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Feb. 22, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
55:14
A New Perspective: George Washington, Founding Father and Great Entrepreneur
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You wanna listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
This house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey, it's Doug Collins.
Hey, it's President's Day.
And we're excited today to have John Burlock here with Competitive Enterprise Institute to talk about our first president, George Washington.
But we're going to do it from a little bit different perspective today.
John has a great perspective on this.
He's wrote a book called George Washington Entrepreneur, How Our Founding Fathers' Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World.
John, welcome to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Thanks, Congressman Collins.
It's so good to be on.
It's going to be fun.
You know, look, so many just talked about our founding fathers today.
It's amazing to me how people, you know, no matter what their educational background, you know, they throw up the founding fathers as the founding fathers were this, and I believe the founding fathers were that.
There's so much mystique and everything about it.
I mean, I have a pastoral background.
I have a religious degree.
I also have a law degree.
You know, it's amazing to me how sometimes today we talk about the founding fathers as if they were all pastors.
Well, they were not all pastors.
You know, they were not all lawyers.
They were just a lot of common people.
But George Washington, being our first president, being the leader, a lot of myths, a lot of things grown up, a lot of truisms, but also one of the things that I think your book addresses that I want to talk about with you today is he was actually a very bright guy, wasn't he?
He really was.
He wasn't formally educated past the age of 13 because his father died when he was 11 and his family couldn't afford To send him to college, plus he had to take care of the family, take care of the farm.
But he both learned from people, would always ask questions, and he read quite a bit.
He read everything from books on agriculture from Great Britain to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which was the first book to lay out the theories of capitalism as opposed to the mercantilism they were practicing in Great Britain.
So he was a very educated, well-read guy despite the lack of formal schooling.
You know, interesting, John, I want to talk about it because you're very well schooled as well.
I mean, I've been to, you know, as my dad said, I had more degrees than I probably understood, and I get that.
But, you know, the one thing, though, that I think is missing, and if you don't mind jumping here, because you said it, he learned by reading and asking questions.
Is that a lost art in our, and I'm going to jump to today's world, is that a lost art in our world today?
There are a lot of people who still read and ask questions, but as I say in my book, George Washington Entrepreneur, available for sale at Amazon and whenever...
Wherever books are sold, I'm plugging my book to talk about books.
He made an art of it.
I go into one of the examples in my book about how he wanted to build a greenhouse.
They had greenhouses back then, even with the lack of electricity, building material.
But it was some greenhouses in Europe and a few around America, but it was very rare.
So he would ask everyone he knew in Virginia, and they mentioned some people, a Catholic family, the Carrolls in Maryland.
So he wrote to them.
He wrote to the widow of a farmer who had built a greenhouse, and she knew a lot herself, and she corresponded with Margaret Carroll.
So that's the thing.
He would just write and ask questions, almost doing like an interview, whether it's to build in something in business or on the military or a greenhouse at Mount Vernon, and would also read a great deal about, you know, he was a great horseman.
Thomas Jefferson said he was one of the best horsemen, he was the best horseman he had ever seen.
I mean, he's famous for riding into battle, but he actually Red Books is invoices show of the books he ordered from everything from how to care for sick horses to actually make jumps.
I mean, that's amazing, you know, just to take that out without the, quote, formal education style.
And granted, our educational system has changed dramatically since even back then, but it is interesting that he kept that up, and it's something that I think a lot of us could do today.
You know, podcasts are becoming a new, I think, audiobook of life because you hear people and a lot of people are learning from those and that's why we're here today.
For someone who, as you was researching this book and getting ready for it, everybody knows, not everybody, but most people know of his military background, they know of his prowess, especially in the Revolutionary War, you know, and sort of leading from that...
I won't say this, you know, for factually, but there's a lot of times when you look at George Washington, it's sort of the silent sphinx, if you would.
Because you hear of Madison and Jefferson and Franklin and everybody going off, but then it was always, well, Washington was presiding, or Washington was there, and then he led.
Is that sort of the persona that you, if we were to go back 200 plus years and sit down with George Washington, is that the persona that we would have after meeting with him for an hour?
I would say yes and no, and it would kind of be depending on his mood.
He certainly did.
I mean, one of his skills was good listening.
He would sit at the Constitution while it was presiding from hours on end, but I believe he did talk to people in between the sessions, and he was certainly a prolific letter writer and quite witty in the letters.
Quite a good writer.
I was surprised.
And much of his business correspondence, as opposed to, like, say, the personal correspondence with Martha, which she burned when he passed, which was the custom of the day.
So that's not here for us, but the business correspondence is there.
And he, you know, he had a lot of friendly conversation there.
But, yes, he was a good listener.
And, in fact, he was the one.
This is not directly in the Constitution.
But he created the presidential cabinet with Jefferson and Hamilton, where he would sit there and listen and ask for their opinions.
And that's a tradition that, of course, still continues today.
Exactly.
Well, he was also the one that sort of gave, except until Roosevelt, he sort of gave the tradition of serving two terms and leaving and going back.
The whole process around Washington, though, leads us back to Mount Vernon.
It leads us back because he always...
From reading and what I've done on reading and studying and going to Mount Vernon and others, he always had this idea that home was his life.
That was his world, but when he would go out to serve, whether it be in the military or the president or others, it was always to come home to Mount Vernon.
Is that what you got in your research before we get into some of the business issues?
Very, very much so.
And, you know, he also sort of gave us the idea of the citizen legislator.
He gave up power twice, both when people tried to make him an emperor when he was victorious with the Revolutionary War, but he said, no, I'm going home.
And then he was sort of drafted to be president and went home from that.
But he really made Mount Vernon into a A show place and a place that, you know, was like what they might even call an incubator today in venture capital terms with so many business enterprises.
I appreciate you mentioned his giving up power.
When I was in Congress, I used to give tours, night tours, and we would always go into the rotunda and I always focused.
I said, all these other things are great.
I said, but to understand the greatness of America, you have to understand that one painting which showed Washington Giving back his power to the Continental Congress after the Revolutionary War and saying, I'm going home.
Because, and I tried especially when young folks from college, I used to do a lot of college tours at night, and I said, I want you to imagine that you're being given Basically complete power.
You could have done pretty much anything you wanted and instead you wanted to go home and you willingly gave up that power.
I said, there's very few in the world that would actually do that.
Yes, he set the example for that and other...
And other representative republics about that people should serve for a limited time.
It is wild.
Well, let's get into the book.
Let's get into the Washington.
Let's talk about, because there's so many things that were going on.
We'll just sort of jump in.
Where do you want to jump in?
Because I think this Private Business Institute and the things that he did with intellectual product, but also branding.
I mean, there was so much in your book.
Let's start unpacking it.
Where would you want to start?
I would just start what we talked about when he was 11. His father passed away.
He was a middle child in the sense that he had two older stepbrothers.
So he really, in those days, the oldest inherited the most.
So he didn't really inherit that much, as much as his older brothers.
He didn't, for instance, inherit Mount Vernon initially.
It was only when he was in his 30s and his brother and all of his brother's heirs, his brother's wife and daughter, unfortunately, they all passed within a few years that he was able to get Mount Vernon.
By that time, Washington had already built up a real estate speculator, But he started out as a surveyor, just surveying land.
And I got to talk to even modern day surveyors.
And despite the GPS equipment, some of the things as far as mapping and taking quality of the land are not much different.
But he built sort of a reputation as being one of the top surveyors in the colony of Virginia.
He surveyed what is now downtown Alexandria, as well as different, you know, What was then just land being developed as farmland in the Shenandoah Valley.
And that's where he sort of built up his reputation.
And he had been a surveyor, really had done, even though wasn't in commercial practice, had done surveys really the rest of his life, including periodically at Mount Vernon.
But also it gave him, you know, knowing the conditions of the battlefields and having a leg up of the British, what some of the land could do.
That really gave him some expertise, knowing land and then later, you know, knowing real estate.
Sometimes as a surveyor, he would get paid in parcels of land and he would build or he would buy the land.
Some of the land he was surveying which didn't have clear ownership and he sort of built up almost a real estate empire from that.
I mean, that's interesting to know because surveying is not somebody you just go out and, you know, doesn't have skills.
I mean, the math, you know, the thought, the process there that goes into that is pretty heavy coming from someone who didn't have that formal education.
We talked about it a few minutes ago, but that learning, you've got to have a mind that's pretty quick there.
Oh, there were several books on, and there was a previous book, Washington and Life in Books by Kevin Hayes.
That just painstakingly traces some of the books he read.
Now, he did have some education in mathematics as part of his tutoring, which we don't know that much about.
He did receive some formal education until he was about 13, so he read math books there, and he would continue reading about that, reading books by English agronomists, including one of whom was actually named Jethro Tull, And the namesake of the band, and he would read that about how to grow different things.
And then, of course, when he did inherit Mount Vernon and started out there being married to Martha, he saw that just the tobacco was not good for the soil, plus there were deals with British exports and the duties there, so he wanted more of a domestic market.
So over a couple of years, He converted it completely to wheat plus really diversified his crops and then the wheat became, he made a flour mill where he would actually brand his flour with the G. Washington brand like a hundred years before the famous American food manufacturers like H.J. Hines would do that.
So just amazing and pioneered in so many ways in business practices.
For the Doug Collins podcast listener, I mean, John, you've just left an amazing imprint for those of us who will now look at every Washington portrait or whatever and then see him in a Jethro Tull concert shirt.
Well, you know, the funny thing was, one of the things Jethro Tull wrote about was how to plant...
Plant hemp.
And so one of my sub-chapters was originally going to be called How Washington Learned About Hemp from Jethro Toll, and my editor thought better of it.
Yeah, they'll probably come back on that one.
Curious, before he gets to Mount Vernon, you know, he was surveying, he was doing the thing, of course, you know, intermixed with the military and all.
Where was he?
Was he basically still living near what is now Mount Vernon?
Or did he come from another, was he closer to DC, more of the Alexandria part of that?
Well, no, he wasn't born in Mount Vernon.
He grew up in, spent much of his boyhood in Fredericksburg, in what's now called, near Fredericksburg, near the Rappahannock River, in what's called Ferry Farm, which they have had to, his home had been gone for about 150 years there, and they only just recently He rebuilt the boyhood home.
But his older brother Lawrence, who did inherit Mount Vernon, sort of served as a mentor.
So when in his teenage years he came to Mount Vernon and sort of learned about sort of the, what was then the aristocratic And he was, in his surveying, he was actually, and in other things, he was mentored by the Fairfax family, namesakes of Fairfax County in Virginia, Lord Fairfax, and they actually took him up on some of the surveying expeditions.
So he sort of He had his foot in both worlds and he aspired and people saw what a good job he was doing his surveying and what a nice young man was that people did help him out and help him advance.
And then he was in the...
The French and Indian War, or the Seven Years' War, what you call different things, where the British were fighting the French over some of the then-Western lands, like lands in Ohio.
He lived partly in Mount Vernon, but some in his boyhood home in Fredericksburg, as well as really on the battlefield.
Exactly.
Now, that war was also where he had, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't that where he had his...
We'll call it near-death experience, life experience, that he sort of proclaimed or he talked about something that that was the point that God had a purpose in his life.
There was a story about that he should have died.
The guy was about to shoot him and the gun didn't go off.
That sort of made an impact in his life.
I'm not familiar with that particular story.
I know he's had several near-death experiences throughout his life, but I know we talked very much about providence throughout the life, and also I write about that he was sort of a part of his and his mother's religion where they would Contemplate God, like in a, it's been called meditation, like say in a table or things like that, or look at different objects and just use that to contemplate God's work.
Interesting.
And when he got back to Mount Vernon, Mount Vernon was not just simply a home place or a farm.
And you've alluded to this a little bit with some of the branding.
What were some of the...
When he got there and began to look at it in the meticulous...
One of the things that I was always fascinated by was the meticulous detail that he gave to the house and the buildings around it in itself.
And the planning of those.
And that was another sort of venture of his, wasn't it?
Yes.
I mean, he was quite the...
The architect, the mansion house is, I mentioned in the boyhood home, the boyhood home in Fredericksburg had to be rebuilt, but the mansion house at Mount Vernon is still, with the Italian piazza, things just so glamorous, is pretty much exactly as he had built it.
I mean, they've had some new paint jobs and things like that, and they've tried to, and also just Some of the things in the decoration, like the dining room with the, you know, sort of painted in green, just, he had a lot of say.
Martha too was a smart lady, but very much in designing Mount Vernon.
Some of the flower gardens, some of the espalier with the trees, which is sort of like the French bonsai where the trees are We're close together.
Everything he had, he had a lot of say.
I mean, he did a lot of it himself.
I mentioned the greenhouse, but he certainly had a lot of say.
Yeah, I've read articles, I've read stories about him in the middle of, that was sort of his relief, if it was to be writing back to Martha or writing back to the workers at Mount Vernon saying, okay, what is this doing?
How is this coming along?
And he had a very fine detail of precision as to what he wanted to see.
The longest letters when he was president, and he was still kind of like running an absentee when he was president, would say kind of exactly how high to build the fences, things like that.
And you could tell, I mean, he was enjoying it, just talking about, you know, just thinking about managing the farm and when he would go back there.
It is.
Explain some of the, because he had a variety of businesses.
He not only had the farm and the wheat, and I want to talk about that, the branding issue here in a little bit, But he also dabbled in some other things there that really sort of, I think, set the We can look at what have shaped his view of America as a free market economy in many ways.
What were some of the other things that he had going on at Mount Vernon?
Well, one of the things was the...
He's been known as the father of American mules because when he came back there after...
After the Revolutionary War, after leading the new American forces to victory, mules were very important and they were being used in Europe to pull the plow before they had mechanized plows and automobiles.
So he had gotten, he had heard about this from some of his European friends, like the Marquis de Lafayette, who had served with him during the war.
And he was able to get like a Spanish donkey, which he bred with his mares and start, you know, that was the genetic engineering of the day, that he would, you know, mules across between the donkey and horse.
And he would start, you know, breeding them and selling them to different farms and became, introduced mules in America and became really the first mule breeder in America.
He had a fishery where there were like hundreds of thousands of fish at one point with a giant, this is some of the ways he integrated his enterprises, a giant fish that, you know, made in part with Some of the hemp that he grew and he would catch from shad and herring several varieties of the fish and then he would use that Some of the fish guts that they couldn't,
you know, sell or couldn't eat for fertilizer mixed in with the fertilizer as far as his weed and other crops.
So the gristmill, as I said, he would brand that with the G. Washington signature.
And one of the things I found is that He was a Burgess, which was sort of a colonial representative, the equivalent of a state representative today, in the Virginia House of Burgesses.
When he was a Burgess, he created a law for anybody, if you met certain conditions for flower, that you could basically register a trademark.
I mean, this was before there was a U.S. government.
So any kind of, you know, like federal, the U.S. trademark law I don't think would come until 150 years later, but you could register that as a court with sort of like your unique branding mark, and it was open to anybody.
It wasn't like, you know, cronyism for himself, but as soon as that became law, he made that.
And he registered the G. Washington, sort of trademarked that, and was able to ship there through the colonies, you know, back to Great Britain and then at the British West Indies.
So he was a pioneer in branding, both in, you know, in policymaking and in...
In utilizing the practice.
And then when he came back, after he was president, on the advice of his Scottish farm manager and an Irish Catholic friend who had served under him in the war, John Fitzgerald, he built a whiskey distillery, which became one of the largest whiskey distilleries in the U.S., and now Mount Vernon has recently rebuilt.
Yeah, let's take this branding for a second.
Just think about that for a second.
How much ahead of his time...
Today, everybody wants to know the local grown sourcing, where it comes from and everything.
Just think about how much George Washington was ahead of his time in marketing, taking the G. Washington.
So we know it's coming from Mount Vernon.
We know it's coming from him.
And really, in a way, though, playing off of his own popularity.
I think so.
Well, it's very interesting as far as what...
That's a great point.
But it's very interesting what...
Led to his own popularity.
It's always been sort of a mystery about how all the members of the Continental Congress in, say, around 1775 chose him on the first ballot to become general.
You know, you didn't have mass communications.
You didn't know.
You know, you couldn't look up somebody on the internet.
Adams, he had Adams support, but how did Adams convince the others?
One of the things I was looking at what Adams That's about the only thing we have recorded.
Of all the other things, he mentions George Washington's service in the French and Indian War, but also says something about his independent fortune.
So it's sort of my theory, and I think more research needs to be done about that, that Washington building his reputation through the flower, which he would have done for about a few years, And people in other colonies becoming familiar with it,
becoming familiar with the fine quality and the G. Washington brand on it, got to know him that way and thought, you know, because he was able, because Adams specifically mentioned his independent fortune, was able to, I think his business acumen actually helped make his reputation and may have been in some ways responsible for him being chosen as general.
Wow.
Well, you know, but that seems to play out even to today.
I mean, it's the idea, well, if you can, you know, if you're a successful entrepreneur, you must be successful in other things as well because of what's going on.
But that is interesting to see because Adam's coming from a completely different background than...
You know, that era with Washington, but Washington branding it out as it comes.
You've brought up the distillery and this is an interesting, it's amazing how it was not until, and I have to be very open, it probably wasn't up until about 15, 20 years ago that I realized or had known that he had one of the largest distilleries in the country.
And not because I don't think I had never heard it but it was never emphasized in stories about George Washington.
Um, that is so true.
I mean, I didn't know it until really Mount Vernon rebuilt it, and that was, in fact, what gave me the interest in the first writing about Washington.
After I found out about that, I looked at his other businesses, and that was what gave me interest in writing about him.
But with Washington, the truth is just so much more interesting, I think, than the myth.
I mean, which is more interesting?
The story, the legend that's probably not true, that he...
Chopped down a cherry tree or that he built a greenhouse to plant orange and lemon trees or built a whiskey distillery.
So that's the thing and that was the motivation in writing it.
I wanted to get Washington, you know, make him show his greatness but show how he was relatable to entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs today and what we can learn from him.
Now, let's dig into the distillery for a second.
It is an unknown kind of quantity, and it brings this back.
I mean, we know about the flower, you know about the branding.
Did he carry over the branding into the distillery?
How did he get, I mean, you talked about a couple of his friends who talked him into it.
Sort of describe that, how it built up and how it went.
Well, it was actually after he was president, in the last two and a half years of his life.
He came back to Mount Vernon in 1797. Both times he came back, you know, he sort of needed to rebuild because there's only so much you can, I mean, if you're absent now from a piece of land that, you know, you might, you own, you might get some breakdown, but imagine, you know, doing it without what we're doing now as far as, you know, video chatting, other things.
Although we had competent farm managers, there's nothing like having, you know, the The owner back there.
So his farm manager, who was from Scotland, James Anderson, said, you know, that you're growing wheat.
You know, again, it was integrating products.
You know, you might want to try a whiskey distillery.
And Washington wrote to his friend, John Fitzgerald, who served as a, As a colonel right under him at war, as an aide-de-camp.
And then Fitzgerald himself, I write in the book, in George Washington Entrepreneur, was a successful entrepreneur, sold rum and many other types of merchandise in Alexandria.
He was also active in building the first Catholic Church in Virginia, which Washington I think there's strong evidence that Washington even helped out with, you know, gave money for the church, even though he wasn't, even though Washington wasn't Catholic.
So he wrote to Fitzgerald, which being from Ireland, he thought he might know something about whiskey, and Fitzgerald said, oh, it's a great idea.
So Washington built it, and now Mount Vernon has rebuilt it, and they actually sell some of his whiskey.
They have like an ABC license from Virginia to do that.
It's straight rye whiskey, and it became some of the top-selling whiskey in the country and I think pioneered a large-scale operation, which Jack Daniel and others may have learned from.
Yeah, because they would have been predating a lot of that.
The question was, so they did the distillery there on Mount Vernon itself, correct?
It is.
It's on Mount Vernon itself.
Now, what's interesting, when they rebuilt it on the same land, but it's adjoining the modern Mount Vernon, because Mount Vernon was actually five farms, and some of those were sold off, some of those...
Have houses on them today.
I know people who live on the original Mount Vernon land.
So the Mount Vernon that has been preserved by the Ladies League of Mount Vernon, by some ladies in the 1850s who didn't like it going into disrepair, which is itself a great entrepreneurial story, is like his main farm, the mansion house, and where he lived.
There were four other farms where that land is being utilized by other people.
But the whiskey distillery, they were able to get some of the original land.
But if you go there today, it's not connected to the main Mount Vernon house.
And you have to take a shuttle.
But it's still great that the Ladies League of Mount Vernon was able to do this.
And Mount Vernon, I've spoken there a couple of times, is a very entrepreneurial organization.
No government funding.
funding.
So I would encourage everyone to visit to visit there.
It is a neat place in that sense.
Now, in looking at that, you've hit on something that interests me, and I want to get back to the distillery in just a second.
As far as staying, you know, a lot of times we'll see these, you know, over the years, it stays within the family, but then moves out of the family, you know, or gets sold off.
How did that transition?
Because there was that time when Mount Vernon could have been lost forever.
It really was.
The family had a hard time keeping up with it.
And Washington...
He also had, you know, this is, I think in one of his other signs of, you know, just the nobility, he had freed all of his, all of the slaves that he owned in his will.
So they, you know, the family did not have, and Antasca's family was actually caring for a lot of them in their old age.
So that was, so they were, they had, you know, that sort of what was a financial disadvantage in the day and also just keeping up Mount Vernon because even then it was it was a shrine and people would come to visit it in Washington's own lifetime so a woman Mrs. Cunningham I believe Ann Pamela
Cunningham just saw it like on a Boat ride past Mount Vernon and it was in the 1850s and was falling into disrepair and she says if the men can't do this we will so she raised money she bought it from The Washington Air that was having it then.
And they just did an amazing job before there was any type of national park system.
I mean, it's just a private organization pioneering historical preservation.
And there are some great stories in the early Mount Vernon about how it was Thomas Edison personally Outfitted it with electricity.
Henry Ford visited with his wife and then gave them their first car.
So it has, you know, Washington himself was an entrepreneur and Mount Vernon has always, you know, been a magnet that has drawn entrepreneurs that have helped out and continued with its growth and its preservation.
Now, it's my understanding, I may be wrong, that Mount Vernon itself is still under this foundation.
It is not part of, or is it part of the National Park Service?
It is not.
That's what I thought.
The Ladies League of Mount Vernon still owns it.
It takes no government funding.
And that's probably why if you go out there, it is immaculately kept.
And it's really a really amazing kind of place to look at.
That is interesting to see how the people took that up, that cause up, and that true entrepreneurial spirit kept it going.
Back to the distillery for a minute, because I think it's fascinating to a lot of people who maybe listened to this podcast for the first time and didn't realize that this was a part of...
No, as close as they can, they are using the original recipes when practical.
I mean, there may be An ingredient that's not as available or they may put some things in to make it safer.
In fact, I know they probably do.
It's very safe.
So that's as safe as whiskey can be if you drink it, you know, moderately.
But they still basically use the same operation with the kind of, you know, With the water wheel that they used to power it.
It's right next to, they've also rebuilt the grist mill, the flour mill, and still make some flour there too.
But they basically used the water power with the water wheel.
That's why it was so important and Washington loved Mount Vernon so much that it was from the Potomac and they still have some of the French burr stones that he used for that.
I mean, they actually had archaeologists actually explore the land and find as much as they could of what was in the old distillery, which I believe was partly destroyed by a fire and rebuild from there.
How long was the original distillery operating after?
Because it was in the last, you said, couple of years of his life.
Did they operate it after his death?
I think like until the 18...
like around 1815 or 1820s, but...
Yeah, it was like about 20 years after his life, but then it just sort of went, you know, I think there was a fire and it went by the wayside.
Well, most people, again, if you've never been to Mount Vernon, you've only heard about it, what you just said about it being on the Potomac, it is literally on the Potomac.
And if you're flying in, if you're ever flying in and coming in, From what they call the Southern approach into National Airport, you get a chance, you can see it as you're coming up the pathway there, because the Potomac was so important to him with his livestock, the fishing, and everything else going on.
Now, all of the process, it's interesting to me, it's sort of intertwined.
The man, the entrepreneur, the business person, Now you have the league that keeps it up, is reinvesting that entrepreneurial spirit with the whiskey and the gristmill and the flour.
All of that goes back into keeping up the estate, correct?
Yes.
Yes, it does.
In fact, if you go to the Mount Vernon restaurant, you can get some of the...
You can get some, I believe, grits and other things that were in...
And some bread that is actually from, you have food that comes from the Mount Vernon farm.
So it's, you know, you could actually, you could literally, they literally serve it in the restaurant there.
And I believe they sell it to other places too.
So it's a working farm.
I mean, relies a lot on individual and business donations.
It's very entrepreneurial in part of the way it's, I don't know how philanthropic arm works, but it's very much an entrepreneurial self-sustaining organization that George Washington would be proud of.
Well, and I think that's the interesting thing, you know, is he made, you know, his fortune he gave to his country.
If you were to look at that entrepreneurial spirit, especially that trademarking and the other part there, He had a sense that what was inherently valuable was not only the work of the hand in the field, but also the making of the product, it, that thought process, you know, I think probably come from his engineering or his surveyor sort of mentality, that the thought process of what makes something work was very special to him, as you know,
whether it be a legislator wanting to keep that branding in the Constitution where we have, you know, for a whether it be a legislator wanting to keep that branding in the Constitution where we have, you know, for a certain amount of time, this is, you know, enshrined in I don't think he gets enough credit in many ways for being on the forefront of that.
Washington, I mean, inventors, um, uh, One of the things in my book is, and I quote professors like Deirdre McCloskey and others, inventors before America was created were sort of looked at as freaks and crackpots, and Washington helped create the atmosphere where inventors like Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were revered.
Washington went out of his way, both as president And private citizen to champion inventors.
When he was going to Western Virginia, what's now West Virginia, Shepherdstown, he met a gentleman named James Rumsey who was experimenting with boats and people thought he was a crackpot.
He actually championed Rumsey's mechanical boat and pushed for the Virginia.
There wasn't a federal government so there weren't federal patents at the time but he pushed for Virginia and Maryland to give Rumsey a state patent and Rumsey would later is considered the co-inventor of the steamboat and Robert Fulton would commercialize it just like Henry Ford did with a car 20 years later, which was a great achievement.
But Rumsey was actually one of the original inventors.
And under Washington's administration, when he signed the Patent Act, and I believe signed some patents himself, Rumsey and a guy named Cook were given the patent for the first steamboat.
So very much was, and he talked about the importance of having inventors here.
In fact, he was so, he welcomed, like, say, French balloonists, and he was so fascinated with the hot air balloon that could take up someone in the air for a short time.
He wrote that one day they might be coming from Paris by, quote, flying through the air instead of plowing the ocean.
So he could even see, like, before railroads were even invented, like, the potential of something like commercial air travel.
Wow. - Wow. - You know, it makes a difference.
And back then, if you look at a lot of the founding fathers, they were, you know, very, many were entrepreneurial.
Many were scholars.
I mean, you look at Jefferson, you look at Madison, you look at Adams, you look at many of these and the way they come about.
Jefferson, and I'm not sure if you may agree or not, Jefferson's similar in that Washington mode of entrepreneurial, you know, the attention to detail and others.
What do you think, and again, just as we look at President's Day, we talk about looking back at Lincoln and Washington and all these, but Washington in particular, having that, and we know that he had that interest in his home and business in Mount Vernon while he was president.
Do you think that the idea to him of what we have known today is becoming more of a government or an employee?
I don't want to say an employee, because I've been in Congress and been in others.
You go and you serve, you come home.
Would he be amazed today at how we basically have separated out our national leaders many times into what that's all that they do with many times no connection back to a business point?
I think he would, and I think he would be disappointed by that.
Yes, I mean a bunch of the founding fathers that, you know, certainly Jefferson.
Jefferson and Franklin are sort of known, I think, for some of their innovation and entrepreneurialism.
Washington is It's sort of seen as more of the face of the dollar.
People revere him, but can't always relate to him.
And that is why I wrote George Washington Entrepreneur.
But that's a characteristic of a lot of the founding fathers.
Patrick Henry had a successful farm and was sort of like the Alan Dershowitz of his day.
He would do everything in his law practice from tax cases to murder trials.
And then you had Robert Livingston, who I mentioned Fulton, was actually sort of like served as a Well, I think it is an interesting point of view because I think,
and it goes to today, as we look at this, John, I think the interesting thing for me is Our country, and this brings us to modern times a little bit as we talk about President's Day, we talk about George Washington, Ontario.
Is there a concern, and I'm not saying overwhelming concern, but for the first time in the last 20 years, 25 years, you've had honest, I'll call it honest discussion in government and other places of the role of the entrepreneur, the role of our, quote, free market economy and the government interaction and interdiction into that.
Our country was started on those principles.
Is there a concern today that we could look back, and hopefully you writing more about this would help, that it is that basis that really started and sustained our country for so long, and that by leaving it, we're leaving sort of the founding roots of who we are as a country?
I mean, it is a very strong concern.
I wrote this book to further show how, with Washington himself, we are rooted in entrepreneurship.
And Washington read Adam Smith.
And the more we are getting away from that, the more we're getting away from the country that Washington built.
I mean, built for everybody.
So I quote some of Washington's warnings, actually, in his farewell address, which is most known for what he said on Farron I don't think he would like some of the things where agencies could
act without authorization of law.
I know he wouldn't like it, so we need to very much Watch that, that agencies, you know, stick to their constitutional spheres and that they don't, you know, kill the entrepreneurship that, you know, started with George Washington.
One of the things that you just brought up that is so, you know, troubling to me is exactly, you know, in his farewell address, he talked about the administrative thing.
There's been two presidents who, in my mind, who have given final speeches, if you were, their final says to the country, that have been You know, predictive as much as they were pointed at the time.
And that was Washington's, of course, with the administrative state, with the growth of government, and it being, becoming unbalanced.
I do believe it is unbalanced.
As someone who served in Congress and saw it up close, I believe that we are, if there were, you know, it's supposed to be all sort of the equals, the thirds, you know, the Executive and judicial and legislative, and now I believe the executive unfortunately has pushed up, leading to this kind of bureaucratic state that we're in.
The other one is, of course, Eisenhower, who predicted the rise of the military-industrial complex, and we're seeing that today.
In getting back to our entrepreneurial roots, Seeing people like Washington, I think, don't you believe that in some ways this could be the new teaching of Washington in our schools instead of just the general and the first president and say, look, here's an entrepreneur who had a well-rounded life.
Very much so, and I hope it's very much.
I've actually talked about my book both with my niece and nephew and with some other kids, and they seem very interested.
They're budding entrepreneurs themselves, so...
Yes, definitely.
This is the picture of George Washington that we should teach.
The truth is, I can understand how the cherry tree may have, you know, showed that he was, you know, he was a good man, but this just, this shows also that he's a good man, but the real man and how both everyone from, you know, from kids to adults can sort of relate to his struggles and triumphs.
It is.
Well, I think, you know, there's this saying going around now, we see it in the Super Bowl, the old quote from fortune favors the bold.
I think that would be very much applicable to George Washington because he was outspoken.
He was bold.
He may not have been the Flashiest of the Founding Fathers, but he was the one that was taking, you know, measure.
And I think that quote you gave earlier about Adams and that personal wealth, if you would, really speaks to that in that he had a standing among his peers because of the non-singular focus of his life, but a rounded focus in his life.
Yes, yes.
And the idea that fortune favors the bold, which was recently in a cryptocurrency, This ad has actually been criticized by some leftist paternalists like Tim Noah at Slate who said, oh, this is terrible.
People will invest in cryptocurrency and they may lose some things.
I mean, isn't that better than people just do it spending?
I mean, you're talking about a couple hundred dollars and going to the casino.
So I have a whole blog at CEI.org about Actually, what Washington would have thought about cryptocurrency and why some of the properties wouldn't be that unfamiliar with him as far as encryption, which he used in invisible ink and ciphers with codes and keys and things like that, actually with his spies during the Revolutionary War.
So the founders would know.
They were smart guys.
They would know some things about encryption and about ledgers, and they also would be familiar with alternative money because one of the things in the colonies they used were Tobacco warehouse receipts were kind of circulated as money, so it's something.
They would know a lot sort of even about what seemed about the most sophisticated modern technologies here.
Who would have known it here on President's Day as we talk about this?
You know, Washington being the first techie, you know?
We look at it in a different way.
Again, though, as we sort of sum up here, if you were looking back and you were telling a group of, and let's just go high schoolers, because I believe right now our high schools are missing some of this historical basis for a lot of what our country is coming into.
And they said, What is the thing that you learned most about George Washington in writing this book?
What would it be?
The thing that I learned most was that he was more like us than you would think as far as having entrepreneurs and ambitions in his life and having disappointments.
He was a great man but also had some very relatable struggles And just, I think, in reading his writing, just how human he was, like, there was one thing, as I mentioned, people were going to Mount Vernon, and he talked about, and he wrote back to his farm manager that, you know, give everyone, you know, hospitality that they go there, but don't give them the fancy Madeira wine.
Give them the Clarat.
So I sort of wrote, you know, he would love today having, like, two-buck chalk.
So, he was thinking, you know, Of like, you know, how to just...
About the things, you know, about...
How to watch expenses and other things.
And I think if you see that, you know, from being, you know, human, right, then, you know, as great as he was, you know, nobody's a god.
And Washington certainly would believe that, you know, that he's, you know, only human and flawed and, you know, with staking, as he put it, providence, you know, for God all the time, that you can relate to him more and be in your life more like George Washington.
And use him as a mentor, not just how the country should be run, but how your life should be run.
I think such valuable lesson.
Tell our podcast listeners again the name of your book and where they can get it.
George Washington Entrepreneur.
Available in all the places you buy books.
Amazon, Barnes& Noble.
You can ask for it at your local bookstore, but just any book site should have it.
And then Ask for it at your local bookstore.
George Washington Entrepreneur, published by St. Martin's Press.
All right.
John Burlaw here with us today, talking on President's Day about our founding president, George Washington, but doing it from a different perspective, talking about the entrepreneurial interest of George Washington, which has really laid the foundation for so many things in our country, that if we ever get away from, then we, as the old biblical term, we become like every other nation, and I think we can't go away from...
That entrepreneurial, innovative spirit that was so prevalent in George Washington.
John, thank you for being with me today.
Congressman Collins, thank you so much for having me.
If people want to see some of my other work about cryptocurrency, financial regulation, the red tape on community banks, it's at cei.org is the website for the organization I work at, the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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