American Odyssey

 

American Odyssey

Review:

‘This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark’ by Craig Fehrman

Richard Norton Smith, Free Beacon

To historian Craig Fehrman the 8,000-mile expedition (1804-06) indelibly associated with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark is nothing less than "our national Odyssey." To this TCM junkie their epic crossing of the continent suggests a road picture with more perils than Pauline and more plot twists than anything starring Hope and Crosby. Fehrman spent five years crafting this frontier Rashomon (my last movie analogy—promise) in which the journey unfolds through multiple viewpoints distilled from 30 archives and a hundred Native and other oral histories. What in less skillful hands might have been a mere travelogue becomes a cross-cultural, stunningly rendered rethink of Discoverers and Discovered.

The author's own discoveries include Clark's college notebook—that he attended college at all is here revealed for the first time—and an eyewitness account of Lewis's violent encounter with members of the Blackfeet tribe that challenges previous reporting of the incident. Flipping traditional chronology, Fehrman reminds us that long before the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of his country, Thomas Jefferson had a "lifelong obsession" to know what lay beyond the mountains faintly visible from Monticello. From the books in his library Jefferson might have surmised that the trans-Mississippi region was filled with active volcanoes and blue-eyed Indians who spoke Welsh.

Operating in secret, Jefferson obtained a congressional appropriation of $2,500 to fund the ambitious enterprise variously sold as a trade mission, a scientific survey, and a chance to become better acquainted with Jefferson's Mandan, Lakota, and Nez Perce constituents. (Fehrman calculates the final tab for the trip at $100,000 or more—roughly $2.8 million today.) The president's stated objective was to find a direct water route to the Pacific, a modern variant of the fabled Northwest Passage long sought by European explorers. His larger goal was to frustrate any foreign power from contesting his vision of the United States as a continental republic. Lewis and Clark were advance agents of Manifest Destiny.

Federalist opponents mocked the venture as a boondoggle reflecting the airy proclivities of "a man better calculated to dissect bones and butterflies than to govern a nation." The 33 permanent members of the Corps of Discovery faced a much greater threat from Spanish cavalry hot on their trail. The targets on their backs were put there by General James Wilkinson, first American governor of the Louisiana Territory, and a double agent who betrayed his countrymen for considerably more than 30 pieces of Spanish silver.

Nature and chance defeated the Spanish posse. The Corps was more fortunate, losing only one man, to appendicitis. That it should survive rattlesnakes, fearsome grizzlies, hostile natives, and a treacherous climate was due in no small measure to its leadership. Lewis and Clark were co-captains in name only, federal budget cuts having deprived Clark of the commission promised him by a government he had come to distrust even while wearing its uniform. It was a ticklish situation but Lewis was naturally tactful and well-schooled in diplomacy.

As Jefferson's White House secretary, he had explained macaroni to dubious congressmen and discussed mammoths with the naturalist president. Jefferson trusted him sufficiently to make Lewis his agent in paying hush money to the slandering journalist James Callender (though it wasn't enough to buy Callender's silence regarding the president's sexual liaison with Sally Hemings). Awesomely organized, a gifted botanist, and amateur astronomer, Lewis was an excellent marksman who could shoot a pelican, then calculate the capacity of its pouch at five gallons. Using a tape measure purchased in Philadelphia he recorded the 21-foot leap of a jack rabbit. And it was all recorded in journals that would influence the likes of Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe.

Harshly self-critical, Lewis was already exhibiting the depressive tendencies that led to his suicide in 1809 at the age of 35. Observant, amiable William Clark had insecurities of his own; the legacy, perhaps, of growing up in the shadow of his celebrated sibling George Rogers Clark. An expert surveyor, artist, and cartographer, Clark assembled 21 bales of gifts with which to tempt native chieftains from their allegiance to Spain or France. Native Americans fascinated Clark. His consuming interest did not, however, prevent the captains from misidentifying the pacific Yankton Sioux for the far more aggressive tribal branch known as the Brulé.

The ensuing confrontation in September 1804 near present-day Pierre, South Dakota, began with trash talk that rapidly escalated. "A single arrow or bullet would have led to horrifying casualties on both sides," Fehrman notes. Only the shrewd diplomacy of Chief Black Buffalo defused tensions. Employing political skills unrecognized by Jefferson's emissaries, the Lakota statesman stared down enemies in his own camp and persuaded the Brulé to form a trading alliance with the Americans.

Clark's biggest contribution to the mission stemmed from his Army-bred aversion to uniformed brutality. Confronting the insubordination and eye-gouging combat generated by "an abundance of energy and an abundance of alcohol" in the ranks, Clark's instinctive response was to lecture the miscreants. Instead of the 50 or 100 lashes prescribed in the military code, disturbers of the peace were ordered to build a hut for a seamstress who had been helpful to the Corps.

In the temporary absence of the captains, authority passed to Sergeant John Ordway, a New Hampshire Yankee whose by-the-book methods didn't endear him to enlisted men. When a Kentucky troublemaker refused an Ordway order, he was threatened with flogging. The defiant soldier aimed his gun at the NCO, who backed down. Eventually more conventional punishments were imposed, but only after being voted on by courts martial comprised of the offender's peers. Each man was asked to identify the squad he wished to join. Ordway's tormenter chose the officer at whom he had pointed his rifle.

Reaching a fork in the broad Missouri River, members debated which of the two streams would point them to the Columbia River and the Pacific beyond. (They guessed wrong, but it didn't take long for separate exploratory parties to realize their error and reunite.) A much greater obstacle awaited them in the Great Falls of the Missouri. From native informants the Corps had been led to expect a portage of "half a mile." The reality was 18 miles and 31 grueling days, punctuated by savage hailstorms and prickly pear cactus that sliced their elk skin moccasins.

A born storyteller, Fehrman conveys the Edenic majesty of white sandstone cliffs and treeless prairies, but he is just as adept at re-creating sleepless nights caused by numberless beavers slapping their tails against the water. Most of all, Fehrman wants us to appreciate the rugged individualists engaged in collective heroism; the largely forgotten soldiers and hired guides, French-speaking oarsmen, Clark's enslaved body servant York, and the most famous interpreter in American history, a young Shoshone woman named Sacajawea who was herself enslaved by Hidatsa kidnappers.

Lewis and Clark were "discoverers" in the Columbus mold—heirs to white European civilization encountering alien cultures with much deeper roots in the continent. The Corps depended on the kindness of strangers while running the continental gauntlet. Separate chapters introduce us to indigenous leaders like Piahito, an unlikely ally who accepted an invitation to visit Jefferson at the White House, only to die in Richmond, Virginia, in April 1806.

As strangers became comrades, their mutual reliance forged in common perils, one is struck by how many individual members of the Corps can be called lifesavers. Sacajawea offered credibility with potential enemies. Through her own Shoshone tribe the young mother helped secure desperately needed horses, enabling the Corps to conquer the Bitterroot Mountains. Lewis, more standoffish than his partner, credited "the Indian woman" with helping to avert the capsizing of a vessel laden with essential supplies. In recognition of her bravery he named a river for her.

Reunited with family and friends after several years with her Hidatsa captors, Sacajawea nevertheless chose to move on with the Americans. She had never seen the Pacific. Besides, writes the author, "her identity was becoming more nuanced." The Corps proved even more transformational for York, William Clark's slave and body servant. Once childhood playmates, Clark and York were permanently separated at adolescence, one to live in a pillared mansion, the other consigned to a dirt-floored cabin.

To Clark, York was property, but to natives who had never seen a black person he inspired godlike reverence (after they tried and failed to rub off what they took to be paint). York more than validated the rare decision to entrust a slave with a rifle, bringing down buffalo, deer, and geese to nourish men whose strenuous labors burned 5,000 calories a day. He rescued Clark, Sacajawea, and her infant son from a flash flood. To be sure, Clark was annoyed by York's behavior around some children of the Arikara tribe. The bondsman pretended to be a bear, wild until his white owner "caught him." But that same owner allowed York to enjoy an independence of sorts, steering a canoe as Clark scouted the forest—"both doing what was best for the expedition."

Some heroes were of the four-legged variety. Seaman, Lewis's sweet-tempered Newfoundland, saved a large part of the Corps one moonless night by diverting a 2,000-pound buffalo charging straight for some sleeping campers. In less dire circumstances Seaman's appetite for squirrels and prairie dogs supplemented a diet of buffalo humps, deer meat, and trout pulled from turbulent streams, washed down with a variable government ration of whisky.

The sheer ingenuity of the Corps will astound readers who have never had to weave rope from animal skin. An improvised wagon moved on wheels fashioned from cottonwood stumps. Bear fat served admirably as insect repellent. The best agent for softening elk skins was a paste made from the animal's mashed brains. Suffering severe stomach cramps, the resourceful Lewis dosed himself with an herbal drink made from chokecherry. It worked. So did the mercury and penile syringes brought along to combat diseases contracted in consensual sex with native women.

Fehrman has written a rousing adventure tale that may also qualify as the most lyrical of survival guides. Ultimately it is a Corps of Self-Discovery that he depicts, never more so than in the decision to give York a vote on where to locate the group's winter quarters on the Columbia River. Frontier democracy had its limits. On returning to civilization each member of the Corps received double pay and 320 acres from a grateful nation. York came back to at least five more years of enslavement. Meanwhile the government paid Clark a monthly bonus of $7.60 for its use of his human property.

This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark

by Craig Fehrman

Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 544 pp., $35

Richard Norton Smith is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author, most recently, of Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (Harper).

The Golden Thread

 

The Golden Thread and the Defense of the West

Western civilization survives only if each generation rejects egalitarian vandalism and relearns its duty to preserve, cultivate, and pass on greatness.

Roger Kimball, American Greatness

A few days ago, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation bestowed one of its storied Bradley Prizes on James Hankins, a sometime professor of history at Harvard University, now at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and co-author of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. (Actually, Hankins is the sole author of Volume I of The Golden Thread, which tells the story of the Western tradition from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC through the Renaissance. Volume II, which picks up the story with the Reformation, is by the historian Allen Guelzo.) This is the moment when I note for the record that, being the publisher of these magnificent books at Encounter Books, I have what is called in the trade an “interest.” But don’t take my word for the adjective “magnificent.” The reception of these books has been nothing short of ecstatic. Perhaps the most searching review is by Spencer Klavan and appears in the current number of The Claremont Review of Books. 

Listening to Jim Hankins’s remarks at the Bradley event prompts me to reprise a few thoughts about what we are up to with The Golden Thread. The phrase names not only these two books but also a larger project that Encounter is undertaking with several partners to change the conversation about—well, I was going to say “about education.” But really, it is about that vibrant thing that the soporific word “education” designates, namely, opening the treasure chest of the past in order to confront and ultimately to emulate greatness.

“Greatness” is not a word you hear much in the once-hallowed halls of academia these days. But that does not mean it is irrelevant to what is supposed to be going on there. In the preface to a collection of essays called Giants and Dwarfs, Allan Bloom insisted that “the essence of education is the experience of greatness.” Almost everything that Bloom wrote about the university (The Closing of the American Mind, for example) flowed from this fundamental conviction. And it was just this, of course, that got him branded an enemy of democracy.

In fact, Bloom’s commitment to greatness was profoundly democratic. But this is not to say that it was egalitarian. The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.

As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works from the woke grievance industry that rules us, works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It means students who graduate not having read Aristotle, Milton, Dante, or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, transphobia, racism, imperialism, and so on. A favorite recent example was the news that Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, has embarked upon the project of “decolonizing Shakespeare” in order to rid the bard’s work and reputation of “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly West-centric worldviews.”

“Gosh,” I thought, “has it come to that?” I am afraid that it has. In many cultural precincts today, we find that faculty and students alike regard education chiefly as an exercise in disillusionment and look to the past only to corroborate their own sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.

The Golden Thread is meant to be an antidote to that bundle of entrenched and debilitating pathologies. They are so entrenched and so toxic that treating them effectively would be tantamount to a Gestalt shift, a revolution in the Zeitgeist. And that is precisely the ambitious task we have set ourselves with The Golden Thread.

Under the rubric of “The Golden Thread,” we are working to develop curricula and various teaching materials to help bring about a counterrevolution that is also a return to fundamentals. Again, phrases like “curricula” and “teaching aids” are sleep-inducing, but the reality they name is electrifying. We intend to embrace and rekindle a number of subjects, from science and mathematics to economics, history, and rhetoric. We have, I believe, made a spectacular start with a book that is transforming our understanding of American history. I mean Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred McClay, a professor of history at Hillsdale College. Among other things, Land of Hope is a fitting contribution to the festivities surrounding America’s 250th anniversary.

Asked what The Golden Thread was all about, James Hankins emphasized two things. One, The Golden Thread aims to help students and readers appreciate “the fragility of civilization.” We want readers to understand how arduous and painstaking the achievement of Western civilization has been and also how quickly and easily it can be lost. Two, The Golden Thread aims to awaken readers to their—which is to say, to our—vocation as “custodians of the Western story, responsible for its preservation, cultivation, and reform. We must be gardeners,” Hankins said, “not engineers, working with ‘Nature and Nature’s God,’ not against.”

Most readers will have caught Hankins’s allusion to the Declaration of Independence with the phrase “Nature and Nature’s God.” You don’t often hear such talk among those currently entrusted with the care and nurture of future generations of American citizens. I pause to note that the ambition that Hankins names stands in the background of all we aim to accomplish with The Golden Thread.

For now, though, I want to take up what Jim Hankins said about cultivation and becoming gardeners. It is consonant with C. S. Lewis’s observation that “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” As a prolegomenon to that process, let me say something about three homely words: “seeds,” “threads,” and “opportunity.”

Let’s start with seeds. I have often recalled my surprise the first time I noticed the legend “cultural instructions” on the brochure that accompanies packets of seeds. “How quaint,” I thought as I perused the advisory: this much water and that much sun; certain tips about fertilizer, soil, and drainage. Planting one sort of flower nearby keeps the bugs away, but proximity to another sort makes bad things happen. Young shoots might need stakes, and watch out for beetles, weeds, and unseasonable frosts . . .

But the more I pondered it, the less quaint, and the more profound, those “cultural instructions” seemed. I suppose I had once known that the word “culture” comes from the capacious Latin verb colo, which means everything from “live, dwell, inhabit,” to “observe a religious rite”—whence our word “cult.” It can also mean to  “care, tend, nurture,” and “promote the growth or advancement of.” I never thought much about it.

I should have. There is a lot of wisdom in etymology, the etymology of which, after all, means the ἔτυμος or “true, genuine sense” of a word.  The noun cultura (which derives from colo) means first of all “the tilling or cultivation of land” and “the care or cultivation of plants.”

But cultura, too, has ambitious tentacles. There’s the bit about observing religious rites again. And it can also mean “well-groomed”—the dictionary specifies that “hair” is meant—and also, more generally, “chic, polished, sophisticated.”

It was Cicero, in a famous passage of the Tusculan Disputations, who gave currency to the metaphor of culture as a specifically intellectual pursuit. “Just as a field, however good the ground, cannot be productive without cultivation,” Cicero wrote, “so the soul cannot be productive without education.” Philosophy, he said, is a sort of “cultura animi,” a cultivation of the mind or spirit. “It pulls out vices by the roots,” he said, “makes souls fit for the reception of seed,” and sows in order to bring forth “the richest fruit.”

But even the best care, Cicero warned, does not inevitably bring good results. The influence of education, of cultura animi, “cannot be the same for all: its effect is great when it has secured a hold upon a character suited to it.” That is to say, the results of cultivation depend not only on the quality of the care but also on the inherent nature of the thing being cultivated. How much of what Cicero said do we still understand?

In current parlance, “culture” (in addition to its use as a biological term) has both a descriptive and an evaluative meaning. In its anthropological sense, “culture” is neutral. It describes the habits and customs of a particular population: what its members do, not what they should do. Its task is to inventory, to docket, not to judge.

But we also speak of “high culture,” meaning not just social practices but a world of artistic, intellectual, and moral endeavor in which the notion of hierarchy, of a rank-ordering of accomplishment, is key.

Culture in the evaluative sense does not merely admit, it requires judgment as a kind of coefficient or auxiliary: comparison, discrimination, evaluation are its lifeblood. “We never really get near a book,” Henry James once remarked, “save on the question of its being good or bad, of its really treating, that is, or not treating, its subject.” It was for the sake of culture in this sense that 19th-century British writer Matthew Arnold extolled criticism as—everyone knows the famous phrase— “the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”

Pursuing that ambition requires that we nurture and care for the cultural seeds of our inheritance. It also requires that we appreciate their flowering not only as individual blossoms but as a harmonious, intertwined garden existing through time. What provides the unifying links, the binding thread?  It is worth meditating on the powerful  image of the thread in our tradition. One thinks, for example, of the three fates in Greek mythology. Clotho spins the thread of human life; her sister Lachesis portions out the thread to each individual. And then her sister Atropos, the “implacable” one, decides when to snip the thread and bring each life to an end.

Or think of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete. Ariadne superintended the Labyrinth in whose corridors dwelt the Minotaur, a ferocious creature that was half-man and half-bull. The Minotaur feasted on a cargo of Athenian youths who were brought yearly to Crete as war booty.  One year, the hero Theseus was among the sacrificial offerings. He resolved to kill the Minotaur and free the young Athenians. Ariadne, having fallen in love with Theseus, gave him a ball of thread and told him how to proceed into the labyrinth. Theseus tied one end of the thread outside the entrance to the maze. After he met and killed the Minotaur, he followed the thread back up out of the labyrinth.  It is worth noting that we call that ball of thread  a “clew,” whence our word “clue,” something that guides or directs us in the solution of a problem or mystery. It is in this context that logicians speak of an “Ariadne’s thread” as a technique for solving puzzles or problems that have multiple ways of proceeding.

And this brings me back to The Golden Thread. One way of describing our ambition is to say that we aim to provide an account of mankind’s adventures in time. In part, that means retracing the steps and the missteps that have brought us to our present journeys. In part, it is a process of what Plato called ἀνάμνησις or “recollection.”  We want to deliver readers from the provincialism not only of place but from what the English writer David Cecil called “a provinciality of time.” We Westerners feel we are “provincial” if we haven’t visited such important cities as London, Paris, New York, and Athens. But Cecil points out that “To feel ill-at-ease and out of place except in one’s own period is to be a provincial in time. But he who has learned to look at life through the eyes of Chaucer, of Donne, of Pope, and of Thomas Hardy is freed from this limitation. He has become a cosmopolitan of the ages,” Cecil says, “and can regard his own period with the detachment which is a necessary foundation of wisdom.”

We believe that The Golden Thread can make an important contribution to building that foundation. And this brings me, finally, the opportunity to say something about the tantalizing word “opportunity.” What is an “opportunity”? The dictionary tells us that it is “a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something,” “a favorable or advantageous combination of circumstances.” The trick is to recognize an opportunity when we encounter one.

The great German art historian Heinrich Wöfflin observed that “Not everything is possible at all times.” He was thinking about the range of artistic styles that were available to an artist at a given time. But the point can be generalized.  “Not everything is possible at all times.” We are living through a yeasty and tumultuous moment in American culture. As many commentators have noted, we seem to be experiencing a sort of revolution in sentiment, a “vibe shift” that is as much cultural as it is political.  In such moments, many things that had seemed insuperable yesterday suddenly seem possible.  The ground for the seeds we scatter is moist and fertile. It is an auspicious moment to bring forth The Golden Thread because the culture is newly receptive to our message of recovery.

That is the encouraging part. The admonitory part is that such beneficent seasons do not last forever. Such opportunities are as fleeting as they are rare. “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” Shakespeare has Brutus say in Julius Caesar, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.  On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures.” Wise words.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).

Protests Erupt in Cuba

Protests Erupt in Cuba as the Country Runs Out of Fuel

State of the Union: The U.S. blockade is pushing Cuban infrastructure to the limit.

Joseph Addington, The American Conservative

Protests broke out Thursday night in Havana after the Cuban government said the island had exhausted its supplies of diesel and fuel oil, deepening a severe electricity crisis across the cash-strapped Caribbean nation.

Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said Wednesday that Cuba had “absolutely no” reserves of either fuel, blaming the Trump administration for blocking oil imports to the country. President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the situation “particularly tense” and said that the “genocidal U.S. blockade” was part of an attempt to “destroy the Revolution.”

Images shared on social media showed residents in Havana banging pots, lighting street fires, and blocking roads amid prolonged blackouts. Some areas of the country have been without power for a full day.

Cuba has struggled with worsening power outages as its oil supplies have dwindled. The country is heavily reliant on fuel imports, and its aging power grid was failing even before the U.S. cut off access to oil from abroad.

Joseph Addington is an Associate Editor at The American Conservative. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University. You can follow him on Twitter at @JosephAddington. 

Thank Democrats

 

Thank Democrats for High Energy Prices

The party spent a generation restricting fossil fuels, leaving the U.S. vulnerable to hostile powers like Iran.

Matthew Continetti, WSJ Free Expression

For Republicans, the numbers are grim. Gasoline prices rise and President Trump’s standing falls—along with the GOP’s chances this November.

The price hike is a consequence of Iran’s piratical closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet the irony is voter backlash to this supply shock benefits the Democrats—the very party that believes high prices for oil and gas are necessary to achieve the fabled “green energy transition.” The same party that’s spent the past generation promoting policies that restrict fossil fuels and leave the United States vulnerable to hostile powers.

At this writing, gas is at $4.55 per gallon, up 50% since Operation Epic Fury began on Feb. 28. The inverse relationship between gas prices and presidential job approval holds true. Since hostilities commenced, Mr. Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 40.5% from 43.5% in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Democrats, meanwhile, have widened their lead in the congressional generic ballot. Polymarket puts their chances of winning the House at 84% and Senate at 49%.

No wonder Republicans are skittish about the war. They have six months to turn around the electorate’s negative assessment of Mr. Trump and the economy—or, failing that, to convince the public that Democratic candidates are unacceptable alternatives to GOP rule. Republicans can’t predict or prevent global price shocks. But they can remind voters which party has spent decades making us vulnerable to them.

Not long ago, President Biden’s administration tried in vain to deflect criticism that its policies were responsible for rising gas prices. “Obviously, the president does not control the price of gasoline,” Biden administration Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Nov. 23, 2021. “No president does.”

Wherefore art thou now, Madam Secretary?

When Ms. Granholm spoke, gas averaged $3.39 per gallon. It hit an all-time high of $5 per gallon the following June. In response, Mr. Biden indulged in demagogic attacks on supposed price gouging. He pleaded with foreign producers to increase supply. He depleted the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to worrisome levels. Yet he also continued to enact laws and issue directives that privileged costly alternative energies at the expense of oil and gas exploration, development, production and export.

The autopen never wavered. The Keystone XL pipeline was canceled. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was closed to drilling. Regulations measuring the “social cost” of carbon were imposed. A moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands was issued. The U.S. re-entered the Paris Climate Agreement—subjecting domestic industry to stringent rules while allowing China, the world’s biggest polluter, to burn all the coal it desires.

Mr. Biden’s stringent fuel-economy standards were meant to push consumers into electric vehicles they were otherwise reluctant to buy. He halted permits for new liquified natural gas export facilities—at the precise moment Europe was desperate for non-Russian sources of energy. He showered green-energy companies with billions of dollars in subsidies. By constraining the oil, gas and mining sectors, and by favoring solar and wind and lithium-dependent batteries, Mr. Biden played into China’s technological strengths while denying America leverage over global energy markets.

Mr. Trump takes the opposite approach. Beginning in his first term, he embraced the shale and fracking revolutions in energy production. He adopted the “Drill, Baby, Drill” philosophy of unabashed development of U.S. natural resources. He approved pipelines and withdrew from the Paris Accord. Increased supply lowered costs, benefiting the economy. America grew stronger abroad as the U.S. became a net energy exporter in 2019.

Mr. Trump has followed the same path in his second term. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright are devoted to enhancing America’s status as an energy superpower. They’ve replaced the heavy hand of government with an aggressive push to develop natural resources, lower prices and advance U.S. interests.

Reviving nuclear power, for example, provides capacity for data centers, thus preserving America’s edge in AI competition with China. Drilling and mining reduce the leverage that Russia and Iran have in energy markets and that China has in rare-earth minerals. Plentiful, low-cost energy is the foundation of a strong economy that can generate the revenues to sustain American military superiority.

The war with Iran complicates matters, of course. That’s why it’s important that Mr. Trump finish the job and restore free passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Then the price at the pump will fall. Yet imagine how expensive gas prices would be today if President Obama’s and President Biden’s energy policies had been allowed to stand—if the nation had continued to give antidevelopment, antigrowth environmental protection groups veto power over the economy and consumer welfare.

For clues, turn to places where the ethos behind “Net Zero” and the Green New Deal has flourished. Look at California, where the price of gas is significantly higher than the national average. Examine Canada and Europe, whose economies have floundered and whose defenses have atrophied amid China’s rise.

The debate concerns more than a sudden price hike. It’s about the type of society we want to be and the future we want to shape. Start by rejecting the premise that environmental protection must come at Americans’ expense. Avoid the tragic error of voters burdened by high gas prices empowering those elements in society that wish to drive gas prices even higher—and leave the world a poor and dangerous place. Think energy costs are high now? Wait until the Democrats are back in charge.

Mr. Continetti is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.

Justice Gorsuch, 'Heros of 1776'

Justice Gorsuch on 1776,

His Court Colleagues, and the Patriotic-Education Gap: Transcript

Dan McLaughlin, National Review

‘I know we’re missing something . . . and I’m very distressed by it,’ the justice said of declining civics and history education, in an interview with NR.

Last week, I conducted an interview with Justice Neil Gorsuch about his new children’s book, Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the coming 250th birthday of the nation, his memories of the 1976 Bicentennial, the importance of patriotic education, the continuity of the Supreme Court, our age of political violence, and the continuing relevance of the declaration and the American Revolution. The full transcript (and video) of that interview follows, lightly edited for clarity:

Dan McLaughlin: All right, Justice Gorsuch, great to have you here. Tell us a little bit about — this is a children’s book. What do you see as the target age for this book?

Justice Gorsuch: Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me. It’s a great pleasure to be with National Review. I remember it being very influential when I was the age of these guys behind the camera, and, as we were talking about earlier, James Buckley was a deep influence on me as a judge and one of the most gentle men I knew.

All right, so, target age of the book. I kind of think we had two groups in mind. So, I wrote this with one of my former law clerks, Janie Nitze. And she is one of the most talented lawyers I know, clerked for me and for Justice Sotomayor and is now a mother of three young children and started her own preschool because she was dissatisfied with their offerings. And we wanted to reach both kids and their parents. And I hope parents will enjoy this and learn a few things along the way that they didn’t know about the Declaration of Independence and the signers. I think C. S. Lewis said, you know, it’s a pretty crummy children’s book if the parents don’t enjoy it too.

McLaughlin: Yeah, because, looking through it, it certainly, the illustration certainly looks as if it was aimed mainly at kids who are old enough to read it themselves, but, I guess some people will be reading it aloud as well.

Gorsuch: Yeah. And you’re right, the illustrations I think will draw in the little ones, right? Chris Ellison, our artist, he should win a prize for his work. It’s just stunningly beautiful. It’s all hand painted. No AI, no computers, you know, no cartoons, and he really brings these people to life. And little details, like we talk about how much Jefferson loved nature and that he had a mockingbird that went around with him on his shoulder named Dick. And if you look, little children are gonna find Dick throughout the book in various places.

McLaughlin: So, you were eight for the Bicentennial.

Gorsuch: Yes, that’s about right.

McLaughlin: So, what is your memory of that and what stuck with you from that?

Gorsuch: Yeah, I’m — we’re probably not too far off in age. I suspect you’re a little younger—

McLaughlin: I was four, so I remember it, but not perhaps—

Gorsuch: Okay, I do remember it very vividly. The country — if we think we live in tough times, everybody always thinks they live in tough times is what I’ve figured out, okay? But in 1976, we’d just come out of Watergate. We had an unelected president. We were suffering from stagflation, you know, interest rates like 18 percent or 20 percent. I mean, think about that. You guys could never buy a house, you two. Inflation, extraordinarily high. Vietnam had just ended and there were a lot of young men who I knew who had come back from Vietnam in our neighborhood or our church who were not the same people who left. And it was a deeply troubling time after the civil rights movements, you know, the assassinations, all of that. And it was a moment that kind of brought us together again and made us realize that for all our differences and troubles, there’s a lot that unites us and a lot more that unites us than divides us. And it was just simple things from painting fire hydrants, red, white, and blue. I remember the Gemma family across the street, big Italian family, and they had one of those VW buses. You remember those things?

And they painted the American flag, stars and stripes with the 13 stars on the side of their red VW. And of course the giant ships in the harbors on the East Coast — we all watched with fascination because there’s no water in Colorado. And I hope that the 250th is something like that.

McLaughlin: Yeah, it’s a shame that Semiquincentennial doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same way.

Gorsuch: But think about what it means. What does it mean? It means halfway to 500. It denotes that we’re on a journey, and that’s exactly how I think of our declaration, right? I mean, those three big ideas in the declaration that all of us are equal, that we all have unalienable rights that come from God, not from government, that we have the right to rule ourselves. I mean, those are perfect ideas. They speak to every soul, they exclude no one, but it’s a journey to realize those ideas. It’s been a journey and it will always be a journey.

McLaughlin: And our generation had Schoolhouse Rock.

Gorsuch: Yeah, that was 1976 as well that it came out to celebrate the Bicentennial.

McLaughlin: And there was a lot of, I think, patriotic education at the time. Is there — do we have as much of that today, do you think? Or, are we — is this filling a need, a hole that you think is missing?

Gorsuch: I know we’re missing something, and there are a variety of reasons why we don’t teach history and we don’t teach civics anymore. And I’m very distressed by it because, you know, surveys suggest like 13 percent of eighth graders are proficient in history at grade level, 22 percent in civics. And if you think it’s bad for them, let’s go to college. Turns out like 18 percent of colleges require a course in American history. One lousy course. And adults: Six in ten cannot pass the citizenship test that my wife took, and I can tell you it’s not hard, right? So yes, we have a deep problem and Janie — it was really Janie’s idea. She said, “You know, you’ve been complaining about this for a long time, old man, we should do something about it.” And so yes, this is an attempt to help.

McLaughlin: You mentioned your wife is British. Did she come to this with a different background and view of 1776?

Gorsuch: You know, I think my wife likes to focus on how much we mimic and how much we derive from England, and she’s not wrong, right? I mean, if you look around the country, virtually every other state and every other town is named after a British king or queen, right? Virginia, Maryland as she would say, all right? I mean, it just goes on and on. So she likes to focus on that, but you know, it wasn’t always thus, right?

I mean, in the book, we talk about the Franklin family. Ben Franklin, you know, one of the leading patriots, of course, we all know that. Do you know about his son William? You know about his son William, but he was a deep loyalist, right? At that time, you have to remember only about 40 percent of the people believed in independence and even during the debate over independence, it was a close-run thing whether they’re going to declare independence. And 30 percent or so were loyalists and the rest were kind of uncertain in between, you know. William wound up moving to England and the two men didn’t talk for years and years. And Franklin — Ben, that is — was deeply, deeply angry and distressed because by signing the declaration, he kind of signed his own death warrant. I mean, we forget that this was an act of treason, subject to death by hanging, and they really took that seriously. And we can talk about the suffering of those people, but his son was among those who were effectively seeking his death. That’s how he saw it. It was very personal and very real.

McLaughlin: You talked in your last book that you and Janie Nitze did, Over Ruled, talked about the individual stories, to illustrate overregulation. And I feel like this book is trying to do some of the same thing with the signers of the declaration, get to the individual stories?

Gorsuch: Well, how do you get somebody hooked on an idea? And I think facts and figures, you know — all right, they’re 13 percent, 18 percent or whatever — kind of don’t speak to us the way stories do. That’s how we relate to one another. You know, I wanna know your story, you wanna know mine, right? And that’s how we learn, really. And, we figure if you’re gonna get interested in the Stamp Act, right? And if you’re gonna get interested in the Articles of Confederation, it might be because of the people behind them. And the 56 signers were incredibly, incredibly interesting people, and their stories are moving.

We forget that the revolution was eight bloody long years. A third of the signers had their homes destroyed. Many of them were imprisoned. Some of their wives were imprisoned. Some of their children were imprisoned. And many of them gave their fortunes to the revolution and died poor as a result of it. So, telling those stories of courage and sacrifice we hope might inspire a few young minds and make them realize the declaration’s three big ideas are not inevitable. They were not inevitable, and their preservation is not inevitable, and that the torch passes to each generation. We’re a creedal nation. What unites us is not a religion, it’s not a race; it’s a belief in those three ideals. That’s our mission statement as a country. And if the people don’t get inspired to learn about them and believe in them, the baton drops.

McLaughlin: I mean, that was why Ronald Reagan in his farewell address, that was his argument — we need to teach informed patriotism to the next generation.

Gorsuch: It was also George Washington’s speech toward the end of his administration where he was advocating for a national university to teach civics and virtues and he wasn’t afraid to talk about virtues that are necessary to maintain a republic. And that is something that all of the Founders agreed on. I mean, Jefferson said, you know, if you expect a country to remain free and ignorant, well, you want something that’s never been and never will be.

McLaughlin: And that’s the old debate, virtue or liberty, but you really need one to get the other.

Gorsuch: Yes.

McLaughlin: I mean, just for perspective, I mean, you’ve been on the Court now just about nine years — so it’s only one year longer than this war continued. I mean, to think of all that has happened in the news, say, in the last eight years, that the revolution ran that long.

Gorsuch: Well, I’m not about to say my suffering matches theirs if that’s what you’re getting at, but it’s been a while, yes, yeah.

McLaughlin: Now you’re on a Court with a lot of strong personalities, with strong opinions about big things. The justices — you and your colleagues sometimes disagree, and quarrel even with the people you usually agree with, even with the people who agree with you that day. You attracted some attention in the tariff case with your concurring opinion, and we’ve seen other concurring opinions like that that are taking to task kind of everybody else, the people on your side today, the people on your side on other days. Does that give you — that experience of sitting on the Court — does that give you some more sympathy or insight into those men in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, hammering out the declaration, quarreling over what should be in, what should be out, what our — what is our next step?

Gorsuch: Boy, that was a very clever bridge from present day back to 1776. Let me take both halves of that.

So today you guys give us 70 of the hardest cases in the country every year and you are a litigious bunch. You all file about 50 million lawsuits every year in this country. Think about that. I’m not counting your traffic tickets over there, all right? They’re real lawsuits and you give us the ones where lower court judges have disagreed. I mean that that’s what this Court does. It resolves disagreements over the meaning of federal law that have split the circuits. You know that as a lawyer. That’s — so you’re giving us stuff that’s hard, and you’re asking nine people from across the country, appointed by five different presidents over the course of 30 years, to work together to resolve those cases. Can you guys agree on where to go to lunch? None of you? Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, right, exactly, all right.

And I actually think it’s kind of magical, our rule of law in this country, because first of all there are only about 60 or 70 cases a year in which the lower courts seriously disagree over the meaning of federal law. One could argue there’s a few more, a few fewer or whatever, but it’s not that many. It’s kind of incredible. You can — you know your rights and duties in this country under the law, much more so than almost any place on the planet or in the history of the world. Okay, fine. Of those 60–70 cases, the nine of us are unanimous about 40 percent of the time. Think about that. Think about what it takes. Am I ever gonna convince Sonia Sotomayor to become an originalist? I kind of doubt it, right? Is she ever gonna—

McLaughlin: Hope springs eternal.

Gorsuch: It does, it does. Ideas tend to win out over time, but I, you know, I understand that she has a different way of approaching law than I do, and she appreciates that I do, too. We know that. We don’t get angry over that. We get on with it, okay? And we start by saying, where — if I listen to you talk — we sit around a room in a conference room. I just got out of there, okay? And we sit around and we listen. We don’t interrupt. There are no raised voices in the conference room ever, right? And I listen. They listen. We find where we can agree, and we’re able to become unanimous in cases the lower courts have disagreed on about 40 percent of the time.

Now, I know what’s going through your head. You’re thinking, well, what about those 5–4s, and 6–3s? Okay, fine. That’s about a third of our docket, all right? But only about half of that third of the 5–4s, and 6–3s you might imagine, and the rest of them are scrambled every which way. All right, now those two figures, that 40 percent and that third, same as they were more or less in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt had appointed eight of the nine justices of the Supreme Court. So, the one thing I know about the Supreme Court is very little changes, right?

We have different philosophies on how we approach the law, but I sit across from the table with people I know love this country. Love the Declaration of Independence. Love our Constitution as much as I do. All right, now you want to go back to 1776. All right, fine. Did they disagree? Oh my goodness, we just talked about — they had a hard time getting unanimity on independence, all right? And let’s take Jefferson and Adams, who are two of the central figures in the book, along with a lot of people you don’t know about, or are less well known. Jefferson and Adams were peas in a pod when it came to the declaration. They were the instigators in a lot of ways, and they worked on the document itself together very closely. Dear friends. And then of course, they completely disagreed on how to implement the declaration and the Constitution. One wanted a very strong central government, the other a much, much weaker one. They fought. They didn’t speak for years. And then toward the end of their life, a friend kind of interceded and said, “Come on, you two.” And they started writing letters and they exchanged over 140 of them in the last part of their life. And what they realized is what I realized and what I try to remember when I’m disagreeing and we’re going hammer and tong over some statutory interpretation case, that that person loves this country as much as I do.

McLaughlin: And Hamilton and Madison, the same — Federalist Papers and then opposite sides.

Gorsuch: And Andrew Jackson walked around with two bullets in him from duels that he fought, you know, and, when an assassination attempt with him just across the street of the Capitol failed, he went after the guy with a cane, and they had to rescue the poor guy from the president.

I mean, you know, democracy is a rough and tumble business. It is. I’m not here to tell you it isn’t, but it’s magical, and it’s through those debates and disagreements that we are — that’s actually our strength if we can harness it. Because the fact that we all can speak our minds freely — and we can have a contest of ideas — means the best things emerge and because we have to compromise with one another and listen to one another, we find ways to mediate our differences so we can live together that, you know, that’s why we’re much more robust and resilient than a monarchy or you know, a despotism which is so much more brittle. What’s the weakness of a democracy? If we start taking those disagreements beyond disagreements and fail to recognize the humanity of the person across from us.

McLaughlin: Yeah, I sadly enough — I feel like, at different times when I’m interviewing somebody, I can say, well, look what just happened this week, and it seems like it’s an every week thing these days.

I get that. But, you know, you go — and that’s why I think looking back through history is so important for our kids because they think, and we all think, our times are unique and our troubles are profound. And I’m not here to tell you we don’t have our challenges. But I will tell you it has always been thus.

McLaughlin: What role should the declaration play in understanding the Constitution and interpreting the Constitution?

Gorsuch: Well, I think of the declaration — is kind of our mission statement. If you’re a corporation, if you want to put it like that, or a kid or your report card, how are you doing? Here are these three ideas we are really aspiring to. And I think of the Constitution as a how-to manual, right? The nuts and bolts of how we’re gonna try and get to those ideas, and so my job is to apply my part of the how-to manual, all right? Now, I’m, you know, one-third of one-half of the manual, right? The manual’s got three branches of government, it’s got federalism on top of that. So I gotta pay attention to my part of the manual and kind of stay out of other people’s part of it. And if we all do our bit, maybe we’ll progress toward those ideas.

McLaughlin: Are we teaching enough? Are law students learning enough of the Founding era?

Gorsuch: No, no, no, they’re not. They, I get disturbed when I — so we’re sitting in the conference room and there’s Charles Evans Hughes and, you know, Taft over there and I have law students in here who don’t know those men, can’t recognize them. I bring them into my chambers and they don’t recognize James Madison. Okay, smart young law students. And I just think it’s tragic. They all want to change the world. Great. I say great. There’s a lot of improvement to be made. All right. But if you don’t know your history. If you don’t know why the gate is there — why it was put there — you just want it removed. Well, watch out. Here come the buffalo. You need to know your history.

McLaughlin: That’s a very Western metaphor.

Gorsuch: Well, mixed in with a little bit of Chesterton.

McLaughlin: Yeah — I mean almost nobody’s read the Articles of Confederation, for example, which to know how we got the Constitution, you gotta know what, what they tried first.

 First, you need to know why we rebelled, right? What were the complaints? You know, why did they feel the need to do that? Is it just tea in Boston Harbor? Did it have something to do with juries and judges, a lack of independence of them? And did it have — a lack of representation in their voices did have a little bit to do with the ideas that we think about with federalism. And then of course, you’re right, with the experiment with the articles, you know, why did we get rid of those? Maybe we went too far in the other direction. We wanted to decentralize in our fight against the king, and we went to the opposite extreme. Maybe the Constitution was a way to try to find a middle ground. But yes, no, nobody learns about that anymore.

McLaughlin: And one of the miracles is that in the middle of all of this they don’t just write the declaration and send home, you know, delegates to find out what their state legislatures are instructing them to do. They write this Constitution. Even if it didn’t work, they write all of these state constitutions. They hold elections in states that are half occupied by the British.

Gorsuch: Oh, I mean, one of the stories in the book is about the first printing of the declaration, with the signers’ names on it. Where were they? They’re in Baltimore. Why was Congress meeting in Baltimore? I thought it was Philadelphia, huh? Huh. Well, the British were attacking Philadelphia, right? And Congress — I mean, this is how fragile, how contingent all this was — had retreated to Baltimore, but they needed to get the declaration out. They had to get it out fast because as we discussed, not everybody was behind this project and they needed to rally people, they needed to persuade people. And so, they turned to a local printer, a Patriot printer, M. K. Goddard, who published a Patriot newspaper and always put at the bottom of the newspaper printed by M. K. Goddard. Well, M. K. Goddard is Mary Katharine Goddard and used her initials for obvious reasons at that time. When it came to the declaration, what did she do? She put at the bottom of that document printed by Mary Katharine Goddard in Baltimore, Maryland, because she wanted to be identified as a patriot too, even though it could have cost her her life as well.

McLaughlin: Yeah, I mean, the amount that they had to put themselves on the line, really, really should, should be part of what we appreciate about all of this, about the sacrifices they had to make.

Gorsuch: Thomas Nelson, you know, one of, one of the signers, was the head of the Virginia militia at the Battle of Yorktown. He saw that the British were using his house as one of their headquarters — is one of the stories in the book. And he didn’t hesitate to have his men fire on it. And when he died, he died very poor, having spent most of his fortune in support of the revolution. They really did pledge their lives, their sacred honor, their fortunes to the cause, and he was asked on his deathbed, you know, do you have any regrets? And he said, I’d do it all over again.

McLaughlin: There’s, of course, you have in here the great story of Ben Franklin advising Jefferson as he saw some of his favorite pieces of the declaration get cut out. His story of the hat maker starts off with a long sign, and it ends up with just a name and a picture of a hat. I guess we’ve all read majority opinions of the court down through the years that look a little bit like the hat sign with nothing but a picture of name on it.

Gorsuch: Understand, Jefferson called them mutilations. It’s a pretty perfect document in a lot of ways. And of course there’s a big debate over who should write the declaration. There’s a great story about that, and Adams wrote this down, so it’s recorded in his words in the book, and it’s kind of priceless, I think, you know, Adams says to Jefferson, “You know, you should write the declaration,” and Jefferson says, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, you do it.” And Jefferson, Adams said, didn’t utter more than three sentences in a row ever during that meeting of the Continental Congress. I mean, he was very quiet, in public. And so he was very reticent. Adams is like, “No, no, no, no, you gotta do it. I’ll give you three reasons. First, you’re a Virginian, and a Virginian should be head of this business because, you know, those Massachusetts guys were a little rabble rousing. They need to bring other people along and Virginia was the wealthiest, largest colony. Okay. Second, I’m obnoxious, I am suspected and unpopular, and you are very much otherwise. And reason third. You write ten times better than I do.” And so that’s how they resolved how to do it. But it was a process, that’s for sure.

McLaughlin: What do you think is the most important thing for — whether it’s students of the Constitution or students of the revolution to know about why they rebelled?

Gorsuch: I think it has to do with those three ideas we’ve talked about. They really believed in those three ideas. And they seem like the air we breathe today, we take them so for granted, like the water a fish swims in [and] doesn’t even notice it. But you have to remember that in 1776, those were unbelievably crazy radical ideas. The idea you rule yourself? Nobody in Europe did that. You have rights. No, you have grace from the king. Right, we’re all equal. Kings and serfs, goodness, no. Those — a British newspaper called the Declaration of Independence — Americans had declared for themselves the unalienable right to talk nonsense, Okay? And a lot of people still think it’s nonsense around the world today, and if we don’t take care to learn about them, to preserve them, and to recommit ourselves to them in every generation, there’s nothing inevitable about their continuity.

McLaughlin: George Washington’s justices — or the justices he appointed, I guess they, once in, they’re not his justices anymore — but Washington’s appointees to the Court spent a lot of time riding circuit, not only riding circuit, but giving speeches and explanations to local juries and grand juries about the Constitution. Here’s what it says, here’s what it means. Is that part of your role? Do you think it to be something of a public ambassador for the Court and the Constitution? Is that part of what you see as your job?

Gorsuch: Well, I actually think if you brought the Founders back today and said, “Walk around the executive branch, walk around Congress, now come over here to the Court.” I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I think the one institution they’d probably recognize most easily is this institution. Nine older people sitting around arguing about whether this dangling modifier modifies this, that, or the other thing, right? And what does the First Amendment mean? And I think that’s something I take some pride in that, you know, we do our own work and it would be recognizable. We don’t ride circuit anymore, but in terms of books, I think Supreme Court justices have written over 350 books. And I don’t think I’ll ever match the output of my friend Steve Breyer. But he is a wonderful teacher — completely wrong about everything he thinks about law — but a dear friend and a wonderful teacher.

McLaughlin: And on that note, I will thank you for being gracious with your time today.

Gorsuch: Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it and thank you guys too.