George Washington Was Our Guest
2011-06-04 · Guest: Thomas Fleming (Historian and Author) · 53:34
Money and politics in the early American Republic
Bob Zadek interviews historian Thomas Fleming about the intersection of money and politics in the early American Republic. They explore George Washington’s views on executive power, the role of wealthy citizens in government, and how the Founders balanced property rights with democratic participation. Fleming provides historical context for modern debates over campaign finance and the influence of wealth in the political process.
Topics: George Washington, American Revolution, Money and Politics, McCain-Feingold, Citizens United, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Executive Power, Society of the Cincinnati
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek — Host
- Thomas Fleming — Historian and Author
- Caller (Carl) — Listener
- Caller (John) — Listener
Introduction [00:10]
Bob Zadek: Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. I’m your host, Bob Zadek. Sundays at noon on Fox Radio 910 AM. We are the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. We are the show of ideas, not attitude. If you have an idea or an attitude, 800-345-5639 is the way to reach us. We are on every Sunday at noon.
Today will be, to say the least, a most special show. My guest for the entire hour is Tom Fleming. Tom Fleming is one of the nation’s leading and most distinguished and productive historians. Tom has written, I think, around 20 non-fiction books on American history, focusing on the American Revolution. He has written 23 novels. As one of my colleagues pointed out, Tom writes books faster than we can read them. Tom is a past president of the Society of American Historians. He was a sailor in World War II. He is a frequent contributor to a column that I believe he created, which caught my attention, called “Channeling George Washington.” More about that in a moment.
This is a most special show because Tom wasn’t aware of it, but Tom and I have been sharing information, albeit a bit one-sided, for years and years and years. Tom has been my mentor. I watch a lot of DVDs on American history. It’s a source of great pleasure and information to me. And invariably, whether I’m watching the American Revolution or Liberty—and I believe Tom may have been on a DVD called The Crossing, but I’ll learn if I’m wrong about that. So Tom has been teaching me without knowing it for years, as I’ve learned from him in a somewhat one-sided dialogue. It is now my pleasure to have the dialogue be a tad more mutual. So Tom, thanks so much for joining me.
The Society of the Cincinnati [04:09]
Bob Zadek: Tom, are you there? We’ll connect Tom in a second. Tom will be joining us in a moment. One more bit of information about Tom. Tom is also an honorary member of the Society of the Cincinnati. The Society of the Cincinnati is one of the oldest organizations in America. It was founded in 1783. It was founded by veterans of the American Revolution. And as far as I know, it is to this day membership is restricted only to those people who are descendants of veterans of the American Revolution. It was founded in 1783 in order to make sure that America honored its promises that it made to the veterans of the American Revolution. Tom, are you with us?
Thomas Fleming: Okay, I was just on hold. I’ll stay on hold. Hi, Bob. We’re live now.
Bob Zadek: Okay, great. Tom, thanks so much for joining us on the show. I was just mentioning to the audience, among your many, many, many elements of your biography, I took note of the fact that you’re also an honorary member of the Society of the Cincinnati.
Thomas Fleming: Yes, yes. I’ll tell you how I got that job, Bob. During the Bicentennial, you know, in the ’70s, ‘76, I gave so many speeches to them that they never paid me for, they made me an honorary member.
Bob Zadek: And if I’m not mistaken, that organization, which was and maybe still is membership is restricted to direct descendants of veterans of the American Revolution?
Thomas Fleming: The only descendants of officers. They have to be descendants of officers, and there’s only one officer descendant per family. And they’re divided up by state, just like the 13 original states. It’s a great organization. They’re really wonderful people. They love American history.
Bob Zadek: And Washington, if I remember, was a little uncomfortable to participate in the society because—
Thomas Fleming: Oh yeah, because Ben Franklin and a number of other people, including Jefferson, thought that this was going to be the foundation of an American aristocracy. You know, and they didn’t like the idea at all. They felt it was going to undermine the whole idea of the Revolution. Ben Franklin wrote a funny satire of it in which he proved that anybody who claimed after 100 years or so that they were still related in any shape or form to the original heir would be out of their minds, as so many—what happens when you get intermarried and so forth. But the point is, they honor American history in a great way. They give money for all kinds of good causes that have to do with teaching American history. And they really are a good bunch. They really are. I’m the George Washington scholar for the New York State Society of the Cincinnati.
Channeling George Washington [07:42]
Bob Zadek: Oh my goodness. You know, there is, of course, I am a frequent visitor, not often enough, to Colonial Williamsburg. And in Williamsburg, they have a theater—I don’t recall the name of the theater—where they have, I’ll say impersonators, but that almost diminishes their role.
Thomas Fleming: Yeah, they’re reenactors, basically.
Bob Zadek: They are reenactors, but these reenactors spend their entire lives living the life of Jefferson and Patrick Henry.
Thomas Fleming: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I have a few friends who have done it. Yeah. Not people at that level, but they played a couple of other lesser Williamsburg people. And it’s a wonderful occupation. They really start to think that way.
Bob Zadek: Well, the reason I mention it is in reading your blog, which is on the History News Network—I think it’s www.hnn.us—in reading that blog where you channel George Washington, I felt that you were doing the same thing for me. You were bringing George Washington to me, just as they do in Colonial Williamsburg. And I thank you for that.
Thomas Fleming: Well, that’s quite a compliment. I’m glad you feel that way. That’s what I try to do. And how I got into doing that, Bob, is really very spooky. It really did happen somewhat like I describe in the blog. I heard this voice say, “To see this country happy is so much the wish of my soul, nothing else can compare to it, this side of Elysium.” And I suddenly realized that this was something that George Washington wrote to a friend when he was trying to make up his mind whether to attend the Continental Congress and risk the reputation he’d achieved as general of the armies during the Revolution.
Bob Zadek: And reputation was, of course, of profound importance to President Washington.
Thomas Fleming: Yeah, as it would be to anybody, but particularly to him. And I—but I—it all just clicked in my mind at that point. I said, “Oh my god, wouldn’t it be wonderful if every so often George Washington channeled me, or vice versa, and we talked about politics as he understood it in his time and his observations from the viewpoint of someone who’s been watching the country for over 200 years from Elysium.” And that’s what the blog is all about.
Bob Zadek: Well, we’re going to give you a chance to help us channel George Washington today. We are going to discuss money and politics. Is money a pollutant, or is it necessary in the carrying out of domestic politics in this country? We will hear from Tom Fleming, aka George Washington, in 90 seconds when we return. Money and politics. How would the Founders view what’s going on today? Back in 90 seconds.
[Ad Break]
Money and Politics: The Founders’ View [11:12]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show. This is Bob Zadek and my guest, Tom Fleming. We are looking for America today. Specifically, how would the Founders feel about the relationship today between money and politics? As a bit of a backdrop, we have, of course, in 2002 or 2003, we have the enactment of the McCain-Feingold Act. In my opinion, an anti-free speech, anti-First Amendment bit of legislation that attempts to restrict how money can be spent in politics. Then we have more sparks flying several years later when the Supreme Court hands down the Citizens United case, which basically allowed corporations and unions to spend as much as they want in support of a candidate. They simply cannot give money directly to the candidate, but they can spend all the money they want in advertising. The country and the Democrats go crazy. They are now seeking to limit how much corporations can spend in the political process. There are disclosure rules bandying about. So money and politics is a very, very big deal. Tom Fleming wrote in a recent “Channeling George Washington” column, he wrote about campaign finance. Tom, money and politics from the viewpoint of the Founders.
Thomas Fleming: The viewpoint of the Founders would divide up. They were no more united than we are about this topic and about a lot of other topics, I might add. And I can assure you, I think, that George Washington would be appalled by our current finance laws and would be very much inclined to agree with you that there shouldn’t be any restraints on free speech. There’s a great Washington motto that really could—should be our guide in this situation: “We must take men as they are, not as we wish them to be.” That was—he must have said that a hundred times during the American Revolution. And again and again, the idealists, if you want to call them that, or the fantasists in the Continental Congress during the Revolution clashed with him.
Pensions and the Continental Army [13:30]
Thomas Fleming: For instance, he asked during the Valley Forge winter, 300 officers just resigned. They could do that. The enlisted men couldn’t go anywhere. If they tried to leave, they’d be hanged. But the officers were gentlemen; they could resign. 300 of them resigned in front of his eyes. So he said, “We’re not going to have an army at the end of this thing unless we get pensions for the officers.” Sam Adams, John Adams, they all went nuts and screamed and yelled in Congress and so forth. And it just was a huge uproar for a couple of months. And then they finally took a vote, and it carried by one vote. And that’s how close we came to losing the Revolution. And Washington got his way; they got the pensions and the resignations stopped. Oh my god. It’s that’s how important money is in real life, not just in politics. And Washington never forgot that.
Property Requirements and the Presidency [16:21]
Thomas Fleming: There’s a wonderful moment in the Constitutional Convention. Washington was chairman, and they were discussing how big an army we should have. And Elbridge Gerry, who’s the father of the gerrymander, he said that the army should be limited to 3,000 men. And Washington, who was chairman, he couldn’t say anything, you know, he was forbidden to participate in the debates. But he could say things, shall we say, sotto voce, that the people in the first two rows could hear. And he said sotto voce, “That’s a wonderful idea, as long as we could get everyone else in the world to promise not to invade us with more than 3,000 men.” Elbridge Gerry, I believe, he was at the Constitutional Convention but wouldn’t sign it, if I’m not mistaken. Yeah, he was—that was typical of him. It all had to be perfect or he didn’t go for it. He was one of those guys—he was like Jefferson—he wanted things to be the way he thought they should be, not the way they were, you know, or the way they were turning out. And he was an extremely difficult character. He was vice president during the War of 1812, which we again came close to obliterating the Republic, the thing was so badly handled because the Jeffersonians were running things.
But so to go back to the campaign finance, though, there’s a very interesting moment in the Constitutional Convention when one of the nabobs from South Carolina—well, they didn’t call them nabobs, they were the wealthy guys. Nabobs were guys who had land in the West Indies and then they went to England and bought big estates. But at any rate, one of the South Carolinians who had a lot of money stood up and he said, “I think that the office of the president should be limited to people who are worth at least $100,000.” And that’s the equivalent, I should add, of $10 million today. And I think anyone—the vice president would have to be worth $50,000. And Ben Franklin put up his hand and said, “May I make a comment?” And he said, “I am opposed to anything that denigrates or lowers the self-respect of the average man.” I mean, that’s a paraphrase, that’s not the exact thing, but that’s what he said. He said, “Why should we offend the average person in this country by insisting on such a ridiculous idea? Let’s keep that out of the whole idea of the presidency.” And it was overwhelmingly approved. So at that point, that was the first time that money versus politics—money in politics—sort of raised its ugly head. And that’s how it was dealt with at that time. But unfortunately, it was not able to—in the succeeding decades, we just weren’t able to sweep it under the rug. It’s gotten to be a huge problem.
Tyranny of the Majority [19:36]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m talking with Tom Fleming. 800-345-5639. Questions for Tom Fleming, or if you have questions for any of our Founders, Tom would be happy to answer those questions on behalf of the Founders. So here is your opportunity. We are talking about money in politics. Now, of course, Tom, there was nothing unusual about imposing a requirement on voters to own property in order to be eligible to vote.
Thomas Fleming: That was based on what the Founders or the people of their generation thought was a common sense idea. That unless you owned a certain amount of property—it wasn’t much, like $50 or $100 was as some states had that little as that—unless you had some amount of property and had a stake in the country, you were likely to vote for reckless ideas and so forth. And so it was a check on the tendency for people who were at the very bottom of society to vote for wild ideas that would alienate the people above them.
Bob Zadek: Well, there was fear of tyranny of the majority. Since many more people didn’t have money, it would have been easy for them to say, “Let’s enact a statute, majority rules, and let’s take money from the few to give to the many.” And how familiar is that today?
Thomas Fleming: I’m afraid it’s all too familiar. The attack on the millionaires and the idea of paying for everything by taxing millionaires is absolute idiocy in my opinion, and it’s totally contrary to the approach that the Founders had. They recognized that you had to keep wealthy men involved in the country. And first of all, you ought to pause for a second, Bob, and remember this: the distribution of wealth in 1790, when we were putting the country—1787, when the Constitutional Convention—was about exactly the same as it is now. The top 10% owned 50% of the property in the country. But there was a thriving middle class, which is what made the United States a successful republic. There were a lot of people who had made a decent living and were making a decent living, and they all had a stake in the country too. So that was very, very important, this idea that people should have some interest in the country. And as you mentioned, Bob, one of the crucial ideas that James Madison had when he was putting the idea of the Constitution together was that majority rule can be just as tyrannical as a dictator.
Bob Zadek: There was a famous quote, Tom, which I’m sure you will know, about pointing out—I forgot who said it, but maybe it was Madison—pointing out that a tyranny of many is no different than a tyranny by one.
Thomas Fleming: Yes, that was—I’m pretty sure that was Madison, and that was certainly the way he thought. There’s no question about it. And that’s one of the reasons why he also—Madison was also a strong believer that one of the really big dangers that nobody was willing to recognize at his time, and I’m afraid even today, is legislative tyranny.
The Need for a Strong Executive [23:01]
Thomas Fleming: He absolutely—but there’s a wonderful little scene that I think we ought to pause and contemplate for a minute. And that is, for a year before the Constitutional Convention, little Jemmy Madison—he was about five-foot-nothing, actually he was about five-foot-six, but he only weighed about 110 pounds. He was a little guy, thin, he looked like he was going to expire at any moment.
Bob Zadek: And he was always sick.
Thomas Fleming: He was a very sick man all his life. But he came to Mount Vernon, oh, I don’t know how many times, and he and George Washington would sit on the porch at Mount Vernon or in the parlor if it was raining, and they’d discuss what kind of a government the country needed. And he was, you know, the six-foot-two-and-a-half George Washington and the big soldier personified, you know, but not a stupid man by any means. And the one thing that Washington hammered into Madison’s head—and Madison was very receptive to it—was, “We have to have a strong president. We can’t let Congress run the country.” Because he’d seen the nightmare that happened when the Continental Congress ran the government for so many years from 1774 to 1787, and with no check on it, you know, it was just a disaster. They had, at one point, they had so many committees. The only thing Congress knew what to do if a new problem came up, they created a committee. Pretty soon they had 3,000 committees, and they had to have a committee to keep track of the committees. I mean, it was—and Washington had to put up with this for eight years during the Revolution. He always treated them with great respect and so forth, but he didn’t respect them in any great—to any great extent.
Here’s how important Washington thought the presidency should be, how strong he should be. During the Constitutional Convention, every so often they would dissolve the meeting into what they called a committee of the whole, where they would just discuss things. And the different state delegations then would break up into groups and they’d all sit and discuss what they were for and what they were against and the recent issues that had come up. George Washington would descend from the podium where he was the chairman, and he would sit with the state delegation from Virginia. And again and again in that discussion with the state delegation—we have this on the record—he insisted they had to have a strong presidency. “One man,” he kept saying, “one man.” A lot of people were in favor of a three-man presidency. And he said he should be elected by the people, not by Congress. That was another idea that a lot of people had. And but the ultimate is, Washington said, “And moreover, the president should have the right to veto acts of Congress, and that’s it. They can’t override it.”
Bob Zadek: Oh, good for him. This is Bob Zadek. I’m talking with Tom Fleming. The subject is money and politics. 800-345-5639. We’ll be back in 90 seconds. We’ll take our callers at that time. Tom, we have some callers when we come back.
[Ad Break]
Washington’s War Expenses [27:44]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show. I’m your host, Bob Zadek. Today’s subject is money and politics. A pollutant or necessary oxygen? How would the Founders have felt about the relationship between money and access on the one hand and the political process on the other? My super special guest is Tom Fleming, one of the nation’s leading historians, the author of at least 20 non-fiction books and at least 23 novels focusing on American history and specifically the American Revolution. Tom, welcome back. And Carl.
Caller (Carl): Hi, Bob. Hi, Tom. I’m calling from Mill Valley, California.
Bob Zadek: How can we help you?
Caller (Carl): Okay, this money in politics and everything. Well, there’s a great book out that I read part of it last month about George Washington’s budget during the Revolutionary War. I’m not sure if you realize this, he did everything on spec. He invoiced the powers to be for boat, powder, muskets, tents, tried to pay his men, and it’s called the Budget of George Washington. So he did that early on, the importance of money.
Thomas Fleming: He kept track of his expenses throughout the war and he handed in an expense account at the end of the war, which took into account inflation and so forth. But I don’t think we should call it his budget. He, of course, Congress paid for everything that the army bought. I should add, though, that they were printing paper money without any taxes to back it up. And pretty soon, say in about three years, people were saying, “It’s not worth a Continental,” they meant a Continental dollar. The money was just waste paper.
Bob Zadek: And Washington, I think he refused a salary, but he was very scrupulous about being reimbursed for his expenses.
Thomas Fleming: Yes, his expenses, the legitimate ones that certainly—but that did not involve putting out any money for his ammunition or anything like that. He didn’t buy the ammunition; the army did. And so Congress was responsible. At first they hired all the people, the commissaries and the other people that bought ammunition for the army. They were appointed by Congress, but they appointed so many total disasters that during the Valley Forge period, Washington and Hamilton sat down—Hamilton was his aide—and they wrote what amounts to the first state paper. I have this in my book, Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge. And it was a 20,000-word paper. Washington dictated a lot of it, Hamilton rewrote it as they went along, and they gave this to five congressmen who came to visit them. And it was a complete overhaul of the army’s relationship to Congress. And the basic idea was they, the army, was going to choose who were the commissaries and who were the quartermaster people, and they would hire responsible and reliable men. And that’s what they did. And if they hadn’t persuaded Congress to go along with that, which Washington did in this conference with these five guys that came to Valley Forge. They came down there, you know what they said when they were coming to Valley Forge? Another congressman who hated Washington said, “They’re going to Valley Forge to rap a demigod over the knuckles.” There were a lot of people in Congress who did not like George Washington. And these five guys came in there ready to go to work on Washington. And instead, he handed them this 20,000-word state paper that Hamilton had written. And they were absolutely speechless. They had no idea how to respond to it. And then he took the head of the committee to dinner—and this is a glimpse of Washington the politician—he invited him to dinner at his headquarters. And after dinner, they went out and they walked up and down in the snow. And suddenly Washington turned to the guy and said, “You know, Congressman, I know Congress doesn’t trust me, and I can’t go on this way.” And the mere thought of Washington possibly resigning, this guy practically shook in his shoes and he said, “General, I trust you, and the men who came here who have met you, they trust you. I guarantee you that Congress will trust you.” And he went back to Congress and became Washington’s biggest advocate. It was just a marvelous performance. But that’s how Washington ran things.
Hamilton’s Financial Plan and the Bank [33:01]
Bob Zadek: When during the early days, the Washington administration and the Adams administration and the Jefferson administration, what role did money play in—and the word that’s used today all the time is “access.” Money buys access. The lobbyists, the whole lobbyist fuss that’s going on. To what extent in the early days was money necessary to gain access, or was influence not so important in those days?
Thomas Fleming: Of course it was important. Politics is politics; influence is always important. But I think you have to come at it from a slightly different angle, Bob. Money was important from day one because it was very important to involve all of these rich men in the government. Now, there was $40 million, the equivalent of I don’t know what, $250 million out there that Congress had—they were bills of credit that Congress had issued during the war when their paper money ran out. They just wrote these bills of credit. And Hamilton said, “We are going to repay this paper, this government paper, at par.” P-A-R. That meant just the face value was going to be repaid by the government. How were they going to do that? He was going to found a bank called the Bank of the United States, and he was going to sell stock in this bank, and the bank would repay these debts. And this was the key thing that brought all of the wealthy men in the country into the government—became supporters of the government. They didn’t—they weren’t in the government literally, but they became supporters of the government. And they didn’t try to invest their money in Britain or other countries; they invested it in the United States. And this was a crucial thing. But a lot of people, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, disapproved of this. They thought it was unfair because the original people who held the money—a lot of them held these notes—they were the veterans.
Bob Zadek: They were the veterans.
Thomas Fleming: They were the soldiers, you know. And they did—but they’d sold them long, long ago. And the notes passed around, you know, as paper does. And eventually almost all of it came into the hands of fairly wealthy men. But Hamilton said, “If we’re going to have any credit in this country worth mentioning”—and Washington backed him up completely, I should add—“we’ve got to do this.” And they did. Now, when Washington took over the government as president, the credit of the United States in the world was zero minus. We couldn’t borrow a nickel from any country in the world. We had defaulted on all the money we owed to France and Holland that they loaned us during the American Revolution. We were a joke when it came to money. In three and a half or four years, our credit rating, thanks to Hamilton and Washington, was the highest in the world. Now, there is how money plays a part in politics.
Bob Zadek: Of course, there was an interesting side note. While Hamilton certainly built up our what I’ll call credit rating, there was some discussion that he opened up the country maybe to the first insider trading because his buddies, in anticipation of Hamilton backing all of these seemed-to-be worthless obligations, they bought this up from mostly from veterans who were given script instead of their paychecks.
Thomas Fleming: Well, some of them were veterans, yes. But as I say, they’d sold that. We’re now talking about 1790, 1789, 1790. The Revolutionary War had ended in 1783. Six years had passed, and most of these guys had gotten land and become farmers and so forth, and they sold this paper for ready money. So it’s the way of the world, that’s all there is to it. And but Jefferson and Madison argued there ought to be some sort of mediation and some money should be paid back down to the original owner of the script. But it would have been an impossible job to track them all down and pay them money. It just wasn’t—there were no records kept of where the script passed through four or five hands. You know, it just wasn’t a possibility. And moreover, all of the rich men would have backed off on the whole deal because then you were involved in, well, how much we’re going to pay, etc., etc. And Congress would have gotten into the picture. And this was the last thing that Washington and Hamilton wanted to happen. So they didn’t do it for very, very good and sound realistic reasons. This is the key word: we must take men as they are, not as we wish them to be. This was Washington’s guidance as a politician as well as a soldier.
Establishing Presidential Stature [38:01]
Bob Zadek: That was his equivalent of “if all men were angels, we wouldn’t need laws.”
Thomas Fleming: Another way to put it, yes. And Washington was very, very much concerned to have a government participating in the whole country. You know, he wanted everybody to participate. And Jefferson and Madison disapproved even of this. Madison so much, but Jefferson was absolutely paranoid about the fact that the president was going to turn into a king or a dictator. And so but Washington was determined to make the president a figure that was known to all the people. So he made a point of visiting every state in the country while he was president. He made a trip through the South and then he went to New England. And everywhere he went, he insisted that the president was the leading politician. And there’s a good anecdote: he went up to Massachusetts and John Hancock was the governor of Massachusetts at the time. And he had been the first—one of the first presidents of the Continental Congress. So he thought he was just as good as Washington. And when he arrived in Boston, he sent a message to Washington saying, “Governor Hancock would be happy to see President Washington when he calls on him.” President Washington sent back a message to Governor Hancock saying, “President Washington will be even more pleased to see Governor Hancock when he calls on him first.”
Bob Zadek: Hancock, of course, made his money as a smuggler and—
Thomas Fleming: Well, partly, yeah. He was a merchant, though. You know, everybody smuggled in New England; it was a way of life up there. But the point is, that was Washington—that was the tough side of Washington. He was not going to let anybody denigrate the president. But Jefferson and his followers, they called these trips around the country “royal progresses.” They said he was acting like the king. Because George III, his predecessors and successors, they did that—the king would make visits to different parts of the country to make everybody feel identified with the nation and all that sort of thing. Well, the president was a substitute for a king in many ways, and that’s what he was doing.
Foreign Policy and Neutrality [41:49]
Thomas Fleming: At the same time, Washington, you know, he knew he had to get Congress’s approval for laws and all that; he never tried to eliminate Congress or anything like it. But he wanted to work with them as an equal. That was his—he really insisted on that. One of—another great decision he made was when the war broke out between revolutionary France and England. An awful lot of people, including Thomas Jefferson, who had been an ambassador to France, expected us to go into the war on the French side. Bingo, just like that. Washington waited until Congress had adjourned and then single-handedly, as president, he announced that America was neutral in this war.
Bob Zadek: Like a recess appointment.
Thomas Fleming: It was a recess statement. A lot of people in Congress were furious, but they couldn’t do anything about it because what Washington was doing was staking out the fact that foreign policy belonged to the president. He was only in office about a week when he wrote letters to every government on earth and he said, “From now on, anyone who wants to communicate with the United States of America should write to me, President George Washington, and not to Congress.”
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m speaking with Tom Fleming. We’re discussing money and politics then and now. 800-345-5639. Back in 90 seconds.
[Ad Break]
Corporations and Wealthy Citizens [46:13]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show. The leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. We are the show of ideas, not attitude. If you have an idea or an attitude, 800-345-5639. I’m joined today by Tom Fleming. Tom Fleming is one of the nation’s leading historians, especially in the area of the American Revolution. We are discussing how did the Founders feel about money and politics. And Tom, before we leave today, I’m going to ask you to channel George Washington for me in a question I didn’t get to ask in Williamsburg, but I get to ask George Washington through you today. So that’ll be in the last two minutes of our show. So stay tuned, everyone. We are talking about money and politics. Tom, there’s a lot of fuss going on today about the degree that corporations are citizens and the degree to which they have free speech rights and how much can they economically participate in the democratic process through spending money for candidates. How did the Founders feel about these economic entities called corporations and how much should they, do you think, participate in the political process?
Thomas Fleming: I don’t think that there were enough corporations in existence during the first ten years of the Republic, the era of the Founders, to really make much of a difference in politics. There were wealthy men and there were people who controlled banks, people like Robert Morris in Philadelphia, probably the wealthiest of all the businessmen in the country. But they did not feel that there should be any bar to them participating in politics in any way, as either running for office or supporting with money people who ran for office. And it was part of their rights as citizens; that’s all there was to it. And in that sense, I think money as speech is—you can’t deny that a corporation should have some rights to participate in politics, since they’re affected by it, the way the Supreme Court has recently ruled. But I don’t think that the Founders really got into the corporate issue to any great extent. But they did have a very strong sense that there was an ongoing conflict between the rich and the poor. And in 1800—now I, you know, I’ve been sort of saying some hard things about Mr. Jefferson, but we do have to give him his due. He did have a very good point. It was very important to make sure that all of the people felt they were participating in politics to some extent, or to a large extent, as much as possible. And that was the basis of his political party. And as I say in my—in the “Channeling George” blog that we discussed, after 1800, after Tom Jefferson became president, there began a tradition of fighting and defeating the rich in American politics. The Federalists were pinned—they were the heirs of today’s Republicans. And Jefferson called his party the Republicans to make things completely confusing. But by 1828, when Andy Jackson was elected, they had all more or less agreed they really should be called Democrats because they were reaching out to all the people, which that word conveys. But there’s no doubt that even back then, there was this issue of, “We can’t trust these rich people, they’re out to soak us, they’re out to steal this and that,” and so forth. For instance, I wrote an article for American Heritage magazine, “The First Bubble,” about the first stock market crash in 1792.
Bob Zadek: That was in the name of a guy named Duer, wasn’t it?
Thomas Fleming: Yeah, a guy named Duer tried to corner the market in shares of the Bank of the United States. And it didn’t work and he lost his shirt and a lot of other people did. Well, in Philadelphia, where the government—that was the capital at that time—Jefferson was Secretary of State. He was ecstatic. He was so pleased to see this crash. He said, “Oh, there isn’t a single man in New York that isn’t bankrupt.” He wrote that in a letter. He was exulting over the whole thing. So you can see this deep conflict between wealth and non-wealth, I guess you’d say, was rooted in to some extent in the temperaments of some of the Founders, certainly between Washington and Jefferson.
Bob Zadek: Tom, we have a caller. We have John. John, welcome to the show.
Caller (John): Thank you. Mr. Fleming, you wrote, I believe, a television program called Liberty! The American Revolution.
Thomas Fleming: That’s right. I—well, I didn’t write it. It was written by a very good writer by the name of Ron Blumer, but I was the consultant.
Caller (John): I took the program Liberty! to some friends in Kyrgyzstan, one of the former Soviet states, and they speak English well enough to listen to it. They were astounded to learn that the United States had to win its freedom from another country; they had no idea it was Britain. Anyway, after I showed them the entire thing, I said, “You think this would be interesting to other people in the former Soviet Union?” They said, “Absolutely.” So on that basis, I went and contacted the—I think it’s Minneapolis-St. Paul television station that produced it, and inquired about buying the foreign rights, which they’d already sold, but I contacted those people and couldn’t make it work. But I really think that that is a program which deserves to be made available worldwide. It was just so excellent. I thank you for writing it and participating in it.
Thomas Fleming: Well, thank you very much. I do too. We tried to really tell the whole story of the Revolution. That’s not done very often. Right now, I’m on the board of the American Revolution Center in Philadelphia. And they’re trying to build a museum in Philadelphia, they hope to do it, and I hope this is a plug to raise money for this museum eventually. This museum in Philadelphia will tell for the first time in any museum in the whole country the whole story of the American Revolution. It’s so important to see the whole trajectory of this thing. It really is. And I’m really pleased to hear you enjoyed it so much.
Bob Zadek: John, thanks so much for the call.
The Betrayal of Benedict Arnold [51:01]
Bob Zadek: Tom, in the last two minutes that we have, the question that I didn’t get to ask George Washington the reenactor, I’d like to close and have you take a shot. My question would have been to President Washington: President Washington, tell us how you felt at West Point the moment you found out that Benedict Arnold had betrayed you. What was your first feeling?
Thomas Fleming: I can easily tell you that. I said with tears in my voice, “Oh, if we can’t trust Arnold, who can we trust?” I was tremendously shocked. Now, as a historian, may I comment on that as George Washington speaking from Elysium? He would say, “This was really not as surprising to me as you’d think. More and more historians are beginning to catch on to the fact that we might have known already that Arnold was a traitor, and this whole elaborate thing of catching him and letting him get away and all that sort of stuff was all part of a plot that we had cooked up to conceal our spies inside New York who had told us about him.”
Bob Zadek: Oh, how interesting.
Thomas Fleming: It really—there is an argument that can be made along that line. And but Washington did, we know, the literal drama, that he did believe that it was a shocking thing and so forth. And but he was relieved to find out that—there’s a very interesting anecdote which very few people know. Arnold had his men row him down to this British ship and he got on the ship and then he turned to the oarsmen and said, “Now I want all you guys to join me, I’m joining the British Army. Come on, we’ll make a lot of money.” They all said no and rowed back to West Point.
Bob Zadek: Thanks to Tom Fleming for joining me for the whole hour today on money and politics. Tom, I hope you’ll come back again real soon.
Thomas Fleming: I’d love to do it.
Bob Zadek: Thanks a lot. Thanks everyone. See you next week.