707. America: An Idea Worth Believing In

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today, I want to talk about somebody who's a modern American hero and somebody who we unfortunately lost. His name was Gordon S. Wood,

and he was a very famous prominent American history historian. And he was very old, 92, so he's been around for a very long time, and he unfortunately passed away right before we celebrated America 250, which is so sad because he was so close to making it to a anniversary of something

that he was so passionate about. His entire career was devoted to discussing not only the American founding, the American Revolution, but the signing of the declaration itself and why that was so important. But one of his greatest ideas was this concept

that unlike any other country, what makes America special is it's not really about a place. Even though America is a place, America and being an American is more about an idea. It's about an idea or a set of ideas that bring us together.

So I want to talk about that today. So for starters, let's talk about what a historian is. You can probably guess by the name, but a historian is like a detective. They go through and they find documents from the past. We call them primary documents,

which are things like letters that people wrote to each other back then or documents they may have written. They go and they find things and they investigate things and they look for not just information, but for significance and meaning behind that information.

It's, to me, the coolest kind of detective you can be. And that's what Gordon S. Wood was. Now let's talk about his really exciting idea, which is this America as an idea. So I want you to think, what makes a country a country? Is it people who just happen to be born there?

Is it the food? Is it the music? Is it the language? What is it that makes a country a country? For many countries, it is the land that they've been on for centuries and centuries

or it is the food. It's more centered on where the actual place is, geography of where it is, right? You look on a map, you see all these places. But America is so different than that. And this is something that a professor

would spend a lot of time talking about because that's what he believed made America so great or makes America so great, is that we're not a place based on this similar culture. We're a club anybody can join as long as you believe in the ideas, but it's not just that.

It's also important because to understand that big part of America, to understand that we are a nation of ideas, not of soil or a place, that's going to be really important because as he says, to understand where we're going,

we have to understand who we are, how we started as a country. And that's kind of the significance of history in general. So let's think about America at the time it was founded. It wasn't a bunch of colonists who were here and born here and raised here,

even though colonists had started coming over almost 200 years before the revolution, it was a place of immigrants really. It was a place of people from everywhere. Remember, we talked about how Thomas Paine didn't even come to America.

He was a Brit until like two years before the declaration is signed. And so America, and there were fans of America, look at John Locke. He was a Brit, he never even was an American, but his ideas sparked this revolution.

And so what does it mean to be an idea? What does it mean to stand out in that way? It means that America is like this idea that brings people together. It wasn't necessarily that we happened to be in this particular place on the North American continent.

It was because people wanted to flee where they came from, to go somewhere where they could live free, where they could have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You also have to remember this pursuit of happiness, and as we've talked about in many episodes before,

that includes property, the original kind of way you would say it is life liberty and property, but pursuit of happiness is important here because this is going to be during a period of enlightenment, which think of like illumination, of light, of good things. And for the Americans who followed the John Locke tradition

of this life liberty, natural rights as a enlightened philosophy, getting to actually experience a pursuit of happiness or live in a society that lets you pursue happiness is crazy because they're coming from history, from traditions of people living under feudal lords

where their main thing in life is to work and pay their, you know, feudal fees and to pay their taxes and to serve their masters, but not in America. America is a place where you can actually be free to pursue your own happiness. This is a huge idea, right?

So these are these core components that made America what it is and it was those ideas, not proximity, not geography, that brought people to America. In fact, Thomas Paine is a really good example of this because remember he had made friends with or was an acquaintance of John Wilkes

who we'll talk about and not John Wilkes Booth. That's the man who shot Abraham Lincoln different. This is John Wilkes, but he is a member of parliament. He's actually a really important figure because he was very intrigued and very supportive of what the colonists were doing to a point.

We'll get to that in another episode. But so Thomas Paine comes here because he is really intrigued by the enlightenment and these natural laws and the things that America stands for. So again, people are drawn to an idea and another thing. And I kind of hinted with this with the feudal stuff

at equality, right? Because you have to remember not just even a quality of race, which would come later because slavery is still in America, even though many, many founders had big, big concerns with it and knew that it had to be eradicated eventually

to live in a free society. But equality of birth and what I mean by that is everybody is born equal. It doesn't matter what socioeconomic class you're born to. It doesn't matter if your dad was just a farmer, you can be an entrepreneur.

And this idea that everyone is born equal, that doesn't mean we're all equally talented, that doesn't mean we're all equally good at one thing or the other. But we are born with equal opportunities to become what we wanted to be.

This is kind of that concept of the American dream. And when you hear a lot of immigrants talk about why they came to America today or years ago, you hear them say it was to get this American dream. Maybe they were living under oppressive regimes or places where they didn't have that right.

And so moving to America where they had potential, that's huge for them. And this is that idea that's keeping America so attractive to people and keeping us united. And self-governance is another huge thing, right? There had never been a place that's like,

hey, couple of here will let you govern yourself to a point, right? There's still gonna be laws. But when you look at other nations, this idea of self-governance of do what you want without hurting other people

and we're only gonna make as few laws as possible. We're gonna have a limited government. That is crazy. That's never heard of. That's another one of these big ideas. And again, the other big part is that anyone can join.

You don't have to be born here. You don't have to be rich. You can join the club if you believe in the American ideals. And that's usually why you came there. It was that freedom. That's what attracted you.

It wasn't the purple mountain magisties and amber waves of grain that we talk about, which are beautiful, right? America is a beautiful place, but it's not the place. It's what it means.

It's what it stands for. Now here's a question I want you to be contemplating. Have we always lived up to that? We're supposed to be this place with these great ideas that unite people, but like I just kind of hinted at,

slavery is something that wouldn't be eradicated till later. And there are points in time where we haven't treated people equally. There's times where we haven't really let people self-govern.

We've created this bureaucratic admin state with all these different things that violate people's ability to solve govern. So we haven't always been true to that. But if we forget entirely that the ideals are what made us a country,

then we're not going to be inspired to keep government accountable when they do these things that go against what we stand for. And that was really big for Professor Wood. He wanted us to remember that, to remember that we were built on these ideals

because he wanted us to defend them, to do what we could. Maybe that's different. Maybe it's like him becoming an academic and teaching generations of new constitutional scholars

and American founding historians to keep the truth alive. Or maybe it's people who work at law firms and defend people for free or writers or communicators who help make these ideas popular.

It's very important to remember what it is that made this country so great. History matters so much because we need to understand the past to understand the future, to avoid making the same mistakes people made in the past

and to remember why it's important to uphold some of these great traditions and life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness. That is America. That is America. And a place can be captured, it can be destroyed.

But an idea, an idea is bulletproof. You can't destroy it. As long as there are people willing to stand up for it, to encourage people to remember it, then you can keep those ideas alive. And it's, you know, again,

so sad to have lost Professor Gordon Wood. He was such a giant of the American founding history realm and of even constitutional foundations. And it's so sad that we lost him, but his memory is going to live on

and what he has done in teaching us about the revolution and the importance of the founding and America as an idea is just so priceless. And we would do well to honor his memory by remembering that. So I will leave it there.

As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, I will talk to you later.