Episode 5325: Founder's Fire From 1776 Tp the Age Of Trump
Steve Bannon and Arthur Herman dissect "Founders Fire," linking the 1776 revolutionary spirit to modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. They analyze mission-driven attributes exemplified by George Washington's Delaware crossing and Henry Ford, contrasting this legacy against a "dying regime." Drawing from Herman's research on WWII production and his controversial biography of Joseph McCarthy using Venona decrypts, the discussion frames American exceptionalism as an optimistic resource for the 250th anniversary, suggesting that true leadership requires hands-on detail and risk-taking beyond immediate problems. [Automatically generated summary]
Nothing could be more important in our, what is the 250th year of the commemoration, celebration, remembrance of our founding, the revolutionary generation, the founding of the nation.
It's going to take place.
July 4th, and there's lots of events that are going to lead up to it.
I kind of got briefed the other day on what's going to happen on those couple of days.
It's going to be really incredible.
But I think, in homage to the revolutionary generation, probably the best thing we do is talk about this country and the ideas that's driven it to be such what do we call it American exceptionalism.
Because I think in today's time with wars going on and The economy, everything going on, technology, we kind of lose sight of that.
We're honored to have Arthur Herman.
Arthur, I want to do this for a long time.
He had an hour a while back, but I've always wanted to get you in studio.
Founders Fire is the new book, it's just out.
And with all your other books, because you're to me, you're my go to guy for the history of this country and just what not even this country.
I just talking about the end of World War I, Gandhi and Churchill, so many.
We're going to get into all that.
But founders fought a fire, and here's what I love about this it's a totally different take.
You kind of combine two big ideas.
And you take it, the energy of entrepreneurial America, of American exceptionalism, which is about the founder, the founder of institutions, the founders of companies, this driving force, and you go back and you tie it actually back to the founding of the Republic.
And you interweave those two stories of the kind of evolution of our history, but do it around individuals as founders.
And you lay out kind of six principles of what these founders are.
So, first off, how did you get the idea?
Given the fact that you've written so many.
Fascinating books about the Vikings, about Churchill, about Gandhi, about how we won World War II part of the way was because of the industrial capacity.
How did you come up, given that people I'm sure came to you and said, look, Arthur, we've got to get a big book out of you for the 250th?
That's right.
How did you figure on this whole concept of the Founder's Fire?
It really began, Steve, as a Meditation on one of the most important themes of that book that you just mentioned, The Freedom's Forge, How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.
You know, and it's been hugely influential, too, in ways that even surprised me, because it really has made, in the last couple of years, last half decade, has made a lot of people in Washington, on Capitol Hill, On the Pentagon, think about we built a defense industrial base that was so efficient, that was so innovative and productive.
How come we don't have one like that now?
And that book gives a picture into the kinds of people and the kinds of technologies that made it possible for the United States to go from basically a standing start in the summer of 1940 to become the greatest military industrial complex in history.
Not just through the war, but then afterwards in the Cold War and go on to win the Cold War.
And yeah, it had enormous influence, still does in a lot of ways.
What this book does, Founders Fire does, is to look at that fundamental issue.
And that is, it's not just a question why we have a defense industrial base today that looks so different and has fallen really on hard times.
It's not just about legislation or about The Pentagon's master plans or strategies or even technologies.
It's also about people.
And what we unleashed in the World War II era was a series of really heroic individuals.
I talk about them in the book, like Henry Kaiser and Bill Knudsen and Henry Jackson Higgins, who built the Higgins boats that landed GIs on the beach at Omaha Beach, and Roy Grumman, who supplied the U.S. Navy with all of its combat aircraft, its key combat aircraft.
What is it that makes America the kind of place that creates more of these types, these founder types, than any other country in the world?
I mean, they exist elsewhere.
Winston Churchill, you mentioned my book on Gandhi and Churchill.
He's clearly someone who fits within that founder mentality, that kind of combination of vision and drive and willingness to take risks.
But there's something special about America that really thrusts people like that.
And makes them spring up from the ground throughout our history.
In other words, what they have is an idea that when they create a business or an institution or create even a movement, that what they have in mind is something which is not just to address a set of issues today.
You know, I've got a, I'm going to build a better mousetrap, right?
But really to rethink what is a mousetrap.
What is the future going to look like, and what role does my company or my institution or my role as president play in shaping that future all the way out to the far horizon?
When they set the framing, they're talking about when, in the course of human events, not just in the course of British events or the events here in the colonies, but in the course of human events, that this was a moment in human history that motivated them to take the kinds of steps, including the risks that they took in order to fulfill that dream.
I am hoping we're going to come back to that because I think, in many ways, Steve, what happened and why what they do in 1776 lives on and becomes a fundamental part of how our world and America is shaped even today and throughout its history is because through the founding fathers, they gave to America a legacy, a series of gifts to the future about what happened and what has shaped American history.
To this day.
First of those gifts, I'll say, just to summarize them real quick.
This was a hugely controversial move because, after all, America had just gone through the experience of dealing with a monarchy, with a king, and deeply worried about why would you create an executive who is going to.
And it's Hamilton who understands, who says that office is where the energy of this new constitution of government, where that founder's fire will be found to take strong action.
And again, it's deeply controversial then, and it's very controversial now when we have the Article II powers that we've developed.
They mean in the sense that the business or institutions.
They are, but they also want to see how that vision is being carried out on a daily basis.
They want to go and meet with the customers.
They want to go and meet with the employees.
They want to see how that vision, the company they're building, the institution, is really taking place on the ground.
The last place founders want to be is withdrawing to the corporate boardroom, to have that corner office and to spend all their time going through memos and checking off boxes supplied to them by managers and vice presidents and so on.
They had this instinctive desire to take control, to pay attention to every detail of what happened.
It gets back to George Washington, who paid very strict attention to what his cabinet members were doing, spent his time, hours sometimes, talking to each cabinet member about what was happening and what was taking place, and where the work that they were doing, whether it was as Secretary of State or whether it was as Secretary of War, Where that was headed and where that was going.
You know, it's interesting because in his, he didn't, Adams was not invited to a lot of the cabinet meetings because in working through how the system was going to work, he didn't want an intermediary between, not that he had anything against Adams per se, but he didn't want a vice president that the cabinet would think that the vice, it was some chain of command where the vice president would come.
Because you talk about one of the most unique institutions in this world, the Royal Navy, and how it was created and what it had to go through and its struggles.
And what you do in your books, it's not happy clap, but you show the resistance, whether it's Gandhi and Churchill, you show the resistance that people have and how they overcome it just by determination, as you say, keeping the vision.
In this, before I get back, going to the punch list, you said there are three gifts.
Cognizant of one I just mentioned, which was presidential power embedded into the Constitution, giving one person in particular that ability to use that founder's sense of vision, sense of drive of will, willpower, and also to a bias towards action.
But Hamilton understood that what George Washington brought.
To the role of president, the very first president of the United States.
I talk about it in the book in detail.
That everything he brought to that his prestige, his record of success, both as general, but then also as leader in shaping the U.S. Constitution, as chairman of the Constitutional Convention that was not just something that would die off with or leave office with Washington.
It needed to be embedded in the institution itself.
And even to be in a situation that even the president could be in a situation where he could oppose.
The legislative majority, if he feels it's something that needs to be done and something that's right, and it have the means by which to carry that out in the face of that kind of opposition.
Did Hamilton, given he was his aide de camp for the whole Revolutionary War period and saw some of the lowest of the lows, because we talk about Washington today as a founder, but he was attacked viciously when he was the commander of the Continental Army by certain elements.
Within the army and certain elements in Philadelphia that were always second guessing, they were always thinking, Got to fire this guy and find somebody else.
And they were always questioning his strategy, always questioning about why you're doing this, fighting this kind of a war.
You really should simply retreat into the mountains rather than try and mount a conventional.
Confrontation with the British in arms and with an organized soldiery.
And then, why are you taking on the British at all?
Of course, that was the other thing that every founder has a key characteristic a willingness to take on risk, willing to take on, to see in facing a situation, not just the risk that comes with it, but the opportunities that lie on the other side.
And that's true for business founders.
It's true for presidents who have had that kind of founder instincts.
It was certainly true of Washington.
You think about that single stroke of crossing the Delaware on Christmas Eve when his army was at its lowest point through desertions, through the loss of state militias who said, you know, our time is up.
That in the period that we're in now, 250 years ago, the beginning of the hey, we need to have a statement to have a purpose to this if we're going to do it, after all their other avenues were concluded, the subcommittee that met and it came up with this magnificent document, the Declaration of Independence, that at the very moment, you know, around July 4th, which we'll celebrate, the British Expeditionary Force, the largest expeditionary force in human history,
had already left Nova Scotia and other places to come for a military conflict.
And from Late July or early August, 30 days after, less than 30 days after the signing, we were in one of the toughest military conflicts we've had.
And from Staten Island and Long Island and the Battle of Brooklyn and Manhattan, it's a continual retreat under fire, strategic retreat by Washington to you get across the Delaware.
And then over Christmas, the whole nation could have been over.
And we have been part of the British Empire in the first 120 days.
And he had people in Philadelphia.
On him nonstop.
This guy doesn't win.
He had a disaster in Brooklyn.
He had a disaster on Long Island.
This is going to be over.
And I tell people if you think you're under pressure, you think President Trump, who's constantly under pressure, you cannot imagine the pressure that this individual was under.
And is that kind of, I guess, founder's fire that gets you through?
I mean, and you just said it in Washington's case, it's the nation itself, the survival of American independence that's at stake at that moment.
When he decides we're going to go across the frozen Delaware, we're going to take an enormous risk to counterattack the Hessians, which was not in itself a great strategic goal in many ways.
But he had to prove that he had a fighting army on his side and that he could beat the Delaware founders.
When you're sitting there and talking, because he didn't really have a council war, but there are even guys in his inner circle that were not wildly enthusiastic about that night.
First off, there's a Northeaster.
It's almost zero degrees.
The Hessians are probably better even than British regulars because they're German mercenaries who know how to fight.
And they have kind of psychologically scared so many people because of their viciousness.
If you had to pick long odds, because nothing's harder than a river crossing under.
I mean, that was the other thing about it, too, that there were three columns that were supposed to head out, as I describe in the book, that were supposed to land on the other side of the river.
Only one of them made it because the others had to turn back because the weather was so bad.
And you know, you just touched on something else that's really important, Steve, and that is, yeah, there were a lot of doubts, even within the ranks, even within his own command chain about this strategy and about the way we're doing it, but they trusted Washington.
They felt if he feels it's possible to do it, then it's got to be possible to do it.
And that's one of the other key characteristics, I think, of founders, is that they build around them and draw together a team of dedicated, loyal lieutenants.
Who carry out, who share the vision, who understand the vision, and who act in order to carry that out.
This is Nelson had, in the entire Royal Navy, they had this, it became kind of the cult of Nelson, that he had a group of frigate commanders who looked up to him, but they were, and that's what created the Battle of the Nile and Copenhagen and eventually Trafalgar, that he had these individuals, because his strategy was a little different than the normal strategy taught by the Royal Navy.
Well, you had to have, in Nelson's case, What he had to do was he had to have people who would understand his orders almost as soon as he gave them and who realized that everything didn't happen.
You know what I want to do, and I'm just going to turn you loose to go and do it.
And think how many business founders have around them that kind of tight knit, disciplined, loyal group who likewise read the mind of the founder, understand his vision, and know what they need to do in order to fulfill that vision.
That was true for Henry Ford.
It was true for John D. Rockefeller.
True for Edison, Thomas Edison, with the team that he built around Menlo Park.
It was true for Abraham Lincoln when he ran for president in 1860.
And I think you see it with our current president.
You know, he has, his first term, he learned you can't operate as president unless you've got that loyal, disciplined team who realize you're there to carry out, they're there to carry out your vision, not there to mitigate or to intermediate.
Okay, Arthur Herman is here with us and we're honored, and it's not a better way to kick off.
Really, our commemoration of the 250th anniversary, we're going to take all through the year with Founders Fire.
He's combined the entrepreneurial drive and the vision of founders specifically with the founding of the nation and the entire history of the nation, and how this is probably one of the most important threads that drives the nation through pattern recognition.
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Author Herman, his 11th book, Founders Fire.
Make sure you get it for yourself and buy a copy for a young person that is close to you.
We have Arthur Herman in the house today in the Worm from 1776 to the age of Trump.
Make sure you come up from Center Street.
Center Street Hachette?
Is Center Street a division of Hachette?
I think they're guys that did Andrew Breitbart's books, as I remember.
Arthur Herman, your 11th book.
How long did it take you to come up with the pattern recognition that to say, I can, to understand the country, and particularly as we go forward, You need to understand this whole thing about founders' fire of founders of companies or institutions or movements with the revolutionary generation, and then going forward, the actual evolution of the American experience.
Well, the genesis of the book was, in fact, an op-ed that I did for Wall Street Journal talking about Trump and Elon Musk as founders.
Exhibiting all those characteristics of the founder's mindset that you just talked about.
And saying, this is one reason why so many people in the media and Congress and elsewhere just don't understand this guy and haven't understood how Trump works, how he functions.
The other one was Ivan Bowski, the bond trader operating out of Salmon Brothers.
And in fact, those were the models.
If you want to be really successful in Wall Street and build a career for yourself, young man, these are the two figures you need to look up to and emulate.
And people say, actually, you have to go back, you have to rewind the tape a couple years before that.
Because I had a PhD in history and I had grown up in an academic family.
I had spent, went directly from there to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, did a PhD, was a prize winning PhD in European history, and I wanted to do something completely different.
I said, let's try something totally in that range.
It was not burned out, but it was make some money, that was part of it, but also experience a world outside of academia.
Outside of the intellectual life.
And from that point of view, the time I spent on Wall Street was a hugely important part of my education because it was the first time in my life I was dealing with people who were smarter than I was who were not intellectuals.
Especially working on Wall Street in those days in the mid 80s, at any time actually.
It was an important part of my education.
And the woman I met, When I was working there, who's now my wife and has been my wife now for 37 years, who I met living in New York, she said, You're not enjoying this at all.
Why don't you think about going into teaching instead, which is where you were headed in the first place before you took this swerve into the world of business, an engagement in the world of finance, and see what you can do with that.
So I did.
And I did an interview at the American Historical Association, a walk on interview.
And the University of the South in Suwannee, Tennessee, if you know it, said, Why don't you come teach for us?
So we got married and moved out to Tennessee, which for my wife was a bit of a culture shock, as you can imagine, having grown up in New York City, moving to the top of a mountain in the Smokies in middle Tennessee.
Yeah, that was definitely, I must have been a really persuasive guy to get her to go after that.
Did the Wall Street experience because your books are written?
You can tell in your command of the topic when you're reading your books, you know how the world works.
You just haven't been in a research library.
You understand, like when you write about this and founders, you've had a business background or a practical background that you've seen how the world comes together.
And you understand how people act in the real world.
And you come to understand historical actors, whether you're talking about ancient Greece and Rome.
Or all the way forward to today, that the way in which they behave has very little to do with the big analytic frameworks that historians or economists or others use to try to understand their own time or to understand the past.
It gives you a real sense that when you go into the archives, for example, and look at documents, that you're not just studying discursive strategies, which you're trying to analyze and understand in some highfalutin kind of theoretical way.
These are the traces of real people making real decisions, sometimes under intense pressure, which you can only imagine if you're sitting there as an historian two centuries or three centuries later in trying to understand why they do what they did in the context that they did.
That, I think, and also the experience in business gave me a real sympathy and an ability to connect with people who fit this founder's.
Mindset who see the world as a series of opportunities and who say, I'm going to take a risk.
My wife would say, You did the same thing, young man, when you decided I had a PhD.
I was going out to look for jobs in the typical academic job career direction.
And I sort of said, I think I'm going to go to Wall Street and see what's happening, what's really taking place there.
Well, that decision, Steve, was made for me by a book called How the Scots Invented the Modern World, because I was still teaching at George Mason University and also at the Smithsonian.
Oh, yeah, I did start doing very sort of standard academic studies and works, turning my PhD thesis into a book to be published by University Press, Yale University Press of London.
It was for me because I was a big Civil War buff as a kid and appreciated the fact that the grandson of General Edmund Kirby Smith was my colleague at the University of the South.
That I understood, and I took very seriously as part of that mission.
Still teaching European history, very much so, but also beginning to integrate some American history.
My biography of Joseph McCarthy.
Which was the second book after Idea of Decline got me interested in approaching American history from a totally different view and taking a totally different view of Joe McCarthy in particular.
Which Ann Calder said, the greatest book since the Bible.
Your books, and I've read all of them, and I've read, was a Pogue's five volumes of General Marshall, because you can't talk about McCarthy without General Marshall.
You are the only two that actually not just give a fair thing, but actually tell the story as it really should be told with the facts.
Yeah, not so much in the history department or in the other liberal arts departments.
They were furious about a couple of things.
They were furious, not just about the political angle of the book, of course, because it was a fair assessment of Joe McCarthy, which in their minds automatically makes you an apologist for Joe McCarthy and for the Red Scare and all the other terrible things.
They were also furious, Steve, because the book made the cover of the New York Times magazine.
And photographers from the New York Times came out to shoot me in my office and to have me pose at various places to look like the investigator.
It was a piece that was, in fact, M. Evans was in it.
Also, very much involved at that time was an interest in the Venona decoups, which are beginning to expose the fact that the Red Scare was about a real communist.
McCarthy was right.
That was the basic summary.
The bald truth about the situation there.
And so the fact that this kid, who's a European history, who shouldn't be writing a book like this at all, is also drawing the attention of the New York Times cover.
But at the time, it was a code breaking operation that was able to get into the messages that were passing back and forth between Moscow and its embassies, particularly in KGB operations.
And this is one of those extraordinary situations in which the Venona decrypts didn't give U.S. intelligence and the FBI real time intelligence because the codes had been changed.
But it did give them a window onto past operations of who is involved in the United States as operating as assets of this and even direct secret agents of the Soviet Union.
It's what exposed finally and ultimately the treason of Alger Hiss, it's what exposed finally the treason of the Rosenbergs.
I thought that the whole revelations that were coming out at that time about it ought to cause a reevaluation of the role that Joe McCarthy and his colleagues had played in terms of exposing this communist conspiracy that was operating at the heart of the government during the New Deal years.
But that's where the left drew the line.
They could just barely swallow the expose of the Venona decrypts, although they still have their doubts about whether Halger Hiss was not.
Okay, we're going to continue this for another hour.
Founders Fire is the book.
If you want to kick off this season, which won't culminate on July 4th, that will be one of the big things, but there are going to be other events afterwards, particularly around.