Was The Ratification of the Constitution A Mistake?
2012-10-20 · Guest: Thomas Fleming (Historian and Author) · 50:35
Ratification of the US Constitution and Anti-Federalist Arguments
Bob Zadek and historian Thomas Fleming discuss whether the ratification of the U.S. Constitution was a mistake by examining the arguments of the Anti-Federalists. They explore the failures of the Articles of Confederation, the impact of Shays’ Rebellion, and the intense political maneuvering required to secure ratification in key states like New York and Virginia.
Topics: US Constitution, Ratification, Federalists, Anti-Federalists, Articles of Confederation, Shays’ Rebellion, James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, US Presidency, Federal Judiciary
Speakers: Bob Zadek — Host Thomas Fleming — Historian and Author
The Anti-Federalist Challenge [00:14]
Bob Zadek: Hi, it’s good to be back to the Bob Zadek Show. Thanks so much for tuning in. This is Bob Zadek, your host. We’re here every Sunday at noon at News Talk 910. Thanks so much for listening. I was on vacation for the past couple of three weeks, and I’m sure I’m glad to be back and glad to hook up with you folks out there in, as they say, radioland. We are the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. We are now on TV as well, Marin 26 in the local area. Please tune in on TV or on the radio.
For a while, I have been reading the story of the ratification of the Constitution. The period of time starting in September of 1787 after the Founders had ratified the Constitution—sorry, after the Founders had drafted the Constitution. They have done their work for four and a half months or so in Philadelphia under great secrecy, and they drafted, with lots of important compromises, they drafted the Constitution. The next step was to start with a constitution and end with a country.
The process created by the Founders, by the framers of the Constitution, was to send the Constitution out to the states—I was going to say states, but I guess I should say colonies—to the colonies for ratification. And with the invitation that each colony form a convention to review the Constitution, to discuss it, and to decide whether to ratify or not ratify the Constitution. And the drafters concluded that once the Constitution was ratified, if it would be ratified by nine colonies, then there would be a country with at least those nine colonies and any other colonies who chose to ratify.
Ultimately, of course, 12 of the 13 colonies ratified, and all 13 ultimately became states, and thus we have the United States. I have spent—I’ve been on the radio now for about three and a half years, and I have just somewhat automatically spoke with uncontrolled praise, respect, and admiration on the work product of the Founders, on the Constitution, the work they have done, and on the drafters, specifically James Madison, and of course not to diminish the work of the others. On the work product, I have spoken in praise of the Constitution as originally drafted and bemoaned Supreme Court decisions and efforts by Congress to alter what I perceived and most people perceive to be the original intent of the Constitution.
But then I started reading about the ratification process, and more specifically, I read the arguments of the patriots who opposed ratification. And I became curious. Here was some pretty smart men: George Mason, Edmund Randolph, Robert Yates in New York, George Clinton, DeWitt Clinton, Patrick Henry, and many, many others. And they were as patriotic as those who supported the Constitution and supported ratification. And what happened was, in reading the arguments of the Anti-Federalists—that was the label given to those who opposed the Constitution ratification, that was the label given to them by the Federalists—when I read the arguments of the Anti-Federalists and I read their predictions of what would happen if the Constitution was ratified, and I looked around, I said to myself, “Oh my God, the Anti-Federalists were right.” What they feared would happen upon ratification did in fact happen, and they seemed more right than the Federalists who supported ratification.
Well, that called into question a lot of what I really had believed somewhat automatically, and I found myself confused. Well, in order to straighten myself out and to share with you the process of ratification, I sought refuge with America’s, in my opinion, greatest living historian. Tom Fleming has been on my show, I believe twice before, and I’m happy to welcome him again. Tom has written, I guess around 55 books. When you write more than 50 books, when someone writes more than 50 books, it’s easy to lose track. So I’m happy to invite Tom to join me on the show to discuss the process of ratification of the Constitution and specifically, how could it be that the Anti-Federalists were so right on so many points? And also to explore what I consider to be, and what I didn’t realize before to be, the very intensely political process by which the Constitution was ratified. It hardly was the pure process that one would imagine. It was heavily political with a lot of nasty business going on as well. Perhaps the ends justify the means; you will decide. Tom, thanks so much for joining me on the show.
Thomas Fleming: I’m looking forward to it, Bob. I have been looking forward to it, and it’s great to be with you again. I think we’re dealing with a topic that is immensely interesting and significant for the country to think about now as we come into a very crucial presidential election. So I’ll let you—the ball’s in your court, I think, and you can start where you want to start, and I will respond as we go along.
Bob Zadek: Tom, I think also, I hope before we end the show, we will discover there are lessons about political life today that can be derived from the intensely political period starting roughly from September of 1787 and ending in the early fall of 1788 when ratification was accomplished.
Thomas Fleming: I think so. I think that’s quite possible. We’ll see. Lessons are always a little—the word makes me a little uneasy to be honest, but we might find a few principles that will emerge. And but that’s why it’s such fun to get together with someone like you who knows the subject and kick it around.
The Articles of Confederation [10:11]
Bob Zadek: Now Tom, when the drafting of the Constitution, the process itself was done in great secrecy, and that was probably the right call because they wanted to draft it where the 55 or so—there never were exactly 55, but 55 or so patriots…
Thomas Fleming: They came and went, the 55. That was the total, but usually there were a few—usually maybe five or six less than that on hand, you know.
Bob Zadek: Which is why I said approximately 55. They sort of did their work, and there were enormous compromises which we all know about, we all study in school. So clearly the Constitution didn’t have the same philosophical purity as, for example, the Declaration of Independence, which was a pure—putting aside the accusations against the King—but in its statement of principle, it was pure. But the Constitution was hardly pure. The Founders had the feeling they better get something which could be passed because the Founders believed this was their only shot. So each of the Founders made compromises because they didn’t want to fail. So no Founder would, I dare say, especially not Madison, would embrace the Constitution itself as being the perfect product. So it was a—if I can use the phrase, and I’m not trying to be harsh—a flawed product when it left Philadelphia. Is that a fair assumption?
Thomas Fleming: It was—hardly. I think the word “flawed” is unfair to the Constitution. It was a series of compromises but based on very realistic political thinking every step of the way. But let me point out something else, Bob. We had a constitution before the Constitutional Convention met. This is something that I think has to be emphasized if you really want to understand and appreciate the Constitution. We had something called the Articles of Confederation, which was an absolutely atrocious constitution.
Since the Founders had the Articles in front of them, and they presumably met to fix the Articles, and man did they fix it—they threw it away. That was the way they fixed it. But we’ll discuss briefly what the stated goal of the Founders was.
I think it’s absolutely essential to know why, if you want to understand why the Constitution was ratified, you have to understand just how lousy the Articles of Confederation was. To give you one example, Washington’s army is starving in 1783. The war is over, and the officers are so angry, they’re owed a ton of money and so forth. And Madison is desperately—James Madison is trying to make Congress into a national body and think in terms of national instead of separate state interests. Each state in the Constitution had one—under the Articles had one vote. So he proposed a bill so that we could tax imports. Under the Articles of Confederation, you had to have every state had to agree to raising money that way. The Congress had no power to tax anybody. They could only—this was a new idea that they could actually tax imports. They had to get the 13 states to agree, and 12 of them agreed, and little Rhode Island, who was making so much money with their own trade and so forth, said, “Nah, we don’t like it.” And they voted no, and bingo, there was Washington left with this enraged army ready to march on Philadelphia and start a counter-revolution. That was the ability of the Articles of Confederation at work. It was just a very, very bad system.
Each state had one vote in the Articles, and the Congress had no power, as I’ve already said, to raise money. So they were totally bankrupt. During the Revolution, they just printed money like it was going out of style. And by 1780, there was something like 220 million paper dollars in circulation, and the phrase went, “It’s not worth a Continental,” meaning a Continental dollar. The stuff had depreciated to waste paper. So this was the kind of dose of government that everybody had gotten from the Articles of Confederation. And this was why Madison in 1785 went to see George Washington at Mount Vernon. He’d been in Congress, and Washington had grown to like him because he was trying to think in national terms, which practically nobody else in Congress did. And he went to Mount Vernon, and they started talking about what could be done to change the government. And over the next year and a half or so, these guys worked out the basic ideas of the Constitution. It’s an amazing and little-understood story that that’s where it all started.
Shays’ Rebellion and Economic Crisis [17:36]
Thomas Fleming: And so then we have one more example, I think, of why these people were—particularly Washington in particular was very anxious to have this Constitutional Convention. Shays’ Rebellion. Now Daniel Shays was a farmer from Western Massachusetts, a former captain in the Revolutionary Army. And the taxes in Massachusetts were pretty high; they were trying to pay off the state’s debt from the Revolution. And so these guys in the western part of the state couldn’t pay the taxes, and courts were starting to seize their farms and their homes. And so Shays started a rebellion. And whoa, it was really a big thing. They shut down courts, they chased judges out of that part of Massachusetts.
And here’s the thing that nobody—well, very few people want to admit: it spread to other western parts of states like Pennsylvania and Virginia, where similar things were going on. And this was really the threat of a counter-revolution. And Congress had no money, not a cent to raise to pay an army. They tried to raise an army of 4,400 men, and they asked—all they could do was ask the states to send them money. Nobody sent them anything. And so finally some very wealthy men in Massachusetts raised enough money to hire a local army, just Massachusetts, under one of Washington’s ex-generals, and they went marched into Western Massachusetts and dispersed these guys. But it was really bad. And to give you a glimpse of what Washington was thinking, somebody went to the general and they said, “Oh, could you go to Western Massachusetts, go to Massachusetts, General? Your influence would calm this whole thing.” And Washington snarled, “Influence is not a government, and that’s what we need, a government.”
So confronted with that as a prelude to the Constitution, the Founders, of course, we could spend 10 hours on just the debates of the Constitution, and I would love to by the way, but I want to focus on—so the Founders were determined to leave Philadelphia with a better Constitution. They felt that literally the future of the country was at stake. The country was totally bankrupt. We hadn’t been able to pay all the loans, the millions and dollars of loans we’d gotten from the French and the Dutch. Our credit around the whole world was absolutely worthless. No one would loan a nickel to the United States of America or to any businessman in the United States. So this was really crucial. Things were at the brink of total collapse.
And to give you another glimpse of what was probably going to happen, Alexander Hamilton, who was a congressman after he’d been one of Washington’s aides, he quit Congress in disgust and he wrote a letter to Governor Clinton of New York suggesting that he offer free land to ex-soldiers from the Continental Army. He said, “Because I think there’s going to be a civil war, and it would be very handy for us to have some well-trained soldiers in our midst.” Oh, it was that—now so the Founders, so they draft the Constitution.
The Shift to a National Government [22:26]
Bob Zadek: And what’s very interesting and not really taught and not really understood is that this document, which was full of compromises as it had to be—it was a political document—goes out to the states. Now to set the stage, what’s really important is the states were told, “Convene a convention in order to vote on ratification.” But by the way…
Thomas Fleming: Could I interrupt, Bob, to explain why that was done? They knew, everybody in Congress knew, that they couldn’t trust this to the state legislatures. That would have been absolute disaster. Probably only two or maybe three of them would have ratified it. They had to get a convention of the people. Now, I grant you a convention of 100 or 55 or, you know, they had different numbers in all the different state conventions, isn’t “the people” in a certain sense, but they were elected by the people. And they had candidates and guys stood for what they stood for and so forth. So there was an election and a free election at that. The important thing was the great change of the Constitution was to shift the power of government from the states to the people. And this was what—this was the great appeal of the Constitution for an awful lot of people.
Bob Zadek: Tom, I’m going to do something very hazardous, which is to slightly, slightly—and I’m holding my breath and biting my fingernails down to the cuticles—I’m going to disagree with something you said. I’ve never done this before and maybe never will do it again. You said the Constitution shifted the power from the states to the people. And I would replace “people” with “general government,” i.e., federal government. We can discuss whether they’re the same. I don’t think they were. And in fact, especially since the people became far removed from the general government, from the federal government, I’m not so sure it really did shift it from the states to the people, and history shows perhaps it did not.
Thomas Fleming: But here’s an answer to that, Bob. It’s a republic. It’s a republic, not a democracy, a pure democracy like the Greeks had in the Greek city-states. Most of them were pure democracies. They just put an issue out there and everybody voted on it, and that was that. But the idea of a republic was to filter the support and opinions of the people through forms of government. And that is one way to avoid the reckless demagoguery and anarchy that pure democracy turns out to create. James Madison wrote a wonderful essay in which he analyzed all of the history of the previous confederacies and pure democracies and so forth. He found the pure democracies all went into—eventually wound up in the hands of a demagogue, a dictator in other words. And the confederacies of various kinds, they were all too weak. They didn’t have a good strong central government. And this was the result of Madison’s long years of study of the history of this problem. And he concluded that you had to have a compromise, which is not a dirty word, incidentally. I don’t want to—we’re very good friends, so I don’t think I could hurt your feelings, but you’ve been sort of using compromise as if it was a bad thing. But it can be a very good thing because it took the best part of a couple of good ideas: the rule by the people and the idea of preventing a direct rule by the people, which had previously history had shown led to disaster.
Creating a Strong Presidency [27:46]
Thomas Fleming: The biggest balance that they created at the Constitutional Convention is the presidency. Here’s how bad the Articles of Confederation were: the President of the Articles of Confederation—there were 14 of these guys, by the way—the President of the Articles of Confederation did not even have the power to answer a letter that was sent to him. He had to send it to a committee in Congress. Congress had absolute power over the whole country and particularly over the President. Washington thought this was such an atrocious idea that that was the one thing that he said to Madison: “I think we’ve got to have a strong President in this new government that you and I are discussing.”
Now, Washington’s idea, he didn’t have a clear idea how we were going to elect this President, and Madison didn’t really have one either. He thought that the President ought to be elected by Congress. But thank God there were other people in this convention. There was a wonderful guy named James Wilson of Pennsylvania, a very smart guy, a Quaker. And he’s the one who said, “No, no, no.” And there was also another guy, Gouverneur Morris, one of my favorite all-time historical characters, a big fat guy, he had a peg leg which he’d lost while fleeing an irate husband. He was a great womanizer, Gouverneur was. But what a thinker and what a gifted guy he was. He stood up in the Constitutional Convention and said, “The President must not be the flunky of Congress.” Isn’t that a great line? I just love it. And so between Wilson and Gouverneur Morris and some other people, they created this strong President that was elected by the people. There’s where the people get into the whole thing.
Bob Zadek: Well, not quite. Elected by the electors, so not quite by the people, but ultimately it came to be that.
Thomas Fleming: Well, the Electoral College was just added to keep the small states happy, but basically it’s elected by the people. You know, only once or twice in the whole 200-year history of the country has the Electoral College gotten into the act and actually made waves in any way, shape, or form when there was a deadlock. But it really—the Electoral College was created because there was this uneasiness about letting the people choose. But in practice, the people have chosen. That’s all there is to it. And that’s why Harry Truman—I once spent a lot of time with Harry Truman, and I remember Truman saying to me, “Tom, the one thing that I think is great about our government is the presidency. It’s the greatest office created by the mind of man.” That’s what President Truman said.
Political Maneuvering in New York and Virginia [33:51]
Bob Zadek: You know, but now the Constitution goes out to the states, and a lot of really smart people found a lot of things they didn’t like about it.
Thomas Fleming: Yeah, and they were very intelligent men, as you say. I think this is why I think this is such a great idea for a program. These people really did have strong objections, and they wrote very, very good essays about it. There’s a huge series of publications about the Anti-Federalist papers.
Bob Zadek: Like the Anti-Federalist Papers.
Thomas Fleming: Yeah, the Anti-Federalist Papers. It was edited by a guy named Herbert Storing, and oh, it’s a whole shelf of a library.
Bob Zadek: I’m reading it now. It’s wonderful. But Tom, here’s my point. The first sort of issue I have is that it goes out to the states and they are told, and the state conventions are told, “Okay, go ahead and vote on ratification.” However, when you vote, bear the following in mind. Number one, you can’t change it. It’s up or down, irrespective of whatever you don’t like. We don’t care. We’re not going to sit back and do it again. Number two, when you vote, bear in mind that we’ll probably never do this again. This is our one shot, so you better hurry up. Number three, we got a lot of very big countries in Europe who are licking their chops, hoping we don’t ratify so they can invade us again.
Thomas Fleming: All that is all true.
Bob Zadek: Number four, we’ll probably end up with three, maybe three separate countries: the Eastern states, the Middle states, and the Southern states, all of which are going to be weak.
Thomas Fleming: This would have been a total disaster. The one idea that Washington had that he thought was why we had to have this Constitutional Convention, at least five or six times in the last years of the Revolution and in the years of peace after the Revolution, he wrote letters to people saying, “I see one head turning into 13.” So what that means, you know.
Bob Zadek: But Tom, we have now, we have ratifying conventions. And one can say, and scholars have said, was there really a rush? Was it really the case that it couldn’t be amended? In fact, there was a Bill of Rights afterward, but that’s a different story.
Thomas Fleming: Oh, wait a minute. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says it can’t be amended.
Bob Zadek: No, no, that the ratifying conventions cannot conditionally ratify, where they can say, “We’ll ratify if you make the following changes,” although some states did with the Bill of Rights.
Thomas Fleming: Well, they added, they said they wished there would be a Bill of Rights, but they still—they all took that as a reasonable ultimatum. Except there’s one guy that wasn’t—New York was definitely not very—was very hostile to the whole idea of the Constitution.
Bob Zadek: My hero, Robert Yates.
Thomas Fleming: Yeah, not just Robert Yates, though. The boss of New York was George Clinton. He was the governor, and his nephew DeWitt, who was the mayor of New York—not right at this point, but later—he was his right-hand man. Clinton was the first political boss, and New York was making so much money under the Articles of Confederation from the states all around it that they were absolutely opposed to it. And only the brilliance of Alexander Hamilton persuaded the convention to ratify it, the New York convention. And that was a really close call. They ratified it by about three votes, as I recall.
Bob Zadek: But although once again, my premise is that the ratification process had a taint to it. And New York is a good example. You talk about New York ratifying, but when New York ratified, nine states had already ratified, if I’m not mistaken. And therefore there would be a country. So the ratification in New York was, are they going to be part of the United States or are they going to go it alone? Well, that’s hardly an objective ratification decision.
Thomas Fleming: Well, it was a realistic decision. I don’t know what you mean by—what else are you going to say? This is the way it was. But we all knew that if New York and Virginia, which also hadn’t ratified—Virginia was the biggest state—if they didn’t ratify, the whole thing would have gone nowhere. There wouldn’t have been a government, that’s all there was to it. And down in Virginia, Patrick Henry was totally opposed to this, and some other very talented guys were opposed too.
Bob Zadek: George Mason, my other hero.
Thomas Fleming: And so this was crucial. These states had to do it. And Clinton then tried the conditional ratification route. “Well, we’ll ratify it, but if we don’t get some of the changes we want, we’ll un-ratify.” Hamilton sent a man on horseback down to Virginia to get the message from Madison, and Madison came back and said, the message came back, “It’s all or nothing.” This is how you get results in politics. And it was intensely political.
Direct Taxation and the Judiciary [44:25]
Bob Zadek: In reading the complaints by the Anti-Federalists, Robert Yates, who wrote under the name of Brutus…
Thomas Fleming: Well taken, by the way. He was trying to assassinate the Constitution instead of Caesar.
Bob Zadek: He made, I think, his writing in the Anti-Federalist Papers made some of the most prescient and clearest arguments against ratification, and some of his predictions really came true. Yates feared, of course, we started with the colonies having all the power, as Tom you have pointed out.
Thomas Fleming: The states had all the power. We were free states by now.
Bob Zadek: So the states had all the power and to the detriment of the general government, which is what it was called then, or the federal government. Now, Yates feared that the states would disappear virtually—now not politically, they would still exist on paper—but all of the power traditionally held by the states would ultimately be transferred to Washington. And he feared that there was enough wiggle room in the Constitution, specifically the Necessary and Proper Clause, which we can spend a whole show on itself, Necessary and Proper and General Welfare. But he turned out—and his argument was pooh-poohed, and Madison would say in the Federalist Papers, “What are you worried about? It’s enumerated powers, the feds can only do certain things, calm down, your fears are misplaced.” Brutus called it right.
Thomas Fleming: Oh, no, I don’t agree with that. I really don’t. The states have not disappeared. This was another term that the Anti-Federalists used was “consolidated government.” It made it sound like the whole thing was going to shrink down to just one guy. That would really be consolidation, a dictator. And it didn’t happen. The states still have a great deal of authority in terms of power to run their own affairs. They control the education of their people, they keep order. I just don’t feel—I come from New Jersey. I don’t have the slightest sense that New Jersey has disappeared. Everybody in New Jersey has a very strong identity that they’re from New Jersey and they’re pretty damn proud of it, no matter how many rotten jokes you make about our state. But I just don’t think it’s happened. The states haven’t disappeared. So I just think Yates’s fear was an illusion.
The point was the states under the Articles of Confederation had all the power. You had to take some of the power away from the states and give it to the federal government, which incidentally Madison didn’t really like the term “federal” as much as he liked the “national” government. He was creating—Madison, the father of the Constitution, although I think George Washington is really the grandfather and he doesn’t get enough credit—but it was a national government which distributed the powers of running the country in three different branches of the government. It was a brilliant transformation from what we had as the Articles, in which Congress did everything and basically did nothing.
Bob Zadek: I’ll make some more arguments in a moment, but just to finish up this state versus federal, I don’t think you would disagree that the trend—and you could cite anything from minimum wage laws on down—the trend encouraged by the Supreme Court, of course, but the trend has clearly been a devolution in power of what was traditionally state domain transfer to the federal government in Washington. Clearly that has been the trend over the past…
Thomas Fleming: I think it’s a flow that goes back and forth. And there’s sometimes there’s a much more of a tendency considering the situation or the depth of the emergency or whatever’s going on. During a war, for instance, nobody had more power than Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, no President ever. But that was the greatest emergency we ever faced. So one of the great things I think about the Constitution is that it can be stretched and it can give the President in particular immense powers in order to get the country through a very, very harrowing crisis. Those things are necessary if we’re going to have a government that can deal with the real world.
Bob Zadek: The next two words scared the bejesus out of the Anti-Federalists, and those two words are “direct taxes.” The Constitution, to the great fear of the Anti-Federalists, gave the federal government the power of direct taxation, which they never had before. And the Anti-Federalists feared that the federal government would, through direct taxation, sap up all of the taxable money there was so that the states would be unable to run their affairs because there’s nothing left for them to tax after the feds get through. Now of course that didn’t happen, but certainly the feds have been consuming a large, large portion of all the direct taxes that are, to use the phrase, available.
Thomas Fleming: No doubt about it, yes. But is it—the crucial question is, is it necessary? You can’t let the needs of the situation hang on a strict interpretation. Jefferson was a big strict interpretation guy, and so he’s got this chance to buy Louisiana Territory and double the size of the country. And he says, “Oh, but we can’t do it, it’s not in the powers enumerated and so forth, and so we’ll have to have a constitutional amendment.” Meanwhile, over in France, Napoleon is saying, “I need this money, and when are those jerks over there buying? I’m going to drop this whole idea.” And a group of legislators rushed to the presidential palace and said, “For God’s sake, Jefferson, buy this thing! We’re going to miss the greatest opportunity ever given a country in history.” And Jefferson said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” And he did it. So necessity is really the mother not only of invention but of stretching laws too. As long as it’s not—there’s a difference between being illegal and being, you know, slightly not the letter of the law.
The Anti-Federalists also feared—they didn’t know a lot about it, but they also feared the structure and the creation of the federal judiciary. And they feared very much that the federal judiciary would, in effect, being part of the federal government, would be the arbiter of which powers could devolve from the states to the federal government. And they looked with great distrust on the federal judiciary because in their minds, the state judiciaries was where the judiciary would sit. And now the transfer of a lot of judicial power to the federal government and the federal courts, they feared in part because they never experienced it before. And I think also the federal judiciary has grown in power over everyday life much more than any Founder could have imagined.
Thomas Fleming: I think that would be a debate that for a long time. It has certainly grown, but the Founders didn’t really anticipate the complexity of the problems that we’re facing and the kind of decisions that the court has had to rule on. I really think you’re basically right; it’s become much more powerful than they imagined it would. But on the other hand, again, was it necessary or wasn’t it? This is where the debate is.
Washington v. Jefferson [49:23]
Bob Zadek: Tom, I want to spend a minute or so on your current project on the presidency.
Thomas Fleming: I’m doing a book, just starting work on a book called Washington v. Jefferson, the hidden clash that really altered our understanding of the presidency. These two men had different ideas about the presidency, and it’s very interesting. I’m in the midst of exploring it now and just warming up, I guess you’d say. It won’t be out for a good while. But I have another book coming out in the spring which I think is going to be quite interesting to a lot of people, especially people who think about our history.
Bob Zadek: We’re running out of time, Tom. Thanks so much for joining me. This is Bob Zadek. I’ll see you next week. Please be sure to tune in. See you next Sunday.