Lawrence Reed has spent a career running economic think tanks, and his ninth book goes back further than the Revolution to find where America actually came from. Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America runs from the Mayflower Compact in 1620 to the Bill of Rights in 1791, and it argues what John Adams argued: the Revolution did not begin at Lexington or in Philadelphia. It began decades earlier in the minds and hearts of ordinary colonists. This conversation is the lead-in to a four-part series on economics with Lawrence Reed beginning next week.
Guest: Lawrence W. Reed, president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, previously president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy for twenty-one years and a professor at Northwood University, author of nine books.
Today's topics:
Why the Mayflower Compact matters more than most Americans realize, and the fifty strangers on the ship who forced the pilgrims to write it
The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, when townspeople who were not Quakers defied a governor's order to shun the Quakers
The Second Continental Congress hands Benjamin Franklin the printing press with a three million dollar ceiling, and by 1780 the continental dollar is worthless
The British ship that anchored off Staten Island and counterfeited American currency, doing more harm with its printing presses than with its guns
How the best ideas of the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening arrived at the same conclusion at the same time
Why the Boston Tea Party was never an argument about the price of tea
The French Revolution began fourteen years after ours and ended somewhere else entirely, and the reasons are specific
The sin of presentism, and the Wright brothers test for judging people of the past
Slavery goes back to 3500 BC and touched nearly every nation, and eight American states had already moved against it by the time the first country abolished it in 1804
Nathan Hale at twenty-one, disguised as a Dutch schoolteacher, and what British officers wrote in their own diaries about his composure
The Poles and the Frenchman who crossed an ocean to volunteer: Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Kazimierz Pulaski, Haym Salomon, and a nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette who broke his own country's law to get here
Mercy Otis Warren, the conscience of the American Revolution, whose history Thomas Jefferson required his entire cabinet to read
Thomas Paine, a bankrupt corset maker, writes Common Sense in January 1776
Esther Reed raises three hundred thousand dollars in private voluntary funds for the troops, and Washington tells her what to do with it
George Washington lost two of every three battles he fought and still held the army together without pay
General Howe's terrier crosses the field after Germantown, and Washington dictates a letter to Alexander Hamilton
The all-black Rhode Island regiment that won three engagements, and Phillis Wheatley's hour in Washington's tent
Twenty-seven American ships against two hundred fifty British ones, and the letters of marque that privatized the navy
John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, who saved Princeton twice
Why the founders gave us a republic with democratic elements and not a democracy, and which rights they put beyond the reach of any majority
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