The Revolution as an intellectual event
C. Bradley Thompson told Bob Zadek that his book grew out of a lifelong attachment to the United States that began when, at seven years old in Ontario, Canada, he read The How and Why Wonder Book of the American Revolution. He said he later read a book on the Declaration of Independence by a Harvard professor that offended him so deeply he decided to write his own book on the Declaration, and that early in that process he encountered John Adams’s description of the American Revolution not as the war but as a revolution in the minds of the people in the 15 years before Lexington and Concord. Thompson said that at that moment he realized the true story of the Revolution was an intellectual and moral revolution in the 10 or 15 years before independence, and broadened the book from the Declaration to the Revolution’s moral causes. Zadek identified the resulting book as America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, and described Thompson as the Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019).
The Society of the Cincinnati
Zadek told his audience that Thomas Fleming was an honorary member of the Society of the Cincinnati, which he described as one of the oldest organizations in America, founded in 1783 by veterans of the American Revolution, with membership restricted to descendants of veterans of the Revolution. Fleming corrected the restriction: it is limited to descendants of officers, with only one officer descendant per family, divided up by state just like the 13 original states. Fleming explained that he received honorary membership during the Bicentennial in the ’70s after giving many speeches to the society for which he was never paid. Asked whether Washington was uncomfortable participating, Fleming said yes, because Ben Franklin and a number of others, including Jefferson, thought the society would become the foundation of an American aristocracy and would undermine the whole idea of the Revolution; Franklin wrote a funny satire of it. Fleming added that he is the George Washington scholar for the New York State Society of the Cincinnati George Washington Was Our Guest (2011).
Money, corporations and the first crash
Zadek framed a segment around contemporary disputes over corporations as citizens, their free speech rights, and their spending in the democratic process, and asked how the Founders felt about corporations participating politically. Fleming answered that there were not enough corporations in existence during the first ten years of the Republic to make much of a difference in politics; there were wealthy men and people who controlled banks, such as Robert Morris in Philadelphia, probably the wealthiest of all the country’s businessmen, and they felt there should be no bar to participating in politics by running for office or supporting candidates with money — it was part of their rights as citizens. Fleming said he did not think the Founders got into the corporate issue to any great extent, but they had a strong sense of ongoing conflict between rich and poor. He credited Jefferson with the point that it was important that all the people felt they were participating in politics as much as possible, which was the basis of his political party, and described a tradition after 1800 of fighting and defeating the rich in American politics. Fleming said he wrote an article for American Heritage magazine titled “The First Bubble” about the first stock market crash in 1792, in which a man named Duer tried to corner the market in shares of the Bank of the United States, failed, and lost his shirt along with many others; Jefferson, then Secretary of State in Philadelphia, where the government was capital at the time, was ecstatic and wrote in a letter that there was not a single man in New York who was not bankrupt George Washington Was Our Guest (2011).
Telling the whole story
A caller named John told Fleming he had taken the television program Liberty! The American Revolution to friends in Kyrgyzstan, one of the former Soviet states, who were astounded to learn that the United States had to win its freedom from another country and had no idea it was Britain. Fleming responded that he had not written the program — it was written by Ron Blumer, and Fleming was the consultant — and said he was then on the board of the American Revolution Center in Philadelphia, which was trying to build a museum there that would tell the whole story of the American Revolution for the first time in any museum in the country George Washington Was Our Guest (2011).
The Revolution invoked in later politics
Zadek told Larry Klayman that he had used the phrase “Second American Revolution,” that he is a student of the American Revolution who studies it with great passion and intellectual interest, and that he had concluded the election then underway was maybe the most important since ratification of the Constitution. In the same segment Zadek explained recusal: in the judicial system, in the inferior courts rather than the Supreme Court, there are clear rules on when a judge must step aside from a case because of improper contact with the issues, and those rules govern all judges; the Supreme Court has decided those rules do not govern it, leaving each justice to decide whether to step aside. Zadek said it was clear that if this were an inferior court, Elena Kagan would be required to step aside, but because it is the Supreme Court the requirement is not there, and Roberts had announced he would not use whatever power he may have as Chief Justice to ask her to step aside Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012).
Klayman said he had two matters in different courts, that the court system had ground to a near complete halt, and described a case concerning Obamacare seeking the contacts of the White House and communications with lobbying groups including Planned Parenthood, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. He said a federal judge — a Clinton appointee, to his shock — held that he was entitled to the information under the Federal Advisory Committee Act and gave Obama 30 days to say whether meetings with those special interests were still going on; the Justice Department responded that it did not have to tell him anything and did not recognize Klayman’s case as valid. Klayman said he filed a motion to hold Obama in contempt and the judge had been sitting on it for six months, which Klayman attributed to running off the clock. He said judges are politicians in robes, more political than the politicians themselves, that he did not think the country still had a republic or a representative form of government, and that the American people needed to rise up and hold politicians accountable through a citizens’ grand jury and possibly civil disobedience, Gandhi style Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012).
The Revolution as a founding model
Vít Jedlička told Zadek that Liberland’s flag was planted on April 13, which he said many listeners would know as the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, though which day it actually was remains disputed; it is very likely Jefferson was born on the 13th of April. Jedlička said they wanted to appreciate Jefferson’s personal involvement in the whole American Revolution, felt the Declaration of Independence was a great document, wanted to start the country on his birthday, and wanted to invoke the spirit of the American Revolution with that step. He described Liberland as a modern-day tax exodus or a new kind of Tea Party movement creating a new country, this time in Europe. Jedlička said that when Liberland started they did not yet have a constitution, but stated in the first press release that they wanted to make a country where honest people can prosper without over-regulation and over-taxation; about a week later a constitutional lawyer from London came forward and did the initial draft, much of which was used in the final version. He said the drafting was putting everything on blockchain, on a decentralized platform, so that many things mentioned in the constitution would function directly as smart contracts, and invited listeners to take part in the final drafting running from that month until the end of the year, giving his contact as president@liberland.org and saying he would forward volunteers to the Justice Minister organizing the review of the latest draft Founding the Free Republic of Liberland (2021).
History removed from the curriculum
Zadek said that a graduate of the North Carolina school system would not know about the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War or the War of 1812 if the Chief Academic Officer, Rebecca Garland, had her way, and that in her view no history should be taught prior to 1877 in the high school curriculum — not the Civil War, not the writing of the Constitution, not the Revolutionary War. Zadek said she did not want American history taught prior to 1877 because her high school students cannot relate to it Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010).
Across episodes: no development
The American Revolution appears across five episodes — as curriculum controversy, as the subject of Fleming’s and Thompson’s scholarship, as the rhetorical standard Zadek and Klayman apply to a contemporary election and to judicial recusal, and as the model Jedlička invokes for Liberland — but the excerpts show no development of a single argument from one episode to the next.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the military conduct of the Revolutionary War, the drafting or ratification of the Constitution, or the text of the Declaration of Independence beyond the fact that it is called a great document. They do not state what the 1792 crash did to the wider economy, what became of the American Revolution Center’s museum, or whether the Liberland constitution was completed. They also do not say what happened to the North Carolina curriculum proposal or to Klayman’s contempt motion.