#1594 Live from Oklahoma

I've been there before to perform as Theodore Roosevelt. This time, they wanted me to come out of character and to talk with their political scientist, Aaron Mason, about Jefferson and the West. So, of course, that's an intriguing subject to me, and I love going to places like this. You know, I don't travel as much as I once did. There was a time in my life after the bicentennial of the Constitution, so around the year 1990 to 2005,, let's say, when I traveled 200 or more days per year and gave hundreds and thousands of performances around the country.

It really was the way I lived and made my living for much of that time. Since then, I've backed that away some. It's pretty exhausting to travel that much, and after 9-11, traveling, as you know, is not very fun, very much fun anymore, and there's a lot of frustration built into the whole world of travel. If you haven't noticed, recently the airlines have been getting grimmer and grimmer so that they not only charge for luggage, which makes everyone try to do a carry-on bag in which the carry-on bins fill, and there are fights and all sorts of problems. The systems have gotten more efficient in terms of profit and less comfortable and pleasant in almost every possible way for the traveler.

But it is, as they say, what it is. I would have loved to have driven from Bismarck, North Dakota, through South Dakota, and then Nebraska, and then Kansas, and down to Elva, Oklahoma. But it would have taken at least a full day, maybe two, and then, of course, to come back. So I flew. I flew from Bismarck to Denver, and from Denver to Wichita, and I was picked up there by my two friends, whom I've met there before, Dr.

Eric Schmaltz, who is a historian. He's actually a historian of the experience of Germans from Russia in the United States, and we have a lot of Germans from Russia here in the state of North Dakota. In fact, Eric Schmaltz is from Washburn, North Dakota, just up the road. That's the site of the Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Visitor Center. But my interlocutor, who was the driver, and they picked me up in a university vehicle, Dr.

Aaron Mason, who is a political scientist with a special interest in constitutional law. So they picked me up at baggage claim, and off we went. It's a little over two hours. Most of it is in Kansas, and then you cross, sort of at the very end, and it's just, I don't know, 15 or 20 miles into Oklahoma to Alva, A-L-V-A. Population around 6,000, a little under 6,000, and the university, which was once a normal school, you know, was a teacher training school.

They were all over the heartland. So we drove a couple of hours from Wichita International. Wichita, by the way, positions itself as the air travel capital of America. You know, they make a lot of airplanes there, including Cessna. I think Learjet was there, too.

At any rate, they're also the home of Pizza Hut. But the air business is central to Wichita's self-conception. I spent some years living in Kansas, in far northwestern Kansas, on a farm, when I was married to a lovely, incredibly intelligent farmer and grain elevator operator.

And Wichita, for us, was a long drive. east, felt like eastern Kansas to us. But if you're in Topeka or Lawrence, or Kansas City or Overland Park, one of the richest suburbs in the country, Wichita is regarded as the Wild West. So we got to Alva. They dropped me off at the Holiday Inn Express, and I had a quiet evening getting ready.

And the next day, they picked me up and went over to the university, and we had an audience in an auditorium and audio equipment. And at the appropriate time, Aaron Mason began to ask me questions about Thomas Jefferson and the West. This is one of my favorite subjects. I've been thinking about Jefferson and the West forever, partly because I think that's one of the most fascinating aspects of Jefferson. And of course, the Lewis and Clark expedition comes straight out of that.

So there's a connect between two of my deepest intellectual passions, and also because Jefferson was kind of a gigantic creative software engineer who was designing the software for an entire continent. So when you fly over America, for example, you see the grid of the cadastral rectangular survey of the square miles and townships and so on. And on the Great Plains, it's perfectly regular. I mean, for thousands of miles, every mile, there's a section line road. And the Homestead Act gave away quarter sections, 160 acres, a full section is 640 acres.

And several of the sections in any given township were set aside for educational purposes. So it was all very Jeffersonian, rectangular, orderly, square. He wanted square states too, and eventually got them long after his time in Colorado and Wyoming. But he wanted them to be miniature square states, the size of Indiana or Ohio and square. So when you get to Four Corners out in the Southwest, where Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico come together in a perfect moment of rectilinearity, that could almost be called the most Jeffersonian place in America.

And if Four Corners isn't the most Jeffersonian place in America, and believe me, I've been there and it's a little on the stark side, then the Library of Congress building, the Jefferson building at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, would certainly be the second most Jeffersonian place in America. It's one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. And it embodies Jefferson's idea that Americans would be particularly given over to the life of the mind. When we began talking about this, you'll hear some clips from our hour and a half long conversation here in the second and third sections of this program. So people ask, why would you go to Alva, Oklahoma?

of all places? I actually take a particular joy in this sort of program. I like seeing the heartland. I had coffee the next day before they brought me back to the Wichita Airport in McDonald's because I was waiting for Aaron to finish a class. And so he said, go over to the McDonald's across the street, just have coffee, read a book, whatever, and I'll come and pick you up as soon as I can finish my class.

So I went over there and I saw six people sitting in a cluster, all 70 or more years old, and they were drinking coffee, of course, and eating their egg McMuffin. And it turns out they come there every day, six days per week at the same time. And they soon realized that I was sitting apart, but kind of hovering near where I could have sat anywhere in that restaurant. And so the leader of the pack, Roy, brought me into the conversation and we had a hilarious hour and a half together. It turns out that all six of them, without a moment's hesitation, proclaimed that the election of 2020 was stolen, that Donald Trump is the rightful president of the United States, that he will soon be restored as the rightful president of the United States.

And when I asked how they could be so sure that the election was stolen since more than 60 legal cases were thrown out and audits were done in Arizona and Georgia and other places and experts in this area, including Trump's own people in the Justice Department, declared that it was the most efficient and safe election in American history, that it was a reliable result. But one of them said, well, look, if Biden got more votes than Obama, that has to be corruption, because nobody could get more votes than Obama in the Democratic Party. And look at Biden. And another one of them said, you know, we've heard this rumor that Biden has been dead for several years and it's a body double that's performing as president. And so, you know, you laugh out loud at things like this, but they were lovely, wonderful people.

You know, this didn't run very deep. And as soon as we got that out of the way, and I didn't say anything about my own politics, I just went to listen. And it's kind of a warm-up act for what I'm going to be doing with listening to America for the next years. You know, I go to listen, not to talk. I know what I think, or at least I think I know what I think.

But what I want to hear is what other people think. And when they're Trumpites, I want to know what's below that surface, because I know hundreds of Trumpites in North Dakota. Some of my closest friends are ardent Trump supporters, and we don't talk much about that. But it turns out that they are incredibly lovely people. beneath that little rhetorical crust on top.

You know, if I needed help, if I needed someone to drive me to Wichita, there's somebody in my small network of Trump supporters who would do that quite cheerfully. If my house burned down, these friends would bring me casseroles, including the hideous egg bake, which North Dakotans seem to love. These are really good and decent people. They pay their taxes. They abide by the law.

They attend church. They pray. They say grace before meals, many of them. They're good citizens. They vote.

They're neighborly. They belong to voluntary associations. They believe in this country. They would never violate the laws of the United States. They're just exactly what you would expect the people of the heartland to be.

And yet, on top of all that, there is this little veneer of rage and cynicism and acceptance of the chaos and disruption and nihilism that we've been through and are still going through. So I'm always fascinated. What's behind all this? What's the source of this grievance? What's the source of this rage?

I can tell you, as a North Dakotan, that we in North Dakota have never had it so good, ever. In the whole history of the state, we've never been as prosperous on average as we are now. We've never been as clean and tidy and efficient and and access to the material fruits of life. Everything's going very, very well. And so you wonder, well, what's all this grievance about?

It's very perplexing, but I do not want to ever be drawn into the trap of dismissing such people merely because of the surface rhetoric and the surface politics that they seem at the moment addicted to, hypnotized by perhaps. And so it's one of the most interesting phenomena in the whole history of my life. And so there I was in the heart, you know, if any state is redder than North Dakota, it would be Oklahoma. I think West Virginia, Wyoming, North Dakota, Oklahoma, that's sort of the cluster of the reddest states. And I think Donald Trump did best in Oklahoma and West Virginia, but it was right up there in North Dakota.

And we'll win again, probably by a larger margin, this time in North Dakota. That was the surround. And then I was there on this lovely university campus with these extraordinary intellectuals who are teaching very stiff loads and engaged in all sorts of committee work and the speaker series that I was a part of, and so on. Aaron Mason was my interlocutor and he wanted to talk about the American West. And so I prepared for that.

So we'll take a break. When we come back, I want you to hear the first of a series of clips with Aaron Mason, professor of political science at Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva, Oklahoma. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson. I want to go right away to some of the questions and answers that I got when I was in Alva, Oklahoma, out of character, talking about the American West. I like to perform as Jefferson, and the West is certainly one of the most interesting of all topics. But in some ways I feel more liberated when I can talk about Thomas Jefferson, because I can range a little more widely and I can be a little more critical of Mr.

Jefferson than I can possibly be from within the impersonation. So let's pick it up with Aaron Mason asking me questions about Thomas Jefferson and the American.

That's a huge topic. And that's pretty ambitious. to try to cover that in one hour. And you're about the only guy I would want to try to do that with. And I don't think we had any chance of possibly doing a good job with that.

But tell us, let's start with Jefferson's early life. His father was an influence on him in a lot of ways. His father died when he was young, but his father was an early surveyor and settler in Virginia. How did that help impact his views of the American West?

So Jefferson did not purchase that part of it. So Jefferson grew up in Virginia. His father was one of the three or four earliest settlers, white settlers in that western part of Virginia near Charlottesville. They were plantation owners. So this is a slave economy, a terrible blot on the life and character of Thomas Jefferson.

His father was an outdoorsman. He was a surveyor and a diplomat and an explorer. And so he used to go off, when Jefferson was a child, mapping parts of Virginia. He also was involved in some diplomacy with respect to Native Americans in Virginia. And Jefferson said he slept in trees and he fought bears and so on, things that Jefferson would never do.

Jefferson was a highly civilized man, but his father was more sort of a frontiersman. That certainly affected Jefferson. His father died when Jefferson was 14. And when that happens, the parent sort of gets locked into a more heroic persona. Jefferson adored his father, not as much his mother, who was not a westerner.

But certainly the fact that his father was a surveyor and a traveler and an explorer and a mapmaker influenced Jefferson, and particularly during the Lewis and Clark expedition. Because when Jefferson sent his protege Meriwether Lewis up the Missouri River in 1804, he was wanting him to do many of the things that his own father had done in his childhood.

So he sent his protege, James Monroe, the fifth president, off to Paris to work with Robert Livingston to try to persuade Napoleon's government to sell us the village of New Orleans or some other place of deposit on the lower Mississippi, so we could keep that artery, essentially the interstate highway of the day, open. And we were prepared to spend $6 million to buy the village of New Orleans. Napoleon needed cash. He knew that the world war that he was fighting was going to start up again, and he reckoned that he would lose the Louisiana Territory to the British because he didn't have a navy. And so he decided to get rid of the Louisiana Territory by selling it to the Yankees instead.

And so it was Napoleon's offer to sell the Louisiana Territory to the U.

S.

, and they worked out a price at about $15.

6 million,

three cents per acre. It was the greatest land sale in human history. The U.S. bought 828,000 square miles, 575 million acres in a single stroke of Jefferson's pen for three cents per acre. So amazing.

It was the making moment of American history in many respects. But Jefferson, as you probably know, was a strict constructionist about the Constitution. He thought the Constitution is a restraining document. It outlines what government can do, particularly Congress, but it also forbids government to do that which is not enumerated in that document. Constitution is about 4,000 words long.

And so Jefferson thought, he looked through the Constitution carefully, and it did not authorize the executive to buy territory. So Jefferson thought that it was technically unconstitutional. what to do about this. You can't say no to the Louisiana Purchase. So he wrote two draft amendments to the Constitution in the summer of 1803, one to authorize the purchase and the other one to authorize the incorporation of the territory by way of new states.

And he wanted to distribute those amendments to the American people and let the people, the sovereign, decide whether to expand the powers of the Constitution, which is, of course, the right thing to do if you're Thomas Jefferson. But James Madison, his very able Secretary of State and much more wise and pragmatic than Jefferson, said, look, just consummate this thing. Just accept it. America's going to forgive you. No one's going to say, oh, he shouldn't have done that.

And if you raise the constitutional questions, Napoleon is already showing signs of a little bit of regret. Don't do anything to get in the way of this thing. And so Jefferson reluctantly decided not to promulgate, not to distribute those amendments, and just did it. And he brought the Senate back early. The Senate had a long debate about this.

And of course, they approved the Louisiana Purchase. And this doubled the size of the United States. And of course, Jefferson knew once you now own everything up to the continental divide of the Rocky Mountains, it's only a matter of time before you get the rest of it. And just one more thing about all of this. This is why, in large part, Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition up the Missouri, because he literally wasn't aware of what we had purchased.

We knew we'd purchased a lot of territory, but he didn't know what native peoples lived in it. He didn't know what the geography was, or the climate or the what we would now call the habitat ecosystems. He wanted someone to do.

John Adams was not interested in the West. He probably thought the West was a distraction from the need to build an American system. James Madison was lukewarm on the West. Monroe, a little bit more interested.

So think of like Finland. That could be a republic. But America, already, with 13 states all the way up and down the eastern seaboard, and now everything up to the Mississippi, and now everything up to the Rocky Mountains, the sense was this can't be a republic. This is going to be an empire instead. They didn't want an empire.

They wanted a republic. And so Madison would have been less likely to make the purchase, simply because he would have thought that makes it less likely. we're going to be a remarkable experimental nation with a republican. When I say republican, I don't mean the political party. A small R republican form of government.

And so that was Madison's famous two of the essays in the Federalist Papers. Yeah. But then Jefferson goes farther, because Jefferson has the mind of a geometrician. Jefferson loves order more than anything in the world. And so he thought, all right, if we're going to have new states in the west and we haven't created them yet, what if they were all identical in size?

And what if they were all perfectly square? He said, this way there won't be any squabbling between the states. because, remember, at the Constitutional Convention, which Jefferson was not at in 1787, the biggest single argument was between big states and little. Big Pennsylvania, big Virginia versus puny, little Rhode Island or Delaware. And this nearly broke up the Constitutional Convention.

And that's how we got the compromise of two senators from every state, but proportional representation in the House. So Jefferson thought, how can we prevent this? We have the continent, but it hasn't been gridded out yet. We'll divide the whole west into these lovely square states and there will be no further problems. So he did this in his own mind.

He wrote something called the Bill for the Government of the Western Territories in 1784 as a member of Congress. And he designed 14 new states in the Ohio Valley as square as you can make them. Because he was really upset by the Great Lakes, you know, that they wouldn't square off for him. But he gave them names like Metropotamia and Polypotamia, and Pellissippia and Michigania and Sylvania, and so on. So most of these names didn't take and most of those states weren't square.

But if you look at Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, about the same size. And then, as you go farther west, things really start to be more Jeffersonian. You get Colorado, a perfect rectangle. Too big for Jefferson, but still. Utah, nearly a rectangle.

Wyoming, a rectangle. Oklahoma has some rational borders and some irrational borders. He'd be very upset with the panhandle. Because why? You know, why would that not, why would you have that thing sticking out?

So he wanted, you know, he was kind of a very notional man, Jefferson. But the reason we have square states, the farther you get west is that his idea prevailed. If you look at the Great Plains, I'm from North Dakota, you're in Oklahoma, two degrees of latitude. So North Dakota, two degrees. South Dakota, two degrees.

Nebraska, two degrees. Kansas, two degrees. Oklahoma, then all bets are always off, of course, with Texas.

I would encourage people to read his. I believe he was one who said something to the effect that Jefferson was one that he didn't like discord. He didn't like argument. He liked the idea of order, very much a man of the Enlightenment and these types of things. And so it's interesting.

you would say that. So his plan for the West was to develop in this very prescribed, quantifiable way that had these square grid lines. And it just didn't implement. I never thought about this. He said that it's emblematic of Jefferson's approach to everything, right?

Even borders in the West, which we think of the West as being chaotic and violent and subject to the whims of nature. and all this on all the Great Plains. And yet he's here trying to create some sort of order. What.

But that's lovely, too, because a perfect circle is also a beautiful piece of geometry. But he gave us that cadastral rectangular survey grid system. in a single moment of almost unbelievable ordering. Jefferson and Monticello said, how shall we lay out America? And he created this grid.

And it's universal. It only breaks down in the high mountains, where you can't square it, quite right. But a section of land in Oklahoma, perfect. So he did that first and then he wanted these square states. So he got more than you think.

He was a harmony lover. He wrote his own Ten Commandments. And one of them was take things always by their smooth handle. And he literally was not fitted to be a politician. He had a bad voice.

He was a shy man, just painfully shy. He didn't like conflict of any sort. And so you can imagine how bad that set of qualities is to be a politician. And he used to get migraine headaches when he got into conflict. And his migraines, people now aren't quite sure they're migraines, but he thought they were.

They were so serious that he would have to go into a room and close all the windows and just sit. He couldn't even read. He couldn't read. He couldn't take notes. He would just sit there for the entire day until the pain in his head went away.

And these were clearly stress-related maladies. So it's amazing that he was ever the president of the United States. And I saw recently that there was a poll by eminent historians of the best presidents, and so on. Jefferson ranked fifth. That's higher than I would ever put him, and that's certainly higher than he would put himself.

Jefferson was not a great president because he didn't believe in executive authority. He thought that Congress should be the principal branch of government. And his whole goal as third president of the United States was to reduce the national debt as severely as possible, which he did. He devoted 73% of every annual revenue to debt retirement. Try that, America, at $32 trillion in debt, and the interest alone is going to eat us alive.

He reduced the national debt of the time by 37% while president. And there's only one way to do that, and that is fiscal responsibility. You can't spend money. if you want to reduce your national debt. You can grow the economy, of course, but chiefly you have to stop spending, and he did.

And so he starved the government. He wanted a very minimalist government anyway. And then he took 73% of annual revenues to retire what he took to be Hamilton's gift to America, the national debt.

I grew up in the heartland. When we come back, we'll continue a series of clips from my day at Northwestern Oklahoma State University at Alva, Oklahoma, topic Thomas Jefferson and the American West. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm Clay Jenkinson. This is my journey recently to Alva, Oklahoma. After this was all done, they took me back to my hotel. I regrouped, did some writing.

Then Aaron picked me up around 5.

30 and we drove east of Alva, about 10 miles, to an unincorporated place called Ingersoll. And I so hoped. when they said we're having a dinner in Ingersoll, we had dinner with about four other people. I so hoped that Ingersoll was named after the famous Robert Ingersoll, who was, his dates are 1833 to 1899.. He was the great progressive orator in the country at that time.

He was an agnostic, which was a tough gig in the post-Civil War period. He was an abolitionist, of course. He spoke on Shakespeare, on literary subjects, political subjects, historical subjects. He was one of the most sought-after speakers. If you think of sort of the great Patricia Limerick of the University of Colorado, one of the most sought-after speakers of my lifetime.

He had that sort of a reputation. And people, of course, didn't have access to media then. And so they were absolutely starved for intelligent conversation. That's why Chautauqua was a big deal on the Great Plains and the Lyceum movement. And once the New Deal came, you know, continuing education and the kinds of home economics training that came from the Soil Conservation Service and county extension agents and so on.

And so, unfortunately, Ingersoll is not named for the great Robert Ingersoll. It's named for a man named Charles Ingersoll of Philadelphia, who was a railroad executive. So many places on the Great Plains are named for railroad families. And sometimes they would be naming the places after their children. You know, there was a town about every 10 miles back when the railroads needed to refuel and to fill up with water and so on.

And so they laid out these towns before there were towns and then named them for family members, for people they wanted to flatter in the railroad business, occasionally for a politician. But essentially, these were names that have nothing whatsoever to do with the life of the Great Plains, except that an industrial roadway was being laid down across the plains and every town had to have a name so they could have a post office. And so the train schedules could be written and adhered to. And so this town, which is now gone, 10 miles east of Elva, was named Ingersoll, not after the great humanities orator Robert Ingersoll, but instead after one, Charles Ingersoll, whom I'd never heard of before, who was nothing more than a railroad official. So let's go back to the clips from my conversation with Aaron Mason about Thomas Jefferson in the.

And again, that line between Jefferson and Roosevelt.

And they couldn't be more unlike. They're exactly 100 years apart. And Roosevelt is a big, brash, boasting, aggressive, hyper-masculine man of action. And a great one, by the way. And Jefferson is a mild-mannered, serene rationalist who believes in limited personality.

So they're not going to get along very well. And we don't know what Jefferson would have thought of Roosevelt, because Jefferson died in 1826.. Roosevelt was born in 1857, 1858.. But we know what Roosevelt felt about Jefferson, which is that he despised him and thought that he was unfit for the presidency. Jefferson was a genius.

He was America's Leonardo da Vinci. Keeping in mind, every time I make a big statement about Jefferson, we have to remember he was also a racist and a slaveholder. That can never be forgotten. But he was also a genius. And so he was a pioneering architect, a pioneering expert in library science.

He knew calculus at a time when that was brand new. He was essentially a universal genius. And one of his interests was paleontology. So there was a mound. There were mounds in Jefferson's, Virginia.

There was a mound on the Ravanna, which was the river that he lived on. He decided to excavate it. I think I'll open that up and see what's inside. But he didn't just take a shovel and start shoveling. He decided to do it rationally.

And so he would take off the top layer and catalog it, and then take off the second layer and catalog it. So the way that he helped to develop the very procedures which became modern paleontology and modern archaeology is considered the father, or one of the fathers, of those sciences. And, of course, today we'd say, hey, you sure you want to be tampering with Native American graves? We have a different attitude today. But he was just totally curious as a man of the Enlightenment.

What's in there? Why did they build these mounds? Was that the same civilization as the natives we know in the West? Or was this some earlier? Now we think it was some earlier civilization.

So he's a pioneering anthropologist, too. So his idea of conservation is different from Roosevelt's. Jefferson's idea of conservation is sustainability. It's sustainability farming. And he was very good at that.

Roosevelt's idea was, man, this is a magnificent country. We'd better set aside a few things to save forever.

Devil's Tower, the Grand Canyon. Mesa Verde. Mesa Verde, one of his five national parks. And then we should, those things we're going to preserve. We're going to keep humans largely out of them, except as guests.

And then we're going to conserve the rest by showing wise use. So he added 150, Roosevelt added 150 million acres to the national forest system. Why? Because he wanted us to conserve our timber instead of just cut it down. So wise use.

sustained yields. That was Roosevelt's philosophy for most things. But if you add it all up, Roosevelt set aside 230 million acres of the public domain as National Park, National Monument, National Wildlife Refuge, National Forest, National Game Preserve. Nobody in our history did more than he did. Saved the buffalo from extinction.

He helped nearly extinguish the buffalo. And then he turned.

You can renew the American dream, campfire by campfire. And see, in Europe, they didn't have national parks then, but their parks were playgrounds for the rich, and the privileged. And average people weren't permitted to go into them, you know, like the private hunting ground of Lord. so and so. Roosevelt said, no way.

In America, our parks are going to be for everybody. And that's what they are. And that's one of the greatest things about our national park system. is any one of you can go out there on any day you want and get off the trails and hike into them. And there's no someone saying, I'm sorry, I'll need to see your social credentials if you want to be part of this.

And so, but I'm serious. I'm only playing about you, pale academics, but it's radio. So they'll all believe me. But, but Roosevelt wanted people who are cooped up in their lives to get out and feel what it was like to be George Rogers Clark, what it was like to be Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. That was his big dream.

And we owe so much to Roosevelt for that. Jefferson might have thought of those things had he lived long enough and seen the West. But in Jefferson's time, the West was infinite space. I should say, before we lose our hour here, that neither Jefferson nor Roosevelt has a very good track record with respect to Native Americans. Jefferson thought something like this.

They're really interesting and we should admire them, but we can't let them get in the way.

Roosevelt said, it's too late for Native Americans. That that's a primitive life way that has no place in a modern industrial nation. And so he wanted Native Americans to get on board and become sort of honorary white people. That's the era of the Indian schools and sort of Carlisle in Pennsylvania. And remember, the motto at Carlisle was kill the Indian, save the man.

I mean, think of it, that was the mission statement of the Carlisle Indian school, kill the Indian in order to save the man. We don't think that way anymore. Thank goodness.

Along those lines, an interesting question. I always like to think about it and I think I know the answer, but just for the discussion here, when we talk about Jefferson's approach to resources and the political dynamics of that. And when we think about the the resources of the West, and we think about how they're managed today, where you have states like Nevada, where maybe 60 percent of it is run by the federal government, it's literally owned by the federal government and they're a permanent landowner. And this has led to a lot of acrimony between the states, the federal government, particularly certain conservative groups that say the federal government is a suppressive landowner in the West. And so Jefferson, of course, being a small government, would probably want the federal government to get out of these land holding agreements or responsibilities that they have.

What would you say, would be his perspective on that? Would he want the Forest Service to diminish in size today, the National Park Service, and let the states run those things? There are two things. First of all, if the whole country had been like.

So in other words, all the arable land in the country was divvied up, and Jefferson wanted to divvy up every piece of it, everything, everything. The government shouldn't control anything. And I have some interest in that.

But in places like Nevada, which is way more federal land than you said, you said 60 percent. It's almost over 90 percent. Why is that? Because there's no arable land, and all the arable land is irrigated. in Nevada, which took federal intrusion.

The Bureau of Reclamation made the desert bloom in that way. But there's no farmland to speak of in the state of Nevada. So the government was willing to give it away. There's just no takers. And the people who did take it often failed, and that land reverted to government.

So I do. But that's one part of it. So it's not as if the government has some sort of a tyrannical desire to own land, the federal government. It really just wound up owning land because nobody, there were no takers. The second thing, though, is closer to Jefferson.

I think he would say Utah is more able to manage its public lands than the federal government. And Montana is better able to manage its public lands than the federal government, that the federal government should get out of it and let the states do this. I don't happen to agree with that, but I understand the logic of it from Jefferson's point of view. So when people like Cliven Bundy and others in the Sagebrush Rebellion whine about government tyranny, all I can say is, first of all, you're getting below market grazing fees on public land, land that you and I own, Aaron, and they happen to occupy. Their leases are very favorable.

Secondly, the regulatory protocols are quite mild. There's a lot of freedom for people on the public lands to do what they want within certain guidelines. But it's not as if someone's on that ranch every minute watching everything that's going on. There's a lot of latitude for self-police out there. And Cliven Bundy, remember, didn't pay his fees for more than a decade that he owed by contract to the United States government.

He said, I don't believe in federal government. Well, if I got, if I were going back to Wichita tomorrow driving 140 miles per hour and I were stopped by the highway patrol, I can say I don't believe in the highway patrol, but that wouldn't stop me from having to pay the fine. Right. And so the Sagebrush Rebellion has validity, a lot of validity, but it needs to be understood in the context of history, which is what you all do. And in the context of history, it's not a black and white issue at all.

So if you think empire, you think of Roman empire or Napoleonic empire, or even British empire. That's not what Jefferson had in mind. Empire for liberty. So they will have an empire, but we will let people have a maximum of human freedom on those lands. It's a beautiful concept.

So empire is a term you would not expect in this context, but if it's an empire for liberty, that's different. And so that's the term as he meant it. What he wanted was, and this is not necessarily your philosophy of government or mine, but what he wanted was a very tiny national government. He even called it the foreign department. that would just do a few little things.

Post office, national defense, treaties, stronger state governments, Virginia, in this case, Oklahoma, stronger still county governments. And the strongest government would be the township along the New England line where we'd all get together once a month and hammer everything out into real democracy. So he wanted to decentralize the system. It got weaker as you go to the top. It got stronger as you come to the local arena, so that the local zip code is the most important one.

And Jefferson basically says, if you send your tax dollars on a senator off to Washington, D.

C.

, they disappear. But if you controlled your tax money within this room, you would find out waste really quickly, and you would be much more frugal about spending money if you knew it was actually coming out of your pocket. So that's Jefferson's philosophy.

Theodore Roosevelt's philosophy is 100% different. The national government should reign supreme, and the local, the states and local governments.

You know, there's so much there. The Cimarron Strip, you know, the Palmel rush to fill the last of Oklahoma territory. Oklahoma was permanent Indian territory at one time. If you've watched Flower of the Summer Moon, you know that the so-called civilized tribes were moved there into permanent Indian territory, and then oil was discovered, and many of these individuals and tribes became quite wealthy. Then there was a scramble for their wealth by unscrupulous people, one of which is played by DiCaprio in that wonderful film.

And, by the way, Lily Gladstone is related to one of my dearest friends, Jack Gladstone of the Blackfoot Nation. He's a singer songwriter with an incredible album on Lewis and Clark. And he does, he's a docent for Glacier National Park, and he's on my advisory board for the Edward S. Curtis project. And, you know, you can imagine how bursting with pride they are in the Gladstone world for her great success, although she did not win the Academy Award recently.

So I love this. This is in some sense what I live for, and I was so pleased to have this opportunity. And there were just a couple of little technical issues in the recording, so that's why we're using only certain clips, but you get a flavor of it here. Meanwhile, we'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.