Voices of Freedom - Interview with William Barclay Allen

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

An Interview with William Barclay Allen America’s founders are revered for creating a structure of governance that values individual rights and promotes human flourishing. Nearly 250 years after they took the first steps toward creating a more perfect union by drafting and adopting the US Constitution, the nation continues to be a beacon of hope and opportunity around the world. That the Framers could so eloquently articulate the principles of ordered liberty that guide us today results in part from their own careful examination of the great thinkers of the 17th and 18th century.   Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Dr. William Barclay Allen. A 2024 Bradley Prize winner, he has dedicated his life’s work to studying the Founders and the philosophers who influenced the Western tradition. He is also committed to instilling an understanding and appreciation of that tradition among the next generation.  Allen is the Emeritus Dean of James Madison College and Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. He is a former member and chairman of the US Commission on Civil Rights and has been a Kellogg National Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, and a member of the National Council on the Humanities. Topics discussed on this episode:  How Allen’s experience growing up in the segregated south influenced his life’s path The story of his intellectual journey Why Allen translated Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws His decision to focus on America’s founders and the US Constitution Why Allen believes Washington is the most important founder and America’s first progressive Teaching history in a way that reflects the words and experiences of those who lived it Advice to young scholars who are just starting out What it means to Allen to win a Bradley Prize 

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. America in 1776 was far from realizing the founding father's vision for a land of freedom. And while by no means is it perfect today, there's no question but that there has been tremendous progress.

Economic and social advances have been made that really make America a land of abundant opportunity to all those who choose to pursue it, thanks in large part to our founders and our founding documents. Our guest today is a nationally recognized scholar whose life's work has been dedicated to promoting a deeper understanding and appreciation of America's founding principles and the Western tradition that inspired them. His scholarship has been invaluable, particularly at a time when the need to instill those principles in future generations has taken on a far greater urgency. Dr. William B. Allen is the Emeritus Dean of James Madison College and Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. He's a former member and chairman of the U.S. Commission

on Civil Rights and has been a Kellogg National Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow, and a member of the National Council on Humanities. Dr. Allen has published several books, including George Washington, America's First Progressive, and Rethinking Uncle Tom, the Political Philosophy of H.B. Stone. His critical edition translation and commentary on Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws was released earlier this year. And he is also a 2024 Bradley Prize winner. Dr. Allen, congratulations. Let's just jump right in.

You grew up in the segregated South. You were the middle of 12 children. Talk to us a little bit about that experience and how it influenced, how it impacted. Well, you know, it's been very difficult for me to reflect back on that. I have been asked so many times the past several years whether I was going to write memoirs, and I could not bring myself to wrap my head around that concept. But I have been remembering lately some things that stand out for me and that are impressive. The first thing I should say is that I grew up in a very small community. It was a small island community

there in the northern tip of Florida, right against the Atlantic, between the Atlantic Ocean and the St. John's River. And when I say that, then it sounds like I had a country life, but that makes it sound rural and people need to understand that I never saw a farm when I was a child. This little island really was an island that was concentrated on pulp manufacturing and fisheries and shrimping so that people may have had small truck farms, but the rural life was not part of it. It was just poor, small island life in a highly segregated community. But it was also relatively small and therefore close. We walked the island east to west from river to the ocean, and we walked

everywhere, those of us who were youngsters especially. We were raised in tight families and raised in the church, and we were raised with a high emphasis placed on education, so that our circumstances were such that going all the way back to the Reconstruction era, when the Rosenthal schools were being established throughout the South, one was established there in Fernandina Beach, which was then only called Fernandina. And that's the school in which I was educated from my first grade through 12th grade years. I lived in a family that was headed by a pastor. But the first several years of my life, my father was not in the church, not a pastor. He was a captain of a commercial vessel, fishing vessel, who would be gone for months at a time.

So that it was essentially my mother's presence in the home that shaped our influences, our character, and gave us direction and kept us on the straight and narrow, so to speak. And so that's the background against which every experience I had has to be understood. But it was an experience of life in a totally segregated community, which is to say our only intercourse with whites was in commerce and in labor. There was no other form of intercourse in those days. But it doesn't mean that it was unfriendly. We lived in a region, of course, that was overhung with a sense of terror because those were the days that eventually met till. And though we weren't touched by it directly, we never felt that we were quite safe from it. And I could relate experiences in my life, which suggests that. But I would want to underscore, Rick,

that the most important part, as far as I'm concerned, about my youth was the fact that I was early on, I hate to say this, but doted on by my mother, probably because I was a sickly youth, to be honest with you. And I needed a lot of tender care. But that also made me relatively sensitive to tender care. And so that the emphasis I had on both personal care and then developing educational purposes and reading especially, played a very important part of my life. And my mother was greatly significant in that. Did she set high expectations? She set high expectations for our behavior. She didn't demand any special ambitions,

but she's other than the ambition to perform well. So we weren't told we had to be a this or a that. And when I decided at age 12 I was going to become a doctor, a physician, that had as much to do with the fact that my mother was critically ill from that time in my life through my years in college. And I was reacting to that so that she was pleased that I would want to become a doctor, thought that was a good thing, but she didn't urge it upon me. She didn't urge upon any of us a particular profession, but she urged always education. And my older siblings had excelled, and therefore I had their examples to try to measure up to.

Fascinating. Tell us a little bit about your intellectual journey. I mean, for instance, what led you to the study of the 17th and 18th century thinkers who advanced the Western tradition? Most of the turning points of my life have arisen accidentally, to be honest with you. I went to school as a pre-med student, and I spent three years on that journey. But I was also a political activist. I'd been involved in the Goldwater campaign in my undergraduate years, and then also at the end of my undergraduate years, the Reagan campaign that elected him governor of California. And so as my

interest grew in political activity, I was also introduced to political theory by a mentor at Pepperdine whose name was Jerry Pornel, who had a tremendous influence on me in that regard. And I realized that my desire to become a physician was actually not my calling, not my vocation. It was a response to something else, a felt necessity, an urgency, but not the thing that was the calling on my life. And so in my senior year, I made the change and decided I would do instead political philosophy. But even that came about accidentally because during those years of activism,

I was asked to appear once at the original Philadelphia Society meeting in San Francisco. I believe it was at the Fairmont Hotel, but it may have been one of the others. And it was on the new left. And so I went there, I sat on the panel, I made my presentation. Then I sat in the audience and listened. I had to listen to William Shockley tell me that I was, by nature, incapable of operating at the highest level. And I had my mentor, Jerry Portnell, next to me,

who in the question period stood up. He had a high-pitched voice, Jerry did. And he ranted at Shockley with his pink finger pointed down at my head because I was sitting next to him at the table. He said, you can't say this. Look here. And of course, I wilted in embarrassment. So I had that tremendous moment.

And then it was followed by a presentation by Harry Jaffa. And Harry Jaffa was talking about the, of course, Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, and the Revolution. But the most incredible thing was, as I listened to that, I came to the very stark realization that I had no business with ever being on that platform. I should not have been there speaking in that presence. And I said to myself, I don't know what I'm talking about, and I'm going to go wherever he is and figure out what I should be talking about.

And that's how I got to graduate school. Immediately after that, I looked up the Claremont Graduate School where he was teaching. It was my last year moving into it. I applied for it and was accepted. So that was an accident. I didn't go there looking to meet Harry Joppa or to be turned around, but I was turned around, and I've been so often turned around in my life that way that I never claim credit for any of the things I've done.

I just point to the accidents that have happened. And one of them had to do with the founding. Martin Diamond also told it, Claremont, and he had a profound influence on me in reading the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalists. In the course of which, I discovered the dispute between Federalists and and anti-federalists about what Montesquieu meant. And so I thought, well, I can't deal with that unless I read Montesquieu. But I found that not very easy to do because I didn't read French and the translations were poor. So I decided, well, I have to learn French so that I could resolve the debate between these two. And I wrote my thesis to resolve that debate.

In the course of which, I actually got to know Montesquieu in a way that made me see far beyond that debate. I made it a career work to try to develop and present Montesquieu fully. It really anticipates my next question. There's a question of the founders were deeply influenced by Montesquieu, and in many respects, Since 1748, there have only been two English translations of the work that had to have been an absolutely enormous undertaking and tough. But why did you feel it was so important to translate it? When I began, there had been only one translation, the original from 1750 by Thomas Nugent. And it is universally recognized as a poor translation. And so I set out to do a better job.

But I didn't know at the time that a friend and colleague of mine, Ann Kohler, was doing the same thing. And it turned out that when we were together once at a political science meeting, we were exchanging ideas and realized what was going on. Her project was farther advanced than mine. And therefore, hers was coming to press right away. Mine would be sometime later. And so I put mine on the shelf. But then to complicate matters further, Anne suffered a brain aneurysm and passed away before actually publishing it. She had it almost done, but it had to be completed by some colleagues of hers, and then finally published by Cambridge. And so having had it occur in those circumstances affected me very deeply. I read it. I said, well, Anne's translation really has to have an opportunity to spread itself abroad and be received and be

evaluated. But I did come to the conclusion that was not quite what needed to be done to overcome the weaknesses in Thomas Nugent's translation. So I needed to resume mine. And I did so. So that's the context in which we got to number three. It was because Anne's premature passing and the not full adequacy of her translation still left me with the burden to create a better translation. And that's why I've done this. And I also wanted to do a full-length commentary, which she did not do in that context. It was tough. It was tough because, you know, it took, after all, 50 years. But I did lots of things in between. So I didn't work consistently on it. I spent a couple of years living in France. The first year I went to France to learn French and

study the manuscripts and work with it. Then I went back on sabbatical to work with it more. And along the way, developed very good relationships with even descendants of Montesquieu, as well as others who were studying on the topic. So it's been a project that I sustained over a long period of time, while nevertheless doing all the other things that were important in the course of my career. And again, it was at what point during your examination of Montesquieu and others, did you then decide to focus on America's founders? Or maybe you said earlier that you felt that you had to go through. Yeah, the founders led me into Montesquieu.

The founders and the Constitution. But what led me to the founding was the work of Harry Joff and Martin Diamond. So these things developed simultaneously. Yes. And you might know that Harry Joff's chief focus was on Abraham Lincoln as the statesman who essentially saved the founding. But that led to some degree to a depreciation of the founding itself. Not a deliberate depreciation, but a suggestion that perhaps it wasn't quite what it needed to be, which made me ask the question, is that true? Yes, what Lincoln did was great, and it was important,

but was it because the founding was inadequate? So just as I did with respect to interpreting Montesquieu, I gave attention to going back to the words of the founders themselves, analyzing what they did to discover whether there were the same dimensions of statesmanship present there that we found in Lincoln. And so that was a point of transition in my thinking. Having taken Lincoln seriously, I now ask questions such as, why did the political parties first originate by the people who founded this country when they didn't like political parties? And I would teach on that subject. And in all my teaching, I said, it's important for me not just to read what the historians have told us, or secondary material, but to read the primary material, which led me, therefore, mechanically to search out and include writings of George Washington. And at that point in time, Washington was almost buried, intellectually speaking.

Nobody read him. Washington was almost buried, intellectually speaking. Nobody read him. There were huge biographies, Freeman and others, that essentially dismissed him as symbolic, a very important person, symbolically, personal character, but not one contributing intellectually and morally. And so as I'm teaching these classes of reading in Washington, I was thunderstruck to read a towering genius and ask myself, how could they miss this? How could all the scholarship miss this? Which meant I had to dive more deeply into George Washington as I did

Montesquieu. And so I read through the whole of his writings to produce my George Washington Collection for Liberty Fund. And that just brought me even more fully under the sway of his influence. And then I embraced the project of showing two things. One, Washington was the chief founder, not just as a military man or a symbol, but morally and intellectually. And secondly, that the founding at large deserved greater respect than it had received. There were some who taught it as a low but solid foundation. And what I discovered was there's nothing low about it at all, starting from the Declaration of Independence and coming forward. It has the highest aspirations for humanity, for affirming the capacities of human beings to govern themselves, and that that was extremely important.

So then it became my mission to make clear what self-government was about and why that expressed the greatest confidence in human beings as human beings. You've just described Washington as the most important founder. You've even called him America's first progressive. I did that teasingly, but not inaccurately. Got my attention. We all think of progressives as early 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and a few other people like his name. But Washington actually referred to himself as a progressive in some of his correspondence. And he particularly set forth the idea of what he called the progressive amelioration of the circumstances, the conditions of mankind.

Because he saw that human beings had this capacity we've been describing, and on the basis of which, with self-government, they would gradually improve their circumstances. So for him to be a progressive meant to have confidence in the capacity of human beings to improve themselves. It did not mean somehow undertaking the task of improving human beings. Now, the more recent progressives want to improve human beings. They want to remake them. Washington began with the strong conviction that they didn't need improving. They just needed the freedom in order to do what they knew and were capable of doing. And therefore, he was the first progressive and perhaps the only true progressive.

What was his relationship with the other founders? Did his colleagues at the time look to him as the leader? The two most dramatic examples, of course, would be Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. James Madison was very much under his influence until Thomas Jefferson returned from Paris and supplanted Washington and Madison's influence. Now, of course, Madison had a relationship with Jefferson from earlier days in Virginia, and so that just flowered again. Madison changed many of his relationships once Jefferson returned.

For example, he had a very close relationship to a fellow student at Princeton with whom he corresponded at great length until Jefferson returned and he broke off that correspondence, which I always thought was a very sad thing. But the fact is that all of the others were people whom Washington could gather around him to achieve important works. So it was Washington who spearheaded all the efforts that led ultimately to the Constitutional Convention, including the Annapolis Convention, which was preceded by a meeting at Mount Vernon, then the Annapolis Convention, and that led to the Constitutional Convention. And in the course of which, Alexander Hamilton worked closely with him. Alexander Hamilton, who had been his

aide-de-camp in the war and was with him through the very end of his life in various roles of assistance, including helping to prepare his farewell address, or people like Gouverneur Morris, who was one of the most important members of the Constitutional Convention, who had a complete confidence in George Washington. Now, no one had an easy familiarity with Washington. Washington was what we might call a relatively stiff personality, though certainly genuinely humane and kindly, but formal. And therefore, people wouldn't take excessive liberties in his presence. But all of this was simply a reflection of a man who, from his earliest days,

was resolved to develop that strength of character that would command respect. And he got the respect he sought. That's why I published, when I published the collection of his writings, his 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, which he transcribed when he was 11 years old. And people wonder, well, why do you do that when he wasn't the author of it? It was probably a gesture of a pamphlet, and he was just doing writing exercises. But I point out to people, look, this happens to be one of the few of his school exercises that he preserved in his papers. He has a few other papers, trigonometry, a couple of things,

but mainly almost all those papers are gone, but he preserved this, which meant not only that he copied it out, but mainly almost all those papers are gone. But he preserved this, which meant not only that he copied it out, but it meant something to him. And as we read through all of these instructions about good behavior, decency, propriety, we realize we're seeing the blueprint that the man followed to make his own life. Yes. You said he had a somewhat distant personality. He must have been very persuasive. I think he certainly held, people held him in very high regard. And the people whom he remained connected with through to the end, I would call close

friends. There were other people who couldn't become friends like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. So we know that there were some, what shall we call them, very ambitious, high-strung people who couldn't survive in his presence. But otherwise, yes, he had good friends. And part of it was he had a reserve, an important reserve. But when his nephew entered the Virginia Assembly and wrote to him for advice about what to do, Washington said, among other things, speak seldom and to effect. So don't just talk, but wait until the moment comes

when you can make a difference and then talk. And then don't say a lot. And that's the course he followed. And we saw how that example just is shown forth brilliantly in the Constitutional Convention. When at the very end of the convention, they had finished the document, had it fully drafted, ready for signature. And he stepped from around the chair and said, I haven't intervened as chair in this conversation, but for now I'm going to pause and say, I'd like you to change the ratio of representation and make it more democratic. And then he was silent, got back behind the chair.

Immediately there was an emotion from the floor and it was unanimously approved to make the change he wanted. He said very little, but with such authority that it was immediately accomplished. Great stuff. Great stuff. You know, as we look forward, your career has spanned many decades now. What advice would you give young scholars that are just starting to teach? And I guess a follow-up to that, how can we ensure that the next generation of scholars spends the time, focuses on developing an understanding and an appreciation of us can foresee very easily what the future holds for us. I know personally that without the intervention of angels in my life, I would not be where I am.

And so I do not claim any special confidence in that regard. I was rescued when I needed to be rescued is the way I look at it. But I said, follow your love. That's all that you can control. Other things may or may not be ready to hand, but follow your love. But in the process, do it with integrity. Give due attention to the details. Respect what others have to say, especially when it comes to looking at historical sources. Read the primary sources. Don't accept

secondhand interpretations. And if you follow those simple principles, you will make a contribution. You've said that your career is as a result of a series of accidents or happenstance, but then you've taken those opportunities and really, really worked at them and risen to the top of your field. So while we all have different twists and turns, you've got to do the work too. That's very kind of you, but I've got to tell you, I do not overstate when I say I needed angels. My mother passed in the last semester of my undergraduate years. And I was so devastated by that, that I left school and probably would not have gotten back. But angels brought me back. My very, very dear friend Maureen Reagan

leagued up with Lucille Todd, the deed of women, and reached 3,000 miles across the country and pulled me out of the deepest darkness and brought me back to California, back to school, to finish at the undergraduate school. I didn't turn to them. I didn't call on them. But they reached out to me. And after I'd gotten back and was in school and prepared to do the work,

that very first year, because I had switched from medicine to political science, my informal exemption from the Selective Service draft ended, which is to say I'm from a small town where the Selective Service officer knew me and knew I was going to become a physician, or at least that was the plan, and kept my file out of the line of fire, hoping that that day would come that I could then serve as a physician. And once I changed my major, that was the end of that. And I was drafted in my first year in graduate school. And so I had to hurriedly complete a master's and then go and report for duty, which I did. But that duty only lasted for the length of basic training because of illness. And I was discharged, but I was discharged and I was no longer in graduate school, no

longer had a fellowship, and no longer had any immediate sense of how to return to it. And once again, it took an influence, Martin Diamond in this case, reaching out to me. I didn't reach out to him and say, I have a fellowship for you. Come back. So without those kinds of interventions in my life, I can't claim that I would have made the best decisions or done the best things.

Fascinating. Last question, William. Tell us what it means to you to win a Bradley Prize. Besides being struck with wonder initially, soon after that I realized I've got more work to do. I didn't realize that, but I do. I mean, for almost three years, physicians have been telling me about the beauties of hospice. And my book had just been published before I got that startling news and I thought, well, okay, I'm done.

But then I got that and I says, well, I guess I need to pray for time sufficient to do something to merit so high an honor. So I think I've got work to do, which I pray I will have time at least over the course of the next year, to revisit the revolution and to introduce some new elements of life for us in that. For one of the things that came out of publishing the work on Montesquieu was a discovery of yet another translation, which no one knew about. And that was a translation by George III. And that was never published. It has only just come to light because the Royal Archives have only just opened up. And I've realized that that young man thoroughly read the spirit of the laws and

thoroughly digested it and was committed to the project of liberal reform, which meant that we need to rethink what happened in the revolution, what was happening in England, and what its effects were in the United States. So now what I'm praying for is time sufficient to be able to make that well understood. We'll all pray for that. Dr. William Allen, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you for the incredible contributions that you've truly made to this country and will continue to make, I hope, for many years to come.

We look forward to celebrating with you and your family in a few weeks. It's a great honor. Thank you so very much. It's such a pleasure to have this conversation 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. Thank you.