Meaning of the Declaration's Three Ideas

This week, Nick Gillespie sits down at the U.S. Supreme Court with Justice Neil Gorsuch to discuss his new children's book, Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence, co-authored with Janie Nitze.

Gorsuch and Gillespie examine why the United States is a creedal nation built on shared ideas rather than ethnicity or religion, and why those ideas require constant effort and courage to sustain. They discuss originalism, equal justice under law, the risks of government overreach, and the growing complexity of federal and state regulation.

Finally, Gorsuch considers what it will take for the American experiment to endure another 250 years, from learning history to cultivating the courage needed to defend freedom.

 

0:00—America's 250th anniversary

3:24—Unsung heroes of 1776

4:43—Why America is not an ethnostate

8:00—Originalism and equal justice under the law

11:29—Is America a libertarian project?

13:33—What constitutes government overreach?

14:31—Does America have too many laws?

21:41—Federal bureaucracies and state legislatures

24:03—Political polarization and the judiciary

30:54—What will allow America to have another 250 years?

34:06—How can younger people cultivate courage?

 

Producers: Paul Alexander & Natalie Dowzicky

Director of Photography: Kevin Alexander

Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

 

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Transcript

This transcript has been edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. My guest today is Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court and co-author with Janie Nitze of the new children's book, Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence. 

Justice Gorsuch, thanks for talking to Reason

Justice Neil Gorsuch: Oh, delighted to be here. Thank you.

Let's start with Heroes of 1776, which is in time for the upcoming 250 anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The book is about ordinary men, women, and children doing something totally extraordinary, which is overthrowing a repressive and distant government in the name of freedom and liberty. What's the main lesson that you think America needs to be thinking about as we celebrate our 250th birthday?

Well, I know we're going to have a lot of fireworks, and there are going to be some good barbecues and parades, but I hope maybe we take a moment too to reflect on the gift we've been given and the challenge we face. And what I mean by that is the Declaration of Independence had three great ideas in it. That all of us are equal, that each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not government, and that we have the right to rule ourselves.

Our nation is not founded on a religion. It's not based on a common culture even, or heritage. It's based on those ideas. We're a creedal nation. And I hope we take a moment to reflect on that and to recommit ourselves to that. One more thing, one more thing. The courage it takes to defend those ideas. They were not inevitable. And the stories of the men, women, and children in the book, I hope will inspire children to realize the courage it takes to carry those ideas forward in their own time.

Talk a little bit about that lack of inevitability, because the way American history gets done, especially to kids, it's like, "Well, this happened, then this happened, and, of course, here we are." How do you focus on the idea that this wasn't inevitable?

Well, there are a bunch of things in the book we point to. A couple I'll start with. One, those three ideas, we point out what was Europe like at the time. It was monarchies. The notion that all people are created equal? No, there are kings and serfs. The notion that you have rights from God, from your creator? No, everything came from government. And self-rule certainly was a very dangerous proposition in the world of the declaration, right?

You're right. We take it as the air we breathe. Fish in the water don't even realize. But those things were dangerous and inevitable, and they were traitors for declaring them. The British said that Americans had declared for themselves an alienable right to talk nonsense. And we walked through how the vote originally wasn't going to go through unanimously-

So this is at the Continental Congress—

At the Continental Congress—-

—and they're deciding we can be brave, we can kind of fudge it or whatever.

So there was huge debate over it. And you have to remember, only about 40% of colonists actually supported the Patriot cause. Another 20, 30% were Loyalists. And a whole bunch of people were undecided, right? Much as our own age. They were divided, right? 

Right.

People were divided. So there was nothing inevitable about it. Absolutely nothing.

And you talk about a couple of people, and maybe you can tell a story or two who actually either changed their vote or were like, "Okay, I'm going to change because this cause makes sense."

There are two fun stories in the book about that. One is Caesar Rodney. So the Delaware delegation was tied. They couldn't vote definitively. So Caesar Rodney was called back from… He was on military service in Delaware. He rode 80 miles through the night in a thunderstorm, suffering cancer of his face. John Adams called him the oddest man he'd ever seen. He could have gone to Britain for a cure, but he was too much of a patriot. He wanted to stick around, and he broke Delaware's tied vote.

Another man, Edward Rutledge, South Carolina. He had voted against independence on July 1st, the first time they voted. When the resolution was first introduced in June, they couldn't agree on whether to even proceed on it. So they tabled it for weeks. They brought it to a vote on July 1st and Rutledge voted against it. And, again, the delegates were divided. He though that night said, "I'd like to take the vote again the next day." And he realized that it was more important that we stand united in whatever decision we made than for his own personal views to prevail. He changed his vote.

When you say we are a creedal nation, it's not the product of a particular religion. A lot of people in contemporary America today say, "No, that's wrong." And, in fact, there's a lot of politicians and a lot of people, influencers or people in the press who say, "No, actually all of the people who signed the declaration were of a very specific kind of ethnic stock." With one exception, we'll get into him in a second, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who's the only Catholic signer, they're all Protestants. How do you respond to people who say, "You're full of it." It's like they were all Scots, Irish and English, basically. So this is an ethno-state of some meaning.

Well, I would say I'd push back on that. There's no doubt that the Revolution, the Constitution and our country have always had challenges living up to the declaration. I think of the declaration as sort of our mission statement. The Constitution, our how-to manual. But look at the mission statement. The mission statement is all of us are equal, that we all have an inalienable rights, and that we have the right to self-rule. Those ideas are perfect ideas. They exclude no one.

Now, have we had to work on realizing them? We talk about this in the book, of course, but we could point to that mission statement. Lincoln in the Civil War was able to say, "How can you possibly justify slavery when you say all men are created equal?" The women in Seneca Falls during the suffrage movement said, "You're absolutely right. All men are created equal, women as well." Martin Luther King before Lincoln's memorial in 1963 called the declaration a promissory note that had come due. And those ideas—

How do you live with how long it takes? I mean, because Seneca Falls is what, 1848, I think. Arguably, the civil rights movement doesn't end until 1965. How do you live in that moment where it's like it's beautiful language, but the reality just isn't there?

I don't think the civil rights movement ended in 1965. I think we've been in a civil rights movement since 1776. And I think one way for me to think about it is we call this the semiquincentennial. What does that actually mean?

I have no idea.

Exactly, right? It means halfway to 500.

Right.

It's a journey, right?

Yeah.

And those ideas are not self-perpetuating. They're not inevitable. The torch passes to each new generation. You got to grab the baton. It can be dropped.

What is the next big expansion of rights that currently we're like, "Well, rights for Blacks and women, yeah, but not for what?" And I mean, you've even ruled on certain things, right?

I've ruled on lots of things.

So what is the next frontier?

I think that's part of the challenge of the book is to the kids at the end. I've got a little message to them saying, "That's for you. You decide. You have this mission statement, right? Make it real in your time."

This may seem like an odd follow-up, but let's talk a little bit about originalism, which is the judicial philosophy that you kind of follow. And the Declaration of Independence, it's not a law per se in the way that some of the things that come before you on the Supreme Court are, but how do you stay true to the text or the meaning of the declaration without them just saying, "Okay, you know what? Everybody, I can just assert rights and say, 'Well, it's in the declaration, and if I have the right number of guns or the right number of votes, I can just make that happen.'" How do you anchor an understanding of the American project in a text and a particular time?

So if you think again of the declaration as kind of our mission statement or ideals, and the Constitution is the how to manual, right? Well, the Constitution is all about dividing power, isn't it? Madison realized men are not angels and that their aspirations for power need to be checked and checked and checked again. And so, how do we set up our system of government? Three branches, and that's just at the federal level. That's horizontally, separated vertically too. States have powers, and the people have powers that are reserved to them as well.

So what's my role in it? My role is as a judge, right? Judge is an important role, but a modest station at the end of the day. My role's not to make war. I'm not the commander-in-chief. My role is not to make the laws. They do that across the street in Congress. My job is to make sure that anybody who comes to court in a dispute has equal justice under law. That is to say the rich and the poor, as our judicial oath says, come to us equally. So you may be very unpopular, but if you have a good winning legal argument, that's my job to vindicate it.

And that legal argument is bounded by what's actually on the page, and then like an understanding of you try….Is it getting into the heads of the people who pass the legislation, or how do you know you're not just projecting your fantasy onto a particular law?

So I forgot the first part of your question about originalism. I'm sorry, but I'm kind of getting to it oddly enough which is, okay, once you realize what your goal is, not to make law and certainly not to change the Constitution, we, the people, do that through the amendment process. You've got an important job, but it's a modest job. How do you go about doing that? And for me, not for everybody, but the way I see it is my job is to apply the law as a reasonable person would have understood it at the time it was enacted. And that way I'm making sure I'm not projecting my hopes and dreams onto the legal text. The text was passed with bicameralism and presentment across the street or through the amendment process and the Constitution itself. And if I start changing with that and tinkering with that or evolving it, if you will, based on what I like, who elected me to do that?

Right.

That's not my job.

Well, you're appointed, right? And you get a life appointment to-

But to do a job, and the job is not to be a philosopher king. It's not to assert Congress's role. It's certainly not to assert the amendment process of the Constitution. It's to ensure that the people who come before me get the promises of the Constitution and the laws. That's it. That's my job.

Are there limits to, you say, okay, there's the federal government, there's state governments, and then there's the rights of the people. How do you decide, okay, well, the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction here, but then maybe the states do or when do the people? How do you make that distinction?

I guess I'm particularly interested in unenumerated rights that reside with the people, because it's not so good, right? If like the federal government says, "Okay, we can't do this." But then a state government says, "We can ban this, or we can force you to worship the way that you want." How do you know what, at the end of the day, is America a libertarian project more than a conservative or liberal project?

I think it is a very tolerant project, right? I mean, look at the First Amendment. You have a right to speak and worship freely. Those ideas were not, again, inevitable. They were not popular in a lot of Europe. They're popular much today.

Yeah, less and lesser, if you ask me.

That worries me. But it's a tolerant idea. It's an idea that you have a right to make your way and your life and pursue happiness and so do I. And we can do that together. And so when I'm asking, "Hey, what rights can government not touch?" The Bill of Rights is your starting place. That's absolutely your starting place. And most of the things we care about are there. I mean, look at what the First Amendment covers. The press, the right to petition your government for grievances, the right to assemble. 

Right.

And that's a very important right if you think about it. What's the point of a right to speak if you can't…

But it also, it took about a hundred years for those, for the states to be bound by that, right?

Yeah. The 14th Amendment effectively did that. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And one can argue about whether it did it through the Due Process Clause or the Privileges and Immunities Clause, but we'd all agree it did that.

Yeah. So then with something like, do states have a right to ban alcohol? And so as an individual, I don't get to consume alcohol if I live in a state that has voted not to. In the end, how do we know when a government at any level has gone too far?

Well, I'm not going to get into things that might come before me, but I will tell you on alcohol, if you told the framers that they couldn't drink, they would have had something to say about it.

They would have really revolted.

They might very well… I mean, they threw all the tea into Boston Harbor. I don't know what they would have done if you told them… At the end of the Constitutional Convention as George Washington is being sent off, there's a party held and 56 men gathered in a tavern, and the list of alcohol, their consumption… I mean, it was 50 bottles of Madeira and port.

It's like Led Zeppelin times a thousand.

It was epic.

Yeah. With Janie Nitze, you previously authored a couple of books, but including one called Over Ruled, which was explicitly about how there are just too many laws in America, like governing people's behavior. How do we know when… Follow through with that a little bit.

Sure.

When is a law… It just shouldn't be there.

Can I start with an ode to Janie and Chris Ellison as well, if I might indulge them?

Yeah.

Thank you. Janie is one of the most wonderful human beings I know. She's not only an incredibly talented lawyer, she clerked for both me and for Justice Sotomayor. She's also started a preschool, okay? I mean, this is just a remarkable, remarkable human being. And Chris Ellison, he should win a prize for this artwork. He managed to bring people to life with a historical sensitivity, but yet very vivid and real, and it's just been a joy to work with them. All right, to answer your question, why did Janie and I write Over Ruled?

Yeah.

We can't live without law. You and I, our rights would be endangered without law. It would be in the state of nature. We couldn't live with any assurance of our security, but there's also such thing as too much law. There really is a golden mean, right? When we speak of the rule of law, what do we mean? We certainly don't mean just rule by law, right? Nazi Germany had a whole lot of laws. Okay, so it can't be that. There's got to be a golden mean to this operation.

Madison talked about it at the beginning of the country, and he said, "The thing I fear most is a proliferation of law." That's why they made the lawmaking process so hard. We complain about it today. "Congress doesn't do anything," right? That was by design because every law is a restriction on your liberty. Now why do I say we have too much law? I've been a judge for over 20 years now, and I've just seen too many cases in which ordinary people who intending no harm to anyone just get swallowed up.

Can you give a specific example?

The book is a book of examples. It's a book of stories and people we knew, we interviewed, talked to. Let me give you one. This will take a minute. All right? John and Sandra Yates, he's a fisherman, okay? Commercial fisherman down in Florida. And one day he's out for red grouper and alongside comes a state wildlife official who's cross deputized with NOAA, the National Oceanic blah blah blah, the administration. And he says, "I see some of the red grouper hanging there look a little too small. Can I measure them?"

And John says, "Well, I've been out for weeks. I've got thousands of them." He says, "I have all day." And he spends all day measuring each of John's red grouper. And the limit at the time is 20 inches, 20 inches. And he says, "You have 72 red groupers that are slightly below 20 inches." And now John disputes the measurements because he says, "This guy doesn't know red grouper from…" He says, "You're missing the jaw." But any rate, fine. He says, "See me when you come back to the dock."

Comes back to the dock. The guy does it again, and this time he finds 69 red grouper and he's suspicious, suspicious. "Why are there 69 rather than 72?" John hears nothing for years, nothing. Then one day federal agents surround his home with weapons, the whole body, the whole thing, and arrest him. Okay, what do they arrest him for? You ever heard of the Sarbanes Oxley Act?

Yeah, sure.

Okay. It was drafted after the Enron and Arthur Andersen…

Yeah, the tech bubble burst, and it expiated all the sins of a hot stock market in the '90s.

And among other things, this is don't shred documents, don't destroy documents and other tangible objects when you know you're subject to a federal investigation because that was what Arthur Andersen allegedly did. He gets charged with violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and faces 20 years in prison. Now, what does that have to do with red grouper? You might be asking that. You just might be asking that right now.

Well, the answer is, the theory is that John threw the 72 red grouper overboard and replaced them, was still undersized 69. So he destroyed a tangible object is the government's theory. This case, I won't belabor all the details. It goes on for years. By the time they bring the prosecution, the size limit for a red grouper is 18 inches. John winds up spending Christmas in prison. He loses his commercial fisherman's license. His livelihood is destroyed. Okay. For what? For what? All right. Now, maybe he deserved a ticket, something, but his entire livelihood and years through the legal system.

Do you feel like that—

Oh, wait, I got one more for you. I'm sorry.

No, please.

Okay. Afterward, the Department of Commerce did a little internal investigation thinking maybe they were being a little hard on commercial fishermen like John. But they found that they were thwarted in their investigation because the folks that they were suspicious about for misbehaving, cases like John, destroyed their documents. No Sarbanes Oxley charges brought there.

No, no.

So those kinds of cases, when they come to you—

Do you feel like that's accelerating throughout American society at every level?

Yes.

And if so, what's the cause of that proliferation? Because people aren't evil, right?

No.

I mean, nobody's like, "Oh, I can really screw over the important red grouper or fishermen lawyer or anything."

No, of course not.

So what's going on?

It's all done with the very best of intentions. I don't question that, but it is going on at all levels. And when people say that Congress doesn't do enough, we add about two to three million words to the federal code every year. The federal register, which started off as 16 pages in the 1930s, it's like 70 or 80,000 added every year. Okay.

Why? That's a really interesting question. And I've thought a lot about it, and I don't pretend to have all the answers, but one thing that I can't help but wonder as part of it is a loss of trust in one another and trust in our ability to solve problems in our immediate community, right? If I trust you, and you trust me, we're going to work out our problems, and we won't need to appeal to some higher authority. What happens when you don't trust one another, and you want to command and control, and you want it from the highest possible level, and you want it as quickly as you can, and maybe you're willing even to forgo bicameralism and presentment just to get it done?

So this is what is often called the administrative state, or something happens where Congress passes some kind of legislation, and then a bunch of bureaucracies take over, and they start promulgating more and more rules. Does that follow a breakdown in trust and confidence among people, or is it the cause of it? Because if you look at the way that Richard Nixon kind of took the Great Society program, he kept those all going, and then he added regulatory functions. I mean, half of the worst alphabet agencies that are around, at least from a Reason, libertarian point of view, start with Nixon or get embellished by Nixon, that was before people were at each other's arm.

I don't know. The 1960s were pretty turbulent too.

Okay. Yeah.

But I guess I would say I'm not going to blame any one source because I actually think if you look at state legislatures and licensing laws, you're going to find a similar story.

Well, they all built up over the last hundred years, right? I mean, occupational licensing, the number of jobs.

Yeah, yeah, but that's not done through administrative, that's done through legislation. Your state legislators are voting for it, okay?

Yeah.

So we're all guilty of it, okay?

Right.

And I just think maybe we need to go back to actually some of the things in this kid's book that might be part of the solution.

Wait, you're not saying armed revolt against the distant, uncaring government?

No, I don't think that's what… But trust and realizing that you and I, though we disagree vehemently, both love this country. Like Adams and Jefferson, they couldn't have been more polar opposite, temperament, everything, right? Habits, parts of the country, belief in how they thought the government should look. I mean, Adams wanted a centralized and strong federal government. Jefferson wanted anything but that. But they could agree at the foundation on the declaration, those ideas. They fought tooth and nail. They didn't speak for years, but then at the end of their life, what do they realize? They start writing each other letters again. Some of them are recounted in this book, in which they really realize they share much more than what divides them. And there's some just beautiful letters…

Talk a bit about that. Because 250 years later, the country… You could do one tally where people are unbelievably polarized. I mean, we're talking a few days after the third attempt to assassinate the President of the United States. There is violence in the air and in the streets and things like that. On another level, we are 330, 350 million people, six and a half, if you count you as half a Catholic. Catholics were not even allowed to hold office around property in most colonies when the declaration was signed and now a majority of the Supreme Court are Catholics. We are a pretty good experiment in living with all sorts of people and doing pretty well. So are we up a creek without a paddle, or are we actually doing exactly what you're talking about in this book?

Can both things be true?

I think so. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the tragedy earlier this week is just horrifying, right? And we have to do better as a nation to talk with one another, right? And yes, we're going to have our disagreements, but again, if I know that the person I'm disagreeing with is in good faith, spotting them the grace that maybe their intentions are good.

Where does that come… Or how does the Supreme Court model that? You're not responsible for the executive branch or Congress. Which I think part of the problem I will editorialize is say, yeah, there's three branches of government, and only one of them still thinks it's COVID, and they're not showing up for work every day. But the Supreme Court has seen since 2021, according to Gallup, like a really stark decline in trust and confidence from people. How does the Supreme Court model the type of behavior that you talk about that might instill a belief that, "Okay, this is not a rigged system. Actually, this is good faith argument in how we go about creating a good country."

Yeah. Well, there's a lot in there. I'd start by saying that the judicial branch, it isn't a popularity contest, right? I mean, actually, as we talk about in the book, one of the major grievances that the colonists had was that they didn't have independent judges. 

Right, right.

They had politicized judges, and they wanted no part of that. And you wouldn't hire a judge to write the laws for the country. That's not self-rule, but you would hire a life tenure judge who didn't care what anybody thought about his decisions, and he was just trying to do the law and insulate him.

How do we model it? I think we do pretty darn well. I mean, you give us the 70 hardest cases in the country, okay. Now, we only take the cases where the lower court judges have disagreed. That's our job, is to resolve their disagreements. By and large, that's our daily fare. There are nine of us from all over the country, appointed by five different presidents—

And from the same two schools.

Well, I think we got a couple more than that these days, but whatever. But there are nine of us from all over the country appointed by five different presidents over 30 years. I don't care. Take nine people you went to school with. Do you think you can agree on where to go to lunch?

Absolutely not.

I don't think you can. I don't think you can. All right. I'm an originalist. My friend Sonia Sotomayor is not an originalist. I'm never going to persuade her. She's never going to persuade me. We know that. That's part of our job. We accept that. Lawyers and judges acknowledge there's disagreement. That's the nature of our profession, but we can be friends. And I think we're doing a pretty good job. And let me just give you a couple of figures to highlight that. So out of those 70 cases, we're unanimous, the nine of us, about 40% of the time.

How does that stack up?

I'm going to get there. I promise. 40% of the time. Now that's where cases where everybody else is disagreeing. How does that happen? By listening to one another. By finding out where, "Okay, we come from very different schools of thought, but what can we agree on here? And let's start there." That's hard work that goes into that.

And then you say, "Well, what about our disagreements? The five-fours, the six-threes." That's about a third of our docket. Only about half of those are the five-fours or six-threes you're thinking about. The others are scrambled every which way. You don't hear about that, but that's the truth. And you want to know how that stacks up? Fine. I'll stack it up to 1945. Why 1945? 1945, Franklin Roosevelt had appointed eight of the nine justices of the Supreme Court and the figures, that 40% and that third, the same, about the same.

Yeah.

So the court I think is a pretty good—

Can you give an example of a case where you changed your mind dramatically because of the arguments that you encountered?

That's the job.

Yeah.

That's the job.

But a specific?

I'm not going to talk about specific cases. Sorry, you're not going to get that out of me. But the process for deciding a case is very rigorous. I mean, we start with, I don't know, a stack of briefs somewhere in that range. I spend a lot of time reading. And then I read the cases behind them, they're cited. Then I talk to my law clerks, then I listen to the arguments. The lawyers who've lived with the case for two years, we had a case today that's been going on since I think 2011. They know the case. I'm coming to it with a lot of information, but not the deep living experience.

So you get there, and then you sit around a table, and we sit around in a conference room and each of us has an opportunity to speak in turn. Nobody interrupts. I've never heard a voice raised in that conference room no matter how difficult the decision before us. And we reach a decision. And all the way along there, I can change my mind, and I have.

Do you take delight, and you have-

And so would all my colleagues say the same thing, I'm pretty sure.

Well, recently, you have taken quite delight in kind of arguing with your colleagues. Is that where the disagreements come out?

As I say, I can disagree with you about how to interpret law. I'm not going to convince [former Supreme Court Justice] Steve Breyer about originalism. He's written like three books telling me why originalism is wrong. I love Steve Breyer. And that's never going to change.

To go back to the Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence, the book that you co-authored with Janie Nitze and Chris Ellison did the illustrations, which are indeed evocative if you know Philadelphia and if you know the Independence Mall. I mean, it's wonderful. What do younger people need to know about? What's the function of history in terms of not just keeping alive a kind of catechism that people, it just kind of goes in one ear and out the other. But what is it about the function of history that will allow us to have another 250 years that are worth a damn?

Well, I think part of it is seeing, if you open up the pages of history, they have so much to offer you. They give you a database of examples of how things have worked out in the past. So before you go do something, maybe you want to look at how other people… It's not a crazy idea. And if you look at the people in this book, we don't just talk about the founders you know about, but a lot of people you don't know about. I'm going to guess Mary Kay Goddard, Emily Geiger.

Yeah. Talk about Goddard real quick, because she's a publisher, a printer.

Yes, of course. A member of the press would like that. But just to answer the last question, the courage.

Yeah.

Okay? Maybe the courage it takes. Are you going to be one of those bystanders? Are you going to stand up and do something about it? And maybe you'll find some inspiration of one of these people. And Mary Kay Goddard is a great inspirational story. So Congress is in Baltimore at the time. Why Baltimore? Why not Philadelphia? Because the British are descending upon Philadelphia. I mean, that's how tenuous the whole thing was. And the war lasted eight years.

And so they're in Baltimore, and they just adopted this declaration. They need to get it disseminated because the country is divided, and they're trying to rally people to the cause. And so they turned to a printer, the local Patriot printer. MK Goddard. Always printed at the bottom of the Patriot newspaper, "Printed by MK Goddard." But when it came to the declaration, she did something different. You can understand why she used her initials in her business.

This is a J.K. Rowling situation.

I don't know about that. But this is a declaration situation. On the declaration she wrote, "Printed by Mary Kay Goddard." And in doing so, exposed herself, of course, as not just a Patriot, but someone who's committing treason and subjecting herself. As you read in the book, I mean, a third of them lost their homes. Many lost their fortunes to the cause. Some of them were imprisoned, their kids, their wives. She faced a grave threat to herself.

And that's also Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the legend. And you guys point out some of this, we're not exactly sure if it's legend or if it's totally factored, but Charles Carroll of Carrollton, he supposedly signed his name and somebody was like, "Oh, you know what's good is there's like thousands of Charles Carroll of Carrollton." And then he's like, "OK."

"Fine. Yes. And I don't want anyone to mistake who it is." And he wrote off Carrollton.

Do you think, is courage something people are born with or what are the ways to cultivate it, particularly among young people who are going to be making decisions, not just about their life, but ultimately about society?

Yeah. I think you need a database. You need to inculcate those things, those habits, right? Exposure, habit, become character. We all know that to be true. Washington had his 110 rules of civility and good behavior that he relied on. Franklin kept a list of 13 virtues and crossed off the days he managed to meet one or another of them, gave up eventually because he was so depressed by his scores. But they made deliberate efforts to improve themselves, and they knew that there was some truths about good behavior with other people that they needed to work on.

All right. We're going to leave it there. The book is Heroes of 1776. The co-author is Justice Neil Gorsuch. Thanks so much for talking to Reason.

It was a real pleasure. Thank you.

 

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