#1597 Arbor Day and the Seeds of Liberty

I've been to the National Forest, the forest that was planted in Nebraska on the first Arbor Day, which began in Nebraska, and I'm fascinated by the New Deal's attempts to stabilize the lands of the West through the Soil Conservation Service. There's a great film by Per Lorenz, which you might see, I think you can see it on YouTube, but if not, on Amazon Prime or some other service. It's called The Plow That Broke the Plains. Lorenz was a great independent filmmaker, a friend of John Steinbeck's. He worked for the government of the United States as a propagandist for the New Deal.

He made a magnificent, award-winning, fabulous film called The River, which was about the flooding and the need for the Tennessee Valley Authority. But his other film was called The Plow That Broke the Plains, and it's really worth your watching. So yes, I'm on the journey starting tomorrow, so amazing that I've got the Airstream right outside. I took it on a shakedown run last week. You can see a comic account of that at ltamerica.org.

Tomorrow morning, I will pack up, and at about 11 a.

m. Central Daylight Time on the 27th of April, 2024, I will begin the epic Travels with Charlie journey around the United States. I couldn't be more excited. I've figured out the systems. on the Airstream.

I think I've worked out most of the kinks. I'm still pretty lousy at backing around corners, and I'm going to need to do some of that at some of the campgrounds that I'll be staying at. Phase one of the great journey will take me from here to the end of Long Island. I will touch base at Montauk, where Theodore Roosevelt quarantined with his rough riders after they came back from Cuba, and then to nearby Saig Harbor, where John Steinbeck lived with his third wife, Elaine, and from which his great journey in the autumn of 1960 began. So I'll touch base there, and then I will go up to Connecticut and Massachusetts and Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine.

In fact, following Steinbeck, I will go to the top of Maine, then down along to Buffalo and Niagara Falls. He was then going to go into Canada. He did not because he had his dog with him, and he wasn't sure he could get the dog back into the U.S. Then I'll skirt the Great Lakes to Chicago and on from there through Wisconsin and Minnesota, back to North Dakota. So phase one, from essentially the first of May through the fifth or sixth of June, takes me out to Long Island and all the way back to Bismarck, following, not religiously but mostly, the actual trail of John Steinbeck.

You can't pretend to want to know America in 2026, as we reach our 250th birthday, unless you see more of it than your comfort zone. And so this is a chance for me to do some of that, and if you have thoughts about this or suggestions, I'd be interested. I'm also, you know, apropos of today's program, interested in the forests, the old-growth forests of the country. And I have lists of them, but if you know of a great swamp, a great forest where the cypress trees are or where the giant oaks are, or whatever, all forests intrigue me. I love to camp in National Forests more than any other place, but if there are places where, in your knowledge, that are tremendous old-growth forests, I would make a special effort to see them.

So anyway, let's go to the show. I apologize for the length of this podcast introduction, but I'm so excited, and this is kind of, for me, a historic moment when I'm leaving the comfort of my home in Bismarck, North Dakota, and heading out on this odyssey. First year, Steinbeck. Second year, Lewis and Clark. Third year, Theodore Roosevelt's conservation footprint in America, and who knows what happens after all of that.

So, thank you all. I deeply appreciate your commitment to the work that I'm doing, and it pleases me enormously to be able to communicate with you on a weekly basis, and I hope the next programs coming from within the Airstream will greatly please you. See you soon.

Mr. President, it is such a pleasure to be with you today. Good day, my dear citizen. I am always in awe of your time as president, as your time as a founding father, but also in your path toward agriculture and farming, and the things that you did, not only at Monticello, but throughout Virginia, throughout Albemarle County. Today, if you would give me the great honor of us going down this path, I'd like to talk about seeds of liberty on two paths.

The things that you did during your time as a founder and as president, that sowed seeds that reverberate and flourish today in our national culture, in the presidency, in the way our government is formed and run, but also in the things that you did as a man, as a president, as a scholar and a humanitarian, with plantings and particularly trees. Today is Arbor Day, the day that we're recording this program. This is Arbor Day nationally and Arbor Day here in Virginia. I think it's an important time to reflect. I do have an understanding that you felt very strongly about trees.

Could you express a little bit of your feeling toward trees?

Of course, I was focused instead on the seeds of trying to build a republic in the new world and not allowing people like Hamilton to take us back down the dreary path of European monarchies and feudal economic systems and aristocracy and so on. I didn't ever get to live my full liberty to pursue the scientific and literary subjects that so mattered to me. I love trees. I don't imagine I could live in a world without them. I had a friend in Washington, D.C.

Her name was Margaret Bayard Smith. She was the wife of Samuel Harrison Smith, the editor of the National Intelligencer. There was a newspaper in Washington, D.C. In your time, you would call it a house organ. It was very much in favor of my administration and the politics that I represented.

I met Mrs. Smith at her husband's house one day in the parlor. She did not at first recognize me. I didn't introduce myself. This is the sort of formality of manners of the 18th century.

But she and I had a short conversation. When she discovered that I was the President of the United States, she was abashed and cringing because she had felt that I deserved more decorum or more respect or whatever. But she said in a beautiful letter, this is the man that we were told to fear, this radical Jacobin, this vulgarian, this demagogue. And she said he was so mild and so polite and so gentlemanly. She said that the myth of Jefferson, the Radical, is just fundamentally wrong.

And she was amazed and delighted to meet the real person behind the public image that the Federalists had thrown up of my character, my politics, and what my administration would be. So we became close friends. And in fact, when I left Washington at the end of my two terms, voluntarily, of course, she asked for a memento. And she knew how much I loved puttering with plants and so on. So I gave her a flower.

I gave her a flower from just one simple little flower in a pot that I had. And it wasn't, I said in a cover letter, this is a pretty small gift. And the plant is not in good shape. Perhaps you can bring it back. And she cherished that plant as somehow, I suppose, a memento of our friendship, but also as an image of what I believed in most the world.

Remember, I once said the greatest service a man can do for his country is to introduce a new plant species into its mist, particularly a grain crop, an edible crop of some sort. She and I had many discussions about this. And at the time, of course, Washington, D.C. was just beginning to be constructed. It was really a building site, through my first term, at least.

But they were cutting down trees pretty regularly as they built Pennsylvania Avenue and so on. And I said to her once that I love trees so much that I regard the cutting of a tree unnecessarily as silvicide, as the equivalent of homicide, and that we should call this what it is. It's a murder of a magnificent species, of a plant. And we should not look on this with indifference, that we should have a moral policy. I wouldn't say a law.

I'm a minimalist. But there should be a moral standard in the United States that we never cut down a tree unnecessarily.

And one story that I thought was particularly fascinating while you were serving as minister to France between 1784 and 1789, your habit of taking seeds of choice North American trees to friends in Europe, just as you talked about the plant that you shared with your friend in Washington. I think these are beautiful things that, Mr. President, that you have done, that make a difference in our society and are so important, not only at Monticello and at Albemarle County and in Virginia, but around the world, around the nation. I'd like to connect this in just a few moments to some of the things that you did as a founder of this country, not only the declaration, but the time leading up to your time as president, and then the things that you did throughout the course of your public life. But just comment a little more, if you would, about your thoughts on.

arboriculture and trees and all of the things related to what we're discussing.

Their view would be, I'll harvest from the world whatever I can during my own lifetime and beyond that, I can't really afford to think about it. The seeds we planted in 1776 and 1787 were going to come to fruition somehow. Now it's possible that those plants would die before they could reach maturity. There were many people who predicted that our republic could not last, and there were deep pessimists even within the United States about that. And most political theorists believed that a republic on so large a geographic scale would not be able to survive.

So we didn't know what would come of it, but the seed you plant determines the tree or the flower that you get. So you want to plant the right seeds. You want to plant a seed that will lead to something that flourishes in the long run and can self-propagate. And so we were very concerned about this. Let me change the metaphor just slightly.

When the Constitution was written, and I was not part of that, I was in Europe at the time, as you know, it's only a 4,000 plus word document. It doesn't specify much. The most specifics come from Article 1 about Congress and the legitimate powers of the congressional branch. It's somewhat less explicit about the presidency and virtually silent about the judiciary. So that meant that the first Congress and the first presidents and the first senators and so on were going to create norms to piece out the simplicities and I suppose you might even say the vagueness of the Constitution.

And so we had a very strong sense that we were acting not for ourselves, but for the future. And I'll use a river metaphor instead of a tree one at this point. When you're up at the source waters of a stream, how you train that stream is going to determine how it becomes a larger river and eventually a mighty river. So what you do at the beginning is going to have enormous influence on what comes later. That means you have to get it right.

You have to get it right. This is why I opposed Alexander Hamilton as fiercely as I did. Because if you start by saying it's going to be monarchical, and you're going to have a class system, and it's going to be based on banks and speculation and so on, then it's only going to grow more. so down the road. You must begin in something like innocence and purity, aware that things may be corrupted, because human nature does tend over time to corrupt systems.

But if you don't start right, you will never get right down the road. And so, just to take an example, George Washington, the first president, one of the greatest men who ever lived, everything he did, from the way he greeted citizens, to the clothing that he wore, to his manner when he spoke to members of Congress, to the social events that he and his wife, Martha, hosted in New York and Philadelphia, everything he did, he realized was a precedent for the future. And so he was more self-conscious, probably, than any president in the whole history of America, because he knew that if he any way got it wrong, he could be poisoning the stream of the American Republic.

Welcome back to Listening to America with your host, Clay Jenkinson. I'm David Horton, and I have the honor of serving as co-host this week. We're talking with President Thomas Jefferson in this edition to discuss a little bit about the seeds of liberty. So far, we have had a wonderful discussion on the intentional propagation of trees and plants, not only on Monticello's grounds, not only in the Commonwealth of Virginia, but across this nation. And I'd like to shift our discussion just a little bit to talk about those seeds of liberty that were sown through the practices, the intentional practices, of the founders, as they established the early formation of our government and the presidency.

And, Mr. President, if you could share some of your thoughts on establishing presidential norms that maybe aren't written down anywhere,

And that act, in a sense, was a second constitutional convention. It defined the third branch of our government, of our national government, the judiciary, in ways that the men at Philadelphia had not taken the time to do. This was true in some other respects too. But there was more pressure on the presidency. And, of course, George Washington was the ideal first president of the United States.

I think that our confidence about our system would have been less, far less, if we hadn't known that, once the Constitution was ratified, it was inevitable that he would show us the way. And he did. However, we didn't know what to make of a president. If you look at the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, there's a lot of uneasiness about this, because we had just rejected a kingship. We knew that that is a provocation to tyranny.

So we wanted to have some sort of national officer and commander-in-chief who had sufficient power to do the things that must be done in a republic, but not enough power to make him look like a king or a monarch. And finding that spot on the spectrum of administrative and presidential power turned out to be very, very difficult. Everyone knew that Washington would be first president. But that actually was a problem at the Constitutional Convention, because they couldn't talk as candidly about what can go wrong with the chief executive as they might have done had he not been in the room. But since he was in the room and was notoriously thin-skinned, they couldn't say, you know, they're all corrupt and we better put in some guardrails to prevent this from happening, and so on.

So they didn't really talk it through as much as they might have done. Washington had to make it up as he went along. When I became president, the third president, and I want to say this carefully, sir, I felt that while Washington was one of the most extraordinary lovers of liberty in the history of the world, he had made a few mistakes along these lines. He had taken it, I thought, a little too close to monarchy. He had delivered his State of the Union message personally before Congress.

That seemed to me a little of the trappings of the King of England opening the parliament with a speech. He would not shake hands with the American people. He had very formal and stiff levies, as they were called, in which people sort of stood in a circle and he would move and bow, but people didn't get to touch the president of the United States. He had a carriage, a very beautiful, expensive, fancy carriage, liveried servants and so on. There were ways in which he appeared to have erred a little bit on the side of too much centralized authority, too strong and too ceremonial a presidency.

When I became president, I decided to break with that habit. I hoped it wasn't too late. You know, the seeds you plant, the river as it's flowing becomes harder to divert, but I thought it was still possible. So, as you know, I walked to my inauguration. I eschewed military escort and liveried servants.

I wore plain gentleman's clothes as the president of the United States. I didn't have a ceremonial sword, as John Adams did as president, a man who never wielded a sword, even against a weed in his garden. I did not give State of the Union messages in person before Congress. I sent up my annual report by courier. I greeted visitors at the White House.

at the door. People were shocked, especially foreign diplomats who came to call on the president of the United States, and they tap on the door of the White House, and I opened the door, sometimes in house slippers. I knew, sir, that over the course of time, the presidency would become more powerful, there would be more pomp and circumstance, that, in other words, that it's inevitable that the executive will become a more potent figure over time, both because of human ambition, but also because that's, in a sense, the nature of things. I was sorry to think that might be true. That's one reason why I thought we should tear up the Constitution from time to time, but I wanted to get it right from the start, and I think that I made, I'll say it this way, this is a pretty bold statement, I helped us make a transition from a severely restrained republic to something like.

It feels very much like President Washington, and even President Adams, to some extent, felt the need to plant some of these traditions because they were expected that that is all that people had known up to that point, and to achieve a level of legitimacy among the population, that they had to incorporate those elements into their presidency, whether it be the trappings of respect that were around President Washington or the fact that John Adams recognized he was not viewed as a great warrior and he needed a sword to somehow show that he might be. Whereas you had the opportunity, whether it was through simply your personality or your introspection, your reliance more on intellect than other elements, to be able to prune back some of those things and to make the forest of the presidency, the garden of the presidency, stronger through the removal as opposed to the addition. What are your thoughts in that direction?

And I think both of them felt that we needed to bring a little bit of that.

ceremonialism, costuming, parade, ritual, liturgy, that there needed to be some of that so that the people of the United States would come to terms with the fact that their state governments were being diminished and a new national authority had been erected. And so I think, in other words, these were honest mistakes.

Adams actually believed we needed titles of nobility for our president and other national officers in order to generate that sense of, I suppose you'd say, awe, but certainly respect for the new national government. So I don't think that they were channeling monarchy. I think that they were trying to figure out what is the right level of informality and ceremony in such things. Because they went a little bit too far, in my view, I wanted to prune that back. And when you use the pruning metaphor, you have come close to my heart, because I also use that metaphor with education, that I believe, I think more than any other of the founding fathers, that the average American is up to the challenge of self-government.

And there's a lot of talk about republic and democracy and the people and the sovereignty of the people. For most of the founding fathers, that was really just enlightenment boilerplate. And they didn't really believe that the people were up to it. They wanted a government by elites. They wanted a government that would represent the people, but not necessarily emanate from the people.

To put it in another way, they hoped that the people who voted, and it was really only about 10% who had the right to vote, even among white men, they hoped that they would always vote for their betters. You either believe that the people are up to it or you don't. I do believe the people are up to the challenge of self-government. If you do, then you must find ways to bring them into the equation. You can't govern on their behalf.

You have to govern with and through them. And so I pruned back some of this ritual that my predecessors had put in. I believe in education, it's the same way that a young person is born with a moral sense, just as you're born with an eye and a leg. All you need to do is listen to your moral sense and you will almost invariably do the right thing. I also believe the American people have common sense, a great deal of common sense.

They might not have learning. They might not have political sophistication. They might be ill-informed about what's going on in the world, but they have common sense. It's one of the great characteristics of the American people. I think, because we had to be so pragmatic in cutting down trees and plowing up fields and, you know, beginning to tame the wilderness, as we did.

But I also said in education, at a certain point you need formal training, schooling to prune back the exuberance of human nature and to train the plant. You know, if you just plant a vine, it's not going to produce good grapes. You have to prune it and carefully train that vine to be productive if you want to produce wine. And so pruning is an essential part of all gardening. So the pruning idea matters to me almost.

That's one piece to sort of establish the difference between the presidency and the Congress, to establish the appropriate place for each of these things to happen. But can you speak a little more to some of the things that you felt like you were able to put into place that really helped the presidency thrive as it continued down that path? A couple of things. First,

The one that's closest to the people is the legislative branch. This was by design that the people should govern themselves. And so if the president begins to send one suggestion after the next to Congress and to try to, in a sense, govern the country as a proto-monarch, you've defeated the purpose. So I would send very short, quite plain reports to Congress suggesting a couple of things perhaps. Or I would say, Congress may wish to consider rather than Congress should pass this law.

In other words, it wasn't just my shyness or my unwillingness to want to do this, or my distaste for public orations and so on. It was really a principle of separation of powers. As president, I rode horseback in the District of Columbia without any security of any sort. I did some grocery shopping for the White House. I would go from one green grocer to the next.

So this was regarded by some as a foolish thing to ride one's horse alone as president. It's not that people thought I needed security, but they thought I needed more of a ceremonial, that there should be an entourage that would go grocery shopping. The idea of a president traveling the country to be seen strikes me as a little unseemly, not really in line with American ideals. So when I was president, I made no attempt to go out through the country. I regarded myself as the chief administrator.

I did my work exceptionally diligently. Truly, I was an administrative master. And I didn't bother with any of those other things, because the president isn't the.

The world belongs to the living, not the dead. But I was fortunate in that Mr. Madison, my closest friend, became the next president, the fourth president. And so it was really a continuity. And then we both selected James Monroe to be the fifth president, and he was our protege.

So the Virginia dynasty, as you Virginians like to call it, lasted for a quarter century. And that meant that we could lay down a number of habits that would probably continue for a long time, at least. In other words, if I had been a one-term president or even a two-term president, and then the Federalists had regained power, there would perhaps be a yo-yo effect in which one party is more monarchical than the other, one party is more informal than the other. And if this changes, Federalist, Republican, Republican, Federalist, and so on, this is going to create a kind of a whiplash effect, which will not lay down the continuities and the stability that we need. And so, thank goodness, we three Virginians were able to be president for 24 years, and we all were modest.

I was probably the most famous of the three, and in some ways, the most formal of the three, because I'm a very shy man. Madison was a very interesting man, but he did not have, I suppose, my stature or what might even be called my charisma. Monroe was a more flamboyant person than either of us, but he was also the junior partner in this trio, and he did not want to do anything that would break with, essentially break with my own vision of the country. I have great respect for John Quincy Adams. I disagree with almost everything that he thinks, and he disagrees with almost everything that I think.

But we knew each other through, of course, his famous father, and I had spent time in Europe with him. He supported many of the measures of my administration, even though he was a Federalist. And as president, he, in a sense, became a quasi-small-r Republican himself, and so I'm glad for that small bit of influence. But once he was supplanted by Andrew Jackson, a vulgarian who could barely spell, a dualist, then American democracy began to take on its mid-19th century form.

establishment. Mr. President, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time with us today, and we are always appreciative of your insights.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm David Horton. I have the honor of serving as your co-host this week, coming to you from the campus of Radford University in Radford, Virginia. And joining us. now is my good friend and your host of Listening to America, Clay Jenkinson.

Clay, it's good to see you, my friend.

And you know, I don't know what's wrong with them, but whenever I talk about the gumbo I've had with you, they just say, no, no, no, no, no, no, that, whatever you, you got to go to New Orleans, you know, you don't be fooled. And so I don't know why they're gumbo snobs, but they are, but I've loved there. And I should say, per trees, that you are in one of the states that has an enormous number of trees. I live in Bismarck, North Dakota, and in fact, it is the most treeless state in the Union. So I wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Language of Cottonwoods, and the cottonwood tree to me is essentially a sacred thing.

I can't imagine the Great Plains without cottonwoods. I literally can't imagine living here if there weren't cottonwoods. There aren't a lot of them, but they're magnificent, especially in the autumn. And they were the tree that got Lewis and Clark across the continent. And so I did a lot of research for that book.

And it turns out that North Dakota is indeed the most treeless of states. And when Meriwether Lewis got here in October and November of 1804, he was shocked by the treelessness. It begins around Sioux City, Iowa, and then the Dakotas and Montana. He was bewildered. He was put off his center of gravity because he had never seen a treeless thing.

Of course, if you come from Virginia and Kentucky, especially back then, it's forest in every direction. But he was planning in his book to have an essay, or what he called a dissertation, on the treelessness of the Great Plains. Two things. One is, he wondered why the Plains are treeless. And there's a long backstory, but it has to do with fires, basically.

But secondly, he wondered, how will they ever settle this place? Because we build our houses out of and barns out of wood. We build our fences out of wood. We burn wood.

How will you ever settle the Great Plains if they're treeless? And of course, the answer to that turned out to be sod houses. The sod house was the way that the Great Plains got settled. And now, of course, because of railroads and transport and so on, you can bring trees in from anywhere. But I just feel that's wonderful, that Lewis was sort of freaked out by the treelessness of the Plains.

And when it blows here, when we're also the fourth windiest state, and when it blows here, to use the vernacular, there ain't a tree anywhere to.

I don't know what's out there. I feel a little closed in. I'd rather see some prospects. It is Arbor Day.

He did not want to be the president of the United States. You know, the fact is that when he retired after the war, resigned his commission, he wanted to go back, using biblical terms, to sit under his vine and his fig tree. And he felt that, having fought in the Seven Years War, the French and Indian War, having fought in the revolution through all of the almost unbearable difficulties of holding an army together, he didn't want power. He wanted to create the conditions under which liberty could allow him to thrive as a planter at Mount Vernon. He just wanted to go home.

He was going to retire after a single term. I did what you asked. Thomas Jefferson played a role in this. He and Hamilton and others said, you can't retire after a single term, because you've got to lay down more precedents. You've got to establish the stability of the government.

If you retire now, we could have this volatility. We don't know what the next president would do with the office of the executive. And so, one more time, against all of his instincts and knowing that his health was beginning to fail, and, frankly, that his mental acuity was beginning to diminish, Washington agreed once again to be the president of the United States. And he finally retires in 1797, in March of 1797, once and for all. But by December 1799, he was dead.

And so we never let him enjoy the fruits of his enormous achievement and success as a human being and a military commander and a statesman. When's the last person who really looked deeply into the future of this country and tried to figure out how we could shape things now, so that in 2050, 2075, 2126, we will thrive. And so that kind of statesmanship, the long view, the sense that history is watching, that the world is watching, that has characterized some of our best presidents.

Because, again, there were a lot of people who thought that we really should have a monarch or that presidency was just a fool's paradise, that this was no way to run this new nation. And that's where I would offer this thought, that many of the things that he did, yes, maybe there was a little bit of a self-aggrandizement as part of it, but perhaps much more, I have to do this because this is what people expect of me. And I will ask you this question real quickly as we continue our conversation. If not Washington, who would it have?

But he couldn't have been the first president. Jefferson, you know, I'm always shocked that Jefferson ever became the president of the United States. The only reason he did is because people didn't know what he really thought. He's the most radical person who was ever the president of the United States. And his ideas, you know, he's a true small d Democrat.

He believed in the goodness of man. He believed that we're up to the challenge. He believed that average people could really gather and govern themselves. Who else might it have been?

Henry Knox? No. Hamilton? No. Although Hamilton was the most brilliant of the founding fathers, it seems to me, and the greatest financier, but he was going to take us way farther down the road to monarchy than Washington did.

I'm sure, you know, if the history had come out differently, we'd probably see it differently. Maybe Madison would have been a great first president of the United States. But you want Washington first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. In other words, he was a larger than life figure in his own time. The Washington myth precedes his death by a long way.

And so we were fortunate. What other person could have been the first president of the United States? I don't think anyone's going to have an answer to that. But, David, I want to just quickly change the subject, if I can. Arbor Day.

There is in Nebraska a national forest in another treeless state. I've been to it. It's amazing. And the person that we have to credit with a lot of this is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Great Plains were emptied out of people during the 1930s.

I mean, 30,000 North Dakotans left and never came back. That's a gigantic percentage of the population at that time. And of course, we all know the grapes of wrath. FDR created the Soil Conservation Service, one of the greatest things ever done by the government of the United States. And to this day, there are shelter belts in this treeless state around most of the farmsteads.

And they were planted. There are shelter belts between fields to slow down erosion. Every year, people win the Soil Conservation Farm of the Year Award for the quality of those trees. FDR had a wild idea, David. He wanted to lay down a single line of forest from Canada to the bottom of Texas.

One big swath, a wide group of trees. And it would be like a wind fence for almost 2,000 miles from Saskatchewan to the bottom of Texas. It didn't happen. Too bad. It would have been an incredible thing.

A silly idea, maybe. But man, would it be something. I mean, to think of human beings doing this. The other thing I wanted to say is that I've been giving lectures about forests. And there are maps, people can go to the internet and find them.

Map of the trees in America in 1800.

. Maps of the trees of America in 1825, 1850, 1875. And you see the great shrinking forest. We were denuding America of its trees, partly because we had to. If you're going to have a farmstead in Kentucky, you have to cut trees out to do it.

But the amount of deforestation that occurred during the 19th century was huge and appalling. And of course, there was no replanting and no conservation, no wise sustained use, nothing of that. Fortunately, the other Roosevelt comes along. in 1900, Theodore Roosevelt, and he loved trees. And he realized that we were stripping the country of its resource base.

And so he brought in his friend Gifford Pinchot, the first national forester in the United States, and they developed the National Forest System. It had already existed, but TR is the one who made it work. Theodore Roosevelt and his cousin, his fifth cousin, Franklin, are the two great conservation presidents in American history. And they both had a huge impact on the forest cover. Remember that it's said in Jefferson's time that a squirrel could jump from branch to branch, from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi River.

Amazing. Just look at the maps of the forests of this country at the time of Columbus and.

It can help us create spaces that really do offer a break from modern life. And I am very fortunate to live in an area that has that. Having grown up in this region, I'm not sure that I would do any better than Meriwether Lewis in other parts of the nation without wanting to plant more trees. And Arbor Day is very special. I think it's that intentional propagation of things, of systems, because a tree is a giant system, intentional propagation of systems that I find the parallels to be fascinating, because without those systems in place, without the trees, without the systems that we've created for our government, without the guardrails that we sort of create, bad things tend to happen.

And that by putting those things in place, we can adjust, we can prune, we can plant, we can move in different directions, but it allows us to truly have the best of all possible worlds. And I would offer forward to, I don't know who it would be if it wasn't George Washington. I agree with you that Adams and Jefferson were both amazing in their own times and came at exactly the right times, but they likely wouldn't have worked as the first president. And very much, we would have looked at perhaps another type of war or revolution or something that would not have been the America we know today. But very much so, the propagation of trees and forests is so American and so much a part of who I think we are, at least since 1872..

I have to give all the credit to Nebraska and give credit to the National Forest Service, give credit to the presidents that have stood behind that, because it has helped.

I don't think you'll freak out and if you do, I'll take you to an arboretum. There are three or four of them here, but this is really an interesting subject to me and I just urge everyone to go to the internet and look at the diminution of the forests of America between the time of Columbus and the time of Theodore Roosevelt, and you will first see what an amazing wilderness this must have been and, secondly, how important presidents can be when they're like the two Roosevelts.

I think it's a lot like democracy. We have to revisit it every so often and redouble our efforts to be intentional about what we do to be able to ensure that healthy propagation of those systems.

I'd love to have 10 different historic trees there. I guess you have to stay home long enough to plant a tree.