It took a village. Dr. Watt sop h dr. Watson has published more than 40 books, and scholarly t articles and encyclopedias and essays. He has coconvened National Conferences on the modern presidency, and moderated political debate and delivered more than 1,000 keynote addresses. He has founded three nonprofit think takes dedicated to political reform. He is a frequent media commentator on cnn, and foxs special report with brit hume, and nbc, usa today, New York Times and the bbc. Dr. Watson has lectured at the four arts numerous time, and he will do so again in the future. We welcome him as he is working the image wick the formidable historians. There you go. Okay. Everybody hear met all right . Most importantly, i have a signed copy. Well, thank you again, molly, dr. Brennamen and the entire team at the society and congratulations on yet another important and successful and exciting program. Id also like to thank cspan as mentioned earlier for covering the program, and jay gaines and the others who underwrote the program. The opportunity to sit and talk h history, if anybody knows me, i never miss the opportunity, and nothing but a nice history talk, and to sit and talk history with one of my heroes and arguably one of the preeminent historians of our time or any time, a man that has been called the capital t the historian of founders is gordon wood who is the dean of historians will be here for a week. I paid him 100 to say that. I would like to thank joe ellis for coming, and thank him for the remarks. We have about an hour, and we may go over [ laughter ] we will try to keep it tight to the hour. And i thought that we would cover a few topic, and one being professor el ellis books, and the writing process, and i want to take him behind the scenes to the research and writing process and get back to the founders and talk about the eternal and important legacy contributions up to today and the meaning today and the relevance today, and we want to touch on a few h historical topics that he alluded to in the the remarks and get back to that and i would like to open up with knowing joe ellis the person. On that note, can you tell us what sparked your interest in history, and at what age did you realize that this was your calling . Well, i dont have a canned answer to that, and usually, i have heard the questions and so im scripted to do this and i went to college at the college of william and mary. Before that i went to a school in d. C. Which which was a Jesuit School called gonzaga and so i was classically trained in terms of the latin and greek and stuff, and so i didnt really take much of the way of american h history, but when i had philosophy at william mary, and then afterwards and people would come up to me in my junior year and say, what are you going to do . And so yes, we all get it. And you had to have an answer so i said that i would go to law school, and i hadnt thought about it, but i knew that everybody would accept that answer. So then my senior year, i realized, i didnt have the money to go to law school, and i was on my own, and wilm ya and mary was cheap and i was working as a lifeguard in d. C. Overs overseeing the pools for the kafitz corporation. And i could not afford law school, so i thought, well, i can get into the graduate school, and i did want to go into the philosophy, because they were heading off in the direction of symbiotics, and so i was more interested in ideas. So i said, well, i could go on the be history and applied and i got into yale, and which nobody could understand how i ever got in. Did you ever ask them how you got in . Well, i didnt know who to ask. I think that i wrote an essay that somebody thought was good, but the people at yale at the same time as me were much better read than me, and at the end of the year, and i will bring it to a conclusion, but at the end of the year, i thought, that i am not cut out to do this and theres a good feel that i was supposed to write a certain way, and i did not want to do that. And so i sort of started saying, i am not coming back. What was i going to do . Is run Swimming Pool i was go running swimminging po pools. And mr. Word said to me, you need to come back. And i said, i am not as good as these other people, and he said, yes, joe, they know more by r d read, but you can learn from them, because you know something that they dont know and they can never learn. I have spent the last 40 years trying to figure out what that was. [ laughter ] i was lean iing forward for that moment of truth. And now i am hanging off of the edge of the cliff here. Yeah. I think that it has something to do with writing. If you were not a writer or historian, what could you see yourself doing . Id be a lawyer. And not a corporate lawyer, but a, you know, like, but. I cant i would not be happy and i have lawyers making a lot of money who write me and say, i want to do what you are doing. And i say, give up. Because it wont work for you that way. But it is, in other words, like most of the things in life, most of the Big Decisions that i have made in my life to include what i want to be when i grow up and who i want to marry and those kinds of things, you make those decision before you have enough information to really know whether they are a good idea. Right. Whether they are a good decision or not. Isnt that right . And so, sometimes they work out. Like in this case, it worked out. When i wake up happy. I go down to my study and try to write out longhand and im not technologically committed to anything other than the way that the roller ball black ink pen. And for me, that is to say it is always fun is not always true, but it is fulfilling for me in a way that is really wonderful. Sure. And teaching for me, and i have retired formally from teaching and i have taught at williams last year, but most of the time at Mount Holyoke and the fivecollege area am amherst and hampshire university. And writing is solitary, and teaching is a social activity. So i like the combination of the two things. Right. And i miss the teaching. I dont miss grading papers. Right. And i dont miss writing, and one of the things that is happening out there in the world of undergraduates and if you dont know this, you need to know this. In the last couple of years, i know that the students would give me their papers and i would make all kinds of comments on the margin, and labor intensive process, but it is important of the central part of the education, because you are playing with the minds of the syntax of the sentences, you are talking about the way they think. And i spent a lot of time doing that and they come up after class and they would say, i cant read cursive. Cursive and and roman numera. I discovered that a few years ago . Its like so you can do that because its interlinear on paper. Yeah, yeah. And thats im an akronistic. A few years ago at our university we had smart boards installed in all the rooms. You have seen them on cnn when you can open up the Electoral College map or whatever. I am athinking how with i use the smart board to teach about gettys battle. I thought i would show him original letters. I cant remember the letter i pulled up, but it was written in cursive. And i asked the First Student, would you read it. And the First Student looked at me sheepishly who said i cant. And then it doesnted on me that the students couldnt read cursive. Likewise probably a semester later in my course syllabus i had an outline for the historical periods and i had it in roman numerals, and then it dawned on me they didnt know that either. I want to get back on the writing, your approach to it in just a moment. If i may, all historians, all of us have a favorite historical place or a site that we like to go to. I know during your research you devote a lot of your poring through all these letters. Do you have a favorite Historic Place or site, a place that you go to to try to get into the brain of john adams. You mean sites . A house, a badle battlefield not a place on the internet or anything. Im not even plugged in in that regard. No. First of all i dont have Research Assistance. I do everything myself. Which is rare today. Which you know is not i mean its rare for people of your caliber. Who are trying to produce works i dont have Research Assistance either, but its different. Its because i in doing research, and reading, i discover things that i would not be able to tell a Research Assistant to look for. Right. Right. So like general howell in the battle of germantown returned washingtons dog. Right. Who he found on the battlefield and had it permanently returned. Now thats not going to change the direction of the american revolution. But i would have never found that. Right. But the i think its letters. I mean its a real interesting fact that whats going to happen with the history of the 21st century Major Political figures. Because no one writes anymore. Because there are no letters. Yeah. And how much of the in some ways it has too much information because emails proliferate in ways that are infinite. Reading letters. The adams family correspondence is to me the most one of the most richest, perhaps the ripest source. Also the what i said at the end of my talk, the Adams Jefferson correspondence. Sure. And you assign that to students. Ive assigned the whole thing to students at holy oak and amherst, and they almost always begin with the assumption that they are going the like jefferson and that hes going to write much more elegantly. Right zhao. And then they realize they dont like him as much as they like adams. Right. And that jefferson has a style that floats. His style is like his mind. Its rap sodic. Its romantic. It floats above the details of ordinary life. And its attractive in that regard. Its beguiling. But i had this one student who said, this is jefferson. This is adams. And. Right. Its pujellistic its aggressive. For me, thats a source. Thats a place. I mean, i love to go back to mount vernon. I love to go back to monticello. Those are the two places that i love to go back to. Mount fooul pulier is being recreated in a big way at the at this moment, madisons home. I respect the work that they do. Theed a 578s i like the adams homestead in quincy, which is run by the National Parks service. Okay . Its not run by a private thing. Right. And its a real home. The other places have become museums in some sense. People actually live, you know, for the next three or four generations in the adams home. And i like that. I like that kind of but if there is anything creative that i do it happens when im reading a letter and i see things in it that made me think about an issue in a way that i had not before been able to think about. I think its fantastic that you do your own research. I would agree that the sorry about the dog in germantown in october of 77, a Research Assistant would have said im not going the pass this along to the professor. But if you read it yourself, both how cell and washington were dog lovers. Its almost an endearing moment. Imagine two leaders in battle exchanging a dog that was running around lost on the battlefield. If you wanted to probe that you could go like this. Sure, sure. How could say, look, howell didnt believe in this war. Howell didnt want to be fighting washington. He hoped they would be able to defeat the Continental Army in long island and end it. That was it. He really, really, didnt want to be there. Right. And he had a relationship with washington in which he saw him as on honorable coequal. And honor exists in a way that we have a difficult time understanding now. Understanding. Yeah. I mean, think about this. Why is it in a revolutionary war battlefield when the two sides approach each other they dont lie down . I mean, why would you stan there while somebody is about ready to shoot you, right . Yes. Because thats dishonorable. And like generals in battles in the revolutionary war, even though they are being annihilated will not retreat. Right. Why . Retreat is dishonorable. Dishonor. Stupido. Okay . Just get behind a rock, you know . Right. But its it so that one little incident can be a device that gets you into a whole mentality that and one of the things i wanted to say, because i was going on too long in the talk, we are talking about a world, late 18th century,s thatprydemocratic. Gordon comes next, you tell him i said its predemocratic. He is going to go nuts. They get along but they have their disagreements. Its predarwin. Its prefreud. Its prepicasso. Its precanes. Its preinternet. Its even predonald trump. Yeah. So its a really different world back then. Right. Now, does that mean its lost forever . I wouldnt go there. I wouldnt if it was lost forever, what had heavens name are we bothering ourselves to go back there . Right. There are things to learn from that world. Right. But in the same way that lets say that you are an anthropologist and you go to sam samoa. You shouldnt expect the samoan parents to raise their kids according to dr. Spock. Right . And we all know that that would be wrong to do that. Its similar to go back and expect and you get into fights about undergraduates about this. Sure. There was a young woman at williams last year. We were talking about slavery. And the constitution. And the constitutional convention. She said, look, they made the wrong case choice. They made the morally reprehensible choice, and thats the end of the story. We cant talk about it anymore. I said, what do you mean we cant talk about it . This is this trigger thing, this notion that you have got to recognize that this is a different world and come to terms with that world and understand in fact if they had actually tried to insert an article ending slavery or saying slavery should be on the road to extinction, the constitution would have never passed. Right. So what happens then . Right. So you get your way. You know, what happens then . The south ends up being separate. They make an alliance with england because of the cotton trade. Slavery probably lasts longer. Its hard to know. You can go back and play the tape, but i feel strongly that you cant impose a politically correct identity politics agenda on from a 2017 perspective on something yeah. Yeah. And there were founders opposed to slavery, hamilton, franklin and others but it was politically not going to happen. You had mentioned john adams is one of those founders that is hard to like according to at love historians and probably not that popular. Yet you have been enamored with him. Yeah, i dont like him. I love him. In terms of that,ed a 5789s, getting right to the point is part of the reason why you like adams because ive always seen him like truman and grant. I can read truman, i can read grant, they were blunt, got right to the point. Whereas im still working on figuring out jefferson and washington. Is that part of the charm of adams, his directness and bluntness . Is that why you love him . Thats true, but only partially the reason. I mean, compared to truman and grant, adams is a genius and its also funny as hell. He has a real sense of humor about himself. Grant never did. Grant doesnt have that. Neither did truman. Truman, uhhuh. He understands himself psychologically much more than any modern politician ive ever seen. He understands what love means. He understands what a realistic and hes a contrarian. Yes, he is. Who thinks that the fact that he lost the election of 1800 to jefferson is the single most important contribution he ever made to American History because he was right to keep us out of a war with france. And he lost the election for that reason. Because of it. And that his definition of leadership is a definition thats unenforceable in our modern political culture. Rather do whats right and lose than suffer the consequence. The people, the public. Whats the people . The people is the, you know, the swoonish thing that changes its mind and can be unpredictable. The public is the long term interest of the people. Right. Which at any given time most of the people dont understand. Your job as a leader is to understand that. Washington passed the jay treaty. Very unpopular. The right thing to do. Lines us up with britain economically for a century. Adams, avoid war with france. Right thing to do. Would have been devastating to the american economy, et cetera. Those are acts of leadership by washington and adams as president that would be unthinkable in a contemporary context because everybody would be poll driven and they would say you cant possibly do that. And so it is a form of leadership. You know, its like when mark twain went to the holy land. He says christ has been here once, will never come again. [ laughter ] like you are not going to see these people around coming back. Right. Its but just to know that that form of leadership actually existed, people did that, okay, thats really wonderful. And you mentioned the Adams Jefferson letters, which we would both agree are one of the most important sources to understanding the founding period and anybody who writes on this topic needs to go back through them. There is a story of adams and jefferson having the fallout over the election. Come back together, dying on the same day. Dying on the same day. If you made that up, nobody would accept it. Hollywood agents wouldnt put that in a film. You can do that. The 50th anners is of signing of the declaration of independence. They both passed on july 4. Same day. 50th anniversary to the day of the declaration. Remarkable. Almost to the hour. Again, you cant make this stuff you have. Cant make this stuff up. Is there something about the Adams Jefferson letters that you particularly like or you particularly find are important on our work on the foundry . Yes, they are a summing up of the revolutionary generation. Okay . The generation is passing of its 1812 to 1826. They are old. They are getting to be old guys. Right. And they are looking back together at what theyve done and the way its they have shaped the revolution and the way it has shaped them. And as adams said, you and i ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other. And they were bitter enemies throughout the 1790s. And jefferson was a duplicitous son of a gun. He hired several scandal mongers. James calendar. Who also blows the whistle on the Sally Hemmings thing with jefferson. But its watching two of the preeminent founders think about what has happened, and what it means, and the fact is they dont agree. Two men have lived the same experience and they dont agree about what it means. And its the beginning it is the what i would