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Hey, we are back, everybody, in studio. If you're kind of smart enough to get the feed, we have Walter Isaacsons with us. He may be America's premier biographer, a professor at Tulane and CEO of the Aspen Institute, the best-selling author of books like Elon Musk on Leonardo Da Vinci. I almost said DiCaprio, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein. And he's got a brand new book out called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, which is 80 pages, and everyone's got to read it.
And first off, Walter, it's great to see you, which you've already accomplished in your career. I can't believe you still want to write, especially after following Elon Musk around for years. I know, but writing is a wonderful thing. You do it all the time. You're going to have a book that'll help pull us together next year.
I just figured we should do something to help lower the temperature and reunite us as a nation for our 250th. And you did it. And tell us about the greatest sentence ever written. We hold these truths to be self-evident. We all know that.
But it was a sentence that Jefferson writes the first draft, Franklin edits it, John Adams helps do it, they do it by committee, and it becomes a mission statement. For our country. It's not a definition of exactly what the country is in 1776, but it's an aspiration of what we can be. And I figured if you want people. To come together and try to work together for at least our 250th, if we all reflect.
on the meaning of that sentence. Each word and how they picked it.
So there's certain people that pop up. In your book. Jefferson, George Mason, because what he did at the writing of the Virginia Constitution. You got John Adams. Um and then you have uh Abigail Adams plays an important role.
Uh but then what I loved that you know, as much as smart as they were, They reached the great intellects and philosophers in order to come up. with the great government they had in their twenties and thirties. Like, how did they get so smart?
Well, they reached and said, give me the best of every government that's ever been that empowers the people to get the most of their life and away from the dictators that told them what their life would be. Every other country had been the divine right of kings imposing power or conquerors with swords imposing power.
So they read some of the philosophers of the time, like John Locke, who says, no, we can form a social contract and we can do it ourselves. That's why the sentence begins with we hold these truths. 11 years later, it's why the Constitution begins with we the people.
So I try to make it fair. Feel like we in America made a social contract. And you also said that it was really a lot built off Thomas Paine's common sense. Correct.
Well, you know, even me writing this 80-page book, which is a bit short for the type of books I usually do. I was inspired by Thomas Paine Wright's Common Sense. And it really, at the beginning of 1776, gets uh momentum going to break from England. And I think the power of pamphlets and short books, they knew it back then, and that's why I thought You know, at least for this coming birthday, let's do something like a pamphlet, a short book that reminds us of who we are. Yeah, and of course, you did the book on Franklin.
Is that what gave you the impetus to say I can get this thing? Because you knew Benjamin Franklin so well and the role he played in the Declaration of Independence? Many years ago, when I was writing the Benjamin Franklin biography, I was surprised to come across in the basement of the Library of Congress, they have the first draft of the Declaration. That Jefferson wrote by himself, right? No, Jefferson's there.
Yeah, he writes that first draft. But then in an apartment on Market Street in Philadelphia, he, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, Congress had appointed a committee to draft it. Last time, Congress probably appointed a good committee with those three people and a couple of others on it. And I looked at Jefferson's draft, and he had begun, We hold these truths. To be Sacred.
And then there's Benjamin Franklin's printer's pen. dark black backslashes and he changes it to self-evident. Because he had been reading David Hume and the Enlightenment philosophers and believed that our rights come from reason, not the dictates of religion. But then the sentence goes on to invoke. The Creator Jefferson didn't say it.
He said they derive rights. John Adams writes in they're endowed by their Creator. With rights. And so this was about ten, twelve years ago. I was reading just in the half of a second.
What was that like when you found that to see that? It's the fly leaf of the book. And when you open my little book, it has that very first draft with all the uh Pen marks and everything else. One of the things it was like, I was working for a TV network. You were running CNN.
Right. And somebody came in the next morning after our study and said, oh, we have a great crossfire show. Judge Roy Moore is putting the Ten Commandments on the steps of a courthouse, and the federal judge is telling him to take it down. And everybody said, Great. Who's going to be for the Ten Commandments?
Who's going to be against it? It'll be a crossfire show. I said, Great. Then I went back. And that night, I was working on this part of the book.
I said, wow. Here we are in the media using the Ten Commandments to divide us. And there were our founders. Balancing the role of divine providence And the role of rationality in creating our rights. And it made me say: no, we ought to get back to that sense of balance.
So, also, for people listening right now, we create everybody's equal, right? Give every man their rights. What about women? And what about slavery? And you went out and you found that John Adams, Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin evolved.
They knew it was an abomination. Jefferson knew it was an abomination. Thanks for reading the book, because that's so much a part of the narrative of America. When they say all men, I was trying to figure out: did they mean men in a generic sense, like the rights of man? No, they were limiting it to men.
And as you say, Abigail Adams writes, remember the ladies, writes a letter to her husband John, and he writes back: no, we're not going to give up our masculine rights.
So they didn't have it that way when they did it. And in that room on Market Street where Jefferson and Adams and Franklin are doing it, there's another person. uh Richard Hemmings. who is the slave of Thomas Jefferson, his valet. Whose younger sister Jefferson's gonna have an affair with.
So this is complicated, but Jefferson. He was a great chef, right? Yeah, yeah. And Jefferson knew it. Jefferson writes in a lot about how bad the slave trade is.
But it takes us a long time to get that right. In fact, it takes four score and seven years. Is when Lincoln dedicates the uh cemetery at Gettysburg. That's when he says, fourscore and seven years ago, brought a new type of nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
So my book is about How we've tried to live up to that aspiration as a nation, and it takes us a while. But doesn't, and I don't never put the average person with Benjamin Franklin, but doesn't Benjamin Franklin's evolving into understanding this emblematic of it? You said he had two slaves when he's in the print shop, but the more he realizes that if you give The African American a chance to read and write. They could do anything the white guy can.
So they grew up in a place where they thought they were not human. They weren't as big as us. Let's be nice, but they can't evolve. He realizes that's wrong. And he becomes the world's leading abolitionist, along with his, maybe the country's leading abolitionist.
Absolutely. And he forms his own school. Right. Absolutely. And this is part of the growth.
We get things wrong. I got a lot of things wrong in my life. But with Benjamin Franklin, he keeps a record of the mistakes he made and how he rectified. He does into the mistakes he made. Because he was indentured to his brother.
But he runs away famously. He says, okay, I rectified it by educating my brother's sons when he died. But the big one, he realizes, is that he had two slaves when he was a printer. They end up wandering off free. But Franklin says, no, we have to grow and rectify this.
So he supports the schools of Dr. Bray, it was called, which educated slaves and freed slaves. And then at age 80, which back then was considered a bit old, he becomes the president of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. And the reason you use the great word emblematic That is not just his narrative, that's our nation's narrative. We didn't get it totally right in the beginning.
But the narrative of America is we try to get it right.
So, for example, if I'm born in 1890. Vote women don't vote. Of course not.
So if you ask me, I'm 12 years old. Oh, women don't vote. I just accept it. All of a sudden, 1919 comes up and the women's suffrage movement happens and they vote. And you think to yourself, of course, they should be voting.
Well, in retrospect, we look back and we go, of course, what were we thinking? But you're subjected to the time you're born. Jefferson didn't invent slaves. They had slaves on his plantation before he was born. And then he evolves to realizing, how do I get out of this?
Exactly. And that's the point of this sentence, is that it's aspirational. But over the course of almost two hundred and fifty years, We've expanded what does it mean to say all men?
Well as you say, in nineteen nineteen we said, oh yeah, it should be all people. Once again, how How do we make sure all men are created equal?
Well, we try to give equal opportunities. For everybody, so that we can be a land of opportunity. Do you know what you're describing though? And I wonder what it would have been like interviewing you in 2020. Because people are going back in history and judging them from where we were in 2020.
Going back to 1890, oh how what were we thinking in 1859? I never thought I thought history was to be studied, not judged. And it seems as though we were judging, take those statues down. This person didn't do this or was against women's rights or whatever. Outside Frederick Douglass and a few others, we'd have no statues in this country.
I do tell my students at Tulane: I say, before you get on a high horse about taking down somebody's picture or monument, think 50 years from now, 100 years from now, why they might want to take your picture down. We all get things wrong because we're all captives of our time.
However, We grow. We look at things, and even the debates about monuments, to my mind, that's a good debate to have. People have to argue about history. And in the end, Like Shakespeare taught us, we realize people are complex. We can honor Thomas Jefferson for the first draft of the greatest sentence ever written, but we can know That we have to get out of that conundrum of uh He had of owning slaves.
When we come back, I want to talk about how Franklin felt about meritocracy and how it feeds into capitalism, why that's important. And number two, what Franklin did for Thomas Jefferson after he had his feelings hurt when they looked at the first draft of the Declaration of Independence and they started chopping it up and saying every cross and everything out, what he said and the interaction they had. Walter Isaacson's My Guest. His book is, It's Out Today, right? Out today.
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So, first I want the anecdote out of the way. Walter Isaacson, our guest, his book is out today, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. You'd be so much smarter if you picked it up. Especially, I know people, when I do events and I talk history, Walter, a lot of people say, you know, really smart people. They're accountants.
They're coaches. I haven't done history since 11th grade. I haven't really thought about it, you know, I haven't picked up a history book in a while. They're busy. They have three kids.
But this is what I like about this book. You walk out with so much legitimate knowledge with quotes from our founding fathers. It's not your projection of what they thought. It's their words. I know.
Thank you so much because I think. We have to re-embrace especially our history. Our narrative as a nation. And history is not boring, it's wonderful stories of amazing people. And I think as we celebrate our 250th, We should go back.
You've written so much. You've written about Jefferson. You've written about Washington. You've written about Lincoln, right? You know through the incidents that those people had to wrestle with, we gained wisdom.
Absolutely. So when we talk about capitalism and meritocracy, you say frankly correct Franklin correctly saw the danger of creating a meritocracy or Meritocratic autocracy. His proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania were designed not to filter a new elite, but to provide opportunities and enrichment for all young people to succeed as best they could, whatever their level of talent. He aimed at what he called true merit. True merit was serving your community and serving your country.
And one of the problems we've had in America in the past 20, 30, 40 years is we've created a meritocracy who thinks of itself as an elite. And Jefferson, who I really like and admire in the book, he wants UVA, University of Virginia, to Take just the top 20 people and make them part of an aristocracy, a natural aristocracy, a merit aristocracy. And Franklin says: no, the point of education. is to make sure every person Can contribute, rise to whatever level they can, and be serious in true merit, which is serving your community and country.
So, Walter, would you say that a capitalistic ideology or philosophy, economic philosophy, is absolutely necessary for a democracy like ours with visions that the Founding Fathers had, because it's an opportunity to be successful, no guarantee of outcomes? Yes, free markets. a part of having free minds, free speech, and everything else. And our democracy is based on, as I said, John Locke and others who said. If you work, take things from nature, you can create private property and it creates great wealth.
But one thing I will say is that John Locke said and Ben Franklin said, yes, but we have to keep some in the common so everybody, each new generation, can have an opportunity.
So they make it so that schools are free and for the public. Police. Uh fire protection. Those are our debates today as how much should we share in common. And we don't have to be so bitter about it.
We should say, hey, it's a balance. But for example, Benjamin Franklin's greatest attribute is he was constantly learning. And Cotton Mather comes out with a model of how to give back. Yeah, you want to be successful, but you got to help out. You got to form different institutions, right?
Essays do good.
So.
So that's where he gets the idea for firefighters and libraries, right?
So everyone has a chance to read and help out your neighbor. You know, the library is the perfect symbol of the commons, which is, he said, we created a library, and the motto was to pour forth benefits for the common good is divine. Because he felt serving your community was the way to serve all of God's creatures, and it was a divine thing to do. And he said it gave every kid, or he didn't say kid, but every person in America the chance to be as educated as the richest people in England.
So for him, the library becomes a symbol of our common ground and the American dream. How do you compare? Uh Hamilton and Jefferson are there different parties. And the friction that they had that resulted in Hamilton's death on a different reason, but Haron Byrd. That's how serious people took it.
that robbery between what Republicans and Democrats are going through right now. I think that we have made this rivalry between left and right, Democrats, Republicans.
So poisonous, it doesn't really have to be that way. Ben Franklin was the one who knew how to get a very passionate person like John Adams and Samuel Adams, who, you know, on one side of the spectrum, and then a Thomas Jefferson together, and say, look, On 70% of the things we're discussing, we can all get to a consensus. And it was under this mulberry tree in his backyard. He had a little trick. He would put some oil on troubled waters, and it would smooth it.
And I think that's what we have to get back to now, that Democrats and Republicans, even on health care. We know we need some new solution on health care, but instead we make it so partisan. I think you're going to be heartened because I think in a few weeks they're going to have something. Because I get the sense Senator Cassidy is going to be a little bit more. My senator from Louisiana, Bill Cassidy, is a smart dude.
And he also knows, I think, That he can find people across the aisle to say, let's try to solve this reason. Not only that, he knows because he's a doctor for years. He's a doctor. Yeah, he's doctor for years.
So, and there's a few Barrasso is another one that could get in there. Go out and pick up the book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. You can finish it in a day and you'll be smarter for the rest of your life. Walter, congratulations on all of you. Brian, I love you.
And I look forward to talking to you on Sunday on One Nation. One Nation. You got to. Remember that. Hey, Brian, Kill Me Cho.
Keep it here, everybody. Don't move.
