them who's okay to work with and not work with. The amount of companies that were using Southern Poverty Law center, which is an overtly discriminatory anti Christian organization as a means of screening certain things. The number of companies that were using them that no longer are is unbelievable. And that's a great thing if you ask.
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Nick Eicher
All right. David Bonson is founder, managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bonson Group. He writes@dividendcafe.com each week and at World Opinions. David, have a great week. Thanks.
- [30:02]
David Bonson
Thanks so much, Nick. Good to be with you.
- [30:27]
Jenny Ruff
Good morning. This is the WORLD and everything in it from listener supported World Radio. I'm Jenny Ruff.
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Nick Eicher
And I'm Nick Icker. Up next, the world history book. As America approaches its 250th birthday, one remarkable collection connects the nation's founding generation with those who lived through its greatest internal conflict. World's Emma Eicher has the story.
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Emma Eicher
The Civil War signaled one of the first threats to break up the United States since the American Revolution. So Connecticut native Elias Brewster Hillard set out to write a book that might preserve unity and shared origins. He traveled to interview the last living men of the Revolutionary War.
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Don Haggist
He was sparked with the idea that we need the voices of these men, not just the pictures, because they created this great nation.
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Emma Eicher
Don Haggist is the managing editor of the Journal of the American Revolution.
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Don Haggist
He's trying to write a book about how important the American Revolution was and the unification was that that war characterized because he wants to bring people back together when this civil war is going on.
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Emma Eicher
In his book, the Last Men of the Revolution, Hillard recorded detailed interviews of six veterans and placed photographic portraits beside each account. The format made it a rarity when it was published in 1864. Although Hillard hoped the book would achieve some significance, the first editions fell into obscurity.
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Don Haggist
It didn't get a whole lot of recognition at the time.
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Emma Eicher
Haggis says the pictures were key to eventually finding public recognition because there aren't
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Don Haggist
Very many photographs of people from that time period. So I think they're captivating because they bring us a sense of an era that we don't have visual ways to connect with.
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Emma Eicher
The book gained renewed attention in the 1950s after Life magazine reprinted the photos. Some early readers took the veterans accounts as fact. Haggist became familiar with the book and published a follow up in 2016 called the Revolution's Last Men. It was a book of corrections and re examination of history.
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Don Haggist
Originally, what we were expecting was to just have the 1864 book with maybe some additional footnotes and things in it, freshen it up.
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Emma Eicher
But in his research, Haggis discovered that Hillard's interviews were fraught with timeline errors.
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Don Haggist
Some of the men's ages are not right in the book. From 1864 off by a few years. Most of them served later in the war than the original book suggests.
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Emma Eicher
Haggist had to untangle the truth from archives and military pension records. In one example, Hillard claimed that veteran Alexander Milliner was at the battles of Saratoga, Brandywine and the siege of Fort Stanwix.
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Don Haggist
Well, all of these things were taking place at approximately the same time in very different parts of the country. There's no possible way that one person could have been in all three of those things. And yet that's what it says in the book.
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Emma Eicher
Hillard's background might have influenced the inaccuracies. Hillard was a lifelong pastor, not a biographer.
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Don Haggist
He doesn't have any particular training in interviewing people and being discerning about listening to what they're saying. He's not a historian of the revolution. This is the only book related to history in any way that he wrote.
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Emma Eicher
The declining memories of the men, all of them around 100 years old, may also account for some of the contradictions.
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Don Haggist
So it may be that the men themselves also misremembered the some things, but
- [34:14]
Emma Eicher
the book got other things right, like the portraits themselves. Photographer Nelson Augustus Moore snapped the originals and made four separate exposures during each session. Hillard later followed up with his own interviews.
- [34:29]
Don Haggist
At the time the book was printed in 1864, there was not a technique for putting a photographic print directly onto paper.
- [34:38]
Emma Eicher
For the first editions, each picture was pasted by hand onto the pages using a type of tissue paper called silver albumin. And since there were four originals to
- [34:48]
Don Haggist
choose from, every single 1864 copy contains some different mix and match of the four exposures of the men. Because for each men they print out four pictures, they cut them out and they put one in one book. And one in another.
- [35:04]
Emma Eicher
Haggist says these photographs are what make the biography stand the test of time.
- [35:10]
Don Haggist
The photographs themselves really almost have a life of their own. It's the photographs that capture everybody.
- [35:18]
Emma Eicher
Even with the mistakes, the last men of the revolution still accomplish what other biographies didn't.
- [35:25]
Don Haggist
As much as I can sit and say, oh, Elias Brewster Hillard, he wasn't a writer, he wasn't a journalist. This book has all kinds of mistakes in it. He did it, he published the book. And that's why we have this set of photographs in particular. Particular that is so well remembered.
- [35:41]
Emma Eicher
The book didn't achieve much popularity during Hillard's lifetime, and after decades of ministry, he died in 1895. But 160 years later, the book serves as a reminder of where we came from and introduces Americans to the men who united the country. That's this week's World History Book. I'm Emma Eicher.
- [36:26]
Nick Eicher
Tomorrow, combating the black market for abortion pills will have remarks and a symphony just for reconnecting music and learning that and more tomorrow. I'm Nick Icker.
- [36:38]
Jenny Ruff
And I'm Jenny Ruff. The world and everything in it comes to you from World Radio. World's mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates and inspires. The Bible recounts Moses charge to be strong and courageous. For you shall go with this people into the land that the Lord has sworn to their fathers to give them, and you shall put them in possession of it. It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you. He will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed. Verses 7 and 8 of Deuteronomy 31. Go now in grace and peace. Sam.