Michael Barone’s Mental Maps of the Founders reveals how Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 Albany Plan and "Join, or Die" cartoon overcame colonial divisions—Protestant New England, Catholic Maryland, Quaker Pennsylvania—while Washington’s surveying and westward focus shaped his military strategy, securing New York as a unity linchpin. Barone dismisses divine providence, crediting terrain and adaptability for the Revolution’s success despite Federalist-Democratic-Republican rifts, contrasting today’s polarized politics with the founders’ limited federalism to prevent ideological conflicts like 1850s sectionalism. He warns modern overreach risks instability, arguing the Constitution’s "light touch" remains the key to endurance. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everybody, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Michael Barone.
The other day I was reading a piece in The Economist called When the New York Times Lost Its Way.
It was by a former Times editorial page editor named James Bennett.
And Bennett writes of Times reporters, the reporter's creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, the exercise of a reporter's curiosity and empathy given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments.
Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy.
They have seen the principle of free speech used to protect right-wing outfits and are uneasy with it.
They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens' judgment confirmed by Trump's election and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts.
They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth.
They want to pursue social justice head-on.
The term objectivity to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cozying up to power.
Because of this, because this illiberal journalism has infected not just the New York Times, but I think almost our entire mainstream media, it's become more and more difficult to find straightforward information.
I mean, I depend on it and I know how difficult it is.
It's about five times harder than it was when I started doing this only about 10 years ago.
The idea that there are such things as facts, that it's good to know the facts before you form an opinion, and that if your opinion is in conflict with the facts, it's your opinion that should change.
Those are ideas that have gone out of date with a generation so certain that it knows the hard contours of moral truth that facts can't possibly get in the way of their narratives.
Well, Sylvester Stallone might say, evoke journalism is the disease, Michael Barone is the cure.
The man has more facts in his brain at any given moment than have appeared in the New York Times over the last 25 years.
He's not just the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.
He has been co-authoring the basic text on American politics, the almanac of American politics, since its first edition in 1972, which is like 50 years.
That book has been called The Definitive and Essential, Definitive and Essential for Anyone Writing Seriously About Campaigns in Congress.
He has this really interesting new book out, an idea that seems to come out of nowhere, but makes perfect sense once you start to read it.
It's called Mental Maps of the Founders.
I want to talk to him about that and about our current politics as well.
Michael, it's good to see you again.
How are you doing?
Oh, I'm doing very well.
Thank you.
Thanks for the introduction and the history behind it, if you will.
Well, you know, I have to say, the Mental Maps of the Founders, when I saw that, I thought that is a very strange title.
But once you get into it, it makes a lot of sense.
Can you explain what it is you're doing?
What is a mental map?
Well, we all have mental maps in our heads of where we live and how to get to grandmother's house, how to get to the shopping mall and which entrance makes more sense and so forth.
Some people's mental maps are very elaborate and up-to-date and accurate.
Other people's just consist of one freeway exit and that's about all they know.
But the fact is, we have a sense of our orientation.
Animals have it, for goodness sakes.
But the way I approached this book was that I've read a lot about the founding fathers over the years.
And there have been wonderful books over the last 20 years by academic historians, by non-academic historians, people that are writing as amateurs.
And as my friend Luke Cannon, the Reagan biographer, great reporter, once told me, if you want to really learn about a subject, write a book about it.
So I thought, what could I write about the Founding Fathers as a journalist, as an amateur, and as a person fascinated by maps?
I thought, well, what was the geographic orientation of the founders?
They were operating in a time in North America where you didn't have accurate maps of North America, where the land beyond the Appalachian chains was terra incognita, only very vaguely mapped.
And they didn't have a concept from the start of the revolution of what kind of a country this would be.
When they voted for independence, it wasn't clear what the outlines of the country would be if they were successful.
It wasn't clear that they'd be successful and so forth.
So I decided to write this book and to look at six of the founders, as it turned out, and write essays on each of them and their geographic orientations.
And I think their different orientations helps to explain their actions during their lifetime.
It helped explain how they were united in the quest for independence.
It also helps to explain some of the very great differences between the founding fathers that emerged during the early Republic and after the first Constitution went into effect and the first president was inaugurated in April 30th, 1789.
So I looked at all these factors and the result is this little book.
I hope it's kind of easy and fun for people to read, but I hope that it also can provide some insights and had some very nice words written about it by, among others, Gordon Wood, who's really one of the last living of the great generation of academic historians of the Revolution and the early Republic.
So, you know, I want to talk about some of the specific founding fathers and their specific mental maps.
But before we do, in a general sense, one of the most, to me, one of the most amazing things about the founding is that the country had, didn't have, the population was small.
It was like 4 million people.
It was like half of New York City.
And yet this collection of men came together.
It's almost unbelievable.
I mean, the intelligence, the integrity, the character of these guys, they seem to come out of nowhere.
And in the book, you sort of say that you reject the idea that this is divine providence, which has always been my theory, but you reject that idea.
Did the terrain of the country have something to do with that, do you think?
Well, I think the terrain of the country had something to do with that.
The cultural variety of the country had something to with it.
I don't say I reject the idea of divine providence.
I don't accept it.
It's just something that I don't believe in.
And if you read the speeches by George Washington as he's contemplating retirement from the presidency and setting an amazing precedent by doing so, he talks about it as a possibility that may occur to some of his fellow citizens, and he doesn't really endorse it or not.
But this is a man who had appeared very prominently on bullet-strewn battlefields, had bullets shot through his cloak, and maybe he thought that or hoped that divine providence was helping to see him through some very difficult situations.
One of the things that emerges from this book, it seems, is to me is that in the first chapter on Benjamin Franklin, Franklin was one of the first people that saw the colonies as a unit.
In fact, they were all different colonies.
To the extent that they were concerned about the outside world, they were perceiving their goal as being their connections with England rather than their connections with each other.
And they were culturally diverse.
I mean, you hear today people saying, well, the United States, for the first time, is culturally diverse.
We used to just be all whitebred people and so forth.
That's a nonsense view.
I mean, you could read the great history book, Albion Seed, by the historian David Eckett Fisher, published three decades ago.
But the founders didn't need Albion Seed to know that the colonies were different and had cultural diversity.
They came from a background where the great wars of the preceding centuries in Europe were fought as religious wars, wars between people with different religious beliefs.
And what were the colonies?
The colonies, New England colonies were founded by Protestant Calvinists.
Virginia Carolina was founded by Protestant Anglicans.
Maryland was founded by a Catholic.
Pennsylvania founded by a Quaker.
New York, which founded by Dutch Reform, had all manner of people and vied with Newport, Rhode Island and Charleston, South Carolina to be the first colony with significant Jewish population.
So they were already diverse.
And it was Benjamin Franklin that suggested when the British colonies seemed to be facing an aggressive war from the French operating from Quebec to the north and invading the Ohio Valley.
Benjamin Franklin says, we must unite or die.
We must act together as colonies.
And he promotes this Albany Plan of Union at an Albany conference with the Iroquois, who were allies of the British colonists in New York.
He also publishes one of the first political cartoons showing a snake wobbling through, and it's cut up into pieces with the initials indicating the names of the different colonies from south to north.
And the key line on the caption on the cartoon is unite or die.
That was a new idea.
That was a mental map.
And it was fostered in part because Benjamin Franklin was one of the few colonists who had ties with multiple companies.
He published For Richards Almanac, which sold all up and down the Atlantic coast and even in the West Indies in British colonies.
He franchised printing operations in different cities where he got a cut of the profits, became quite a rich man, retired at age 42 with enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his life.
So Franklin is originating an idea, and the founders dealt in different ways with this cultural Cultural variety and with a unity of colonies that wasn't at all clear geographically.
When you look at the map up and down the Atlantic coast, they just had very different geographies and different economies and different religious bases.
You know, let's talk about George Washington a little bit.
You know, sometimes I find myself walking on Washington Street in Georgetown looking at the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., and I'm struck by the incredible imprint this one man left on the consciousness of the country, how much of what he did became the model for what we do, how for so many years until only recently, he was kind of the person you turn to to say, you know, what is an American?
What does an American look like?
And he was in a lot of different ways a man of the land.
He was a surveyor.
He was a genuine farmer, a guy who really cared about his farm.
What mental map made him, what was in his head that made him the kind of person he was?
Well, I think his mental map goes back to his teen years.
Remember that George Washington was not from one of the richest of the Virginia planter families.
He was from his father's second marriage.
His half-brothers from the first marriage were educated in England.
Washington's father died when he was 11 years old.
There was no money left for him to be educated in England.
And he set out to become a surveyor.
He learned about surveying.
He learned about geography.
And he became a surveyor for Lord Fairfax.
Now, Lord Fairfax was the only British member of the House of Lords who actually settled in North America.
He had prosecuted an 11-year lawsuit in London to certify his grant of land.
It was sort of an ancient grant, which he had cobbled together, of all the land in what is now northern Virginia and West Virginia between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers from Chesapeake Bay to the source of the rivers in the Appalachian Mountains.
Nobody knew exactly where those rivers were sourced and so forth.
So Washington is hired at age 16 to work with one of Fairfax's, Lord Fairfax's nephews, to go surveying in the mountains and go west of the Blue Ridge.
And that's his basic orientation, I think.
North by Northwest, I call cribbing from the movie title.
But he's going up the Potomac River.
And his experience as a surveyor enables him to buy his first land in the Shenandoah Valley at age 18.
He ultimately amassed about 50,000 acres of land that he owned.
He planned all these land holdings to go up the Potomac River.
He saw the Potomac River as an avenue into the vast North American continent.
And he was sent at age 21 by the Virginia House of Burgesses, which knew about his experience surveying, to go stop the French from moving into the forks of the Ohio, the spot where the Allegheny and Mononcahila rivers join to form the Ohio River, the heart of Pittsburgh today, of course.
Washington's Strategic Vision00:05:58
And Washington does that.
He's not successful.
The French want to keep coming.
Militarily, he's not successful, but he goes up and explores this territory.
He gets within 15 miles of Lake Erie, as a matter of fact, covering a lot of territory that would tire many of us out if we had to drive it on the interstate roads.
Washington is going in the winter, landing in the Allegheny River with ice flows around him and so forth.
He's going in a pretty tough time, but he knows the geography.
Ultimately, the French are defeated, and Washington has gained that military experience, which then makes him the obvious choice to become commander of the Continental Army when the Second Continental Congress is considering that question.
He's nominated by John Adams of Massachusetts.
Washington continues to prosecute this.
He promotes a canal after his retirement as a general and then as president, paralleling the Potomac River.
Some of that canal was eventually built, and you can hike along the Canal towpath.
He contemplated the idea.
And I think he envisaged something like industrial America.
One of his journals, when he's going northwest across the various Appalachian ridges, he makes a note.
He says, you know, they have excellent coal here.
Well, coal, of course, is one of the great ingredients of the Industrial Revolution, of Pittsburgh and steel making and so forth.
And in less than a century after Washington is trudging through this wilderness, you have the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, which provides the military sinews of victory for the Union and the Civil War, and then for America as the arsenal of democracy in the 20th century.
So Washington foresees this kind of America.
He's not very enamored of the southern slave societies, and particularly when he eventually goes to South Carolina as president and sees these territories that were, you know, where 90% of the people living there were slaves.
He doesn't care for this at all.
And of course, he makes an effort by writing out his will by hand to free his slaves.
And at a time when he knew, as a general who had resigned his commission, as a president who had declined to seek a third term, that he was setting precedents for the rest of the nation.
I think he was trying to set a precedent on slavery as well.
Do you think that his sense of the greater land, that he was actually out there, as you say, surveying it and fighting in it?
Do you think that that contributed to his strategy to just avoid the British through most of the war, the stuff that drove John Adams crazy when he didn't engage with them but let them sort of burn themselves out?
Well, he was, I think there was a military strategy and a political strategy by his course of action during the war.
As an experienced surveyor, he was a pretty good judge of terrain, and his judgment on that improves during the Revolutionary War.
He has some problems in New York City.
As you know, he gets thrown out of Brooklyn.
He evacuates to Manhattan, and then he's fortunate to get out of Manhattan because the British Army is there in large numbers, fortified by a huge flotilla of the Royal Navy.
But he continues to try to surround New York.
And if you look at where his winter encampments are, they're in New Jersey.
He occasionally goes to Connecticut.
When the British occupy Philadelphia for one year, he's outside Philadelphia at Valley Forge.
But he's trying to make a connection between New England, which was fiercely revolutionary and from which the British had basically evacuated, except for one port in Newport, Rhode Island, and the lower colonies of his own native Virginia, Maryland, and the Chesapeake and Pennsylvania, where you had support for the revolution.
He wanted to, New York was the key, I think, for him.
He wanted to, he was constantly trying to reconquer New York because geographically, it was a connection between New England and the Chesapeake colonies.
Without New York, you don't really have a geographically united nation to emerge after the war.
And so it's only with great difficulty that the French are able to persuade him that, hey, this time we're really going to provide a navy in the Chesapeake Bay to surround the British soldiers that are on their southern trip, their southern strategy.
And we need you to go down and bring the American troops down to the Chesapeake in Yorktown.
It turns out it works.
But one of the things that's recorded is that when Washington first gets down there and sees the French Navy outside there, he literally jumps for joy.
And this guy who we think of as a very prim sort of person with those clenched teeth and that kind of frown on his face really is literally transported because he sees a victory at hand that was, from his point of view, anything but inevitable.
But his strategy was to keep the colonies together.
And so he has to learn a lot of the geography of New Jersey.
Federal Government's Limited Powers00:12:07
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Today, how do you spell today?
Well, actually, how do you spell Clavin today?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No idea how you spell today.
I want to move on a little bit.
We're talking to Michael Barone about his book called The Mental Map of the Founders, Mental Maps of the Founders.
I want to move on to today's politics a little bit because you've always been such an insightful observer.
Is there something, before we get into detail, is there something about our terrain today, our sense that the frontier is gone, that there's no place to go, that this is basically what we are and we're not going anywhere.
Is that having an effect on our politics, the old kind of idea that we have run out of the America that we had in the beginning?
Well, I think, you know, that sort of feeling of all the exciting things are over and we're in decline now.
That's a tune that's been hummed and sung to by many of the can we call them musical chroniclers of American life over the years.
You know, if you're looking, you know, Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 1850s says, oh, my people have been in New England for 200 years and it's on the downturn once again.
Decline is a constant fear of Americans.
And perhaps that's in part because we've had a rise.
I mean, you know, we've gone from the three plus million people that fought the Revolution or fought, sometimes fought each other during the Revolution in some cases, to 333 million.
And we're also grappling, as the founders did during the Revolution, with the cultural variety that I talked about earlier.
One of the things that strikes me is that when you look at the Constitution, when you look at what J. Lee Republic, that James Madison in particular, was trying to set up, though not all the decisions of the Constitutional Convention went his way, and that Madison and Alexander Hamilton defend successfully in the Federalist Papers,
persuading New York to ratify the Constitution and having an effect on other states as well to having that effect.
One of their formulas that they have is a light touch.
We have a federal government that still has room for the states.
These founders, whose own history of the preceding century and more that had come down to them was a history of religious wars and religious antipathies, write a First Amendment saying that Congress shall pass no law regarding an establishment of religion.
You had established religions all over Europe and in the British Isles.
They say the federal government's not going to do that because, hey, we've got so many religions already.
We're not going to get into an argument about which one gets government money.
But also no law regarding an establishment.
And what that meant at that time was that states could have a religious established church if they wanted to or not.
Connecticut and Massachusetts retained their established churches till 1818 and 1833.
Madison, meanwhile, and Jefferson in the 1780s were busy disestablishing the Anglican Church in Virginia, which they very strongly believed in.
And what they say in the First Amendment is Congress is not going to affect that one way or the other.
Congress isn't going to tell Massachusetts what to do and not going to tell Virginia what to do.
It's not going to tell Americans what to do about religion because we're going to have a federal government with limited powers and a government that's not going to try to make dictates of cultural variety.
And I think one of the problems that we face in the 21st century and that we faced in the 20th century as well is that as the federal government's powers have been increased in a variety of ways, constitutionally and just in practical terms, you know, we've had military drafts during the World Wars as well as the Civil War and so forth.
You have questions arise about how you deal with this cultural variety.
And this can promote discord.
The founders certainly, the founders hated the idea of political parties.
And when the federal government gets formed in 1789 under the Constitution, they almost immediately start creating political parties.
And they did so, well, there were very serious reasons to do so.
You had serious proposals on finance on setting up national debt, the national bank, that were proposed by our youngest Secretary of the Treasury ever, Alexander Hamilton, and were adopted by President Washington and endorsed by him and adopted by the Congress in large part against the opposition of his Federalist co-author James Madison.
And you had the question, you had a war, a world war from 1793 to 1815 with only slight pauses between revolutionary France and maritime Britain, France, our wartime ally, Britain, our leading commercial partner by far.
And there were going to be principal differences about that.
That was a very different issue.
I think one of the things that's sort of amazing about the early Republic is that it stayed together.
When you had very substantial numbers favored Britain, substantial numbers favored France, that owes a lot to the leadership of George Washington.
It owes a lot to the fact that he, though he never claimed to be a great intellectual, and he bemoaned the fact that he was not as educated as some of the other founders, nonetheless chose men of the very high talents like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson to be in his same cabinet, to be Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State,
and kept them there for years despite the very serious differences that they had.
That's a pretty amazing performance when you think about it.
And, you know, we do, I do sometimes think that, gee, the 3 million people in the early republic produced leaders of that ilk, and the 333 million Americans of today are producing leaders who, in the opinion of many, are at least somewhat deficient in those talents.
That's politely put.
I'm almost out of time.
I would love to hear what you think that this moment, which seems like to me a moment of tremendous transition, where parties that stood in one place now stand in the opposite place, brands are disappearing.
If you were to look ahead 100 years, what do you think the entry, and again, I've only got a couple of minutes left, but what do you think the entry in the textbook of American history is going to say about this moment?
I think it's going to say that we had some unusual mess-ups, but it was nothing like the 1850s that produced the Civil War of the 1860s and produced a death toll of,
what, 600,000 people at that time, which is the equivalent of something like, I don't know, three to four million people today, if you can imagine, three to four million Americans being killed in battle in a civil war.
They will say that we've had our periods of eruption in history and some very distinct, you know, and that we've had a difference in quality of leaders at different times.
That, you know, the Constitution guarantees us a democratic result.
It doesn't guarantee us a good result.
I sometimes say, according to what your earlier introduction said, the Constitution guarantees us a free press, not a fair one.
But it's going to be perhaps a time of troubles.
And I think it's going to be one that perhaps will persuade later groups of Americans that the Constitution's creation of a federal republic with a sort of light touch central government was a pretty good idea.
And if we stray a long way from that without good reason, we pay a price for it.
And that we have periods where we get extraordinarily good leaders and periods where we get, I won't say exactly the opposite, but those whose talents are perhaps not as great and that we seem to be going in the 2010s and 2020s in that latter direction.
I still think that we'll have a United States of America.
We'll have operating under the Constitution misinterpreted here and there, perhaps, and that we'll probably still have Democratic and Republican parties, though the oldest and third oldest parties in the world, but they may look a little different from the way they look today.
Well, that's a reassuring assessment, especially coming from someone who knows as much as you do.
Michael Barone, the name of the book is Mental Maps of the Founders, a genuinely different and original look at the founders.
Michael, thanks.
It's really good to see you again, and I appreciate the conversation.
Thanks.
Well, thank you very much, Andrew, for having me.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Good to know we may still be here in 100 years.
We will be back next Friday with the Clavin Christmas special.