Nov. 27, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:55
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| We've come to the time in the season when family and friends gather near to offer a prayer of Thanksgiving for blessings we've known through the years. | ||
| To join hands and thank the Creator Now when Thanksgiving is due And this year when I count my blessings I'm thanking the Lord he made you This year when I count my blessings I'm thanking the Lord he made you | ||
| I'm grateful for the laughter of children, The sun and the wind and the rain, The color of blue in your sweet eyes, the sight of a high ball and train, The moonrise over a prairie And all love that you've made new. | ||
| And this year, when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord he made you. | ||
| This year, when I count my blessings, I'm thanking the Lord. | ||
| And when the time comes to be going, it won't be in sorrow and tears. | ||
| I'll kiss you goodbye and I'll go on the way, grateful for all of the years. | ||
| I thank for all that you gave me, for teaching me what love can do, And Thanksgiving Day for the rest of my life. | ||
| I'm thanking the Lord. | ||
| He made you Thanksgiving day for the rest of my life. | ||
| Thanking the Lord, he made you. | ||
| It is Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, 27 November in the year of the Lord, 2025. | ||
| Johnny Cash with the Thanksgiving song we play every year about this time. | ||
| Very special, honored to have back Dr. Larry Swikert, the co-author of one of the most profound books, I think, about history in the history of the country, The Patriots' History of the United States. | ||
| Larry or Doc, thank you so much for joining us again as we do this one more time. | ||
| It's always fantastic. | ||
| Talk to me about not just Thanksgiving Day, but the whole, you know, Patriots history. | ||
| You guys had a totally different take that's resonated down through the years. | ||
| It was a number one bestseller. | ||
| If Rush Limbaugh fell in love with the book, it became a blockbuster. | ||
| You know, people, I think, would think, hang, hang on, a conservative history of the United States. | ||
| You guys had the idea because you were teachers of history, right? | ||
| And you couldn't find a textbook that actually told the true story of the United States, sir. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Mike Allen and I met at a Western history conference, and we were lamenting how bad the traditional textbooks that were out there were. | ||
| You know, it's interesting that they started off many of these, like the National Experience or American Pageant, weren't terrible. | ||
| But over time, especially as they took on more co-authors and younger writers, they got to be extremely liberal. | ||
| So by the early 1990s, Mike and I couldn't find anything to teach from. | ||
| And as an instructor, it's a pain to have to argue against the textbook all the time. | ||
| So we said, why don't we write our own? | ||
| So around 1999, we started writing this book. | ||
| And by the way, it was not a direct response to Howard Zinn's People's History. | ||
| This wasn't even really the original title of the manuscript we gave him. | ||
| And we didn't think we'd get a publisher. | ||
| We thought we'd end up with a book that we had to bind and sell out of the back of a van along with plastic straws in California and various other sort of contraband items. | ||
| Buddy, plastic straws, Patriots' history of the United States. | ||
| But we did get a publisher, and it worked out very well. | ||
| And as you mentioned, we had a number of years where we had just good, good sales. | ||
| Everything was fine. | ||
| And then I went on Gwen Beck's show in 2010, and he had a massive audience at that time, about the equivalent of what Tucker had at Fox when he left Fox. | ||
| And overnight, the book just exploded to the point we were shipping over 19,000 copies a single day. | ||
| It is now in its 45th printing. | ||
| And for your audience, I will have a free update from the last edition, which ended in 2018. | ||
| I will give people a free update if they just email me at Larry at wildworldofhistory.com. | ||
| That's Larry at wildworldofistory.com. | ||
| We have two new chapters that go from 2018 to 2025 through Trump's first full term, through Biden's term, through COVID, and part of the way through Trump's term. | ||
| So if you want that free update, it's a PDF. | ||
| I'll email it to you if you email me at Larry at wildworldofistory.com. | ||
| We're going to get into all of this today. | ||
| You know, you're one of my favorite people to have on. | ||
| Just such not just great chemistry and give and take, but your love of history just comes through and it comes through on the book. | ||
| So if anybody's ever wanted to, particularly their grandchildren, children, or yourself, if you don't think you know the whole story, what Swikert and Alan do is it's a narrative, it's kind of academic to a degree, like parts of it like a textbook, but it's like a narrative. | ||
| You read, it's like a huge novel, the arc of the history of the United States, and it's pretty, it's very profound. | ||
| I want to thank everybody for, we do this, we do our specials on Christmas Day, we do our specials on Thanksgiving Day. | ||
| I want to thank everybody, part of the Warren Posse, particularly the day we know you're probably traveling around trying to get to Thanksgiving dinner this afternoon. | ||
| And I love this book so much. | ||
| I had Mo send me a bunch of copies. | ||
| I started with the one at the prison library, but this is, you know, people comment about I taught civics at Danbury Federal Prison, and one of the key textbooks I used was the Patriots' History of the United States. | ||
| And it was amazing. | ||
| Somebody of the inmates came up to me afterward and said, What's this history book? | ||
| And so I know it was standing room only at the prison library. | ||
| After the fact, I bought a bunch of copies and gave it to the prison library so they had more to circulate. | ||
| Larry, let's talk about Thanksgiving. | ||
| I'm going to go back to the founding of the country and all that. | ||
| But we've had Ken Burns's The American Revolution that's been on. | ||
| I don't know if you've been watching it, but let's go back to Thanksgiving because Did you watch Burns' American Revolution? | ||
| No, no, I did not. | ||
| Sorry, I've been. | ||
| I've had not only the book you see in the background, America in the 21st Century, which is coming out in February, but the publisher and I decided we needed a book for America's 250th anniversary specifically, although I wasn't going to write any more books. | ||
| I go, okay, I'll do one more. | ||
| And it's called American Biography. | ||
| I know this is going to be right up your alley, Steve, because I follow the history of America starting with John Smith all the way up to Trump by linking people together, one to another, to another, all the way through the history. | ||
| It's quite an amazing story, you know, that Bradford, William Bradford, his ship was sent off on a prayer service by Increase Mather, who was Cotton Mather's father. | ||
| And Bradford, of course, liked Cotton Mather a lot. | ||
| And you just get into these connections whereby, did you know that Davy Crockett had on him one book at the Alamo? | ||
| He brought with him one book, and it was Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. | ||
| I mean, you find these links through American history. | ||
| We really are all tied together by less than six degrees of separation, quite honestly. | ||
| So you're saying it's kind of an unbroken chain of, you can look at American history. | ||
| I think it was Carlisle that said history is just biography, right? | ||
| But you're actually going to prove it by doing American biography and linking back to the unbroken chain of American patriotism all the way back to the beginning through telling people stories. | ||
| Yeah, exactly right. | ||
| I mean, we forget that so many of these people were contemporaries, but they weren't the same age. | ||
| You know, Washington overlapped Patrick Henry, who overlapped Thomas Jefferson, who overlapped James Madison. | ||
| And you get Daniel Boone in there. | ||
| You get Davy Crockett. | ||
| Crockett, Boone, and Mike Fink apparently never met, even though Disney had Mike Fink and Davy Crockett doing a keelboat race. | ||
| Apparently, they never met. | ||
| But they were all in that same milieu, all at that same time, and they all knew of each other, which is just really remarkable. | ||
| Let's go back. | ||
| I want to talk about Thanksgiving a little bit to kick the show off. | ||
| Did you, and by the way, the song, our out-song is three minutes long, or does this take me down to it, or you want to cut it three minutes? | ||
| You let me know. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| You're going to give me the sign? | ||
| Maybe I wait for Larry. | ||
| Maybe I wait for Larry to we come back. | ||
| Is it three minutes out? | ||
|
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Yes, three. | |
| Okay, fine. | ||
| Larry, our doctor, and I'm going to bring you back. | ||
| You'll be with us for all two hours. | ||
| When you come back, here's the question. | ||
| Is any other nation on earth really segregated out a time of year or a day to actually give thanks to God, to give thanks to divine providence for the blessings of the nation? | ||
| So we're going to let a very special song. | ||
| Every year at Thanksgiving, we do this. | ||
| Odette, and we're ready to go. | ||
| Let's go ahead and let the song, we're going to play the entire song to kick things off. | ||
|
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His truth is marching on. | |
| I have seen him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps. | ||
| They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps. | ||
| I have read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps. | ||
| His truth is marching on. | ||
| Glory, glory, hallelujah. | ||
| Glory glory, hallelujah. | ||
| Glory glory, hallelujah. | ||
| His truth is marching on. | ||
| I have read a fiery gospel written burnished rows of steel. | ||
| As you deal with my condemners, so with you, my grace shall deal. | ||
| Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel. | ||
| His truth is marching on. | ||
| Glory, glory, hallelujah. | ||
| His truth is marching on. | ||
| He has sounded forth a trumpet that shall never far his reach. | ||
| He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. | ||
| Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer. | ||
| Oh, be jubilant, my feet. | ||
| His truth is marching on. | ||
| Glory, glory, hallelujah. | ||
| Glory, glory, hallelujah. | ||
| In the beauty of the release, Christ was born across the sea with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me. | ||
| As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. | ||
| His truth is marching on. | ||
| Glory, glory, hallelujah. | ||
| His truth is marching on. | ||
| Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. | ||
| He is trampling out the vengeance where the grapes of wrath are stored. | ||
| He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. | ||
| Hello, America's Voice family. | ||
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Sign up for free and be part of the movement. | |
| We've come to the time and the season when family and friends gather near to offer a prayer of thanksgiving for blessings we've known through the year to join hands and thank the Creator. | ||
| Now when the welcome back on a Thanksgiving morning, we do our worms on Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the holidays. | ||
| Make sure that we're there for you all the time. | ||
| Larry Sweikert, Dr. Swikert, the author, co-author of the Patriots History of the United States. | ||
| When I was a kid growing up, Doc, there used to be arguments around the table. | ||
| We were from the Commonwealth of Virginia, you know, family was from Norfolk, but we had gone up to Richmond and were there. | ||
| We used to get together with the Norfolk crowd and there'd be big debates over people at the time. | ||
| I think Jack Kennedy in 19, I think it was Kennedy in 61 or 62 put out a proclamation that both Thanksgiving were both Massachusetts and Virginia. | ||
| But it was a huge debate at that time as things often were about American history. | ||
| You wouldn't have that debate today. | ||
| Talk to me about that. | ||
| I think you come down, if I remember reading the book correctly, you believe Berkeley and what happened in the Berkeley plantation, all that happened afterwards. | ||
| You come down on the side of this, that it was Massachusetts, sir? | ||
| Massachusetts, especially Plymouth, was the site of American exceptionalism and not Jamestown. | ||
| And the reason for that is what we call in the book the four pillars of American exceptionalism. | ||
| The first one being a Christian, mostly Protestant religious tradition. | ||
| And the reason that's important is not for matters of theology, but because the Puritans believed in bottom-up congregational government of the church. | ||
| And every other church government at that time was top-down. | ||
| Second pillar was common law, that God puts the law in the hearts of the people, not the ruler, and that the people elect or select rulers who will carry out God's law. | ||
| The third was private property with written titles and deeds, which was at Jamestown. | ||
| And the last was a free market economy. | ||
| They wouldn't have called it capitalism then, but they did have early elements of a free market economy. | ||
| But it was only Plymouth that had those first two elements. | ||
| And as a result, American exceptionalism, are you listening to me, 1619 Project? | ||
| American exceptionalism has nothing to do with slavery or slaves. | ||
| There were no slaves in Plymouth. | ||
| It's interesting you say this. | ||
| I want to drill down because in Jamestown was freebooters, right? | ||
| It was really entrepreneurs. | ||
| They were not there to farm. | ||
| They were there to find gold. | ||
| I mean, it was a corporate entity. | ||
| There was a corporate entity. | ||
| They were going to have allocation of profits. | ||
| And they were much more capitalistic in looking at it because it was really an entrepreneur. | ||
| The Virginia Company was an entrepreneurial activity, sir. | ||
| Supposedly, so was Plymouth. | ||
| But of course, we know what happened there was that the pilgrims could not go to the king and say, listen, horror of Babylon, we want a place where we can worship without your oversight. | ||
| And they were being persecuted severely in England at that time by the Church of England. | ||
| So they couldn't go to him and use a religious argument. | ||
| So they went to him and they said, hey, we think we can make you some money if you just give us some land up there in the top of the Virginia grant. | ||
| And as you know, they were originally supposed to be part of the London Company, Virginia Company grant at the top of Virginia, and they were off course and ended up in Massachusetts. | ||
| The Puritans had actually left, I guess the group called the Pilgrims had gone to, because they didn't fit in in England, right? | ||
| They just felt that the English society was getting too decadent. | ||
| In fact, there was a, I think it was Kevin Phillips wrote The Cousins' War, which is one of the most profound books I've ever read about the founding of America. | ||
| It talked about the Puritans versus the Royalists in the English Civil War and the different parts of the country came from. | ||
| It didn't extrapolate that down to really how the revolution in our country was kind of two parts, the New England part and the southern part. | ||
| And they took it all the way to the Civil War, right, with the abolitionists and really the rebels. | ||
| It was quite interesting, the distinction. | ||
| But when they left England, they didn't come to America first, right? | ||
| They made a stop in which they, I guess they pissed off the locals there and had to keep going. | ||
| Tell us that story. | ||
| Well, they went to Leyden in Holland. | ||
| And it's something of a myth that when they came to America, they didn't know how to farm. | ||
| Of course they knew how to farm, but they'd spent some time in Holland doing other things, tanning and leather and all these other kinds of what we call mechanical skills at that time. | ||
| And they had wanted an area which wasn't, as you said, decadent and sort of a Las Vegas. | ||
| And that's what they found in Holland. | ||
| And that greatly disturbed them. | ||
| But when they left England, it's important to understand that it wasn't just, oh, these guys are a little too sinful for us. | ||
| They were being actively persecuted. | ||
| Members of the separatist group and the Pilgrim and the Puritans as a whole were being thrown into jail because they were not kowtowing to the line given by the Anglican church. | ||
| So their physical safety was in question. | ||
| And then when they left Leyden, they said, we've got to go really far away here. | ||
| Let's get to America. | ||
| But one of the things for the audience is that they wouldn't count out to the fact that the king was the head of the church of England, right? | ||
| Not Arch. | ||
| Remember, Henry VIII had removed the Catholic Church and made it more nationalistic. | ||
| They wanted it to be English, not Roman. | ||
| But they did put the king, they put a secular head in charge. | ||
| That was one of the big complaints, besides all the ornamentation and how they felt the Church of England or the Anglican Church was too much like the Catholic Church, except it reported to a different person. | ||
| But the thing that really stuck in their craw was that the king was the head of the Church of England. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| This comes to that first pillar, which is that in America, you have a Christian, mostly Protestant tradition that emphasizes congregations and bottom-up church government, which was contrary to the Roman Catholic Church, to the Greek Orthodox Church, and of course, as you just mentioned, to the Anglican Church. | ||
| And Henry VIII, I used to tell my students, created the Anglican Church because he wanted a hottie. | ||
| He wanted Anne Boleyn. | ||
| And the Pope says, no, I'm not going to give you a divorce. | ||
| He said, well, fine, I'll start my own church and I'll be the head of my own church. | ||
| When you combine the pilgrims' bottom-up religious experience with their bottom-up political government experience, you have such an absolutely powerful force that it makes America different from every other nation in the world. | ||
| And just a few years ago, you might remember how many Americans, I'm sure they asked you this too, what's going on with Canada and Australia? | ||
| Why are they locking down so hard? | ||
| Aren't they democracies? | ||
| And I would always say, yeah, they're democracies, but they don't have the pillars of American exceptionalism that begin with this two-fold bottom-up resistance against top-down governments. | ||
| So they were very different in their COVID experiences than we were going all the way back to the Pilgrims. | ||
| Going back to the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, what stuns me, and having gone up there and been to Plymouth Rock and to Plymouth, and going and actually tracing not just how they came across, how they landed. | ||
| How did they survive? | ||
| This is what I don't get. | ||
| Because you have, every day you have to get your heat, your food. | ||
| It just, it stuns. | ||
| I tell people, we stand on the shoulders of giants, right? | ||
| Because I wouldn't last too long in that environment. | ||
| Larry, how did they actually survive when they had nothing and they were on the tiny, tiny sliver of a vast wilderness? | ||
| Well, first of all, they didn't all leave the boat the minute they got here. | ||
| They stayed on board the Mayflower for some time and they sent out scouting parties. | ||
| Obviously, are we in the right place? | ||
| Is there a place here where we can settle? | ||
| Is there a place where we can live? | ||
| Once the whole body of people, remember, more than half of these travelers who came to America, we all call them the pilgrims, but more than half of them were not separatists. | ||
| They were just others who wanted to come over and they were known by the term strangers. | ||
| And they fished and they hunted and they gathered and they did whatever they could to stay alive for those weeks. | ||
| It's quite amazing. | ||
| Odette will take us out, one of my favorite songs. | ||
| What a beautiful voice from 1959, the Battle Hymn of the Republic. | ||
| And throughout the day, we'll actually, in the second hour, we'll play the entire all the stanzas for it. | ||
| It's quite amazing. | ||
| Larry Swikert is our guest as he is. | ||
| Basically, we said a tradition in the last couple of years of every Thanksgiving. | ||
| The reason is, I have not met any one individual that has just not a storehouse of knowledge and information in these amazing stories, but has a great love for this country. | ||
| And in that love, I think you can connect a lot of dots. | ||
| Larry Swikert, the book is Patriots' History of the U.S. Now, United States known as 45th printing. | ||
| He's got an incredible book coming out: American Biography of the 250th in America in the 21st century. | ||
| We'll talk all about those. | ||
| Larry Swikert, Odette will take us out with Battle Hymn of the Republic. | ||
|
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His truth is marching on. | |
| I have read a fiery gospel written in burnished rows of steel. | ||
| As you deal with my condemners, so with you, my grace shall deal. | ||
| Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel. | ||
| His truth is marching on. | ||
| Glory, glory, hallelujah. | ||
| Glory, glory, hallelujah. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| Thanksgiving morning. | ||
| Larry Swikert is with us. | ||
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You know, they were off course, Larry. | |
| They thought they were hitting Virginia. | ||
| They hit Massachusetts, and I think they figured it out fairly quickly. | ||
| I can tell you as a kid from Virginia that went and spent four years at sea, you know, homeported out of San Diego, but spent it in Asia, the tropics, you know, ended up in the Persian Gulf, North Arabian Sea. | ||
| When I came back and went to the Pentagon, back to kind of Virginia for a couple of years and then went to Harvard up in Massachusetts. | ||
| There's a big difference in the climate. | ||
| There's a very big difference in the climate of Virginia than it is up in Massachusetts. | ||
| So once again, I realize some stay on the ship, but how did they, the grueling nature, I mean, how many people did they lose? | ||
| Because Jamestown, the entrepreneurs, the people looking for gold, essentially starved to death and really packed it up and were leaving when they caught an inbound ship that was coming with not just reinforcements, but resupplies. | ||
| Although they had a grueling time in Massachusetts, they never really said, they never came close to saying we're calling it quits, did they? | ||
| No, and the story you just mentioned is absolutely incredible. | ||
| I don't know if people understand this, but the Jamestown settlers, you know, it got so bad that they'd been eating rats and dung and shoelaces. | ||
| And you know, my wife and I love these cooking shows where you have a market basket of goods and they'll pull out, oh, we have a rat, we have dung, we have shoelaces. | ||
| And of course, the great cook show, I know what I'm going to do with that. | ||
| I'm going to make a rat puree over some nice rocks. | ||
| And anyway, that ship with the settlers had completely pulled out. | ||
| They said, enough is enough. | ||
| We've lost over half of our people. | ||
| Two years in a row. | ||
| We're getting out of here. | ||
| And as they get to the mouth of the James River, now people think about the incredible providential nature of this. | ||
| They get to the mouth of the James River and they meet another ship inbound. | ||
| A half an hour in either direction, and they wouldn't have encountered that ship. | ||
| If they'd left a half an hour earlier, they would have missed them. | ||
| So you get the pilgrims up at Massachusetts. | ||
| They did lose a lot, but not at the same level as those in Jamestown did. | ||
| But remember, their mission was to set up a city on a hill, a godly colony. | ||
| And, you know, hardship was just a part of that. | ||
| And they weren't going to leave no matter what. | ||
| So the difference between the two colonies was rather significant. | ||
| What to talk to me about, because there's a separation of the legend and what the reality was. | ||
| Walk through as close to reality as we can get of the first Thanksgiving Day. | ||
| How did it come about? | ||
| Because part of this is the sophistication of the Indian tribes because the Indians had alliances with each other. | ||
| They were in confederacies with each other. | ||
| They were against each other. | ||
| There had been a huge epidemic, but there's also a constant, and this was quite a big war, I think, going on in New England at the time between the tribes themselves, where the whites were kind of these, you know, these kind of very odd folks that just kind of arrived out of nowhere. | ||
| Yeah, that's absolutely right. | ||
| So let's back up so that everybody understands that both Jamestown and the Plymouth colonists, the Puritans, they all arrived with a socialist model in mind. | ||
| They were going to run the colonies as a socialist model. | ||
| They wouldn't have used that word. | ||
| They would use something like communal, but they had communal grain. | ||
| They had communal lands, the commons. | ||
| Everybody was to go out and work the land. | ||
| You're only supposed to take from the grain barrel what you needed and leave the rest. | ||
| And of course, people weren't working nearly enough to replace the grain barrel. | ||
| And after a couple of seasons, John Smith in Virginia said, that's it. | ||
| He who won't work won't eat. | ||
| And he doled out private land holdings. | ||
| And all of a sudden, they didn't flourish the way that the Plymouth colony did, but they did survive. | ||
| But in Plymouth, Governor Carver, after only one season, said, this isn't working. | ||
| And he gave out seed to everybody, gave out land to everybody. | ||
| He says, you're on your own. | ||
| And as William Bradford noted in his novel, he said, you know, the socialist model, again, he wouldn't have used that word, the socialist model, we thought we were wiser than God in adopting that model. | ||
| And so the first change that occurred was in how they approached their basic economy. | ||
| Second change that occurred, of course, is that they met the one Indian in all of North America who spoke English, Squanto, they called him. | ||
| And you can imagine what a shock it was. | ||
| They're on their hill, they're cutting wood, you know, they're hunting or whatnot. | ||
| And two Indians come up over the ridge and the Indian walks around and they're getting their guns. | ||
| They're not sure what to do. | ||
| And the first Indian goes, hello, Englishman. | ||
| I mean, that would be like, I don't know, arriving on some other planet and you encounter the reptile people and you immediately know who they are. | ||
| So yes, the Indians saw the arrival of whites, particularly. | ||
| But hang on, hang on, hang on. | ||
| Don't bury the lead here. | ||
| Squanto just didn't, you know, it wasn't divine providence that he knew English. | ||
| Tell the story of that. | ||
| It also tells you the amazing heroism of the people in Plymouth. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| How and why did Squanto actually not just know English, but he spoke it pretty well, didn't he? | ||
| Squanto was taken as a slave by some explorers. | ||
| They got him back to Spain, where he was apparently, all this is a little questionable because the records are somewhat spotty, but he apparently was sold to a group of priests who taught him English, taught him the Bible, of course, and he became fluent in it. | ||
| Well, somehow he ends up over in England, where he's kind of a showpiece, but also kind of a servant around some of the aristocratic halls and so forth. | ||
| And it's then that he's taken back to America on another voyage because he knows English and knows many of the Indian languages. | ||
| Now, as you pointed out, there were civil wars going on between the Indian tribes, the Narragansett, the Pequots, the Penobscots, many of the tribes up in these areas were constantly fighting each other. | ||
| I used to ask my students, who do you think killed the last of the Mohicans? | ||
| The white men, no, it was the Hurons. | ||
| But anyway, so he goes all the way around the world. | ||
| I mean, at least the Atlantic world, and comes back to America, which is when he meets the current residents, the current occupants, the pilgrims, and that's when all this takes place. | ||
| And so combining the shift from a socialist economy to individual property ownership, and Squanto told the pilgrims about a number of better ways they could raise corn, raise Indian corn, another, you know, all sorts of helpful hints as to how to survive here in North America. | ||
| Again, many of them were farmers. | ||
| It's a nonsense that they didn't know how to farm, but they didn't know the North American landscape at all. | ||
| So by the time they have an early form of capitalism combined with the information that Squanto gave them, they had more than enough. | ||
| They had what Bradford called abundance. | ||
| And Carver called for a Thanksgiving day to God. | ||
| There have been many Thanksgivings in Virginia and elsewhere before then, but this is the first official government-proclaimed Thanksgiving to God. | ||
| And not like what the public school teachers teach. | ||
| They weren't thanking the Indians. | ||
| They were thanking God, and they invited over 80 Indians to share in their abundant feast. | ||
| Just to make sure people know, Squanto is here because the Mayflower in Jamestown weren't the first people actually to make it to North America. | ||
| There had been other traders, freebooters, et cetera, that had actually made it to the shores. | ||
| And Squanto had been picked up or enslaved by some of these, I don't call them raiders, but people with, they were not coming for permanent settlement. | ||
| They were kind of coming for as to do what they could ever do, extracted what they could extract and move on, correct? | ||
| Yeah, and of course we did have a settlement off of the Carolinas, Roanoke, and that one disappeared. | ||
| And to this day, historians are arguing about what the one word carved into wood, Croatoan, means or meant. | ||
| But there's almost no historical evidence as to what happened to that colony. | ||
| And of course, both the French and the Spanish had planted colonies all over other parts of America, St. Augustine, and then up in Montreal and Quebec and those areas, small trading areas. | ||
| But these were permanent settlements, especially in the case of the pilgrims. | ||
| They were going to make, as Winthrop said, a city on a hill. | ||
| They weren't leaving. | ||
| They were going to grow. | ||
| Real quickly, the haunting story of Roanoke Island, I mean, they came over pretty well situated. | ||
| And in fact, they started running out of supplies. | ||
| And the leaders or some of the heads said, hey, let's go back to England and we'll go get more material, some fresh people, et cetera. | ||
| And when they got back, they didn't have the money. | ||
| It took them, what, three or four years, three years, I think, to actually come back to return to Roanoke Island? | ||
| Yeah, as I recall the story, the war with Spain and the Spanish Armada intervened in that. | ||
| And obviously, you weren't going to be sailing a lot of boats out while there's ships out in the English Channel shooting at each other. | ||
| So if I recall correctly, they got delayed there. | ||
| But like you say, they came back and no colony. | ||
| And to this day, nobody knows really what happened to them. | ||
| They were captured by Indians. | ||
| If they'd been wiped out by a plague, there would have been bodies, but there were no bodies to be found. | ||
| Somehow they look like they marched inland and they left that haunting word put into the tree. | ||
| And of course, Virginia Dare, the first baby born of European settlers, was born in Roanoke Island, has become very famous since then. | ||
| Odette's going to take us out. | ||
| Larry Swikert's with us, the author. | ||
| Larry, the books, you have America in the 21st Century is coming out when? | ||
| February 6th. | ||
| February 6th. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| And that's basically an update. | ||
| Is that an update of the first quarter of the century of the United States? | ||
| Is that what that's about? | ||
| Yeah, I could find nobody else working on a real textbook of the first quarter century. | ||
| And so I thought we needed to get that said, especially with the right political attitude. | ||
| And American biography is going to come out. | ||
| That will come out in the summer around the 4th of July, the 250th. | ||
| Father's Day. | ||
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Wow. | |
| You have a book coming out in February and another in June. | ||
| And I've written a curriculum for good government for my history curriculum course, Wild World in History. | ||
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So we'll have that coming out, too. | |
| Larry Swiker, you are, man, that is a machine. | ||
| People don't realize how hard it is to write these books. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| Larry Swiker is with us. | ||
| It's Thanksgiving morning. | ||
| We know that you are en route, either cooking at the location where you're going to have your Thanksgiving today and give thanks to God, or you're en route to be with family and friends. | ||
| Whichever you are, you're in the war room. | ||
| And we do this every year with Larry. | ||
| Just incredible. | ||
| Incredible, incredible guy, incredible knowledge. | ||
| And now know he's got two books coming out in 2026, the 250th anniversary of the commencement of the birth of our country. | ||
| What we're talking about today goes a little before the actual birth of the United States, the beginning of founding of America. | ||
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Short commercial break, back in a moment. | |
| I have read a fiery gospel, written burnished rows of steel. | ||
| As you deal with my condemners, so with you, my grace shall deal. | ||
| Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel. | ||
| His truth is marching on. | ||
| Glory, glory, hallelujah. | ||
| We've come to the time in the season when family and friends. | ||
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Welcome back. | |
| That's Johnny Cash. | ||
| We're going to play all of it at the top of the hour. | ||
| Larry, one thing when you say about the four pillars of American exceptionalism, when you get to private property, you always throw in with written, was it written deeds and contracts? | ||
| What's the phrase that you always put it? | ||
| You go private property with boom. | ||
| And what do you say? | ||
| Written titles and deeds. | ||
| And that's so important. | ||
| Why is Larry Swiker? | ||
| You always make a point to add that. | ||
| Why? | ||
| There's parts of Africa to this day that do not deal in written titles and deeds. | ||
| It is a key aspect of economic growth because if you want to use, you know, there's a guy named who did the book, The Mystery of Capital. | ||
| Okay, I'm forgetting his name right now. | ||
| But anyway, he did this book, The Mystery of Capital, and he looked at what was missing in all of these nations that have some form of capitalism, but they're still extremely poor. | ||
| And one of the leading elements is that many of them still do not have written titles and deeds. | ||
| So if you want to grow your business and get a loan from a bank, you're going to have to put up collateral. | ||
| And when you put up collateral, you're going to have to have written titles and deeds to whether it's your house or your car, whatever else it is that's securing that loan. | ||
| If countries don't have that, and Hernando DeSoto, I think, is the guy who wrote Mystery Capital. | ||
| He looked at several of these regions and they don't have that. | ||
| And it would take between 100 and 50 steps just to get something registered. | ||
| I mean, I filled out a car registration yesterday in 10 minutes. | ||
| So this is a very important key element of America's past that we just glide by because it's so common to all of us these days, but there's parts of the world still struggling with this. | ||
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Oh, and Steve, let me remind you one more thing. | |
| What I call the most important law in American history, even before the Constitution, was the land ordinance of 1785. | ||
| And what did that do? | ||
| That set up a series of surveys in the old Northwest, starting in Ohio, going all the way out to Illinois and Wisconsin, that would sell off land at a buck and a quarter an acre and give you a written title and deed. | ||
| And they broke up the countryside into sections and townships of square miles. | ||
| And as soon as you would fill up one section, you'd move on to the next section. | ||
| This is all for protection against Indians. | ||
| Well, we're Americans. | ||
| Damn it, I'm American. | ||
| I'm going to go settle where I want. | ||
| And people began running out settling in many of the unsurveyed areas. | ||
| And so we had a clash between written titles and deeds and common law, which says the people know what they're doing. | ||
| The people know best. | ||
| So Congress sided with the people and it drafted a law called preemption, what we call squatter's rights, which says you can go out and if you can find land that nobody is on and you can stay there seven years and build a house, you can claim ownership to that land by law and get your own title and deed. | ||
| And so when you fly across America from the east to the west, you'll notice in the east, especially when I was teaching in Ohio, you fly over Ohio and you look out the plane window and you see what looks like a jigsaw puzzle of property. | ||
| And that's because so many of these people had not waited for the survey. | ||
| They said, well, my land runs from the creek down there to that mountain over to that big rock that looks like Jimmy Duranty and then back here down here. | ||
| And they would draw that up and take it into a assay office or a government office and it would be certified that that's their land. | ||
| As you move further west, though, you look out your plane window and what do you see? | ||
| Nice squares because everything had finally been surveyed by the time they got out west. | ||
| Were there titles indeed? | ||
| The Pilgrims were more communal than the Jamestown crowd, right? | ||
| Although both of them had kind of a more of a socialist system. | ||
| It's only when they kind of went to California. | ||
| But did they have individual titles and deeds? | ||
| When you go to Plymouth today and they've got the recreation of the village, were those individual titles and deeds that people had for their own private property? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you would get your title deed for a lot in the city. | ||
| I think Bradford's lot is still there. | ||
| And it might take a while, but eventually you would get that piece of paper, which was, it's crucial. | ||
| It's amazing how one little piece of paper can be so important, said every man who's ever been married. | ||
| Mayfower, before we go to break here at the top of the hour, Mayflower Compact. | ||
| They knew even when they arrived, there might be an issue. | ||
| The Mayfair Compact, which you had, you had a long time to kind of figure out how this thing was going to be governed. | ||
| Why did they wait to the last second? | ||
| And then they came up with one of the most profound foundational documents in American history. | ||
| I think the reason they waited, and I can't prove this, but I think the reason they waited was it's always dangerous to try to restructure a government at sea. | ||
| You know, at sea, the captain is the government. | ||
| He's the sole government. | ||
| And so they didn't want any conflict between a newly elected governor from the body of people and the captain. | ||
| You saw the same thing actually in Jamestown where Captain John Smith had been put in the brig on board ship for being a little too boisterous about what he was going to do. | ||
| But his name was one of the seven administrators that was named there from England. | ||
| So I think that they didn't want to rock the boat, so to speak. | ||
| But we do need to get back to this because the Mayflower Compact is very important. | ||
| Okay, we're going to do that in the next hour. | ||
| By the way, Nate Morris from the Commonwealth of Kentucky is going to actually come in the beginning of the next hour. | ||
| And I think we may have a little bit of discussion about the land ordinance of 1785. | ||
| If you watch Ken Burns' The American Revolution, Larry, that when you get time, I know you're busy doing your books, but it makes a very big deal about the Ohio Valley and the Indian lands. | ||
| That's the sole purpose of the revolution. | ||
| There's a few woke moments. | ||
| I actually liked it quite a bit. | ||
| I liked Burns's Revolution quite a bit. | ||
| Although there were, being Ken Burns, you're going to get some woke, right? | ||
| But he's talking about the proclamation line of 1763, not the land ordinance. | ||
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Yes. | |
| Well, no, no, no, but it projected out that eventually you would get to that the purpose was to get to the land, not just keeping us back, but the Indian lands, native lands where the, where the, which the land ordinance, I think, went over and gave you ordinance. | ||
| Anyway, we'll talk about in the next hour. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Back on Thanksgiving Day. | ||
| Dr. Larry Swikert, author, co-author of Patriots History of these United States. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
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Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel. | |
| His truth is marching on. |
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