The Mayflower Compact was signed the day before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and it is the first agreement on governing between two groups of people in the history of the world that no monarch signed. Lawrence Reed calls it the most meaningful early benchmark in the American story, because everything the Declaration of Independence said so beautifully 156 years later was already there in 1620: mutual consent, toleration, no king. Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, where he served twelve years as president. He ran the Mackinac Center for Public Policy for twenty-one years and taught economics and history at Northwood University. Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America is his ninth book, and it runs from the Mayflower Compact in 1620 through the Bill of Rights in 1791. Jenny Beth Martin and Lawrence Reed also cover the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, when townspeople who were not Quakers defied a governor's order to shun the Quakers. The continental dollar Congress printed into worthlessness by 1780, and the British warship off Staten Island that counterfeited American currency by the crate. The sin of presentism and the Wright brothers test. Mercy Otis Warren, whose history Thomas Jefferson required his entire cabinet to read. And why the founders handed us a republic with democratic elements rather than a democracy. This conversation is the lead-in to a four-part series on economics with Lawrence Reed beginning next week. More at jennybethshow.com and teapartypatriots.org.
Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, where he served twelve years as president. Before that he ran the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan for twenty-one years, led a think tank in Idaho for three, and taught economics and history at Northwood University for seven. History is his first love and economics a close second, which is the shape of all nine of his books. The newest is Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America.
Jenny Beth Martin is the host of The Jenny Beth Show, co-founder of the Tea Party movement, and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
Key topics:
Timestamps:
00:18 — Meet Lawrence Reed: Foundation for Economic Education, the Mackinac Center, nine books
01:57 — Born of Ideas: from the Mayflower Compact in 1620 to the Bill of Rights in 1791
03:17 — The Mayflower Compact, and the first governing agreement in history without a monarch
06:59 — The religious Magna Carta: the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657
09:57 — Congress could not tax, so Congress printed: the continental dollar collapse
12:36 — The British warship Phoenix and the counterfeit American currency
14:57 — The Enlightenment, the Great Awakening, and the Boston Tea Party
20:40 — Why the French Revolution went the other way
23:58 — Slavery, presentism, and what actually made America exceptional
29:43 — Nathan Hale at twenty-one
32:31 — Kosciuszko, Pulaski, Salomon, and Lafayette
35:19 — Mercy Otis Warren, the conscience of the American Revolution
37:31 — Thomas Paine and Common Sense
39:57 — Joseph and Esther Reed of Pennsylvania
43:28 — How Washington won a fight he kept losing
47:47 — Black Americans and Native Americans in the Revolution
52:20 — Twenty-seven American ships against two hundred fifty British ones
54:51 — John Witherspoon saves Princeton twice
57:16 — A republic with democratic elements, not a democracy
Links mentioned: jennybethshow.com, teapartypatriots.org, Born of Ideas by Lawrence W. Reed, the Foundation for Economic Education, the National Archives correspondence between Esther Reed and General Washington.