0:05 [SPEAKER_01]: The English writer, G.K. Chesterton, once said that America is the only nation in the world that has founded on a creed that creed is set forth in the Declaration of Independence. 0:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. 0:23 [SPEAKER_01]: It announced that all men are equal in their claim to justice. 0:26 [SPEAKER_01]: The government's exists to give them that justice. 0:30 [SPEAKER_00]: He went on to say that while France is French and England is English, America is united not by an ancient history, or by ethnic identity, but by a public agreement about the right of every human being to live in a free society, or to phrase it as the founding fathers did. 0:50 [SPEAKER_01]: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. 0:58 [SPEAKER_01]: That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 1:03 [SPEAKER_00]: We've all heard this line from the Declaration of Independence so many times that it's lost some of its power, but in the history of human civilizations, this really was and remains a huge deal. 1:18 [SPEAKER_00]: This idea of founding a society, on so-called human rights and a public creed, was a bizarre and idealistic, almost naive thing to do. 1:30 [SPEAKER_00]: But it remains the bedrock of our society. 1:35 [SPEAKER_00]: When the founding fathers began adding amendments to the U.S. Constitution to help secure those rights in safeguard that free society. 1:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The first thing they focused on was the most fundamental, free speech. 1:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Back in Europe, criticizing your government could get you fined and present and killed. 1:57 [SPEAKER_00]: But how can you pursue life, liberty, and happiness? 2:05 [SPEAKER_00]: How can you have a truly democratic republic without free speech? 2:11 [SPEAKER_00]: You can't. 2:12 [SPEAKER_00]: So the first amendment of the many amendments to the U.S. Constitution was basically this. 2:19 [SPEAKER_01]: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or the press or of the right of the people to petition the government. 2:28 [SPEAKER_00]: But this kind of freedom is easy on the general population and hard on the people who 2:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And within a few short years, these same American founders were attempting to undermine the first amendment. 2:43 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1791, when they wrote the amendment, they still felt like rubbles. 2:49 [SPEAKER_00]: If you short years later, that had officially become the man, with gigantic targets on their backs. 2:59 [SPEAKER_00]: So in 1798, they effectively repealed the right to free speech, with a sedition act, with criminalized criticism of the government. 3:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Our friend Charles Slag has written a book about this pivotal moment in American history, called Liberty's First Crisis, and we've invited him back onto the podcast to discuss it. 3:27 [SPEAKER_00]: welcome back Charlie. 3:28 [SPEAKER_00]: How did you first become interested in this? 3:31 [SPEAKER_02]: As a writer, I've always cherished the first amendment above all the others on the bill of rights. 3:38 [SPEAKER_02]: It's not only central to what I do for a living, it's also... 3:43 [SPEAKER_02]: a source of immense pride to me personally to live in a country that holds up free speech as a fundamental right. 3:52 [SPEAKER_02]: And I think going back to when I was a child, I had been vaguely aware of this time early in our history where 4:01 [SPEAKER_02]: Just very recently after passing the bill of rights that same generation passed a law making it essentially illegal to criticize the government that seemed like an amazing contradiction and that sort of bounced around on my head for many years and then I started looking into what could have been going on back then what could have gone through their minds, why did they. 4:24 [SPEAKER_02]: just decided to pass this law called the Sedition Act. 4:28 [SPEAKER_02]: What happened? 4:29 [SPEAKER_02]: Who were the characters involved? 4:30 [SPEAKER_02]: And then the more I started to look into it and read and research, the more fascinated I became. 4:35 [SPEAKER_00]: The words sedition basically just means to do and say things that rebel against authority. 4:43 [SPEAKER_00]: The sedition act of 1798 was a law that criminalized public criticism of U.S. government officials in policies. 4:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Charlie, what was the crisis that prompted this violation of the First Amendment so early in American history? 5:00 [SPEAKER_00]: And who was responsible for it? 5:01 [SPEAKER_02]: The central issue 5:04 [SPEAKER_02]: In 1798, the country had been recently founded. 5:10 [SPEAKER_02]: They passed this bill of rights in seven years earlier, which guaranteed freedoms for all Americans free speech, due process and so forth. 5:20 [SPEAKER_02]: It was easy for Americans to all get behind those during the Revolutionary Days when the British were the controlling authorities. 5:28 [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, we want freedom and independence from England. 5:31 [SPEAKER_02]: But when Americans started to run their own country and started to take positions of political power and become president, they realized that 5:40 [SPEAKER_02]: It was a whole different ball game and getting criticized and lambasted in the press was something they didn't like very much. 5:47 [SPEAKER_02]: So some of the very founders who had been most outspoken on free speech turned around and said, you know, what free speech is dangerous. 5:57 [SPEAKER_02]: And John Adams was the president. 5:59 [SPEAKER_02]: He represented the federalist party. 6:02 [SPEAKER_02]: They didn't even really call themselves a party. 6:05 [SPEAKER_02]: The federalists considered themselves the United States. 6:08 [SPEAKER_02]: They were the English descended sons of liberty and they were the wise leaders. 6:15 [SPEAKER_02]: And Adams was getting picked apart as president by critics. 6:20 [SPEAKER_02]: who loosely became known as the Democrats, the Democratic Republicans, the sort of outliers, this opposition party, which began to swell. 6:31 [SPEAKER_02]: And they were going after him on a daily basis and calling in terrible things, making it very difficult for him to govern. 6:38 [SPEAKER_02]: He and the Federalist controlled Congress got tired of that, and they passed a bill known as the Sedition Act, 6:45 [SPEAKER_02]: of 1798 and imposed $2,000 fines or two years in prison for essentially making the government look back. 6:56 [SPEAKER_00]: It may surprise you to know that many of your favorite founding fathers supported the sedition act of 1798, but it's much less surprising when you understand what was happening in the world at the time. 7:10 [SPEAKER_00]: People like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were watching the reign of terror and France, in which more than 16,000 people were executed, including the king and his wife, Marie Antonette. 7:25 [SPEAKER_00]: And they were frankly terrified that America might descend into the same anarchy. 7:31 [SPEAKER_00]: The same government, a supported the American Revolution, was the one being overthrown in France. 7:39 [SPEAKER_00]: And all of these men lost personal friends to mob violence. 7:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The Duke de la Russia for coal, one of the most passionate French supporters of the American Revolution, and a personal translator for Ben Franklin, was stoned to death for his support of the French monarchy. 7:59 [SPEAKER_00]: The great Marquis de la Fiat, 8:02 [SPEAKER_00]: who commanded American troops throughout the American Revolution was forced to flee France before being captured in in prison in Austria. 8:12 [SPEAKER_00]: It's easy to romanticize the French Revolution, but it was an ugly brutal era. 8:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Things escalated quickly from open criticism to open war on the establishment, mobs of Republicans, literally hunted officials and aristocrats. 8:31 [SPEAKER_00]: in just about every form of authority was in danger. 8:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Even Christian nuns were lined up and be headed one after another for their association with the Roman Church. 8:46 [SPEAKER_00]: In short, a French Revolution was an absolute horror show and even at a distance of 4,000 miles American officials had reason to be scared. 8:58 [SPEAKER_02]: The federalists, as I say, were the old guard. 9:00 [SPEAKER_02]: They saw themselves as the caretakers of the country, if you will. 9:05 [SPEAKER_02]: They saw France going through its own revolution as a terrible danger and a threat because you had a populist uprising and heads rolling and keyteens and so forth. 9:18 [SPEAKER_02]: So they saw the principal danger to the United States as coming from 9:25 [SPEAKER_02]: France, that French infused idea of populist uprisings. 9:30 [SPEAKER_02]: Now, on the other side, you had Americans tend to be this Republican party that held with France. 9:37 [SPEAKER_02]: They believe that France stood for liberty. 9:39 [SPEAKER_02]: They stood for the power of the people and decentralized power. 9:43 [SPEAKER_02]: And anti-monarchy, they tossed off the monarchy. 9:46 [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of Americans were fearful. 9:48 [SPEAKER_02]: that the Federalists would start imposing a monarchy, so the Republicans were equally convinced that the French were the model to emulate and they didn't want a monarchy on our shores. 9:58 [SPEAKER_02]: So now you had two sides equally convinced that they stood for the salvation of the Republic while the other sides stood for a disaster. 10:09 [SPEAKER_00]: We might say that the Federalists cited with old friends, the friends that had supported them during the Revolution, and the Republicans, led by people like Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, cited with new friends, and the People's Revolution. 10:27 [SPEAKER_00]: and as terrified as the Federalists were of anti-authoritarian andarchy. 10:33 [SPEAKER_00]: The Republicans were equally fearful of a new monarchy being established in the United States government, which at that time was a real possibility. 10:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Powerful early players, like Alexander Hamilton, wanted as strong as a federal government as possible, 10:57 [SPEAKER_02]: Hamilton is an amazing character and was a great figure in American history. 11:02 [SPEAKER_02]: He was an immigrant himself to the United States, but ironically he became one of the great symbols of the Federalist Party in the sense that he wanted a strong government. 11:13 [SPEAKER_02]: He believed he wanted a president appointed for life. 11:16 [SPEAKER_02]: He wanted Senate's appointed for life, essentially as close as you could get to having a king as you could get without actual calling them a king. 11:24 [SPEAKER_02]: Because he believed in the necessity of a strong government. 11:29 [SPEAKER_02]: The two things that the early Americans feared 11:33 [SPEAKER_02]: was on the one side, you feared that the rabble was going to destroy, that the mob was going to rise up in destroy the country. 11:41 [SPEAKER_02]: And so Hamilton came down on the big government side. 11:45 [SPEAKER_02]: He put in place the building blocks for what became the greatest economy in the history of the world. 11:50 [SPEAKER_02]: So he wasn't a bad guy and he was a great thinker and the federalist papers are wonderful. 11:56 [SPEAKER_02]: But in this case, I think he had a blind spot. 12:00 [SPEAKER_02]: I think that he had little faith in the ability of average people to govern themselves. 12:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Part of the way that people govern themselves is through exercising their free speech and freely criticizing their elected officials. 12:16 [SPEAKER_00]: In the earliest years of American history, this meant holding people like George Washington and John Adams, accountable through the press 12:28 [SPEAKER_00]: and make no mistake, these critics were not necessarily heroes. 12:33 [SPEAKER_00]: They could be slanderous, vengeful jerks. 12:36 [SPEAKER_00]: In John Adams and his fellow Federalists were not crazy to fear for a sudden end to the young American political experiment. 12:46 [SPEAKER_00]: It made perfect sense in their minds that mob criticism might eventually spill over into mob violence and mob rule. 12:55 [SPEAKER_00]: They were reading about this very thing every day from the other side of the world. 13:02 [SPEAKER_02]: So the Federalist government passed this law called the Sedition Act and the principal people they were going after was opposition politicians and critical journals. 13:13 [SPEAKER_02]: Those were I think the two targets they had most in mind and among those one was a guy named 13:19 [SPEAKER_02]: Matthew Lyon, we'd come over from Ireland about the age 14. 13:24 [SPEAKER_02]: He'd made his way up to Vermont where he'd fought in the Revolutionary War, fought with the Green Mountain Boys, built a fortune up there in the mountains and got himself elected to Congress. 13:35 [SPEAKER_02]: Now, this was a great front to the Federalists who thought that immigrants really had their place in the country, doing more menial tasks and serving in Congress. 13:44 [SPEAKER_02]: And Matthew Lyon was, is a wonderful character, 13:49 [SPEAKER_02]: Never back down for anyone. 13:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Matthew Leon was a skilled talker who brought a street fighter's mentality to the world of politics. 13:59 [SPEAKER_00]: His real problems often began when he stopped talking and started expressing himself in other ways. 14:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Like the time when he violently pulled the hair of a political opponent and tried to kick him. 14:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Or the time he spit in the face of a fellow congressman, while congress was still in session. 14:20 [SPEAKER_02]: And so there was the sparks right from the start. 14:23 [SPEAKER_02]: Among the chief journalist targets of the Sedition Act, one was a man named Benjamin Franklin Bage, who was Benjamin Franklin's grandson, and who ran a newspaper called The Aurora, and Benjamin Franklin Bage, 14:38 [SPEAKER_02]: head in his character that, as soon as someone became powerful, he didn't like him. 14:43 [SPEAKER_02]: And so he did like Washington, and then when Washington became present, he started accusing Washington of being a royalist with his white carriage and horses, and then when Adams became president, he began accusing John Adams of being a royalist who wanted to go to war with France and wanted to be king, and so forth, and was criticizing him on a daily basis. 15:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Another journalist who made a career out of harassing and exposing the powerful was a man named James Thompson, Allender. 15:18 [SPEAKER_02]: He was the journalist who exposed Alexander Hamilton's extramarital affair. 15:24 [SPEAKER_02]: He criticized Adams mercilessly, and he was another target, interestingly, when the roles reversed, and Tom's Jefferson later became president, calendar was the first one to expose to write about Jefferson's affair with one of his slaves. 15:41 [SPEAKER_02]: One of the fascinating characters, to me, was a guy named Luther Baldwin. 15:47 [SPEAKER_02]: who was not a politician. 15:49 [SPEAKER_02]: He was not a journalist. 15:51 [SPEAKER_02]: He was a waterman. 15:52 [SPEAKER_02]: He owned a boat. 15:53 [SPEAKER_02]: He fared people across and carried cargo and so forth. 15:57 [SPEAKER_02]: And he was one day when John Adams was passing through with Abigail on their way back to Massachusetts in a carriage. 16:04 [SPEAKER_02]: Luther and a couple of buddies had been out drinking. 16:07 [SPEAKER_02]: And when the carriage came through some Adam supporters set off a ceremonial cannon fire in salute of the president and someone said, they're shooting at his ass. 16:19 [SPEAKER_02]: And Luther said, I don't care if they shoot through his ass. 16:23 [SPEAKER_02]: And the tavern owner, they were standing outside on the street and the tavern owner heard that and said, that's sedition because this sedition law had just been passed. 16:34 [SPEAKER_02]: And for that, Luther Baldwin wound up being pounded for the better part of a year. 16:39 [SPEAKER_02]: Ultimately convicted, I don't think he spent time in jail but he was fine. 16:43 [SPEAKER_02]: And so, to me, Luther has always been written off as the comic relief of the sedition act story, because he wasn't a thinker. 16:52 [SPEAKER_02]: He wasn't a politician and it was a humorous event. 16:57 [SPEAKER_02]: What he said and everything. 16:58 [SPEAKER_02]: But to me, it was really illustrative of the dangers of laws like this, showing how quickly and how deeply the icy fingers of the law can reach down into society and touch all of our lives. 17:11 [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, it was the relentlessness and often unfounded trolling of media players, like Benjamin Franklin Bosch, that ultimately drove the Federalists to restrict free speech and violate the first amendment of the Constitution. 17:28 [SPEAKER_00]: and one of the sad ironies of this edition act, with seeing good men like atoms who had been an outspoken champion of free speech throughout his life, buckle under the pressure of public criticism. 17:44 [SPEAKER_02]: John Adams is, I see him as a tragic figure because in the context of the sedition act in three speech because of all the founders, he was probably the most eloquent on the subject of free speech. 17:58 [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, wrote as a younger man about the 18:00 [SPEAKER_02]: importants don't let the powerful tell you what you can and can't say and he said that the jaws of power will always be there to clamp down on you and then when he became president and he's 63 years old and being besieged on every side you know what pre-speech not so much and he signs the sedition act and it doesn't mean he he was still a great 18:24 [SPEAKER_02]: figure and a great thinker. 18:26 [SPEAKER_02]: But boy, that was I think his worst moment because he betrayed this sort of beautiful soul that he'd be get bit and earlier on the side of free speech. 18:36 [SPEAKER_00]: So how long was this sedition act of 1798 in effect? 18:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And why was it repealed? 18:42 [SPEAKER_02]: So that's a great question. 18:43 [SPEAKER_02]: The Federalists who enacted it were very cagey because they passed it to sunset at the very start of 1801. 18:54 [SPEAKER_02]: So a couple of years later, and that just happened to coincide with the end of John Adams' term as president and the Federalists, so they had it set up so that 19:04 [SPEAKER_02]: Presumably, if they were all returned to power, they could re-op the Sedition Act, and if things went the other way, the law would no longer exist. 19:16 [SPEAKER_00]: In the short term, this law was a convenient way for federalists like Adams and Hamilton, to silence their critics. 19:25 [SPEAKER_00]: but in the long term, it backfired in a big way. 19:28 [SPEAKER_00]: It violated the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution and everybody knew it. 19:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The next four elections would go to the Republicans. 19:38 [SPEAKER_02]: Was a great sort of moment in American history with the Sedition Act because I tend to think that Americans are often slow to act to injustices, 19:51 [SPEAKER_02]: But I think that ultimately, as a country, we have a history of waking up to injustices, whether they are international or domestic, they were not a perfect country by any stretch. 20:03 [SPEAKER_02]: But I do think that when we are awoken, we tend to take the right steps a lot of times. 20:09 [SPEAKER_02]: And in this case, the Sedition Act was passed. 20:11 [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people didn't give it much thought. 20:14 [SPEAKER_02]: but when people started to see journalists and other Americans being rounded up and tried and convicted and put in jail for using the rights that these unalienable rights that have been declared so in the Bill of Rights, the country woke up and 20:33 [SPEAKER_02]: turned against the Federalists and mountains of petitions began flooding into the capital and instead of creating villains, the Federalists wound up creating martyrs and heroes out of everyone they prosecuted, then the public rallied around the people who had been prosecuted and ultimately John Adams lost the next election in a landslide to Thomas Jefferson, the Federalists lost power in Congress. 20:59 [SPEAKER_02]: And it really was, I think, a signature moment in the downfall of the federal's part. 21:05 [SPEAKER_00]: This moment in American history was the first great test of our commitment to freedom of speech. 21:10 [SPEAKER_00]: As a country, do you believe that it had been the ultimate test of the commitment to free speech in American history? 21:18 [SPEAKER_02]: We tend to think or hope that we can get through these issues a great test of whether we're going to live up to the Bill of Rights or another great test. 21:28 [SPEAKER_02]: And we tend to think that we can pass that test and then that issue has been solved and we can move on. 21:35 [SPEAKER_02]: But of course, what happens is you get new generations facing similar problems and we have to refight these things during World War I. 21:43 [SPEAKER_02]: There was a new Sedition Act passed and people who spoke up. 21:46 [SPEAKER_02]: against the draft or against the war or thrown in jail. 21:50 [SPEAKER_02]: These were some socialists who gave speeches and wound up being thrown in jail. 21:54 [SPEAKER_02]: You've had over and over again throughout our history. 21:58 [SPEAKER_02]: We've had tests of free speech and of course, then we had the great court cases, the Supreme Court cases of the 20th century that established 22:06 [SPEAKER_02]: of standards like imminent harm, and so there are limits to free speech, but establish some pretty clear ones that have preserved a remarkable degree of free speech into our own age. 22:19 [SPEAKER_02]: But as long as we are a country that values free speech, we are going to have to be 22:25 [SPEAKER_02]: protecting that and being tested over and over again, there is no ultimate test for free speech. 22:30 [SPEAKER_00]: As a historian, what would you say to people who say they're unconcerned with the issue of free speech or who might even be opposed to it? 22:39 [SPEAKER_02]: I think that people who profess themselves to be unconcerned about free speech are people who are currently not having their 22:50 [SPEAKER_02]: people who have not been forcibly shut down for voicing their opinions or who feel themselves generally aligned with whoever happens to be in control. 23:02 [SPEAKER_02]: The problem with putting the government in control of speech and giving the government greater control over speech is that you don't achieve the objective of eliminating 23:19 [SPEAKER_02]: bad, dangerous opinions and screw balls. 23:22 [SPEAKER_02]: What happens is you get rid of those views that don't happen to guide with the views of whoever's in power. 23:30 [SPEAKER_02]: Let's go back to the Sedition Act of 1798. 23:33 [SPEAKER_02]: The people on the Republican side were saying horrible things about the Federalists. 23:39 [SPEAKER_02]: The Federalists were saying, 23:40 [SPEAKER_02]: equally horrible things about the Republicans, but the end result, the Federalists were in power, and they passed the Sedition Act and the result was that everybody who got prosecuted was a Republican. 23:54 [SPEAKER_02]: and nobody who got prosecuted was a federalist. 23:57 [SPEAKER_02]: Even though you had people on both sides going to the same degree of viciousness with what they were saying and writing. 24:06 [SPEAKER_02]: When you begin to pass laws and control, I think you do it with the idea 24:12 [SPEAKER_02]: that you're going to eliminate misinformation or you're going to eliminate nasty thoughts so that everybody will have a garden without weeds as one of the metaphors that you hear. 24:24 [SPEAKER_02]: But what really happens is you wind up converting free speech from a right into a privilege. 24:31 [SPEAKER_02]: And it's a privilege enjoyed by those who are aligned with or approved of by whoever's in power. 24:38 [SPEAKER_02]: I think people, 24:40 [SPEAKER_02]: From a point of temporary safety, may either not care or even support a bridge of free speech of people that they hate and think are dangerous. 24:51 [SPEAKER_02]: And they think it'll be great to get rid of those people. 24:55 [SPEAKER_02]: But what happens is that it's short-sighted because the power seats change and before you know it, it's your rights on the chopping wall. 25:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Which is exactly why we have the Bill of Rights. 25:07 [SPEAKER_02]: The reason we have the Bill of Rights, the reason we have free speech is because it's my right and you're right, you're unalienable right as a human being to have your say and not be told by a government that you can't express your opinion. 25:23 [SPEAKER_02]: So I think it goes beyond whether we have a functioning democracy, but having said that, I think it's absolutely essential and that people have the right to say what they want. 25:37 [SPEAKER_02]: And I think the danger in eliminating voices that are perceived to be wrong-headed or misinformation or dangerous. 25:45 [SPEAKER_02]: The problem with that is that you wind up narrowing free speech. 25:50 [SPEAKER_02]: And you say we have free speech, but only within a certain corridor of accepted opinions, and that it's impossible to have a free flow of debate under those circumstances. 26:00 [SPEAKER_02]: What you have is a debate under officially approved conditions. 26:05 [SPEAKER_02]: I think when you decide that there's one opinion to have on a specific idea or scientific area or issue and you decide that that matter settled there are no other opinions outside this certain corridor of opinions, you think you do society a great home. 26:21 [SPEAKER_00]: We're turning to your book in the historical episodes of the Center of the Conversation. 26:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Do you have any closing thoughts that you'd like to leave us with? 26:29 [SPEAKER_02]: What has always struck me, the two things about the experience of writing about the Sedition Act of 1798. 26:34 [SPEAKER_02]: Now, this was a long time ago, but the two things I've noticed is that when I talk to people about my book, 26:43 [SPEAKER_02]: that I talk to left wing people and right wing people. 26:47 [SPEAKER_02]: They all say, oh, this is a time for it. 26:50 [SPEAKER_02]: And they all mean very different things. 26:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Everybody says that it believes that the threats to free speech come from the other side, that there's that these dangerous forces on the left want to shut me up because I'm on the right, or if you're on the left, you say those dangerous forces on the right want to shut me up because I'm on the left. 27:08 [SPEAKER_02]: And everybody's equally convinced of that. 27:14 [SPEAKER_02]: is if we recognize that often the dangers come from your own side. 27:19 [SPEAKER_02]: The Federalists in 1798 believed they were saving the country. 27:23 [SPEAKER_02]: John Adams didn't turn into a monster. 27:26 [SPEAKER_02]: He believed that he needed to shut these people down who were threatening him and saying these awful things. 27:32 [SPEAKER_02]: And he didn't think that he was a bridging freedom by shutting them down. 27:36 [SPEAKER_02]: He thought, let's get rid of these guys and we can get back to healthy speech. 27:40 [SPEAKER_02]: So I think that's the first thing 27:44 [SPEAKER_02]: come from ourselves and our own party, not necessarily from the people, because we can all recognize when our own rights are being abridged. 27:52 [SPEAKER_02]: We can't necessarily recognize when we were bridging somebody else's rights. 27:57 [SPEAKER_02]: The other major lesson I think that I took away was not how different 28:09 [SPEAKER_02]: they were we like to think what did that have to do with us they didn't have the internet they didn't have jet travel they weren't on smartphones all the time they were fighting over the same things they were fighting over big government versus small government they were fighting over immigration they were fighting over taxes they were fighting over a lot of the same things the lesson we can draw from that is that the battles never going to end it's something that 28:40 [SPEAKER_02]: fighting over forever as long as we're Republican and I think we need to find ways to do it peacefully rather than violently and we're 28:51 [SPEAKER_02]: I close my books sort of saying that in the end the measure of greatness of any generation isn't the laws that it passed to shut down this or that dangerous voice or to get through a temporary crisis. 29:06 [SPEAKER_02]: To me, the measure of greatness of any generation is the wisdom that it shows in looking beyond the moment and handing down liberty intact to the next generation.
Show full transcript (229 segments)
