Timeless Wisdom - Learn History with Dennis Prager - Part 1

Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs. And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com. Hi everybody, you're listening to the Dennis Prager Show, and I have an author on about America's favorite subject, and that is George Washington. The number of books on George Washington, I am certain, could fill a small library. Must be thousands and thousands of them, and deservedly so. But this is different, otherwise I wouldn't have had the author on. It is called Blood of Tyrants. George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency, and it is a look at George Washington and the times in which he lived, which is, um, real. I think that perhaps that's the best word to use to describe it. The author is Logan Birne, and that is spelled B-E-I-R-N-E. Logan Birne is an Olin Scholar at Yale Law School. Prior to the broadcast, I asked him what that meant, and that is Yale Law School pays him to do research in writing, and I told him that was the second best job in America. The first is shortstop with the Red Sox. Are you a Red Sox or Yankee fan?

I'm afraid to say.

No, no, you don't have to be afraid with me. I don't like either of them.

I'm a Yankees fan. My father's from the Bronx. I'd be disowned if I wasn't.

All right, fine. There's no problem in that. You, you— on the contrary, it shows that you adhere to the biblical admonition to honor your father and mother, unless your mother were a Red Sox fan, and then it would be very difficult. That would be a Talmudic issue for another time. It is a pleasure to have you, Logan Byrne. I ask authors all the time, why did you write the book? Take a minute. Why'd you write the book?

So I, I wrote the book basically because I needed to write something to graduate from law school. So back in 2005, I was at Yale Law as a student, and you need to write what they call an SAW. It's basically a thesis in order to graduate. And I was sitting in constitutional law class, and the professor was, you know, going through the Constitution, and we got to the Commander-in-Chief Clause. And all it really says is that the president shall be commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy. And it doesn't really say much else. And there's not much guidance, and we still fight today about what that even really means, what powers are in there. President Bush was claiming certain powers, now President Obama's claiming certain powers, and no one really knows. So I immediately thought, well, when we wrote the Constitution back in 1787, we had only had one Commander-in-Chief. That was General George Washington. So why don't we look at exactly what he was doing, so what precedents he set and what powers that these, the founding generation had in mind when they enshrined that unique little clause into the Constitution. So I wanted to take this history and show, like you said, how it's real, it's relevant, it has a direct impact on today.

Very good. So you used him as the model on which— do you think, I guess the obvious question is, do you think it's relevant? Because a lot of people will say today We have nothing to learn, really, from Washington's era.

And that breaks my heart. So I think we have two main reasons to look to this. The first is, these were brilliant people. These are, you know, the people that forged our country and the founding principles on which our country was made. So I think it's sort of enlightened of us to look back to the wisdom of the past and see where we came from. But even if we're not enlightened enough to want to do that, it impacts us either whether we like it or not, because when the Supreme Court is interpreting the Constitution through the theory of originalism, they look to exactly this type of history in determining what the Constitution means. So you may argue with whether we should or not, but whether, you know, whether we like it or not, it still impacts us.

So you have tried to apply Washington's policies to the contemporary era.

That's right. So I try to look at the analogies and sort of the same fundamental questions that we face today. He was looking at them back then. So often people say, "Times are so different. How can you possibly compare?" But you know what? People really haven't changed that much.

No, people don't change at all. I certainly believe that. Human nature was lousy then and it's lousy today.

That's absolutely right.

That's my view. Okay, so you had to deal with it. Talking about lousy human nature, your description description in your book of tarring and feathering. I remember reading about this, of course, in elementary school and on, and I always thought it was, you know, an ugly thing, but I never thought of it as torturous.

Yes, it sounds so silly. I mean, you put tar on the person and then you throw feathers and it sticks, right?

Exactly.

It's a mess, right? But the problem is, is that you need to melt the tar In order to melt the tar, you need to bring it to such a temperature, and the temperature of the era would cause third and fourth degree burns and even more severe based on that prolonged contact with the hot tar. And then, even if the burns weren't too deep, what would make it even worse was peeling the tar off because the skin would really come with it. Which is disgusting to think. And then when you think about all the infection that they had back then, they didn't have antibiotics or even realize how to treat it. People would often die from tar and feathering.

Yeah, it's— that's what I said in the beginning about your book being real. You combine a non-romantic view with a very admiring view. Is that fair to say?

Absolutely. So I, you know, a lot of times people try to drag the, um, the founders down to, down to earth and sort of—

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You know, tarnish the pristine image we have of them. That was not my goal at all. I have so much respect for the founding fathers, and I think that they have so much to teach us and so much to learn from them. But I want to— instead of enshrining them as a picturesque statue that we can't even relate to, I want to show how they're even more tremendous and interesting when you look at them as real human beings who are overcoming these insurmountable problems and issues. And these are the same dilemmas that we're facing today.

Yeah, and including a, a fair amount of, uh, shall we say, to use a quaint word, adultery.

Yes, absolutely. Adultery helps our nation come to life. So the, um, interestingly enough, um, we were fighting this war, and it sort of seems so inevitable now that we would win. Most of the war, it looked like we were going to lose. I mean, we were fighting the greatest empire on earth, the British, and we didn't even have a navy to respond to them. And most of the war, Washington was losing. He was a great political leader, but he wasn't the greatest general, and he was losing left and right. But these adulterous affairs actually helped distract the British long enough—

Yes, that's what I remember from your book. The British generals were so busy was he sleeping with other officers' wives that they didn't pay attention to the war? I mean, that's a new read for me. You may well be right. I mean, you know, they're very far from home, and when men are very far from home, it's not always the healthiest circumstance for their superego.

It was great for the Americans.

Yes, no, apparently so from the way you describe it. When you did this research into Washington, and we're going to talk about policies obviously, but talking about the people and your great admiration, learning the non-wonderful parts that every one of us has, did that lower your estimation of the founders?

It raised it. Because, you know, like you, I learned in school that George Washington was the man on the dollar bill and he could not tell a lie. And the whole cherry tree thing is a myth, by the way. He could not tell a lie. He could do no wrong. And for me, that sort of this whole demigod view of Washington, which many people actually at his time had the same sort of view, it made him, you know, a distant sphinx that I couldn't really get my mind around or relate to. But then when you look at the challenges he faced and sort of the uncertainty that he came across, and the fact that he was able to hold the nation together, he was able to remain principled in the face of so many different temptations and issues, that makes him even more admirable in my mind, and the other founders as well.

What did you think in studying Here's a question you don't hear asked often of American historians. Reading about the Patriots and the Loyalists, that is the colony dwellers who were supportive of Britain, and the music's playing, so I'll let you think about it while we take a break here, but did you develop any sympathy for the loyalists? Because I've never thought of them as just bad guys, and I'm wondering how you thought of them. Plus, the treatment of them was often very horrific, and I wonder if one can be totally pro-patriot and yet have some both intellectual and even moral sympathy for some of the loyalists. We'll be back. The book is Blood of Tyrants: George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency. I'm Dennis Prager. Hi everybody, and welcome back to The Dennis Prager Show. I am featuring Logan Byrne, B-E-I-R-N-E, probably the youngest historian I think I have interviewed, and that's obviously a great compliment to you. Blood of Tyrants is his book. Highly well received and published by one of my favorite publishers, Encounter. And, uh, it is subtitled George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency, and it is up at DennisPrager.com. So I asked you a question, and just know, uh, I, I say this to all my guests, nearly all my guests, there's no need in any way for you to think you have to agree with me. I, I'm perfectly capable of hearing, I totally disagree with you, Dennis. But I, I want to know your feelings in doing this research about the loyalists, the, the American colony. How would you— would you still say colonialists? What would you say? Uh, what was to be the word?

I, well, I would call them as a dissenting minority.

All right, the dissenting minority of quote-unquote Americans, because they didn't think of themselves as purely American. But rather as British. What did you think of them?

So not only do I agree with you, George Washington actually agrees with you. So, you know, too often we think of the loyalists as, you know, in a certain demonized fashion. And that was actually— that was in vogue back then, and a lot of propaganda actually encouraged that because these people were a real threat to our independence. When you stop and think about it, it was akin to a civil war. In the sense that 40% of Americans were patriots. They were pro-independence. And then another 40% were sort of— they'd sort of drift, or they wouldn't really get involved or care. And then the remaining 20%, they were actively pro-Britain. So these were people who were a real threat. So Washington could not ignore them. And a lot of times, the sort of mobs, and even the court system itself, would do horrible things to them, sort of cut off ears, brandings were not uncommon. But for the most part, what was so interesting about the American Revolution compared to other revolutions throughout history is that we weren't bloodthirsty. We really kept a lot of that, a lot of that in check for the most part. So Washington viewed and, you know, other leaders viewed these loyalists as, like I said, a dissenting minority. So they needed to quash them, but at the same time they couldn't violate their rights because to them they still were Americans, whether they liked it or not. So they wanted to be British subjects, but from Washington's point of view, the majority—

How much did the loyalists aid the British?

Quite a bit. So they would sign up and fight alongside the British. And in that sense, Washington had no qualms about gunning them down. So if you're attacking Washington or his people, he had no qualms about, you know, destroying you. But then when it came to loyalists who were maybe just speaking out against the cause and maybe not actively aiding the British in any way, For them, he was actually very protective. He wanted to make sure the military and his soldiers didn't go in and start pillaging. There was one instance when some of Washington's soldiers were trying to get supplies. So they had authority to request supplies from the townspeople, and they would provide reimbursement. But this one loyalist said, "Absolutely not. I'm giving you nothing. I disagree with the patriots." And he said no. So the American— Washington's guard snuck in that night and they robbed him. So what does Washington do? You think from his perspective, I'd be very tempted to say, "Oh, well, forget that guy. I mean, he's opposing me and my troops are starving and they went and they grabbed some utensils and things. Who cares?" Washington had the ringleader hanged. He had his own soldier hanged. And that's a very striking statement that shows how amazingly high regard that Washington had for Americans' rights. So you don't have to agree with Washington, but he was still going to defend you.

What other lessons— because that's really what your book aims to do, is to teach us lessons for today from Washington. So this notion of the right, the moral, the good is above even the national proclivities is a good lesson. What else?

Absolutely. So I find, you know, a strong divide between Washington as commander and the way he treated foreign nationals versus the way he treated American citizens. So like I said, for American citizens, he found them— he protected them whether they liked it or not. But foreign nationals, he was actually very sometimes ruthless towards, because he saw his role as Commander-in-Chief was to defend his people. And when it came to even, you know, lightning rod type subjects like torture, Washington— you hear about his quote from the beginning of the war in which he would like to raise—

yeah, what is it? Justice and policy will require recourse. Is that one? Is that the one? To be had to the law of retaliation, however abhorrent and disagreeable to our natures. In cases of torture and capital punishment.

And that really sums it up. He was a man who was morally opposed to torture, but at the same time he was even more morally opposed to letting Americans die. So he, you know, if we take his lessons and sort of the powers he thought he was instilling in the commander-in-chief, those are that when you have no other choice, torture might be a necessary evil. He definitely described it as an evil and wanted to raise our conduct above the barbaric wars of the past. And so as a policy argument, he would say, you know, torture is definitely the last, last, last resort. At the same time, when it came to protecting his people and if he could use torture as a tool, there's a couple instances when he was trying to get information, but I'd say that the majority of the time, the way that he used torture is a little bit different from how we do now. For him, the British soldiers were doing horrible things with searing irons and scourges to the American troops that had been captured.

Is that right? Was that the norm?

It was, unfortunately. So they would do—

Why would they torture the American troops? For information or out of just hatred?

Mostly hatred, because a lot of times these troops were low-level and didn't have much information. There was this guy named Bloody Bill Cunningham who was in charge of the New York City area prisons. And he really was, I don't know how else to describe it, he was an evil man. And he would do these awful things to the Americans. He'd starve them, he'd have them hanged for fun while he was eating dinner. And he sort of, the New York Harbor was sort of filling up with bodies with this man. So Washington saw no other choice start writing to his British counterparts saying, you know what, I've been trying to treat our prisoners very well, but I can't. I need to torture them in order to save the Americans. And that was sort of the leverage that he had.

So in other words, you will treat your people the way you treat our people.

That's right. Wow.

That's a tough one. I, but I, I understand it, but it is a tough one, and I know Washington felt that. I'm speaking to Logan Byrne. The book is Blood of Tyrants: George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency. We continue. I'm Dennis Prager. Hello everybody, Dennis Prager here speaking to a prominent young historian, Logan Byrne, B-E-I-R-N-E. He is at the— he is a scholar at Yale Law School, and his book is Blood of Tyrants: George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency. And it's just fascinating because it's a glimpse of the real world, and yet you, you still end up with this tremendous admiration for the founders, but you realize that what they confronted and whom they lived among. This was real people. It's not a romantic movie that we're reading when we read this book. So we were talking about a particularly difficult moral dilemma for George Washington, in that so many Americans, when captured by the British, were tortured. And he felt— and tell me if I have this right— that the only way to put a stop to that was to tell the British, we will do the same to your troops that we capture.

That's absolutely right.

And what happened? So what happened?

There is some evidence from the— that the British intelligence was picking up that the Americans were doing some, some, um, awful things to the British troops. And it actually helped, um, it helped because the British did back down. So one instance involves Ethan Allen, sort of the bombastic leader of the Vermonters, and he was captured and the British started, um, treating him very poorly, sort of beating him, starving him. They brought him back to Britain, and they were planning to hang him. So Washington got a hold of a British officer and started treating him very poorly. And sure enough, King George III gets wind of this, and he says, "You send that Ethan Allen back to America." And sure enough, Washington saved his life by using all the leverage that he had. And that leverage sometimes—

well, in effect, he saved both their lives.

That he did, absolutely.

Yeah, well, it's a sort of— and I— it's not a perfect analogy, but it's sort of like the number of lives saved because of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That's a very interesting analogy. It's sort of, you know, necessary evil.

Yes, exactly, exactly. The world, especially in wartime, is not an easy one. What other moral dilemmas? Or let me put it this way, let's talk about a lesser sin, obviously, than torture. What was his— because you hear about this a lot— what was his view of the men drinking and cursing?

He was opposed to both. So Washington was a great man, I'd love to meet him, but he's not the kind of guy that you'd want to have a beer with.

Well, he wouldn't have the beer. He would have a seltzer.

He probably would, yes. He would drink on occasion.

But only with Martha.

Only with Martha, yes. Only with Martha. He was a man who was intensely in control of his emotions, and he didn't like the idea of alcohol sort of tampering with that. So he frowned upon any kind of drinking or cursing, and he made rules for his troops to follow his lead. And his thinking wasn't purely, you know, puritanical. He saw this as a way to craft the Continental Army into a virtuous force that the American citizens would admire rather than fear. Because at this time, there was great fear that the military is going to take over. In fact, The military at one point did encourage Washington to become king, and they were going to march upon Congress, and Washington stopped them. So this was a real fear. And Washington helped counter that by encouraging religion and opposing any kind of vices. There were, you know, brothels would pop up all over wherever the troops seemed to go. And Washington made it a crime. To frequent them.

Is that right? Even for the enlisted men, not just an officer and not just a married man?

Anyone. So he discouraged it very highly, and it was outlawed by Washington to frequent these brothels. He did what he could to get rid of them. Interestingly enough, he used to take opportunities to lecture his troops on, you know, the the evils of, you know, loose women and questionable morals. So there's one instance when a man named Hickey was actually involved in a plot to potentially poison George Washington. And the history shows that Hickey was a counterfeiter. He was, you know, he was basically trying to make money. But when Washington caught him and and had him hanged. He took the opportunity to say, look what happens when you, um, you, you hang out around with, um, loose women and you gamble.

Well, we'll continue. Blood of Tyrants, Dennis Prager, Logan Byrne. Dennis Prager here with historian Logan Byrne, a historian, if you will, at Yale Law School. And he has written Blood of Tyrants: George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency.

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A real book about the time, and yet you leave with great, greater, even greater admiration for the man. And that's, that's a big accomplishment. Now we're talking about the last thing we were talking about was Washington's attempt to elevate the moral ethical level of the soldiers in the Continental Army, which leads me to ask you two questions. One, where— what ranks of society did the Continental Army come from? And similarly, what ranks of British society did the British Army come from?

So throughout the war, it changed. In the beginning of the war, it was, um, very much, you know, the middle classes. And that was, you know, pretty much true for the British side as well. But then, you know, definitely on the American side, to a degree on the British side, as the war went on, the men who were, you know, sort of in it for the venture and the principles, they kind of dropped out and it sort of turned to be, you know, the poorer people who kind of need the money and the food.

In both cases?

Mostly on the American side. In fact, that's one of the reasons why Benedict Arnold decided to betray the American side, because he saw the ranks of his troops sort of shifting, and he sort of saw this— he scoffed at this idea that these lowly people are now making up the fight for the American cause, when the people of higher standing who originally fought with high that fought for the ideal of liberty now were replaced by people who were—

Why did they drop out, the original idealists?

Because war is horrible. They weren't fed very well, they weren't being paid on time, they kind of wanted to go back to their farms. They really originally thought that this would be a quick fight against the Germans.

Yeah, just like they thought about World War I.

That's right. They thought that, you know, they'd throw off the chain—

Yeah, I'll be back by Christmas.

Absolutely. And then Christmas came around, and then another Christmas came around, and he started dropping out. That's right.

Now, I always wondered about this, and it may be beyond your purview, but what did animate the British soldier? The guy is thousands of miles across a very, very large piece of water in a strange place And he's thinking, what am I dying here for exactly? They're not invading Britain. Did any of them think that way?

They did, and there were defectors. The Americans could be very hospitable to some of the British, and sometimes they'd farm out the British prisoners to homes in Pennsylvania, and the British would say, wow, these are actually really nice, it's actually really good to live here. And there were many defectors. One of the reasons we won the war is sort of being a nation where people want to settle down. But at the same time, the British largely were very loyal to their king. They were prideful in their service, and at the same time, they were actually much better off for the vast majority of the war than the Americans were. They were well fed, they were well trained, they were well clothed, and they were looking across at the American rabble, as they called them, And Washington's troops were sort of wearing tattered clothes, they were lacking shoes, they were lacking food, and the British took pride in the fact that they were this well-oiled machine that were, they were going across the world on adventure. And when the British fell short in the number of troops that they had, they actually went out to, and they hired the mercenaries. That's when the Germans came in. And the British actually originally went to the Russians, and they tried to get cheaper mercenaries from them, but Catherine the Great refused because she didn't want the British king sending her soldiers off to die. So King George needed to pay a higher price to the Hessians, and he sent them in to fight the Americans. And now they were especially hated because they were seen as sort of interlopers in a war between brothers. And they were much more barbaric than the British soldiers were. So the British soldiers tried, they certainly did awful things themselves, but there was at least some sort of code and rule-based system, while the Hessians were more likely to plunder and rape and pillage when they, because the Hessians were basically men who were sometimes kidnapped on the side of the road by the German princes and then sold sold off to go fight in these battles, and they really didn't have that sense of loyalty and pride that the British had.

And it doesn't sound like they grew up in a very biblically oriented home.

Definitely not.

Yeah, exactly. Why did the American forces lack for money? Americans weren't poor.

They weren't. I mean, it's interesting, people forget that the United States, you know, the colonies before they even broke away, It's one of the wealthiest places on Earth.

Exactly. That's why I asked you.

Ironically, it's also the lowest taxed one of. And they were poor just because they were fearful. So they were fearful of creating a new government in which they would subjugate their local rule for some far-off power. So right now, they were fighting against London. And they're afraid that, okay, we're going to trade London for, you know, what now we call Washington, D.C., or right then it was Philadelphia. Are we going to cede our power in Connecticut, for instance, to a far-off government that's again deaf to our pleas? So the government was based on the Continental Congress, was basically a very weak confederation of states, and each state was more its own little republic. Very loosely held together by the Continental Congress. And Congress didn't have the power to, you know, to raise the money it needed to get supplies. So it depended upon donations from the states. And those states, fearful of the fact that, you know, they wanted to keep some of those donations and their troops home to defend their own state, they were very reluctant to send troops, you know, and supplies to Washington. And he really was the uniting force behind the fight because Congress itself was very weak.

Very interesting. So they were torn. They wanted a small government, but with a small government comes a small army.

That's right.

It doesn't quite work if you're fighting a war. Final segment coming up has been truly fascinating. Blood of Tyrants: George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency. Logan Byrne of Yale Law School, my guest. I'm Dennis Prager. We return in a moment. Hello everybody, final segment with Logan Byrne, B-E-I-R-N-E, Blood of Tyrants: George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency. Learned an immense amount, and obviously one will learn far more in the book itself. So coming to the end of our time together, true or false, and I have no vested interest in your answer, but true or false, without George Washington, there's a good chance we would not have won the war?

Absolutely true, without a doubt. We would have had basically no chance without George Washington. He really was the, you know, the symbol and the leader of the country because there was a vacuum, as we were speaking about before. There was very little leadership and we didn't have a strong central government of any sort to unite the fighting and sort of bickering colonies that had just become states. And Washington was the person that they looked up to. They saw this man who would courageously lead the charge. He wasn't like the British generals who were fighting from far back and safe distance. He was literally right there in front, and this inspired great confidence and devotion. So this man was giving up his fortune and risking his life time and time again, and people saw his virtue and sort of, first they were fearful that he would sort of, you know, grab for power. He did the opposite. He started off being very deferential to the states and Congress, and then as the war went on and we were losing left and right as Congress tried to micromanage him by committee, then they were willing to give him power. And that's as the war went on, the Commander-in-Chief evolved into a much more powerful one because America was willing to give him more power. And without that, We never would have won.

But he was indispensable, and that's not common to be indispensable, but he was indispensable not because of great tactical warfare knowledge, but because of his human greatness. Is that fair to say?

That's absolutely right. He was the moral center of the country, and he, you know, he lost more battles than he won. He wasn't a great tactician. He tended to have these overly complicated, three-pronged attacks that would always, you know, not quite work out the way he wanted. But at the end of the day, he kept the men fighting, kept them enlisting. He would— he sort of won the hearts of the states to have them provide supplies and more troops. And that's what— that's why we won the war. It was a political battle in Washington.

So he really is the father of our country.

He absolutely is. And that's why I was the first president. There was no one else who could fill the role.

And you'll understand why in the book Blood of Tyrants. Working on a new book?

I am, but this one is completely different. This one involves, uh, business startups.

You're right, it does. Well, let me know when you write it.

Thank you very much.

It's been a pleasure to talk to you, Logan.

Absolutely, I've enjoyed it.

Thank you. The book Blood of Tyrants: George Washington Washington and the Forging of the Presidency, a real-life look at the world and at greatness at the same time. I'm Dennis Prager.

Don't go away.

This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Visit DennisPrager.com. Dennisprager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs, and to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles.