American Thought Leaders - How Stories Will Quietly Rebuild the American Character | Matthew Mehan

Episode Date: July 4, 2026

💰Protect your wealth with precious metals! Call American Hartford Gold today & get up to $20,000 in free silver on your 1st order! Call 855-862-3377 or text AMERICAN to 65532 or click here: https://ept.ms/ATL-AHGThere are few people who understand America’s history—both political and artistic—better than Matthew Mehan.Mehan is an associate dean and associate professor of government for Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, as well as a best-selling author of children’s literature.His recent book, “The American Book of Fables,” is a beautiful collection of fables celebrating the landscapes, virtues, and enduring principles that have shaped the American story.In honor of the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, we discuss some of these timeless lessons on freedom, friendship, and the development of moral character.On the importance of stories, he said, “American educators from the colonial period forward spent a great deal of effort to try to help people to have these virtues of civility, politeness, civic life, independence, rule of law, justice, truth telling, candor. In one sense, you can have a kind of ‘dark age’ version of these morals, but you have to have a much more adept, technologically advanced moral vocabulary and moral praxis, and that’s what fables and stories can do.”Through adept storytelling, Mehan tackles important questions such as: What is true patriotism, and why is it a virtue? How ought we practice the art of civic friendship when there is so much to divide us? What was the Founders’ vision of American republicanism, and what practices ought we implement in our daily lives to foster love of country?As Mehan argues, there is no better time than America’s semiquincentennial to reflect on the laws, the beauty, the places, the people, and the principles that gave rise to this great nation.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The American sense of hospitality, the American sense of friendliness, and the American sense of optimism, those are three things that I try to push very hard throughout the book as a kind of celebration of our past, our founding, our history, but also our present. As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of America's founding, I sit down with Hillsdale Professor Matt Meen, author of The American Book of Fables. It's designed to basically move the American imagination back towards these deep truths of our civilization. He brings together a beautiful collection of stories, poetry, and original artwork that deeply captured my imagination. As I read it, the book took me on a journey from coast to coast in America, encountering some of America's picturesque landscapes and natural beauty, while showcasing the virtues and enduring ideals that have shaped the American story.

It's a shared memory. That is what actually unites the people. They have a shared memory that they love of themselves and their history. And if you lose it, you're in real trouble. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kelleck. Matt Meehan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me, Jan. This is wonderful. So perhaps one and a half million people.

have come to America for the World Cup recently. And some of them are experiencing it for the first time. And there's almost a meme has come out of these types of reactions. My goodness, I had no idea this was what America was about. I've been lied about America, lied to about America. Decades of anti-American propaganda obliterated in one summer as one of them. So, you know, aside from marveling at American food, establishments like Buckees and so forth, they're actually discovering something about the American disposition, something about the American

spirit, and something that I think features deeply in your new book. Why don't you tell me? Yeah, the American sense of hospitality, the American sense of friendliness, and the American sense of optimism. Those are three things that I try to push very hard throughout the book as a kind of celebration of our past, our founding, our history, but also our present. and to be sort of restored and strengthened. I love the fact that we are the first country

since the Roman Republic that has our word for stranger is a positive word. So howdy stranger? That the stranger is a friendly word in this country. And I do think that seeing yourself as others see you is a huge gift.

And that's what we're getting from the World Cup, even though. I suspect some people put the World Cup here as a way to try to dilute our 250th anniversary with a kind of more international cosmopolitanism. But I think it's, insofar as anyone intended that, it's totally backfired because it's been actually a very stirring patriotic moment.

It has been, and at the same time, it does highlight that what people have heard outside of America, but America, certainly recently or in recent decades, is a very different story. And almost a kind of, of nihilistic story. At least that's what, the word that comes to my mind. There is a lot of anti-American propaganda. I agree with that. But we've also presented

ourselves in a pretty dark way through our arts. Our arts have not been very aligned with our character, our faith, our virtues, our way of life, our love of equality. Think of Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad, which Breaking Bad is artistically excellent, but it is, you know, 40 plus hours of dark, horrible sort of meth underworld drug dealing. The Wire, the fascination with anti-heroes. We haven't done a lot of sincere, straightforward, kind of Capra-esque, love of country, love of family, love of the good. We don't do a lot of that art anymore.

And so I can understand why people would have a kind of strange false impression from how we've put ourselves forward. I remember during 9-11 years ago when people said, oh, America's a paper tiger. It's like, well, if you just watch, you know, sort of the sitcoms, you might think we're sort of a vapid group of silly people. But you need to go to, like, church on Sundays or Friday night lights football in Texas, right? Or a Fourth of July parade, you know, like get a flavor for the real sort of what doesn't get on camera very often. And the American Book of Fables, that's what we do. I traveled the country.

I went all over, and I read through the history of the country to sort of get that the local flavor, but also sort of the deep settlers flavor, the settler's spirit of the American character. Before I dive into that, I have to mention this. You know, on the flight back from London, I just came back from London, I watched Casablanca. The shocking thing is perhaps that I'd never seen Casablanca before. My wife demanded it when she learned this. And of course, I fell in love with it. And, you know, patriotism is a virtue in Casablanca.

American patriotism is a virtue in Casablanca. Yeah, this is something I've been speaking on for years, actually. As Associate Dean here at Hillsdale and D.C., we also have the Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship. And so this has always been a focus for me. Patriotism is a really important virtue for a number of reasons. One, it's just just people have sacrificed. They have built the country.

They have given their lives. They have dedicated themselves to acts of heroism and suffering so that we could have the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our independence from Britain, all of that, plus the settlement of the country. All of that kind of thing is just just. but it's also good for us. It's good to do in itself, but it's also good for us.

Why? Because if we do not have an attitude of gratitude, not to be all rhymy, but I am a children's poet as well, if we don't have that attitude of gratitude, you actually don't have the motive force to continue to be another link in that chain of generous sacrifice and service to others, because gratitude is actually the motive force of all duty.

There's not another. It's a fundamental part of the natural law of human beings that if you are ungrateful and you don't see that you've been given anything, you feel no duty to give back to others. So patriotism is of the utmost importance. You know, not that I want to make this interview analysis of Casablanca, but isn't this what happens? You know, you have Rick who's, you know, basically neutral. He's been kind of demoralized some kind of. and anything goes and it's fine and at some point things look very dark, but he gets motivated and he finds that gratitude finally, right? And then you're trying to help Americans remember

with this book. One of the things you're trying to remember the amazing things, the amazing realities, the founders, the geography, you know, all of it. And but there's something, there's something that has to happen to make that leap. if you're not there already? Yeah, I mean, part of it is imitation, right? He sees the patriotism of others, and he sees love of country or countries themselves, that which you love, threatened, right?

Sort of the occupation. So I do think that getting an outside view can be very helpful. But I also think it's important to think of America is, if we're not patriotic, then others can't imitate us. They can't see our way. of life and imitate it. So our patriotism is actually the strength of others. That's a lesson I take from Casablanca's. Sort of what you see, the love of country and others actually causes you to,

wait a minute, they love their country, so I should love mine. In America's case, I think I am an American exceptionalist. I think we have an amazing story. There's so much to be thankful for. It's just an embarrassment of riches we've been given from the previous generations and from a provident God with this beautiful land. But yeah, I think that there is a, you're right, there's a switch that can flip. And I think A250, the semi-quincennial, is a kind of key moment to try to flip that switch in a lot of people. That's why I really wanted to sort of pile on to the festivities with a big book, because this is a kind of moment when everyone's sort of thinking back, how should I love my country? What is my country? There's a sort of reflection that anniversaries like this

always beget, and that's what I really wanted to insert a kind of narrative history. And like you said, it's a shared memory. That is what actually unites a people. They have a shared memory that they love of themselves and their history. Even if it's adoptive, like if you're an immigrant, you adopt the history, right? It's your story now because you inherit the laws, the beauty, the place, the people, the sentiments, right? But that's a shared memory of the past. And if you lose it, you're in real trouble. If you're an American thought leader's regular, you know we spend a lot of time digging into the powerful forces trying to reshape America and the Western world. Everything from censorship and central banking to the growing economic pressure coming from Beijing. I'm not

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I don't think even a lot of people know what that word means today. Civility, right? Civics, the civil life. politics and politeness. These are words that are co-located for a reason, right? It's like, how do you work well with others, right? The social virtues, as Cicero would put it. It's civics, but it's also, in a certain sense, it's almost a teaching about the humane, about what is it to be human? And I do think this is one of the reasons why I gravitated towards fables as a genre. People need moral technology, if you will. I know it's a sort of novel phrase,

but, you know, tell the truth, be good. There's some simple lessons, but at the same time, it's like, well, but how? In what way? What's the smart way to do that? How do I deploy these things? That kind of like moral wisdom, that adroitness, it's a theme throughout the book that starts in the very first lines

about wit and wisdom. That's a hard thing to learn. And the American people and frankly, I'd say American educators from the colonial period forward, spent a great deal of effort to try to help people to have these virtues of civility, politeness, civic life, but not just those, but also independence, rule of law, justice, truth-telling, candor. But in one sense, you can have a kind of dark-age version of these morals, and you have to have a much more adept, technologically advanced moral vocabulary and moral praxis.

and that's what fables and stories can do. Well, and you also describe patriotism as a virtue. And I wonder, and this has been written about somewhat, after World War II, you know, looking at the horror that it begat. You know, you had, you know, Japan, Germany, Italy. It seems like people thought to themselves, maybe this patriotism is the problem. Right.

Yeah, I mean, so I teach both political, Theory, literature, rhetoric, history, a lot of different things. Studied Shakespeare extensively. I did. Yeah. But I also teach Gerta, the sort of Germany's national poet. And I have a particular read on Gerta, and I take him as a kind of antithetical or a nemesis of mine in that he is a national poet that gave a national character of what

he referred to as Straben, struggling. that you have to just struggle against all and that that's what Germany was. So there are ways that people can tell a lie or tell a new novel tale and bond love of country to some completely foreign ideological plan. And I think Straben is not far from Kampf, right?

Struggle. And I do think that that sort of German romanticism of sort of always, like just new challenge but not necessarily concerned with human nature and with sort of resting in a certain sense on the Sabbath under the divine nature and nature's God, which is just an incredible bulwark we have in the Declaration and in our own habits and lifeways as a country,

which we could lose. Different countries had bad poets who co-located false ideologies with love of country. And so it's kind of like the serpent wrapped inside the fruit tree, right? That love of country is good, but if you introduce ideological sort of evils, moral evils, and wind them round love of country, you can use patriotism and hijack it.

But that doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. You actually have to then do the work of purifying those sentiments of the heart, which is the poet's job. That's something that America is, I think, left off as a duty for a while, and it's one I take very seriously. What is Nature's God? Nature's God is a phrase from the Declaration of Independence, but that's not what you were asking. But it's important, nature and nature's God, this famous formulation,

it's an account of the fact that we have causation, and we have solid spiritual causation. That is to say, there is divine mind that organizes the universe and that the universe is organized with natures, that these things are made. Now, there's a debate in the sort of the academy right now in A250. Scholars are saying, ah, nature, nature's God in the Declaration was an expression of a deist account of the founding's attitude towards religion and toward the divine. What does that mean deist? You've heard the sort of the stock version is a kind of clockmaker god that, yeah, there's some kind of divine agency, but it's not in any way providentially connected. it's not deeply sort of shaping the nations.

It has nothing to do with anything close to divine revelation or the Christian religion or the Trinity or God as love sort of in him we live and move and have our being. None of those sorts of much more sort of transcendent and eminent God views. It's a distant sort of set something in motion. So it's a kind of desiccated last gasp of a kind of pagan philosophical account. although the pagans would have thought deism was ridiculous. 99% of them would have rejected it out of hand as irrational.

That phrase is generic, nature's God. It doesn't say Jesus Christ or it doesn't say, you know, Adonai, or it doesn't say anything that's specific. It just says nature's God. But that is a kind of concession to the fact that there's a lot of different ways that people prefer to refer to God, right? And there's not full agreement. but that doesn't mean we therefore are upholding a deist god.

We're basically trying to use a general term. But the term also comes, it's as deep as Antigone, Sophocles is Antigone, from Greek Athens, from Democratic Athens, where Antigone faces up to a tyrant and says, right, how dare you, Creon, not let me bury my brother? Even though, yes, he betrayed the city, there are things deeper than politics in human nature. And it's the laws of Zeus in heaven

and the laws under the earth. Nature, right, to sort of out from the soil, the very way we are, and the divine, Zeus, the shining one, divine mind. So it's a very ancient version of sort of, yes, it's a title that can be used by pagans, it can be used by Christians, but when the Americans used it,

they used it as a general agreement about, right, a divine creator God that was basically a Trinitarian kind of loosely agreed to Christian understanding of religion, but decorously open-handed so that others can engage who might disagree. But that's very different than saying we are putting forward a deist god. Because just in a few lines later, even the deist advocates have to admit that there's a discussion of a creator, right, and there's much more talk of a provident god foreseeing things and sort of being much more engaged. So it's a complex phrase because it's a politically negotiated document, but

But it has a deep and robust history and an active provident and even a creator god by the end. So you very explicitly wrote the American Book of Fables as a, I'll simplify it here, I think, but a collection of stories and fables and myths that can be uniting for Americans to kind of build that, I think, use the term moral imagination. What about for those people that, let's say, don't know what to believe about these types of questions that you just discussed? So, in one sense, the book, and this is what I love about literature, the book is just what it is. It's clever tales, its beautiful stories, its images. And yes, it juxtaposes lines of the Declaration of Independence alongside nursery rhymes, fables, stories.

And even the ones that seem to be more sort of decisive in character, there's still songs and poems that can be sort of just enjoyed or set aside if you don't believe in what it's saying. But it's more of a kind of sort of suggestion. It's a handshake, not a wagging finger or a clenched fist. And that's what I love about art is it's come and go as you please. I don't think anyone is going to have a problem with the book in general. They're going to love lots of it because it's generally natural truths about living together, about justice, about friendship, about honesty, about, you know, overcoming discomfort. Like, how do you deal with discomfort with courage, right?

Like, there's all kinds of basic human truths in the fable tradition and in these stories. And it's also just there's primary sources, so there's just history. there's all these wonderful things. So part of me says the whole purpose of a book like this is to start a dialogue with people who disagree and give them a sort of set of, do you all agree to this? No. How about this one? Yes.

This? No. How about this? Yes. But you start to gather a kind of collection of unifying threads for everyone. And then the other thing that I do throughout the book is it's 13 regions. We travel in 13 chapters, and there's a major focus on the national parks and the natural wonders of our country.

And I get to sort of sing the beauty of this country. We have a whole chapter in Yellowstone and Glacier National Park. We go to the Everglades, Biscayne Bay, Sequoia National Park, all these things. And I think that is one where it's like, who disagrees that Yosemite is beautiful? Like those are things we all agree on. And I know that's a very low baseline. a time when there is so many sharp disagreements, the book gives everybody a handhold to unify in some way as a starting point for a longer conversation. I really like how you describe it as a,

you know, you need a kind of a collection of threads and some of which will make sense to some people and others will make sense to others. We kind of live in a society where we're expected to wholly believe mantras of sorts. Does that make sense? Like that's, I'm thinking of that in juxtaposition to your phrasing. Like, we, we have to agree. We sort of, oh, yeah, I can agree here. Here, I'm not sure. I'm going to keep an open mind. As opposed to, here's the statement, you need to take it. And if you don't, you're the enemy. Sort of this, in this house, we believe, right? It's sort of almost kind of like a talisman. Like, if you don't, don't come in, you know, sort of. Yeah. Well, that, well, that's, that's, that's certainly is, you know, certain ideologies prominent in U.S. society right now. Think like that.

There's nothing wrong with thinking that there are things that everyone ought to believe. The question is, how do you maintain friendship over time with people who don't fully ascribe to everything? That's a trick, and that's one of the things I put in the, throughout, is how do you practice the art of friendship? Civic friendship is friendship, right? It's the beginning of deeper friendship, friendship. This is something from Cicero that I'm always banging on about to my students. It's like, you're Barbara and you are friends. It's like, well, it's a friendship of utility, says Aristotle. It's like, yeah, yeah, but if you read Aristotle carefully, he says what Cicero says, which is it's also friendship, right? And insofar as it's anything, it is friendship, so you need to build

on it. And there's an art to building and strengthening friendship. But at the end of friendship is common policy, shared sentiment. So if we get better at being friends, we're going to get better at actually having not mantras, not gatekeeping, but sort of, don't we all agree to this? Right. And that's what the Declaration of Independence is in a certain sense. Is this sort of aspirational document? Everyone agreed to it. It was read out loud every July 4th and at other times for many, for hundreds of years.

It's still, we just read it out loud at a wonderful event here with all of our alumni as a kind of throwback to yesterday year, hopefully is a new tradition for Hillsdale in D.C. There is the declaration. There are these principles that we really want every American to hold. But how do you get them to hold it? That is a kind of deeper part of what it is to be an American and to be a wise and prudent civic friend to others. I was recently in London at the ARC conference. And, you know, one of the, you know, one of the interviews that was done with Ayan Hersey Ali, well-titled summary, The West is Throwing Away What Made It Great.

Feels to me like you're trying to bring all these ideas that made America great to the fore in maybe a quiet way. In one sense, it's very subtle, like water through the mountains, right? It's sort of, it doesn't crash, it doesn't bang. not a lot of fire or fanfare. It's just, here's some stories, right? Here's some beautiful images. Here's these beautiful paintings and fables and nursery rhymes. But I do think it's also extremely ambitious. This is not a small work. It's 400 pages. It's designed to basically move the American imagination back towards these deep truths of our civilization and how we actually

have a healthy, prosperous, powerful, humane, just, protected, and protecting society, like all of those kinds of aspects, that takes a lot and it's been drained out of us. And I think, for instance, people talk about how Homer created the Hellenic world. He basically gave them a unifying language slash culture and sentiments, heroes. He shaped up their godhead. Now, I'm a modern, like, I don't, those are bad things to do, I think. That's not my goal. I'm not going to be like the old poets that make up religions.

Like, that's not okay. But I do still feel a burden to try to unite the country with language, story, and that shared memory. And that's a hard thing to do. Like, it actually, I'm not the tube of my own horn, but it takes training. It is very ambitious. Yeah.

It's right. And granted, this will probably fail. I'm not Homer, right? But it'll do some of this work. And it'll lay the groundwork for others to still do more of that work. Because that is some of the quiet work we've left off. And we've left to people who want to see the disillusion of America and the disillusion of our Western Republican, Democratic, natural rights way of life.

this sort of great basket that carries the eggs of human happiness and, you know, the Christian religion and all these wonderful things that can be protected inside that nest. It's been picked apart and ignored. And I think, yes, our laws, yes, our economics, yes, our politics, all sorts of, yes, medical ethics, which I know you've done a great deal with, but we also have to help the human heart. And that's what the poets do. Well, I want to talk about King Sussie Scroffa, the Lord of the Boers. And I got kind of captured, or the story captured my imagination, but I also wonder if it might be missing something. So I'm going to...

Please. Actually, why don't you read it? Sure. Yeah, we'll do. The raccoon. the Apostom and the Kingdom of the Boers greatly adapted from Esaup. In the time of America's founding, we praised less the creatures whose mouths were full of falsehoods and lies, and more greatly honored the truth-tellers among us.

But in other times and places, the liar is praised for his clever lies, and the truth-teller is thought to be ugly and burdensome, as we can see from this fable. A raccoon and opossum went through the smoky mountains together. the raccoon loved to lie, and the opossum always told the truth. One day on their travels, they strayed into the kingdom of the great boars. The king of the boars had them captured and brought before his throne, made of kudzu vines that covered an old stump on the hillside. He declared himself King Sussi Scropha, Lord of the Boers,

and he demanded of the lying raccoon what he thought of his court and royal guard of snorting boars, of his crown of emerald ash-borer beetles, and spongy moth wings. and of his carpeted throne of witty kudzu at the foot of crooked ridge on old Hess Creek. The raccoon wiggled his fingers with excitement and praised the boar as the fairest king, nay, an emperor that he had ever seen. The lying raccoon from behind his masked eyes brought out so many witty inventions of extravagant praise for King Sussie's glorious court, his regal crown,

and his imperious throne that the boars all began to blush with pleasure. King Sussi Scraffa named him then and there to be his great steward and head of all of his household, effective immediately, and all to the approving snorts of that court of bores. When the king turned to the apostle to ask the same question, the apostle thought to himself, if lying had gotten such rewards for the raccoon, how much more would the truth bring him adulation and gifts? For one truth is worth more than all the lies that have ever been told. And then the opossum answered him truthfully. Dear King Scroffa, You are a boar and a pig,

an animal feared and disliked by all in these smoky mountains, except perhaps for your meat in the sport of driving you from these ridges, hollows and gaps. Your court is no different. Your crown is an abomination, and your throne is a pile of weeds, not fit to be burnt. The king then commanded that the opossum

be gored to death on the tusks of his personal guard. The poor opossum played dead, but it did not help him. Such was the anger of those boars. So it struck me, I love this story, and it struck me that there's kind of a third animal that might be missing from the story. I don't know if it's missing from the story,

maybe it's not the purpose of the story, but the third animal would be, and perhaps an advisor to the boar king and who would be able to tell the truths in a way that the king might be able to accept some of them. Indeed, like these people have been very important in history, right? So anyway, I'm curious, why is that person missing from the story?

Or perhaps I'm missing the truth? Well, I don't think I'm missing the truth. No, so part of the power of persuasion is to allow someone to arrive at the truth themselves. So the process you're describing is precisely the one that I want to create in a reader. where they called the Apostle, like, that can't be the right way to play it. But obviously, I don't want to be like this lying raccoon. He's disgusting.

And these boars are gross. By the way, sponge moths, emerald ash borer beetles, Kudzu, and the boar themselves, those are all invasive species in the Smoky Mountains that the Rangers fight to keep out because they're actually, like, killing the natural things. I actually have a picture of chestnuts that are a native species that have been deeply hurt

by a, I think it's a Chinese fungus, I think, came and wiped them all out. Well, and so that adds a lot of meaning to why the crown is an abomination, for example. Right, and it obviously has a kind of nod to the American candor, because there is actually something about a republic where we don't have to flatter quite so much, or at least we think we don't, right? And we shouldn't flatter, but we think we can be less careful with the truth because we no longer have some king who can just kill us. We have free at speech, we have natural rights.

But nevertheless, this is not great. This is not a great way to be. And in fact, I have an image of a kind of curious image. In fact, it's too long for this interview, but I can give a whole hour-long lecture just on this initial scutcheon here. It's an image of the declaration and the Constitution and sort of the American way of life, a commemorative image.

But it's just before I have a line from John Adam, a line from George Washington, and then a line from Matthew 1016, from the Gospel of Matthew. And John says, John Adams says, we must use all our wit, vigilance and virtue to avoid being deceived. We don't threaten or bribed out of our freedom, right, because there's clever people that will mess with us and subject us again to tyranny. Let us look, and then George Washington says, let us look to our national character and to things beyond the present period, no more and ever dawn more favorable than ours did, and no

day was ever more clouded than the present. wisdom and good examples are necessary at this time. So we have to be witty, says John Adams. We also have to be good and wise. Witt and wisdom. Ben Franklin said that that was the goal of an American citizen, was to both marry wit and wisdom, which is a line from Shakespeare, the marriage of wit and wisdom.

And I think all of that comes from a line that Shakespeare, Franklin, and the founders were all basically gathering up from and meditating upon, which is from Matthew 1016. when Christ says, behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, be ye, therefore, wise as serpents and innocent as doves? Well, how do you be innocent as the apostle who knows lying is evil and wrong? But how do you be shrewd and wise like that raccoon, but without becoming a liar and a flatterer and a disgusting feed? That trick is the trick of fables and moral technology. That is the adroit, witty, wise American citizen who doesn't get taken advantage of,

who can stand up for his rights, who can shift for himself. It's a very important kind of virtue. Aristotle calls it a virtue, wittiness or wit. He calls it well-bred insolence. We say today, it's how do you take a liberty? Well, taking a liberty, we mean it's sort of like, forgive me if I take a liberty and you do something slightly out of sort of character or a little rude. Well, but it actually means you're clever enough to see an opportunity to not let someone sort of concentrate power, boss you around, right, subject you. It's actually a really important part of American citizenship and our Republican way of life. And so that is a kind of, it's there in absence, but it's in presence in all kinds of other fables throughout.

But I wanted to sort of cause a striking, arresting sort of, whoa, we're missing something here. It's like, yes, keep reading. Well, it worked. Very good. You called this a scutcheon. It's a word I'm not familiar with. What is that? It's like basically an old fancy medieval term for a shield or a coat of arms, a crest.

This is technically, it's a, it comes from, it's ancient Greek, Roman, and Renaissance. It's called a caduceus. And it's got a lot of images that have to do with Greece and Rome and Christianity. Matthew 10, 16, among them, but also the liberal arts. The exterior border of this image is actually the proud design on the USS Constitution, old iron signs. And so the Constitution is basically that frame that's protecting the Declaration and our principles and way of life.

So I like to use kind of curious and arresting images. Most people won't notice all of them, but it gives it a kind of texture and a liveliness. and then those who have a kind of deeper curiosity, the book has many layers for them to explore. There's a checklist at the back for people that want to find all the hidden little Easter eggs and so forth. That's just in the images.

And it doesn't come close to all of the sort of embedded different sort of cultural material. I try to write like the great poets used to write where you actually weave in all kinds of primary sources sort of blended in. Thank you. Thank you for doing this. You're welcome. Thank you. I mean, it's for me as someone who's on the path to becoming an American. This is a very useful tool. That was my hope. I actually hope the State Department takes it up. I hope the State Department gives this as a gift to other embassies. Like here, you want to learn about our national

character, not just read a kind of wrote history or memorize a declaration. This is the warp and woof, the principles mixed with the praxis of the American people. You provide stories for Littles, Middles, and Bakes. Explain that. So I literally, in each section of the book, there's a part of the Declaration that takes up a region of the country. And then we break up sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, sometimes word by word, the declaration. And for each of those subsections of each chapter, there's nursery rhymes for Littles. and little poems. And I literally have an acorn seal that says four littles. And then in the next

section, there are fables. Some of them adapted from ESOP, like the one I just read, but greatly adapted and changed for my purposes. And then some I've written out a whole cloth from myself and from using U.S. history and various things. And always U.S. animals and regional animals from that region. And that's for middles. And I have a little sapling seal. And then I have primary resources, more advanced poetry, Socratic dialogues. Think Animal Farm meets Socratic dialogue, sort of, and these much more elaborate stories with humanity, which kids can read or be read to, but sometimes it might go a little over their head and parents need to kind of edit. But it's sort of pulling the, inviting the whole family to engage the book. And I wanted little's, middles,

and Biggs, one, so the family could enjoy different sections and kids didn't feel left out, but also that you could grow up with the book. So you can actually take the book through your whole life and enjoy it at deeper and deeper levels and read more and more of it. But a bright, like I have a very bright sixth grade son and he is now 275 pages through. And he confessed to skipping one part of one letter of Washington could have got a little boring. And you're like, that's great. That's exactly what I want. But you can read, a middle schooler can read the whole thing, but it's challenging, but the whole family can enjoy parts of it together. And it is, it has a very high upper register. It's a kind of, it aspires to be a classic, if you want to use a term of art. And it's a road trip

book. It is. It's a road. And so you have a manatee named Hugh. Yes. That's, you know, on the road through America. Tell me the genesis of Hugh the manatee. So Hugh Manatee is a walking, talking dad joke, right? But it's also part of the American experience. The Declaration Dependence makes normative claims about human nature. This is what we're all entitled to, these unalienable natural rights, right? This is what we have. So if that's the case, then I thought it was good to take up that old Ciceronian Republican term, Humanitas. What is human nature? How we to be treated, which is that's the base, sort of the basis of natural rights thinking is what is a human being, what is our human nature, how do we treat each other most humanly. So Hugh the

manatee was a kind of fun, kind of allegorical image, but also a delightful, humorous way of kind of kicking off a discovery of our own human nature, but also seeing how it interacts with the land, the history, and the people and the principles of the declaration. So Hugh, The book begins in the Everglades and the mangroves during a hurricane's about to hit. And they have a congress of manatees. They get together at a real place called Deering Estate and they decide what to do, right? And there's lots of bad ideas, but there's a few good ones and maybe some crazy ones. One of them is, well, if this huge storm, if the pelicans are right and this is the mother of all hurricanes,

we might all be wiped out. So we should send someone off to try to get help for cleanup if we survive, but also to go and teach the tough and gentle ways of the manatee of huge. humanity in case we don't survive, right? Which is kind of like the immigration from Europe, people coming here to try to start over and live out religious liberty and sort of reconstitute natural rights and proper treatment, you know, fleeing from different forms of oppression and tyranny. That's always been kind of the story. But it also is a kind of nod to the declaration. They passed the declaration in Congress as the Brits were disembarking for the largest amphibious assault in the history of mankind prior to D-Day, right? So this is a major storm

that they make these decisions. So in Congress, Hugh leaves, and each region of the country he journeys to, he meets new animals, and each of them teach different kinds of lessons, they have different kinds of character, but one of the things they are is they're all different aspects of our human nature. So each of them is a kind of part, a constitutive part of human. of human nature. And so it's a kind of fun allegorical way to kind of teach people very indirectly about their own nature and what we are. And then if we know what we are, we know how to live well with what we are. And so, for instance, he meets Cuddy, the cuddly porcupine in New England.

And Cuddy is kind of an image of the effective part of our soul, the passions, the sort of like the huggy bear, animal, mammalian side of us. We all want a hug and a warm hot soup and a comfy bed, right? And we're effective. We like to, you know, hug and kiss and be friends and slap each other on the back, right? We want to be close to each other. And he always wants a hug. And Hugh, oh, okay, I'm going to hug the porcupine. And that becomes a kind of image of the effective side of us because our passions can also prick us.

They can be painful if they get out of order, right, if we don't treat them right, and we don't discipline them. so they can prick us like the quills of a porcupine. But also the effective side of us is that we're social animals and we have to have friends, but our friends are always fallen. Our friends are always prickly. And so hugging the porcupine becomes this sort of image of, no, this is the right thing to do. This is humanity.

We have friends. They cause us pain, but that's okay. We keep hugging them anyway, and we get closer and closer to one another in friendship and grow together. So that's just one of the characters, and there are many others. One of my favorites is Nicola, the beaver, they meet in the southwest and the canyon lands. And he's sort of the technological powers of man, right? Technae, that sort of are intellectual power to make tools and build.

And like a beaver, he's constantly building dams whether or not he ought to, which is sort of a kind of like even the technological impulse needs to be properly governed and made ethical, which I know you appreciate very much. And so there's a kind of morality play with Nicola, who's very useful. He's the one who gets the cover road trip. He's the one who gets the Ford F-250 hotwired and started because he's good with machines, right? So it's a little madcap. But he's also an image of how you have to moralize technology. You can't just build and build and build dams. You have to decide when a dam ought to be able to, where it ought to be built.

You have to consider the human good, humanity. So it's one of being a wonderful engine to both explore the country, introduce all kinds of beautiful national parks, new wildlife, and tell the settlement of this country, almost the history of the country, chapter by chapter. As you were speaking about the porcupine, I was thinking back to this amazing painting of the porcupine communing with the bison. But tell me a bit about the paintings. I mean, they're beautiful. There's, of course, the cover with the F1. 150 or F-250. Right.

But the art is quite spectacular. Yes. So John Folly is my dear and now, I think we can almost say, old friend. He and I used to teach together at a boys prep school here in Washington, D.C., the Heights School. And we didn't like the way the children's book world was going. We didn't like that they weren't making things beautiful. They weren't making things literarily rich. They were getting uglier, crasser, more facile. And they didn't have that quality that we really loved.

We would actually go to used bookstores to buy old children's books for our families. But at a certain point, I kind of got sick of it. This is actually sad that we're going to use the bookstores. Let's make our own big, beautiful books. So John and I started, and we spent a year doing political cartoons. A couple of them got into some newspapers. One of them actually stopped a really bad treaty in the Senate because it got passed around to the Senate staff

and it was kind of like, oh, we don't want to do that. But every week we do one on the news, just to practice getting my sort of my wit and wisdom, my opinions, my ideas into his paintbrush, into his, well, at that point, pen and ink. And it actually was hard to do. And it was incredibly useful for us because then when we switched to our first children's books,

We had a vast sort of ocean of experience to work with as to what would get what out of John and how to make sure we understood it. So it actually wound up being a kind of practice of the art of friendship to get all these beautiful illustrations. But wait, is that how that coat of arms was created at the beginning of the book? Correct. Yeah, precisely. So but John's a realist impressionist, is trained by Paul Inbritsen, who can trace his master apprentice line through the Boston School to the occult of parts in Paris.

all the way back, I kid you not, to Raphael's Workshop in Florence. So he is a classically trained realist impressionist who has something bold. Has it in the blood, so to speak. Old and new. He's amazing. And he does a lot with light, so he creates heft in his, and I won an NEH grant, and part of, you know, that was doing research, but also run an innovation prize from Heritage. And we funded these 13 gorgeous, huge three-foot-by-five-foot oil paintings. We also did 40 watercolors like you just had.

Tell me about this painting of the... I haven't read this part of the book. I don't know why the porcupine is communing with the bison. So on the Great Plains in the section that's just on the word liberty, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, when they go to the Great Plains, humanity is on a prairie schooner. He's on a wagon.

And he's with his band of merry animals. and they come across a wounded buffalo who had broken his leg in a gopher hole or a prairie dog hole. And there's a prairie fire coming. And they have this conversation. They're trying to rescue him, trying to find a way to help him. They think they do. They almost do. But then things go wrong.

And they have to leave him to escape the flames. And as far as they knew, spoiler alert, he may have been lost in the fire. And Cuddy, who's particularly effective and loving and quick to bond and love with people, is very sad about that. And it turns out that he was, in fact, rescued. And they reunite with Paul, who, as you know, that name, Paul means small, and he's anything but, they reunite with him and convince him to sort of go on the journey with them. And this is Cuddy, seeing him from afar, he leaps off a stagecoach that they're traveling

in in Yellowstone and runs up to greet him. And so it's a kind of reunification. It's a beautiful, beautiful. painting. Yeah. John and I went to Yellowstone and went to this mountain, this little hilltop, really, and to paint. So a lot of the paintings, particularly in Glacier National and Yellowstone, were on location paintings that John got to do while we were out there. We have to find the ways to, so we can become inspired. And the American nature is second to none for this sort of thing.

When I went to Glacier National for research and with John, I kept the phrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet kept coming to me. Hamlet says the wonder-wounding stars, and these weren't stars. These were gorgeous glacial mountains and waterfalls, but they were wonder-wounding waterfalls. I was like, oh, like, so beautiful. It just made you just say thank you. And I don't even care if you might not believe in God. You might be a dyed-in-the-wool atheist.

Something in you was going to say thank you to somebody or something, right? And I'm not an atheist, so I knew I was saying thank you to. But that is, I think, the universal response to that kind of beauty is gratitude, which, like I said before, we desperately need. Tell me about the carpenter and the roses. It's a gentle, quiet fable. It sits nestled in the very middle of the book. And it's actually a kind of reinforcement of a motif.

that is throughout the book of roses, which garnish every page number in the book, and on the title pages of each chapter, the rose and the lattice. It's actually an image of Republican self-government that comes out of the early modern period. And the rose in the lattice is a kind of image of American republicanism, rightly understood.

And it's a hard, Small art republican. Correct. Exactly. How do you have a rule of law, Republic, particularly one where the people are sovereign. A man and a woman, a rancher, they build a ranch that overlooks a beautiful view of the Grand Canyon, and then they decide they want to plant roses

on the sides of the ranch house. So they get cuttings from the shady lady, which is a real rose bush that grows in Tombstone, Arizona. It's one of the oldest and biggest rose bushes in the country. And they plant it there. They grow up, but they keep falling and getting trampled by the animals and just sort of falling into a morass. So he takes his father's carpenter tools, nails and wood, and basically builds a lattice. And he and his wife weave the rose bushes, the roses up into this.

And then it really takes off. And it grows up over the roof. And they have a beautiful rose-covered house with aromatic, you know, sort of rose perfume every night as they sit after a hard day. day's work looking out over this beautiful view of the Grand Canyon. The image that is in this, that is Republican is the idea that the people in a republic, the res publica, to use the old Latin, the publica, they are natural. People are natural. They're naturally families. They naturally make homes. They naturally start to shift for themselves, make businesses and take care of animals and property, that's natural. But the laws of the country that protect them, and if the laws really care

about their nature and their natural rights, they will be cleverly arranged such that they prop them up. And so at the end of this process, when they build it, they're sitting there bathing in the glorious sun, these roses, and they say to the carpenter, we told you it was not in our nature to grow so tall. To which the carpenter replied, Perhaps it was in your nature to grow so tall with the help of a carpenter. Sort of the idea of like, well, people aren't naturally self-governing. They need a king. They need to be told what to do. It's like, or they can self-govern if they have good laws that help prop them up and strengthen them as a people.

It's a sort of difference between a simple-minded version of what our nature is and a more complex version of understanding our nature, which is we're artful and political creatures that can artfully make laws, and thus it is in our nature to self-govern if we do it with the right laws and attend to our human nature. So it's a kind of pretty nerdy stuff, but it's also just a beautiful story that teaches you about that location and those roses. But there's also a pun in there too,

which I think is part of the Christian depth of the American Republic, which is not, it's not overtly Christian in that, it is overtly Christian the people were, but the public way of our law is nature's God that we discussed earlier. That is, in a certain sense, a kind of gentle, open-handed way and invitation. And so the idea of that you can, perhaps it's in your nature to grow so tall with the help of a carpenter, that's a reference to the framers of the Constitution and the founding fathers and the Republican government, it's also a quiet and gentle sort of invitation to the carpenter, which is Christ. Like, we actually need religion. We need grace. We need help to really grow to our full potential.

And I think that kind of encapsulates the kind of gentle way that America is secular, but also Christian in its way, or at least religious. As a kind of, I guess, advice, aside from, of course, I'll read. recommend people that are become, this is capture, their imagination, absolutely get this book. It's beautiful and wonderful and it's teaching me a lot as I go through. It's going to take me a while before I, before I'm reading the whole thing. You know, as we are in the 250th anniversary of this great nation, what would be one practical habit that parents and children can implement, you know, basically to cultivate that, I guess, the basics, the civics. So I actually recommend one inside the book, which seems appropriate to represent now in interview.

It sounds small. It sounds funny, almost trite, but in the end, I think it's actually an extremely important thing to do. And that is basically to stop at the roadside markers. In fact, I have one. It's an excerpt called Two Sleepers. And it's basically a roadside marker that I stopped it with my family, my first time ever vacationing in Vermont with them. And I came across 1781 near this spot by a blockhouse guarding Hazen Road, which was one of the military roads they set up during the Revolutionary War. to be able to bring armies quickly along the frontier because the English had actually set Indian raiding parties to scalp and kill the women and children

while their husbands were away in the army, which is very wicked. Two scouts, Constant Bliss and Moses Sleeper, classic old Puritan New England names, were killed by Indians and buried where they fell. Lest we forget the pioneers, this memorial was erected in 1941. Just a small little sort of, here, kids, and we stopped, we got out,

and we looked at this and read. And you could see their minds going like, so people were just waiting at night on the road in case Indians came in order to try to defend the country and the frontier so that they could fight the war for independence? Like, yeah. And then they go, and people in 1941, that long after, built a memorial. And by the way, it was well kept with little American flags and flowers

that the locals were clearly still adorning every year. He's like, yeah, isn't this beautiful? This is how you love and cherish the sacrifices of your ancestors in patriotism. So stopping at the roadside markers in America has done a great job. There are many of them all over the country. That's a great window in. It opens people up out of their screens, out of their small little universe of their desires as a child.

That's an incredible engine for fostering patriotism and a love of history. You're just reminding me of a, It wasn't technically a marker. It was a signpost when I was on a motorbike many years ago in Oregon. Or is it in Washington State, I think. You may know where this is, but there was a sign that said Stonehenge. So there's a full-scale replica of what Stonehenge would have looked like when it was created. I believe it's in Washington State that I discovered.

Clearly, I have to go to Stonehenge. there's a sign. There you go. Anyhow. And it actually does have some, I'm not going to go into it, but it does have some actually quite profound meaning and why it was put in there and so forth. Let's talk about some more profound meaning, the American Morning. Please read that for me as we finish up. Yes, it's a short poem, only 20 lines. It's the benedictory poem at the very end of everything in all the stories, all the fables about when the founders in the Declaration pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. But it's five-beat line, 20 lines long, 250, and each line, until the end, each line is a kind of encapsulated part of our history in lots of little subtle ways.

But also the title, American Morning, is a kind of, whither will thou go? Like, which way, Western man, which way America? Do you hear American mourning like sorrow and sadness at what has lost or what has passed or how we don't get to be on the frontier or we didn't get to fight World War II or we're not as heroic or whatever? Or we're in decline. Exactly. Right? Yeah. That's a choice. What I hear. It's a lot, right? Or do you say American mourning? No, we reorient ourselves, pun intended, to the east, to the rising sun and be a hopeful people and recultivate the entire country again, which is what we're actually called to. That's obvious. That's what we, our forefathers went west. And I actually have a joke, go west young manatee.

But then by the end, he gets to California. And it's like, you need to go east. You have to recultivate this entire country. And then Europe, right? And then we have to face the east. Like we've got, we've got a lot of work to do to face the east, go east. Right. There's a triple pun there. But so it's a kind of invitation to a new American optimism to roll up our sleeves and get after it. American Morning. If we could till the earth as our fathers did and look on loam that Providence long hid and drink from gin clear rivers overflowing through meadow traces full of bison lowing, if we could step beyond that blackest tillage and wander into hunting ground and village, and smoke the peace pipe, trading well for furs, and find a spring before we die of thirst.

If we could make a track without a rest, and end at peaceful waters in the west, and build the dams and raise the towers up, and from them ring the bells for all to sup, if we could dredge the harbor and port the air, and send our ships abroad to make things fair, and rise beyond the curvature of earth and in one step both wax and wane man's worth. If we could do what our fathers did before, then what on earth would we be grateful for? The sun now shines on us to play our part as holy as we orient our heart. So this is a watercolor of Grizzly 399, and that's that fable or short story for Biggs in Yellowstone or this is in Jackson Hole. Grizzly 399. This is 399 and Backpacker 2020.

It's kind of about COVID, but also about magnanimity. And like even when there's difficulties, you have to not count the costs. She's actually a folk hero. She had quadruplets, triplets, triplets, twins. She's the most successful grizzly mom out there. And so I wanted to commemorate her. And there's a lot of things like that throughout. This takes place at Glacier National.

There's a Theodore the Moose. Teddy is a kind of nod to Teddy Roosevelt, the National Parks. And I learned while I was out there, do you know moose can go down like eight feet into the water? They'll swim. And a major part of their diet is actually eating water plants deep below. This is Hugh Manateo with virginly black hair. I was in a comment that he has reading glasses. Hugh often in one of his...

He's very educated. Yes, he's thoughtful. He can produce sort of primary sources and read from them. Yeah, and we don't know where the book came from. No one knows not where. He's sort of a magical power. But he actually has a debate with Virgil the Black Bear, named after Virgil the poet, about how are we going to tell tales in America? Are we going to talk about Niyads, nymphs, and, you know, sort of gods and fakery?

Or are we going to do something more historical, more natural, more moral, which is kind of the American way. We don't think, we know our founding. We don't have, you know, kings talking to nymphs and, you know, being said by sheep. Right. This is. Oh, the king's snake, of course. Yes. The king's king who eats other snakes, right?

Sort of an image of tyranny, the hunter of men from the Bible, right? And this is actually a visual quote from a famous 1776 painting of the Philadelphia skyline with Christ's church and Independence Hall. And this is the two rattlesnakes, a kind of Gadsden flag reference, but also that Matthew 1016 be wise as serpents, innocent as the dove, right? That you don't fall for the truth. I actually read this one. This guy, the king snakes demanding that they stay and be their subjects. And they're like, eh, I think you're going to move on. Yeah, we're going to go to Philadelphia, the Independence Hall.

Yeah, yeah. What's going on here? This is the Gila monster, some jack rabbits and kit foxes. This is a kind of Esop's fable about a king who judges all cases, but he sleeps very often in his cave. And occasionally he eats a baby rabbit if no one's watching, right? And eventually they start going to these clever. Foxes who were kind of like lawyers. And it's a kind of notion of sort of when a king is absent and like George doesn't actually do his job, everyone will start to be seek the governance of someone

else. In this case, the law, right? The lawyers. And so it's a sort of the slow transition, benign neglect under the kings of England towards a Republican rule of law in America. Fascinating. This is a famous story from Utah, the seagulls and the Mormon crickets. This is Sammy the Eagle, who's actually a famous eagle that sits in the House of Representatives of Wisconsin. The regiment of Wisconsin of soldiers brought a live eagle into battle with them during the Civil War. And afterwards, it was the mascot of the Congress, and then they stuffed it. And so it's this kind of reference. It's over the Great Lakes.

Yeah, it's headed into the Apostle Islands of Wisconsin. where it meets Mishinama, King of Fish, is a kind of nod to Longfellow. There's a whole fable there. It's also very, very high up. Yes. And then. Shark and the dolphins? Yeah, this one takes place out.

It's references of beautiful historic lighthouse off the Florida Keys. And it's a famous Esops fable about the wolf and the bulls. And I change it to the bull shark and the four-spotted dolphins. And then this is one of my favorites, the cave fish. they're actually called well angels because in the lead mine in the lead mine country of southern Missouri

you wanted these in your well because they're in the groundwater right if they're in your well that means that you can drink the water there's no lead poisoning so these were actually a guarantee of your safety so if you're like oh I don't want to fish in my well is like think again you might want to keep it around that's yeah wonderful Yeah, John did a wonderful job with all of these.

Well, Matt Mehan, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you very much, John. Thank you all for joining Matt Mehan and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jania Kellick.