Voices of Freedom - Interview with Allen Guelzo

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Interview with Allen Guelzo What would Lincoln do? Leaders and historians often ask this question when America is in a time of crisis. It’s understandable, considering Lincoln’s extraordinary leadership during the darkest and most fragile period in the country’s history.  Today, our nation confronts a vast array of serious challenges that threaten to undermine its strength and the trust of its citizens. Underscoring this point is a recent poll showing that only 28 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way democracy is working in the U.S. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Dr. Allen Guelzo, a preeminent authority on President Lincoln. As America navigates another time of strife, we turned to him for answers to the perennial question – what would Lincoln do?  Allen Guelzo is a New York Times bestselling author, American historian, and commentator on public issues. He is Director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.  Topics discussed on this episode:  Why Dr. Guelzo focused his scholarship on Lincoln The many unexplored angles and aspects of Lincoln Lincoln’s character and complexity Lessons to be learned from Lincoln’s leadership Whether democracy is currently in peril Election integrity in Lincoln’s time compared to today How citizens can restore trust in each other What could have been different if Lincoln wasn’t assassinated How Dr. Guelzo himself became a distinguished orator Previously, he was the Director of Civil War Era Studies and the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He is a 2018 Bradley Prize winner.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. We often hear today that democracy in America is in peril and that polarization will prevent us from ever coming together again as a nation. And with an election in the not too distant future, that's only adding

to the concerns about the future of the country. History reminds us, though, that we've endured immense division before, only to prevail and become stronger. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Dr. Alan Gelso. Perhaps the preeminent historian in the country on Abraham Lincoln, Alan offers insights into how America can persevere by applying the lessons of Lincoln in his new book, Our Ancient Faith, Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment. We can learn an awful lot from that. Alan is the director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statementship and Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Previously, he was the director of Civil War Era Studies and the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College. He holds numerous distinctions and has won many awards, including, of course, a 2018 Bradley Prize. Dr. Alan Gelso, welcome. It is wonderful to see you and to be able to spend some time with you. Well, it's good to see you again, Rick, and to be able to talk about Abraham Lincoln, a favorite subject of mine. A favorite subject indeed. Well, let's start right there. Truly, much of your life's work has been rooted in the study of Abraham Lincoln. How did you decide to focus on our 16th president? First of all, I think it probably has something to do with the fact that Lincoln really is the

central character of what is the central event of American history. Trying to understand what happened to our American experiment in the Civil War years has a lot that's bound up with Abraham Lincoln himself. In many respects, you might say he's the navigator through the hurricane. And the fact that he's able to navigate the ship of state through that storm automatically bestows attention upon him. So I come to Lincoln, I think, in the sense that many people do. Here was a moment of great crisis, and here was someone who rose to meet the crisis in so many of its aspects. Is this not an admirable person? Do we not want to pay at least the homage of doing good history for him? So I think that's one thing. Another thing is, well, it's a little bit like what the people who were trying to climb Mount Everest said back in the 1920s. Why are you trying

to climb Mount Everest? And the answer they gave was because it's there. And it's precisely because he is such a monumental figure that I think it stimulates a sense of ambition in the part of someone to really want to come to grips with and really want to understand and write about this towering figure, because he really is that. So when you put all those things together, I think that you find Lincoln a subject of tremendous interest. And especially, I think, because I got, well, I got acquainted with the subject of Lincoln so very early. People sometimes ask me, how did you ever get riveted on the subject of Lincoln? And I say, well, you know, it really began in second grade. Not so much because of formal schooling, but

when I was in second grade, my grandmother was taking me on a rail trip to Chicago. And in the old grand station there in Philadelphia, there was a newsstand and had newspapers and magazines. It also had comic books. And there was a comic book biography of Abraham Lincoln there. And I pestered and pestered like a second grader would, and she bought it for me. And I think in some ways the hook was in my mouth even then, and in fact I still have that comic book. That's great. I mean, it's true that few American figures have been analyzed and written about more than Abraham Lincoln.

If I'm right, you've written at least 10 books about him, and certainly he's been central to many others that you've authored. Yeah. How can you possibly find more angles, facets about him that haven't already been explored? Well, one thing which is certainly true about Lincoln is that he is a very complicated and complex person. He was not the kind of person that when you met him for the first time, you could sum him up very easily. He was a man of lights and hidden shadows. And you had the sense when you met him that you were meeting already someone who was not your ordinary sort.

Now, there were some aspects of him that seemed very ordinary. He was ordinary looking. He sounded ordinary. He spoke with this very thick border state accent. He'd almost sound like somebody out of the backwoods. And a lot of people made the mistake of assuming that was all about him. But one person who knew him said that when you met Lincoln, the impression you had was of what this person called a rough, intelligent farmer. And in so saying, what that person really put their finger on was all these different aspects of the man.

So he wears many different aspects. But another reason that you can spend a lot of time with Lincoln is because, yes, there are these hundreds and thousands of books which have been written about, and I'm not exaggerating when I say thousands. There's an exhibition across the street from Ford's Theater in Washington, because across the street is their education Theater in Washington, because across the street is their education center. Yes. They have this long, twirling, ascending spiral of Lincoln books.

It goes up four floors. So these are all books with Lincoln in the title. And you look at it, you think, oh, my goodness, you wouldn't live long enough to read them all, much less to read them and then start writing something. But in 1930, James Garfield Randall, who was, I think, maybe the first academic historian and biographer of Lincoln, gave an address to the American Historical Society in which he asked exactly the question you have put, and that is, has the Lincoln theme been exhausted? And he went on to say, no, it hasn't. And he laid out as many as a dozen new avenues of research, interpretation, and appreciation about Lincoln. You know what is surprising about

that, Rick, is how few of them have been followed. How many of those lines of interpretation in this very complex map still remain open for students to explore. I think that sometimes the Lincoln Field, if you can call it a field, is a bit like a meadow that has been crossed one time by a heavily freighted wagon that left deep ruts. And so many people since then have just followed in those ruts and forgot entirely about the rest of the meadow on either side. One of the things I did when I got involved in working on Lincoln, I was attracted to Lincoln, but for a reason entirely different from most other Lincoln biographers, if not all.

And that was to talk about Lincoln as a man of ideas and try to situate him in the intellectual context of the 19th century. And the remarkable thing was no one had really ever made a serious effort to do that before. So I found myself a pioneer unwittingly. And there are so many other ways in which people can find themselves pioneers in talking about Lincoln, simply by going back to a number of the lines of research that Randall offered to us back in 1930. They're still open. Was he a quiet man?

He could be a man of great silences. And sometimes he could be a man of abstraction. His law partner of 24 years, William Henry Herndon, once made the comment that Lincoln lived in his thought. He was not a man of heart or emotion or passion. He was a very rigorous, reason-oriented person. And Herndon once said that there were many times when he walked past Lincoln on a sidewalk in their town of Springfield, Illinois, and Lincoln would walk right past him. He wouldn't even notice him. And this wasn't because Lincoln was rude, it was because Herndon said he was thinking about some problem, some question. He was thinking about it so hard that it would just make him oblivious to his surroundings. He once said that Lincoln was looking so hard for exactly the right word, exactly the right phrase

with which to clinch an argument, that he would curl up on the sofa in their law office there in Springfield, and he would just ball up within himself trying to find that right expression. So he could be a man of great friendliness. He could meet people, and he could be over the top and, hello, how are you? How you doing? And then there were many other times in which he would be distant, so far distant that you weren't sure you were ever going to get him back. Again, that's the complexity of it. Yes. Turns out Lincoln worried about many of the same issues that faces today. Democracy, election integrity, political division, the economy, race relations. It's really uncanny.

What would you say to a nation that is still very concerned about these very issues today? A lot of people, as you can imagine, a lot of people ask me questions like that. Sometimes it's a question that's framed a lot like WWLD. What would Lincoln do? Of course. There's an upside and a downside to those questions. The upside is that some of the problems that we face today, and that we look to Lincoln to for answers, we think are unique to our situation. But the very fact that they have occurred before, they occurred in Lincoln's time. The same problems, the same questions, the same quandaries, the fact that they've happened before, and in fact happened more times even than that, suggests two things. One is, and this is the upside, that the problems we're dealing with are perennial it some of the questions and some of the difficulties that it's going to pose. I mean, for instance, if, as we believe in a democracy, sovereignty belongs

in the hands of the people, then we also have to live with the fact that sometimes the people don't always come to the right decision. They make a wrong decision. A lot of people get carried away. They make a wrong decision. And then people get carried away they make a wrong decision and then you think oh my goodness what were they thinking the great thing about democracy though is that when you've made a mistake like that then the people sit down and look at the consequences of it and say all right well let's go back and do the other thing and in a democracy you can do that a democracy has resilience a democracy can can make mistakes, and it can admit that it's made mistakes and rectify them. Authoritarian systems can't do that. Authoritarian systems basically have one shot at doing something, and if they don't reach their goal, they fly to pieces. Yes. they fly to pieces. Democracy is not like that. Democracy, as many times as democracy falls off

the ladder, gets knocked down in the ring, nevertheless, it comes back because it has a certain resilience. And I think the great thing about Lincoln is he gives us the image of a man of that kind of resilience who could absorb punishment, even into himself. There's one letter he wrote, Rick, that I come back to all the time. He wrote it in July of 1862 to an unhappy constituent in Louisiana. Now, Louisiana had seceded from the Union, joined the Confederacy, but by that point, Union forces had reoccupied significant parts of Louisiana, and this man was in one of those parts. He wrote this letter complaining to Lincoln, what else do you do when you're writing to the president? You write a complaint letter.

How many people write a letter saying, oh, you're doing a wonderful job? He writes a complaint letter to Lincoln, and Lincoln responds. First of all, he says, you're complaining about all these troubles? Well, I think you people in Louisiana asked for some of them, so you're going to have to work your way out of them. But then he concludes the letter with a really remarkable statement. He says, I shall do nothing in malice. What we are dealing with is too great for malicious dealing. Which I thought was a beautiful statement.

Wow. Yes. A beautiful statement that says, all right, I can take getting knocked on the head by a constituent, but I'm not going to reply that way. I will not do that kind of thing. In malice, why? Because I'm just a Hallmark card kind of guy? No. Because he understands that what he's dealing with, with a democracy, with he understands that what he's dealing with, with a democracy, with a nation, what they're dealing with is too great, greater even than himself for malicious dealing. That is a remarkable example of what a democracy produces and how a democracy can function. And it's an illustration, I think, of how even

facing the problems we face today, yes, we will come through them without malice. Because what we deal with is, even today, too great for malicious dealing. Remarkable that he responded himself. Times have changed. Let's talk about the president for a moment. We hear almost every day that our democracy is in peril, that democracy is at stake in the next election. Do you think that's a crisis that's manufactured by the media and certain prominent politicians? Or do you think we really are in a tough spot right now, a very real

and urgent threat to democracy? There are, there have been some elections which are fuller of sound and fury than others. I think of the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. I think of the elections of 1824 and 1828 with John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. There have been elections which were vehemently contested, and we survived them. But the truth is, I've never come to one of these four-year, every four-year events without somebody saying, this is the most important election of our lifetimes. And then the day after the election, it's, all right, and we got to think four years ahead. Oh, you mean we survived? We've got four more years? So I tend to take a somewhat more jaundiced view of the people who are always pressing the panic button. David Runciman wrote a really perceptive book a number of years ago about democracies.

And what he said in it basically was this. Democracies panic over things they don't need to panic about. And then they totally miss the really dangerous things that are liable to whack them the upside of the head. And we panic over these small-scale things that only afterwards we tend to realize, well, this really is not all that critical. And then we don't see the big ones that hit us. But when they hit us, this is the moment when we get back up onto the ladder, back up off the canvas. And Lincoln himself is a demonstration of this. You know, there's an issue that you hear a lot about today, and that is election integrity. People are saying, well,

we have to count ballots a certain way. We have to count votes a certain way. We've got voter suppression. We've got a lack of transparency in our election process. And it sounds sometimes like this has never happened before. Rick, if you read the newspapers back into the 19th century, and believe me, I spend a lot of time reading 19th century newspapers. There isn't an election that comes down for a president that doesn't fill the columns of those newspapers with complaints about ballot box stuffing and a lack of integrity and an election. complains about it at one point when he's running for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858 against Stephen A. Douglas. He's concerned. He's concerned that there are Irish workmen on the Illinois Central Railroad who are being used by Douglas's party because the Illinois Central was very beholden to Stephen Douglas. The Illinois Central Railroad is taking their Irish-born workers, and that's how he identified. He calls them

some Celtic gentlemen. He says they're moving them from one place to another along the Illinois Central Railroad on election day so they can get off the train at a particular station, vote there, get back on the train, go to the next one, vote there. He's complaining about this. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, I thought that only happened in the 20th century or the 21st century. I think it only happened with Mayor Daley in Chicago. No, every election we have had, I said, someone complaining that the ballots aren't being counted right, or they're not being cast right. And the truth is there was actually much more opportunity for that kind of fraud in the 19th century. Because when you walked into a polling place in Lincoln's day, let's say, in the 1850s, when you walked into a polling place, you didn't walk up to a booth or to a machine that listed the candidates you were going to vote for. You didn't pull a lever. You didn't fill in a

little oval with a black pen. You didn't have anything like that. What you did was you brought a ballot yourself to the polling place. And usually it was a ballot you cut out of the newspaper because the newspapers were wildly partisan. You were either a Republican newspaper to the polling place. And usually it was a ballot you cut out of the newspaper, because the newspapers were wildly partisan. You were either a Republican newspaper or you were a Democrat newspaper. And if it was a Democrat newspaper you were reading, there'd be the Democrat ballot for every office, president on down to dog catcher. And you would cut that out of the paper and you'd walk in the polling place and hand it over. So the opportunities for stuffing the box, the opportunities for fraud were, if anything, even greater in Lincoln's day.

So I read, as you have to, you read the tallies of election year results for 1852, 1856, 1860. And you look at these very precise numbers, 1,612,483. But then when you realize how the voting actually took place in the 19th century, you're thinking, maybe. So we today complain. The truth is that even in some places where there are some, shall we say, irregularities, we actually have better and safer voting processes today than was had in Lincoln's day. But nevertheless, that doesn't mean we drop our guard because elections are the very lifeblood

of a democracy. And maintaining those elections, it's an extremely important issue. Because if you can't trust elections, then the functioning of democracy itself falls down. But the good word is, it's actually better today than it was in Lincoln's day, or at least safer. Very instructive. Well, let's stay on the topic of democracy for just a moment. You point out in your book that the United States was never meant to be a true democracy, and that in fact, Lincoln only uses the word democracy 137 times across

eight volumes of his collected work. Why was he so restrained in the use of that word? Partly because he didn't need to use it that often. He can assume that people understand that what he's talking about is a democracy. Now, it is true that at the time of the founding, among the founders, there was a real determination to see that the United States is founded as a republic, not as a democracy. And you only have to read through the Federalist Papers to read how alarmed Madison was at the idea of a democracy, because he understood a democracy to be what happened in Athens. And in Athens, democracy was everyone who's a citizen of the city of Athens

participates in the city assembly, and the city assembly decides every issue. Well, Madison was not entirely enchanted by that. He could remember what happened to Socrates in Athens, and he makes a comment in one of the Federalist Papers that if every Athenian had been a Socrates, the assembly would still have been a mob. So what Madison was afraid of was mobs. What Madison wanted us to be was a republic in which, all right, like a democracy, sovereignty resides in the people. But that sovereignty gets resigned by the people into the hands of their representatives.

Yes. And the representatives are like a cooling off layer. And the representatives are presumably wiser, better trained, more experienced, and they will make the decisions. Now, that is a significant difference. Rome was a republic. Athens was a democracy. In the American experience, though, yes, we were designed as a republic, but we were already showing real strong democratic instincts. So that even with Hamilton, even with Mattis, even with people among the founders,

they were starting to talk about a republic as having very democratic features. And in the time between the Constitution in 1787 and Lincoln's election, the two terms, republic and democracy, have almost fused so that Lincoln will use the term republic and democracy. He'll use them not only interchangeably, he'll use them in the same phrase. He'll talk about our democratic republic. So he doesn't need, in fact, to offer a lot of complex definitions and illustrations of democracy. By his time, this is what people have assumed as the basic ground rules. And the person who is the best testimony to that is Alexis de Tocqueville. Because when Tocqueville, in 1831, does his wonderful tour of America, the results of it that he writes up, that he describes in his great opus, is democracy in America. Not republicanism

in America, but democracy in America. So democracy and a republic, they have become almost interchangeable. And Lincoln uses the terms that way. Interesting. Lincoln wanted citizens to restore trust in each other after the Civil War. He wanted reunification. He didn't believe that the North should act as a conqueror. We seem to have a mentality in today's world, today's politics, where each side feels that it needs to win, it needs to be victorious over the other side,

or else the country's going to collapse. Do you see a way out of this cycle when we start to view each other as fellow citizens rather than enemies? It is absolutely critical to a democracy that whatever our political orientation or our political alignment, that we understand that we all have the same status in our system, and that is the status of citizen. Citizen is an extremely important status. To be a citizen, that is the way you describe Americans. I think one of the least appreciated clauses in the Constitution is one that you find at the end,

or toward the end, of Article I, Section 9, where it simply says that there shall be no titles of nobility in America. That does away with all the ancient hierarchies and simply says everyone is a citizen. You're going to be part of the American experiment. You do it as a citizen. Now, if we could understand how precious it is to be a citizen, what a wonderful thing it is to be a citizen of a democratic republic, we can stand back from each other and look at each other, not as members of warring cults, which is sometimes what it seems like given the frenzy of politics, but instead see in each other what Lincoln saw when he said, we must not be enemies. We must be friends. We are friends. Now, we don't often think of people across the political divide from ourselves as friends, but in civic terms, yes,

that's what we are, and that is what we must be. And if we could step back and understand the importance of what it is to be a citizen, you see, Rick, that underscores a different failure in our lives, and that is the wholesale failure, and this plagues me in particular, the wholesale failure of civic education. We have pushed our educational philosophies in so many different directions that we've lost a grip on something that the founders saw that was very important. And that is, why do you have education at all? When Thomas Jefferson laid down the ground rules for the University of Virginia, one of the things that the university education was supposed to promote was citizenship, understanding what citizenship was. The great 19th century educator, contemporary

of Lincoln's, Horace Mann, talked about how if you're going to have a republic, you have to educate people to be citizens of a republic. And so much of that has been lost in our pursuit of efficiency, vocationalism. The most important thing, it seems to me, that an education can do today is to teach us from the very beginning what our citizenship is, what it has been, which is to teach us about our history, what it is, which is to say how we function in relationship to each other. How many people today can name the justices of the Supreme Court? And yet, their decisions... Very few. Very few. Their decisions affect our everyday lives. There are some times in which I'm sometimes stumped by people who can't, in fact, identify the three branches of government in the Constitution. That kind of education, if that falls out, then the bottom of citizenship falls out. And when that goes, so does a great deal of this thing we call democracy.

So I have to say that one great task that lies before us in restoring a notion of citizenship is the idea and the practice of civic education. And I think some people have made some interesting steps in this direction, have been involved with some projects this direction. I've been involved with some projects this way, but I think that there are a few subjects that really deserve greater attention and greater energy than rebuilding our sense of what it is to be a citizen. Extremely well said. We have time for a couple more questions, Alan. And at the risk of asking a WWLD question, I'll do it anyway. I'm sure you've been asked this a million times.

What would have been different if Lincoln had not been assassinated? What would this country have been? I think I'm asked that question more often than any other. I believe it. In places that I go. And part of me wants to say, look, folks, I'm a historian. I've got enough trouble trying to track down for sure what actually happened without worrying about the hypotheticals of what might have happened. But people are really curious about this. It's not an idle question. They would like to know what this man, for whom even today,

160 years after his death, people still hold in such great reverence. People would like to know, what would this man say? What would he suggest? What would he have done had he lived? So I'll disregard my own warning about what-if questions, and I'll go out on a flyer and suggest a few things. One is, I think he would certainly have put his shoulder to the wheel for black voting in the Reconstruction era. He had already given manifold signs that this was a direction he believed America had to move, not just emancipating the slaves, but immediately recognizing that they too were citizens. There's no halfway. You're either a citizen or you're not. And if you are going to be in the American experiment, you're going to be part of it, then you need to be part of it as a citizen. That needs to be recognized. So I think he would definitely have moved in those directions.

I think he would also have given some pretty serious consideration to the idea of redistributing some property. Now, I know that sounds like a radical idea in many ears, but the property that he meant was the property, first of all, that the slaves themselves had worked for generations, and secondly, property that their Confederate masters abandoned. What he hoped for at the end of the Civil War was not to have show trials of Confederate officials, Confederate leaders. What he really hoped was that they would just leave. They would go into exile. He made this shooing noise, like he was shooing chickens out of a yard. He just wanted them to go someplace else. And the lands that they left behind, the lands they abandoned, he could see, yes, there's a real possibility there.

He issued an order, a military order, to his military commanders in areas occupying plantation lands that have been abandoned by their owners. And he said, I want it clear that the former slaves who are working this land are entitled to receive the profit and the fruit of their labor. And officers who balk at this, who do not protect them in receiving the profit of what they have earned, will be subject to military discipline. So I think there is a glimmer there in Lincoln that in the post-war years he would have seen not only should there be some political and civil rights that are involved with the freed slaves, but also there has to be some economic leverage that's put in alliance with those rights. Because, I mean, Lincoln is a politician, but, you know, Lincoln has also thought a lot about economy.

Probably his favorite reading was in Economists of the 19th Century. He corresponded with prominent American economists about policies that he would adopt. And you know, the truth is, Rick, that if you look beyond the drums and bugles of the Civil War, then what you see is an Abraham Lincoln who's initiating a number of really dramatic economic policies during his presidency. So I think that he would have paid a lot of attention, not just to the political future of the freed slaves, but also to their economic future. I think he would probably also have looked for a more extended occupation of the South, not because he wanted to be vindictive, but because he wanted to ensure the emergence of

a new generation of Southern politicians who had put the era of slavery behind them and were now wanting to think of themselves not as Southerners, much less as slave owners, but as Americans who are now part of a new economic system. And that would have taken more in the way of occupation of the defeated Confederacy. And perhaps, I mean, Ulysses Grant, just to give you an example, Ulysses Grant made a comment that he thought perhaps military occupation of the defeated South should have run perhaps for 30 years, rather than the comparatively short time that it did. And I think there's a possibility that Lincoln might have endorsed that. But, you know, saying that, and here's where I have to put the brakes on the speculation,

he would have only been president if he obeyed the traditional two-term rule. He would only have been president until the 4th of March, 1869. It's not a whole lot of time. Not a lot of time. Reconstruction. So reconstruction with all of its problems, and those problems were legion, might have been beyond the grasp even of Abraham Lincoln. So interesting. Alan, we have time for one last question. President Lincoln was a distinguished orator. You point out he didn't have the classic speaking voice by any means, but he was good at it. You too are a really gifted orator and you have the voice to go with it. I know you're frequently called upon to narrate with music ensembles and other occasions.

Do you think that your immersion in Lincoln has helped you develop your speaking skills? Well, I would hope that the Lincolnian way of expressing things, the clarity with which he worked. He's always working to persuade people. Even as president, he's still the trial lawyer in front of a jury I would like to think that that has had something to do in my own pursuit of clarity in explaining situations and explaining Lincoln but someone made an observation

many years ago which I think may come closer to the mark and that is music someone said said, did you ever have a musical background? I said, well, yes. In fact, my first year in college, I was a composition major. They said, oh, we can tell from the way you write and the way you talk. You have the rise and the fall. You have the structure almost in your bones of serious musical composition. And I thought when I said that, they said that, yeah, that's right. That is, I think, in sonata form.

So I think there's actually a long sense in which my appreciation for, my love for serious music has had an impact in the way that I talk that lets me follow the arc, let's say, of a great symphony. Not that I would ever have written a great symphony, but maybe in a very distant way, I'm paying some homage that way. And I do love music, and I do love the opportunities I get. In this case, they're mostly limited to performing as a narrator. And my long suit is Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait. So if there's anyone out there, listen, if the Milwaukee Symphony would like to do Lincoln Portrait and it wants a volunteer

narrator, here's my hand. Dr. Alan Gelso, it has been just wonderful spending time with you today. Thanks so much for truly the remarkable contributions that you have made to understanding history in this great country. Pleasure to be with you. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be with you. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom

and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation Podcast.