The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon by Daniel T. Rodgers

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

The Chris Voss Show Podcast - As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon by Daniel T. Rodgers Daniel Rodgers Webpage How an obscure Puritan sermon came to be seen as a founding document of American identity and exceptionalism “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England’s founding in 1630. More than three centuries later, Ronald Reagan remade that passage into a timeless celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop’s long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In As a City on a Hill, leading American intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea. In doing so, he brings to life the ideas Winthrop’s text carried in its own time and the sharply different yearnings that have been attributed to it since. As a City on a Hill shows how much more malleable, more saturated with vulnerability, and less distinctly American Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” was than the document that twentieth-century Americans invented. Across almost four centuries, Rodgers traces striking shifts in the meaning of Winthrop’s words―from Winthrop’s own anxious reckoning with the scrutiny of the world, through Abraham Lincoln’s haunting reference to this “almost chosen people,” to the “city on a hill” that African Americans hoped to construct in Liberia, to the era of Donald Trump. As a City on a Hill reveals the circuitous, unexpected ways Winthrop’s words came to lodge in American consciousness. At the same time, the book offers a probing reflection on how nationalism encourages the invention of “timeless” texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past. Dan Rodgers is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is a prize-winning teacher and the author of six prize-winning books on the history of American ideas, arguments, assumptions, and culture. His Age of Fracture, which won the coveted Bancroft Prize in American history in 2012, not only helped put the word fracture on the map as a description of the last forty years of American history but showed how the very idea of “society” began to fall apart after the 1970s. His latest book, As a City on a Hill, available in paperback this fall, hones in on the history of one of the most iconic phrases in recent American politics: the claim that ever since their beginning Americans knew that they were destined to be a model to the world. The book uncovers the myths behind that assumption. It shows how a 17th century document’s words were lost, how they were found again, and how they were filled with radically new meanings. Finally, and most importantly, it asks what the phrase “city on a hill” ought to mean for us now.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Today, we have the most exceptional author on, some brilliant folks again from Princeton University. We've had a lot of folks from the Princeton University press on, so thanks to them for sending us brilliant minds. And we're going to be talking about some issues today that are not only historical, but current as well. Today we have the author Dan Rogers on. He is the author, Dan Rogers, on. He is the author of the book, A City on a Hill, The Story of America's Famous Lay Sermon. Daniel T. Rogers, you can find it on Amazon. Dan Rogers is the Henry Charles Lay Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is a prize-winning teacher and the author of six

prize-winning books on the history of American ideas, arguments, and assumptions, and culture. His Age of Fracture, which won the coveted Bancroft Prize in American history in 2012, not only helped put the word fracture on the map as a description of the last 40 years of American history, but showed how the very idea of society began to fall after the 1970s. His latest book, A City on a Hill, available on paperback this fall, hones in on the history of one of the most iconic phrases in recent American politics, the claim that ever since their beginning, Americans knew they were destined to be a model to the world. The book uncovers the myths behind that assumptions. It shows how 17th century documents' words were lost,

how they were found again, and how they were filled with radical new meanings. Finally, and most importantly, it asks the phrase, a city on a hill, what does it mean for us now? Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Dan? I'm good. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Good, good. And we got a chance to get your book and start reading it. Let me hold it up as a plug so that people can check it out. Beautiful book. Nice, good thickness there with lots of good details. So give us your dot coms, Daniel, so people can check you out on the interwebs. Yeah, you can find me at Princeton University. Just check in there.

Look under the search engine, put a D in Rogers, and you'll find a biography and links. And you go to Amazon.com and you can find all the books. They're still in print. They're still selling, and I hope this one does too. Awesome sauce. I'm sure it will. It's a great book, and you've written quite a few books. And like we talked about in the pre-show,

I'd love to have you talk about Come Back for Age of Fracture. Even though it's an older book, I'd love to rep-promote it because actually that's what I've been talking about with what's going on right now. This coronavirus has opened up the fissures from the original fractures that we had in our society and just everything seems to be breaking. So this is pretty interesting because we've had some discussions over some of the different book authors, a lot of stuff that applies to Black Lives Matter. A lot of people have referenced the shining in the city, the city on the hill,

the shining city on the hill that Reagan used a lot in his conversations. So let's talk about your book. What made you want to write this, if you don't mind starting there? Sure. You know, one of the things I preach to students, readers, is that nations are all kinds of things. They're governments, they're police forces, they're armies, but they're also ideas.

They're sets of things that people hold in their mind. They go and fight in a war. They fight for something more than just the fact that they were told to do so. They fight because they imagine an America. And so they pay taxes or they don't pay taxes because of what they imagine about America. They're loyal to the country because of what they imagine about America. And that's true with every nation in the world. A nation's an idea. It's held together by all kinds of conversations and arguments and ideas. And if that falls apart, the nation falls apart, as happened once in the United States and happens all around the world. So I got interested in what would mean to take a particular phrase that had been so important in the making of the idea of America, city on a hill,

and saying, okay, suppose we drill right down into the beginnings of that and the history of that. What will we find out about the nation? It turns out to be a fascinating story. Awesome sauce. And it really is because in politics it's been used a lot. Obama, I think, used it at least once. Reagan, as we talked about in the pre-show, was using it a lot. You begin the book by saying it's a book about a phrase and a story

that has saturated American politics for the last 40 years. I guess the phrase is, as a city on a hill, and what's the story behind it? Well, I can start by giving you Barack Obama's version of it, even though it was Ronald Reagan who, as we'll talk about, made it, I put it into circulation because Obama really caught the story, which I'll come back to talk about in a second. He was giving a commencement speech in Boston, 2016. And in the middle of it, he said, it was right here, it was right here, he said, in the waters around us where the American experiment began. It was right here that the earliest settlers dreamed of building a city on the hill,

and the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. That's a really interesting statement, partly because the American experiment didn't begin in Massachusetts, it came late, and partly because, as we'll go on to say, nobody was watching when the boats arrived in Massachusetts. But one thing did happen in that voyage, or somewhere around the time of that voyage. It happened in 1630, when a group of English folk left England for what became New England. And somewhere along the line of the preparation for that voyage or in the voyage, I think that's not

so likely, the governor, the elected governor of that colony got up and gave a long, long, long, long speech about what the operation was all about, what they were seeking in America, why they were going, et cetera, et cetera. And at the very end, he says, and we must know that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all the people are upon us. That's the story. Middle of the Atlantic, people kind of lost in a place where they don't know what the future is, but they already have this conviction that they're going to be a model to the world. Everybody's going to pay attention to them. And part of what makes that story so attractive and the phrase so attractive is that it seems to straighten out all of American history from this moment of beginning, so more or less, all the way to the present, to the great power nation of the 21st century. Americans have always known that they were going to be the world's ideal,

the world's model. Straightens everything out. And I wanted to figure out whether the story was as straight as it seemed. It's probably an interesting revisional history. It's like me saying I knew everything would go well in my life all up to this time or something. Maybe. I don't know.

When you were four. Exactly. Yeah. I called it. I know. When you were four, exactly. Yeah, I called it. I'm sure there's no writing of that. But there is of this, which is pretty interesting. So what's wrong with the story? Why did John Winthrop really mean by calling the Puritan outpost in New England a city on a hill? Well, there are all kinds of really, really fascinating things

wrong with the story. The first one, which can throw you back a little bit, is that John Winthrop never mentioned writing it. He kept a very, very detailed journal through these first years of the England settlement, and he never mentions it. He actually never mentions the term city on a hill again. And nobody remembers hearing the sermon. So a lot of us, when we begin thinking about this, first comes a skeptical question. Did Winthrop really write such a thing? Is it a later myth? Well, it does exist. There's one copy at the New York Historical Society, even though it's not in John Winthrop's handwriting. And there's some correspondence, very little bit of correspondence. And we know that the words are close enough to some other things that Winthrop wrote about.

But the idea that it was famous in his time is the first part of the myth. It was not famous in his time. And it disappears. It's a real lost and found story. The manuscript doesn't turn up in the New York Historical Society until the very first part of the 19th century. That's 300, almost 300 years after it was delivered. And then when it turns up, nobody pays any attention to it at all. It doesn't come into the history books until the 1970s, and then not in a big way until Ronald Reagan began to use it in the 1980s. So it's a really modern invention taken off from something that did happen but wasn't famous in its time.

And I think you have a picture of it here in your book, don't you? Let me see if I can get that on the right camera. I think you can see it. It's pretty interesting. So when Ronald Reagan discovered it, was it in the historical departments or was it just running around? No, you can find it now on the New York Historical Society website. You can see the whole thing. You can see, try to read the 17th century handwriting if you're really a button for a kind of punishment. You can find on the New York

Historical Society website a transcription. You can find a much better transcription actually in the back pages of this, my own book, As a City on the Hill, which is the most accurate and easiest to understand transcription we've got on the thing. But there had been, in the 1950s, a few historians had begun to notice it. So I think you asked earlier, and we'll come back to Ronald Reagan, whether his speechwriters invented the phrase for him. In fact, he found it on his own back when he was governor of California, probably in one of the standard books,

probably in Dan Boorstin's book called The Americans, where it was on the second page. So we know we had a president who at least read to the second page of books. That's kind of interesting. That's historical. He loves history. He was a real historical president. And that's great.

He used it for his own purposes. We need more of those. Anyway, that's the first And that's great. He used it for his own purposes. We need more of those. Yeah. Anyway, that's the first thing that's wrong with it. The thing is, it's a lost and found story. And the lost goes on for centuries and centuries. And then the finding is, you know, sort of inventing of importance for this document that it never had. But the second part of what's wrong with it is, I think think even more important for us to get our heads around, because the document, the sermon, if it was a sermon or the piece of writing, whatever it was, is about love.

It's not about America. The city on a hill is a phrase from the Bible, as most of us listening to this will know. It's out of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says to his followers, you shall be as a city upon a hill. America is nowhere in that phrase. And it's not clear that John Winthrop was thinking about America. What he was talking about was that particular group of Puritans that came to Massachusetts in the early 17th century,

fleeing England, not because they were so radically persecuted, but because they thought the wrath of God was going to fall down upon England and they better get out and form a more pure society somewhere else. And they chose Massachusetts because by chance they had a sort of a charter,

not that the king had a right to give them a charter, but nonetheless, they had one. And what he says in that document is that we are in a covenant with God. And the terms of those covenant is that we must love each other. We must care for each other. We must practice charity. That's why the thing is called the model of Christian charity, which means the essence of Christian charity. We have to, these are his words, we have to mourn together, labor and suffer together as members of the same body. We must put aside selfishness.

We must forgive debts. We must take care of the poor. We must get rid of economic calculation. And if we do, if we do, we will be, others will speak well of our society. But if we deal falsely with God in his work, that's what he says now. We shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world. We will be consumed out of the good land, whither we are going.

We are going to have the same fate that he feared was going to happen to England. So his notion of City on a Hill was not that everybody was paying attention to the success of this new proposition, but that everybody was waiting for it to fail. Wow. The City on a Hill meant you were conspicuous, you were naked to the observation of others, you were naked even to the feelings of your own self, and that it was all conditional,

that you had to live up to the contract or else curtains. So if I understand you correctly, the city on the hill didn't mean that we were going to be this perfect, beautiful object. What he was doing was saying you have two choices, and either way, people are going to see you for whichever path you follow? Yes, exactly. Interesting. Very interesting exactly. Interesting. Very interesting.

Excuse me. That's really interesting. And, you know, I love the part where he talks about love and everything else. I mean, if we should have politicians vaulting that part of the text rather than the city on the hill, you know. But I guess maybe that makes a better catchphrase on the Twitter feeds or something. I don't know. You know, it's got that, you know, shining sun on the hill. But seriously, but, you know, I don't know.

Maybe, you know, love doesn't sell well to either much in the world. I mean, we don't have a lot of people running around going, kumbaya. It seems like division is the great way of many politicians on both sides over the years. Let's put over the decades, actually, or hundreds of years. And that's kind of interesting. I love that you brought that to the forefront because it seems to me that's the real meat of the text, of the fallacy of it. So the Puritans weren't escaping persecution. They just felt like, did they feel like there was going to be like a sort of, I don't know, second coming, Armageddon, hell rain down, or they just felt like Engle was becoming Sodom and Gomorrah or

something like that, and they were just escaping it? Some of them thought the second coming might arrive. Some of them, you know, that's been a long, long tradition in Christianity. But most of them really feared a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah. And their friends, their neighbors, their fellow Puritans in England, 10 years after this group went to New England, they start a revolution. They throw out the bishops, they change the liturgy, they try to purify the religious practices, they try to purify morals, they try the king, they execute the king, they make one of the first modern revolutions to try to make a pure society in England. So in some ways, these Americans are the much more cautious types. Even when they're being asked to

come back and join the revolution in england they want to stay and create this sort of island of what they hoped might be a more pure society the puritan effect on american morals and ideals there's stuff i've read over time is the that's one of the problems that goes through our affects of society today the the Puritan ideals. Some people say the Puritanization of color. Do you really feel, from what you've studied about the Puritans, that that thread runs as an effect on this country's morals or its amorality or what it thinks of itself as to what it really is?

Well, there's certainly a very, very powerful impact over time. The Puritans themselves change. New England society changes. New England society becomes much more mercantile, finally. The Puritans become as deeply involved in transatlantic commerce and including the slave trade as everybody else in British North America. But through the 19th century, you would have noticed a really pronounced difference between the rest of the country and New England. Laws were stricter. Sabbath laws were stricter.

Drinking laws were stricter. At the same time, you would have found some of the great universities in the country in New England. So they both valued the life of the mind and a questioning life of the mind. At the same time, it was puritanical, as we say now. It's a very complicated, very interesting part of American culture. And until the 20th century, a very distinct part. Interesting. At the beginnings of this nation.

So, Dan, in the book, you talk about how Americans didn't talk of themselves as a city on a hill before the Second World War. Does that mean they didn't think of themselves as a people with a special mission in history? Good question, Chris. Two parts of it. The first part was really a surprise, even though the few other scholars had found the record, and I should have trusted them more than I did. But nowadays, we've got research engines that are incredibly powerful in a way that when I began teaching history and writing history, weren't available at all. And if you have the privilege to be connected with a major research library, you can search almost anything in print. Not just the Google Books, which are only a fraction of what's out there. You can search newspapers.

And you can find the word city on a hill or the phrase city on a hill everywhere. It's applied to everything. It's applied to colleges. It's applied to particularly model cities. It's applied to anything with an influence. I found a wonderful example of somebody saying that breweries, beer factories were cities on the hill because they spread their noxious moral sin out all over the countryside. I'm drinking some coffee right now that's my city on the hill. There you go. And there was even a TV show made with the name City on the Hill. It could be used for anything.

And most of all, it was used for Christian believers to talk about themselves. We are a city on the hill. That's the biblical use of the thing. I'm going to start walking around and claiming it every day. There you go. How are you doing, Chris? I'm just sitting here in my city on the hill. There you go.

What it wasn't connected with was America. That's the startling thing. So the second part of that question, when Americans wanted to puff themselves up with pride, and people do, when they wanted to talk about the specialness of American history, when they wanted to talk about their special role in the future, if they didn't use the city on a hill language, and if they never heard of Winthrop in this regard, they knew Winthrop in other regards. They didn't know about this speech and this use. What did they say? Well, they talked about their God-given destiny. They talked about their manifest destiny, as we talked about in the pre-show conversation. They talked about their mission in the world. They talked about the need to civilize less civilized peoples. They talked about their, like Woodrow Wilson did, a crusade for liberty and freedom and order and all this kind of stuff. So they had lots of ways of thinking of themselves as an important

nation, even long before they were truly an important nation at all. But what's really fascinating is that the language of national specialness, the language that we are like no other nation, is actually universal. Almost all nations say nobody's like us in the world. We're just better, we're more unique. We're unique. We have a destiny like no other nation. We've got God on our side. And so in some ways, the Americans just grabbed onto this traveling that language of nationalism and used it. One of the endings of one of those chapters takes a poem written by a nurse in this First World War when soldiers were dying in the trenches

and the war was going nowhere. It's one of the bloodiest and most dispiriting wars in modern history, even more so than the Vietnam War for Americans and others in Europe. And she says, it's a perfect place for Jehovah. Where is he? All the nations think God is on their side, every single one of them. And here in the trenches, he's not to be found anywhere.

But the first part of that, that all the nations went to war, thinking that they had God on their side. The Americans were no different from everybody else. So they didn't need Winthrop. They didn't need something out of the New England past. They just borrowed their own national rhetoric. You know, you said something really, really just beautiful at the beginning of the show.

I mean, you put into context what people think about their countries, you know, and the collection of ideas, because that's really all it is. I mean, there's a paper somewhere, a couple papers somewhere in a museum. But really, I mean, we're the ever-evolving context of this argument of what America is and what it should be. And a lot of times in our blind America is and what it should be. And, and, and a lot of times in our blind spots or what James Baldwin called the lie. And Eddie Glaude Jr. talked a lot about his book, The Lie and expanded on it. Manifest Destiny, of course, the same way, you know, the,

the, the irony has always been, especially with people like me or atheists, is that there's been a lot of murder and killing in the name of God. And it's interesting how what you're talking about is a lot of people don't get outside of that nationalism, that probably tribalism as the cavemen talk on it, of allying to a flag instead of humanity, which is something I've always been interested in studying because I'm a big believer in being a, in humanity, John Lennon's song, imagine being a citizen of the world as opposed to, you know, being like, this is my country, but I do, I'm proud of my country. But as I went through, as I was going through research on your book, it drew me into American

exceptionalism. And, you know, I was, I was looking at different stuff where we refer to different other countries or governments as godless societies when you know like what you just said um every society seems it's deemed by god and whatever its iteration of you know there's been 3 000 gods invented by humans across uh its span and you know i'm sure there'll be more next week um and and so it's interesting that we we're always utilizing this as instead of an agent for love as a weapon. So there's that. You know, this was to jump ahead of our story a little bit.

But when Barack Obama was on one of his state tours through Europe, he was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism. That was a very loaded question at that moment. We can come back to that if you want. And he says, yeah, I think most people believe in exceptionalism. The Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Belgians believe in Belgian exceptionalism, and the French believe in French exceptionalism. And then he said, but I believe in America is really the most extraordinary country on the earth. And he went on to talk about freedoms and possibilities and that make his case for the argument that might be America. But the conservative press took him to the cleaners for even imagining that the British or the Belgian or the French exceptionalism was comparable to American exceptionalism.

And, in fact, John Bolton said he's not really an American. He wrote in one of the blogs that he's a citizen of the world, and that was not a good thing in Bolton's mind. Now, Bolton said that about Obama, that he was a citizen of the world. Yep. Yeah. I read John Bolton's book, The Guy's a Traitor, in my opinion. Excuse me.

But I did read his book. It was kind of interesting, but it was a very selfish thing that I felt he was on. But that's another story. It is interesting to me because I've studied religion. I've studied why people believe stuff all their lives. And, and I've looked at the horror show of, of what people have done in the name of religion or God. Um, and I imagine, you know, a lot of times, you know, people have often said to me, if

we could have world peace, uh, that'd be great. I'd be like, you know, you get world peace, you kill all the humans because human nature is the problem in itself and you can't even really say religion or god is the problem it's just the weapon that we wield as the excuse for reason for being a murderer um you know when we go into countries that we call godless and we start destroying everything um but i diverge so you diverse but you know i'd say there's there's what i love about this history and what you've written and everything else is this is all part of a massive fabric of everything and what people use to push their agendas or their thought process or their belief systems like what you talked about in the beginning of of show, of the idealism of a country and the perception of whether or not it's true or not.

So how did Winthrop get back into the picture? Who promoted him as America's founder? Well, let me just backtrack, if you're going to use this piece of the show, Chris, because coming out of New England, you can find statements of manifest destiny, though Southern slaveholders were at least as deep into the manifest destiny idea as were the New Englanders. You can also find a lot of moral reform coming out of that same Puritan roots, anti-slavery, women's suffrage, education. The first public schools are founded in Massachusetts. Attempts never as good as they should be to care for the poor. So we don't want to write off religion as one-dimensional. It is the ways in which people are empowered. They're empowered in terrible ways, terrifying ways, and they're empowered in quite wonderful ways at the same time.

And New England is probably for a long while the most religious part of the country. But who promoted Winthrop as the founder? Well, some New Englanders had been trying to say to anybody who would listen to them that they were the most important part of the nation. That young, now famous French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to the United States, and he was taken in by the Boston elite who told him that we're the beginnings of America. It all happened here, and he actually repeats it in Democracy in America. But he didn't know about Winthrop. But it was after the Second World War and in the course of the Second World War when the whole balance of world power changed so radically

that the city up on the hill phrase began to take on a different idea. And what I mean by that is before the Second World War, the United States had the biggest economy in the world. It was a magnet for immigrants until immigration was closed in 1924. But it was a real world power. After 1945, it was the only world power. All the great nations of Europe had been devastated by the war, truly devastated by the war. And the Soviet Union simply wasn't a match to the United States of America in terms of its economy, in terms of its attraction for the rest of the world, though they tried very hard, of course,

to promote a different kind of politics than the United States and promote revolutionary politics around the world. Still, the U.S. is left standing as all the other giants either fall or are crippled around it. And so the idea that we are all that's left, we have to be the city on the hill, help people go back and try and refine this phrase that the historians have begun to notice. They've begun to write some essays on it and say, yes, that's who we are. And go back to where I started. That's who we always have been. We just have our moment of realization now. Yeah. Are we going to continue to be the city on the hill with the rise of China? I mean, China's going to beat us in economy eventually. They were supposed to be beating us, I think,

in 2025, but there may be some delay with what we just, what we're going through right now with coronavirus. But does that take away from us being the shining city on the hill? Because I'm certainly trying to grab the gauntlet of claim of exceptionalism. Well, I mean, sure, they already do, but you know what I mean, once they become the biggest economy. Well, I mean, there's never going to be a moment of asymmetry like the one from, say, 1945 to 1965. I don't think's never going to be a moment of asymmetry like the one from, say, 1945 to 1965. I don't think that's going to happen again.

Some people could say that something like that had taken place when the British Empire grew to its height in the early part of the 19th century. But for the most part, the world is normally multipolar, and it's going to be multipolar in the future. Now, what was interesting—I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. What was interesting about your book, and I'm flipping back a topic because you mentioned it. When I did get your book, because there's been a lot of talk about Manifest Destiny, Black Lives Matter, the issue of the lie, I was kind of under the impression just from my uninformed self that, you know, this was some of the beginnings of Manifest Destiny. But you mentioned that Manifest

Destiny was actually, did come from this era in Boston and that sort of thinking. Is that true? Manifest Destiny comes really out of the debate over moving American, first moving American settlers and moving American troops into Mexico over the Texas annexation. And it was the Southern slave-holding Democrats and their allies in the North who were most behind the idea, not just that Texas was a great place for expansion of Americans, not only that, well, the Mexicans weren't using the land properly

or all this other kind of stuff, but that God really was pointing his finger right on the map. This belongs to you. This is interesting. This is interesting in how that was used. Like I mentioned, when I got into American exceptionalism, it's amazing how we use that, you know, well, we've got to go take care of those godless people and, you know, take their land or oversee their land or conquer their land.

You know, I remember, what was it George Bush saying? We're going to be arrived as conquerors or whatever. And you're like, what? I mean, that fits the notion that the United States is the envy of every other nation. And I think the administration in the Bush era was just caught completely dumbfounded by the fact that when the American troops came in, they came in so quickly, so militarily, that was an easy victory at the outset, that they weren't welcomed with open arms. They somehow thought America was a city on a hill, and everyone should recognize it as such. Yeah, and it's interesting how this whole, you know, what you've written about in your book, this whole thing, is attached to this fabric of something we have to decide whether it's right

or wrong for us or what the real meaning of it is, and I guess that's the evolvement of it. How did Ronald Reagan and those who followed him radically change the meaning of City on a Hill? Well, I told you that Ronald Reagan found the words, both the positive words about the eyes of all people shall be upon us. But he also wrote down in that little note card that we can find in his own handwriting down there in the Reagan Library in California. He wrote down, and if we fail to live up to that promise, we'll be made a story and a byword to the world. So he had a kind of something not totally different from Winthrop's notion that being a city on a hill was conditional. It meant you were exposed to criticism, you were exposed to scrutiny, that you over and over again. As he began to run for president, he began to discover that the conditional part,

and we shall be a story and a byword that God might be angry. We might deserve not to be the envy of the world. That didn't sell as well. And he began to talk about the city on the hill as a place that was lit with almost like Hollywood floodlights. It was a shining City on the Hill.

It hadn't been for winter at all. Shining was Reagan's word. It was almost like, I think he must have had Disneyland in part in his mind. It was a place of towers and dazzling promise. And he packaged that over and over and over again. He packaged it really, really successfully. In this sense, he didn't practice an aggressive projection of American power,

though he certainly was a Cold Warrior right through the very bottom of his bones. But he practiced a kind of extraordinary pride in this imagined city. So let me read you what Peggy Noonan wrote for him. He wasn't writing a speech at this time. In his very last year as president, she had him say, and he probably didn't mean, that he'd thought about the city on the hill all his political life.

Not quite true, but he thought about it for a long time. And when he thought what it was, he said it was a shining city filled with light, a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get there.

Now, compared to America you and I live in at the moment, that's a really extraordinary and hopeful notion of America. And this was one he helped to sell, and helped to sell his own use. When people voted for Reagan, they voted in some ways for this utterly optimistic, shining, confident city. And they did it because they thought it was true. They did it because they hoped it was true. They did it because they feared it might no longer be true.

They did it for all those reasons. But that's what he made. The city, which had an element of fear and self-scrutiny in it, became a city of just self-congratulation. And they definitely needed it because of what was going on during Carter's administration. I'm not blaming Carter's administration, but we had the oil issues. The economy was in the toilet. There was a lot of different things going on. I believe cities were rioting or we were having issues there.

It seemed like during the Carter administration there was a lot of challenges. We had the Iranian thing that was going on right as they were leading up to his election. And I think a lot of people were lost. I remember the Iranian thing, the captives, and that was a real hard thing to deal with because you're like, why does this little country of Iran have us up against the vice and we can't seem to do anything with it, even when we sent helicopters in that failed. And so a lot of people were probably at their wits' end,

or at least feeling like something's happened to Americanism or exceptionalism, and so they probably endeared to that even more. Yep, exactly. And that's where the Winthrop story comes in as far as I try to show in the book. And I do really believe that it's important because it's one thing to say, we are now the top dog.

It's one thing to say, we now have a spectacular nation of which we're deeply, deeply proud. But it's another thing and really even more hubristic thing to say, and we've always been so because John Winthrop at the really very beginnings told us we were. So all of American history pulls together into this language of pride that, as you say, after the 1970s, many Americans were really hungry for. Yeah. So what has Donald Trump done with that phrase?

Well, when I started the book, one of the things that's easy to find out is what kind of language have presidential candidates and presidents used? There's a wonderful website at the University of California at Santa Barbara called the American Presidency Project. You can search any word for any president for any time during their presidency or the run-up to the presidency. And so you can quickly find out who used the phrase city on a hill in the way that I've described. And after Reagan, every single, every single candidate for president and every single president uses the phrase. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton says, we are still Ronald Reagan's city on a hill. She knows it's no longer Winthrop's, it's Ronald Reagan's. Except Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has used that phrase once in what was obviously a prepared speech, and never again. He doesn't know history, and he doesn't care about history. So it's not surprising he doesn't know history and he doesn't care about history. So it's not surprising he doesn't know who John Winthrop was. And he doesn't have Reagan's interest in historical quotations and this sort of stuff. But Donald Trump won the election by talking about something radically different. He said America was a disaster. He used that word disaster over and over and over and over and again. And we can see some of that going on right around us right now.

A disaster that only I can fix. We lose, everything is going wrong. He was the first one to really say, we're not a city on a hill at all. And he's also the first American president since the Second World War to say the rest of the world is irrelevant to us. That why should we care what the rest of the world thinks? Why should we be the admiration of the world?

At what cost does that come? And at a profit loss sort of thing, how much do we value the opinion of the rest of the world? And for Trump and many of his closest advisors, the answer is there's not much value that they see in that at all. So he really tried to turn his back on the city, on the hill, as strongly and powerfully as he could. And that's really interesting what you've said there.

You know, one thing I was going to bring up was the American Carnage speech at his inauguration. And most of us sat around just going, what the hell is he talking about? I mean, George Bush has a quote that someone overheard him say that I just won't repeat it for YouTube's sake. But like a lot of people just were stunned by the American Carnage speech. And we were just like, what America are you living in, man? Because we were doing fine up until you. But, you know, I just got done. And it's really interesting that you bring that up about how he he hasn't been using that phrase um and and and and has been using more of a i don't know what you call it depressionary darkness i mean i think

we can easily say donald trump isn't a lifter uh he he he works by division um i just got done reading mary trump's book and i i i vault vaulted Donald Trump to a god for me during 1986. I grew up in that. I came of age in that whole junk bond, Ivan Bioski era of the greed is good, and we should bring you back to talk about your fracture book for that. So I thought he was a great businessman, you know, based upon the modeling that I would give him. Of course, you know, that was the, when his book came out and then I started reading his following books

when he fell. And I think there's one book that he's been taken out of print because it kind of exposed his, his failures, uh, and his bankruptcies and, and stuff. Um, and, oh, just over time watching and watching the bankruptcies of the. And just over time, watching him, watching the bankruptcies of the junk bond that they made for the Atlantic City casinos, and they kept bankrupting it until finally they kicked the family out. Just more and more over the years, I saw the truth of what was going on with Donald Trump and his family and money.

And I thought I had a good grip on him and his psyche to a certain degree. But Mary Trump's book, like one of the things she really nails down is that he runs by divisiveness. He rules by divisiveness because of the insecurities and the, you know, as you mentioned, he doesn't read. He doesn't educate himself. I mean, he literally is running most of the distractions he's doing is to keep you from looking at what a giant hole he is as a man. And his need for, you know, recognition and everything else that comes with being a malignant narcissist, sociopath, and everything else. And so it's interesting what you talk about, about how he hasn't used it because the juxtaposition of what you said, where he says, you know, we're the greatest country in the world, and we're exceptional, but screw everyone else. Like, you know, it's kind of like a different thing.

It used to be when people would quote the city on the hill, they'd be like, we're the city on the hill, so we should be, you know be trying to be good for everybody. He's just like, F it. But we're still exceptional. Yeah, there's a really strong contrast. One of the things I've been interested in all my career is the language of politics and the shifting language of politics because it's always in motion. But Obama was an extraordinary sort of conductor of the word we.

Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Together we can do this. Americans believe this. Americans don't believe this. It didn't work nearly as well as he hoped. I'm sure he's a somewhat disappointed man about the way his presidency turned out, but he tried harder than any modern president to say, we together can do this. And that was, of course, Hillary Clinton's phrase, together. I'm with her, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which is in some ways close to some of what Winthrop's

model of Christian charity was about. The nation is held together by bonds of affection and community and love and care for each other and et cetera, et cetera. Donald Trump is both not interested in any of that language, which he thinks too soft, too unmanly, too whatever. He's also a divider, as you say. This is the way he got himself positioned into the election. But also he wants to broadcast an idea of the nation in crisis so he can step in and fix it.

This is the would-be strongman. So it's not that we can put the nation back together, but that he can put the nation back together. And we have to give him our ultimate trust and blind faith and plan that he will. And I think we've heard those sort of run-throughs in authoritarianism over the years. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, you know, that sort of thing, I suppose. There's a very strong, There's a very strong element. Yeah, you see a lot of it, Mary. I remember Venezuela. I forget the gentleman's name.

I always forget his name, but he started the rundown of Venezuela back in the 80s, I believe it was, early 90s, before Maduro. And I watched all that thing go on. I'm like, let's see where this guy goes to this, you know. And it's interesting to me. You know, I've studied leadership all my life. I've studied CEOs. I studied CEOs to become a CEO, you know, planning to eventually own my own companies. And so I looked at what leadership was, what leadership did, you know, study a lot of great leaders, uh, you know, Jack Welch of, of GE, I mean, just this every great leader. And I, I of course thought Trump was from his original book, which was fiction. Um,

according to the ghostwriter wrote it, um, the, and so I studied all this stuff and one of the one of the things that i believe about about leading people whether it's military or anything else you have to set a visionary goal much like you can say a city on a hill or a shining city on a hill you have to have a bright goal a dystopian future can i, can only give it drag so far. Or, well, actually, maybe not. I mean, Hitler definitely, you know, Hitler started out, you know, saying we're going to do good stuff and we're going to fix things and everything else.

And then it became this, you know, it just got uglier and uglier and uglier. And there probably was no end to the ugliness until he was stopped. Now, they're two very radically different styles of of leadership and um i think what we find is that the the darker version doesn't seem to last very long either in america or in america or in the world or american boardrooms for that matter let's hope let hope. I can't run a company with this style. No, it's very, very hard to do. You make a lot of people angry, and you don't understand where the anger is coming from.

Going to pit the accountants against the salespeople. They're going to go fight. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But, you know, one of the things I want to make sure we don't lose before we have to end this conversation, Chris, is one of the things I kept asking myself in writing this book. So you're taking a really iconic piece of American culture, something that many, many Americans have believed, many Americans have thought was really essential to who they were as Americans. We've taken one of the, you know, like a mom and apple pie phrase and said,

well, it's not at all what you thought it was. And so I kept asking myself, well, what good is Winthrop's word? What good are Winthrop's words now for us? And I came away actually with two thoughts, both of which do speak to our present moment. One of them was that the notion of community, care, common bonds of affection and sympathy, they weren't very strong in Puritan New England. And Puritan New Englanders sent to the centers packing. They weren't very strong in Puritan New England. In Puritan

New England, there's a sense that the center is packing. They hanged some of those who came back because they refused to leave. They were intolerant as they could be on the religious front for many, many, many, many decades. But among themselves, they practiced an idea of mutual care. They were indeed skeptical that the price system alone could do all the work that a community needed to have done. And if that's one of the beginnings, only one of the beginnings, but one of the beginnings of American history, it's worth remembering that. The other thing I think that's really important to remember about Winthrop's words is what he asked of the people in Puritan New England was not only that they behave, not only that they do certain kinds of acts,

but he asked them to be self-critical about what they were doing. And something we don't see very often now. That is to say, be reflective, to be conscious of the possibility of error, to think over and over again about whether you got it right, to be self-critical. And I think that's what being on a sitting on a hill means. It means you're visible to others and you're visible to yourself. And so I love that about it. Even if that wasn't what Ronald Reagan found in it, I love it. And I think we could use more of it. I think you just said something really beautiful that we should also aspire to.

And gives me new meaning for the city on the hill. Because, you know, for years we've been, you know, operating with this American exceptionalism, this manifest destiny, and the a-hole American, of course, who wanders the planet thinking they're exceptional. And everybody goes, there's another a-hole American. And hopefully we're in a moment of reckoning that will last in getting us maybe to thinking about these points where with Black Lives Matter and we're looking at racial injustice and, you know, as we mentioned earlier, every fissure that we had is now fracturing into giant holes. And we're finding that, you know, all the things we were kind of in denial about, we're kind of like, yeah, we know there's some problems over there, but yeah, we're the greatest American

country in the world um it's the you know coronavirus is just exposed at all like it's just it's just a ban hammer from hell that's going yeah let's uh we'll show you you know it's a great equalizer like everybody's everybody's up on the target board. And although I should say it is impacting minorities more than it is impacting white people, which is a sad fact, and poor people as well, older people as well. But for the most part, you know, no one is seemingly immune from this thing. I mean, everyone's kind of losing sleep. But I think you're right. You said something really beautiful that we need to get back to that point of, of being a, a society that, that re-educates, that contemplates what's doing. And, and I hope that's what a lot of people are doing with Black Lives Matter. And, and, and a lot of

discussions we've actually had, which has been serendipity going back the past month or two since we opened up to book every book author. We used to just do business. But the conversation we've been having through this whole thread is this contemplation of who are we and what are we and what does this mean? is going to be a referendum on whether we're still going to follow the lead of someone who, you know, claims this dystopia America of Armageddon and is helping incite it actually right now to make sure that his message follows through to his voters, or whether we're going to maybe go back to what Biden kind of represents of, you know, we're better than this, the soul of America. So it's kind of an interesting point.

I mean, I think we're kind of at that inflection point where we're going to find out what this country is about and maybe what we learned or maybe what we haven't learned and we need to get beat over the head some more maybe beating up being beaten over the head uh sometimes clarifies the mind chris sometimes it just it just deadens all the all the nerves that are in there uh so we have to hope for is i agree with you that this has been a there's been a moment of of real trauma for uh for the nation as uh but at the moment, unfortunately, it has served to drive people into their separate bunkers.

So that the idea that mask wearing is a political statement is that for all you could say about the fracturing of society from the 70s on, this has really caught most of us, I think, by surprise. Public health, public safety, these were issues upon which people could come together. So what we need is not only to be beaten on the head by a terrible disease and be beaten on the head by the realization that that terrible disease has really got differential impacts on Americans that are with privilege and without privilege,

but most importantly, we have to really use it to ask ourselves, okay, what does it take to hold a nation together? How do we need to do the things that we don't want to do because they're necessary? How do we have conversations across these silos with people who are so stuck in their heads? How do we get ourselves unstuck from our own heads enough to be able to do that? If we can manage all that, I know I'm speaking utopianly, if we can manage all that, we can make something out of the coronavirus epidemic. And if we can't? It will make something out of us. I'm sorry. I don't know if that was, but I love what you said.

You know, it's interesting. My hope was for the coronavirus that we would come together. This is the pre-mask thing. But I talked about it. If you go back to my podcast, I was talking about how it is the great equalizer, unfortunately. And I was hoping that it would bring us together as Americans, that we would go, holy crap, you know, my neighbor, I need to take care of my neighbor as well as I take care of me. And I was hoping that would bring us together. But, of course, the great divider has divided us once again with the mask, making it political. The devastation that fall out of this

is going to be immense i mean some of the scientific numbers say uh until we get a grasp on this because of our recklessness and you see you see it on the graphs and i mean other countries right now are having sports and having fun um and uh uh we could be seeing 200, 300,000 deaths, which would be extraordinary and devastating. I think we're not really getting it because we're in the midst of it and there's so much horror around us, but I think eventually we're going to look back or hopefully we'll look back if we're still here

and we go, that was bad on an extreme that Vietnam and World War II and everything else. So my question to you is, and I put this to Eddie God Jr., but yours is more pertinent because this exceptionalism or this idealism that we put behind the city on the hill and this reckless sort of selfish bravado, do we bring this on ourselves? Do we deserve this? this reckless sort of selfish bravado, do we bring this on ourselves? Do we deserve this? Does it take something that's this dark? Do we earn this to have such a calamity upon us

and then handle it so badly that we have to almost be crushed as a society to wake up? Well, you know, the Puritans would have thought that way, and they would have thought that God was going to do the crushing. And I don't believe history works that way. I don't think there's a sort of destiny maker in the sky that looks down and says, you know, we gave you this test, and you particular countries, you did pretty well, but you, the United States, you did really badly. So tough it out. You're going to have all the casualties. I know you didn't mean exactly that, but I think what it really shows, and here maybe you and I disagree a little bit, Donald Trump orchestrated something that was already there to be orchestrated.

That already, whether it was in the form of a resurgent of anti-Black sentiment through this white nationalist stuff that we thought had all gone away, whether it was simply the defensive mechanisms of people who thought that they'd been screwed over by the economy and by globalization, and they were angry at other people around them. And we're looking for enemies, whether it's the media that now enables theories, particularly conspiracy theories, but other ways of,

it invents enemies. It lives on the construction of enemies, parts of the media. Which one of these things is involved? It's all. But ultimately, there was enough fear and anger around to be combustible. And if there hadn't been, we wouldn't be in the fix we're in. So again, I'm talking maybe more like a preacher than I should, but we need to look inside our own selves as a country

and not blame it all on one person. And it's going to be very troubling to figure out how we move back. Yeah, and there's a lot to unpack to get back to what many people would call normalization. But yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't feel like, like you mentioned in responding to me on that, that, that, that was a destiny sort of thing, but just the, just the bravado and the selfishness and the blindness to our own inequities,

you know, it's that person who's, who's, who walks down, I don't need a mask, you know, it's that person who walks down, I don't need a mask, you know, and I actually see it in a lot of the Trump voters that are doing the anti-masking thing. You know, they're still punching the American exception on the card. We're Americans. We don't need a mask, you know, and so thereby, you know, the stupidity, you know, it's the punishment for the stupidity. I've never really's the punishment for the stupidity. I've never really been, especially being an atheist, I've never been a believer when I see that dichotomy of when religious people go, well, God sent the punishment and then he's going to save us. And you're like, that's a real sadistic, sadomasochistic sort of attitude if you really think about it. But he loves you as george carlin

would say i should insert the great line from george carlin where he's like god hate you you're evil you're bad you're better but he loves you and he's gonna go to hell and he's gonna bury you but he loves you um the last question for you monument uh monuments are being overturned statues etc etc um is this a book about tearing down our past, the one you've done as a city on a hill? Well, I hope people won't read it that way. Some will. Some will see it as a kind of trashing exercise.

Have you been on Fox News with this book yet? No, I have not. I have not. I don't know what the – some interesting conservatives, some very sad reviews from liberal pundits who praise it. And I'm very, very pleased by that. But it's also been reviewed by some very, very thoughtful conservative pundits who respond to this sort of more serious, more honest look at our past than most versions of this story have. And I'm pleased with that, too, because it seems to me that the point about looking really honestly

and critically and skeptically at some piece of our past is not the way we would like it. It's an essential part of what being a nation is all about. That's why the 1619 Project matters. It may not be the only thing you want to say about America, but it's a critically important thing, essentially important thing to hold in mind about this nation that we live in. That's why this moment of hubris in the 1950s is important to hang on to, not

because we need to be proud of it, but because we need to recognize what it was and what its faults might have been. That's why when people dump statues in the river, I hope what they are not talking about is forgetting. We don't want to forget John C. Calhoun. That would be an enormous distortion and a kind of whitewashing of our past. We ought to look at John C. Calhoun with new eyes because we now see parts of him that his admirers at the time did not see, and those who put up those statues in the 1890s did not see. So I have two minds about tearing down monuments. In some ways, it's a very easy thing

to do. In some ways, it was really easy to discover. Nobody talked about the city on the hill from the 19th century. It took me a couple days work with all the search engines we've got. That's not the most important part. The important part is what does that mean? What do we do with the past that we have? How do we live with it? How do we improve upon it? How do we think without fantasy about the America that we've made? So that's my hope for the book. I love that word fantasy because I think that nails it. I don't know. Maybe I listened to Billy Joel too many times, but no, it's sometimes a fantasy. But yeah, I mean, the fantasy of American exceptionalism and our place in the world.

And it's interesting how, as human nature, we go, you know, we go depend upon whatever country or flag, territorial flag we're tribalizing under, where we go around and bang each other on the head over, over, you know, you're godless. I'm, I'm, I have a God and you're not. And they do. You're just lost in the whole, the wholeness of it. And, and hopefully what you, what you said, we bring to this discussion, we learn and maybe we teach more in where we, you know, we, we look at the ugly

aspects of our leaders and we balance them out as more humans, as opposed to these vaulted fantasies of, of, you know, this perfect being of Andrew Jackson or, uh, George Washington being this, you know, I could tell no lie, you know, and this is the silly stories that we tell, uh, about some of our things. And we don't talk about the dirty secrets and the, and the things. So hopefully you're right. I agree with you. Um, I'm all for, I think the monuments do need to be torn down because a lot of discussion I've had with, with African-American black friends is, is a lot of those were used as symbols of repression. And when they see them, there's a lot of connection to that sort of thing. But I do think they should be put in a museum where we talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

We talk about how they contributed and then maybe how they weren't so perfect. And maybe that would lead to what you talked about. You said a lot of beautiful things in this podcast that I want to go cut pieces out of and remember them. But maybe that will lead us back to the point where we become a better society, where we would, you know, like you said, think about stuff and consider the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything that goes on, that we'd be introspective in our true place in the world or our true place as Americans or who we really are as a humanity. I don't know. Sounds good to me. Sounds very good to me. Sounds much better than American carnage.

All right. Well, we'll have to follow up with you after the election and decide if we're still deciding on the Hill, I guess. Okay. We'll talk again. Sounds good. Well, Dan, give us your plugs so people can look you up on the interwebs. Sure. You can find me at – go through the Princeton University website.

Just click on Rogers, R-O-D-G-E-R-S, got an extra D floating in there, and you'll find the bios, and you'll find links to the sorts of things that I've talked about and written. And then many of your bookshops and certainly amazon.com have all the books that I've done. And I want to make a plug, though I can't do it here as well as I might, Chris, for the kinds of work that my students have done, which is just extraordinary, all over the lot of ideas, arguments, convictions, changes in them. They have been an extraordinary gift to me in terms of what they've taught me, and they've been a gift to the reading public in terms of what they've printed. So you won't find those so easily, but keep your eyes open. That's an awesome plug. And hopefully those young people are going to help us change the world to a better place. they printed. So you won't find those so easily, but keep your eyes open.

That's an awesome plug. And hopefully those young people are going to change and help us change the world to a better place and less carnage. Let's hope. There we go. Hope is hope. It sounds like a, was that Obama? Hope was Obama. There you go. I'm seeing the image in my head. Anyway, guys, thanks for being on the show. Dan, you've really enlightened us with a lot of stuff, and you've said some really eloquently beautiful things that have inspired me

and actually made me think about this phrase. And instead of coming away from it as like, well, that really wasn't what it meant, you've actually given me some new meaning. You're giving us some new meaning to what this phrase really means and some ability to have some introspection as to as to really what it's about and hopefully uh become less braggadocio over you know what american is or american exceptionalism really start questioning you know who are we and what we're about and hopefully we do that with the monuments as well um so thanks to dan for being on the show thanks my audience

for tuning in be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube. If you want to see the video version of this, you can see it on YouTube. It's really cool technology. Or, you know, you can listen to the audio version of all of our different things. You'll also find us on Book Author Podcast, Chris Foss Podcast as well. Be sure to give us a like on YouTube. And then if you can, give us a great five-star referral on iTunes. Thank you to the people who have been doing that lately.

We certainly appreciate that. Helps get that spread out there a lot more. if you can give us a great five-star referral on iTunes. Thank you to the people who've been doing that lately. We certainly appreciate that. Helps get that spread out there a lot more. I don't ask for it much, but we're asking for it a lot lately. So we can get more eyeballs on the show. Anyway, guys,

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