- Jefferson and Hamilton stand astride the core debates in American history, from neutrality to civil rights and beyond.

Today's guest traces that history, the rise and fall of each man's reputation and the enduring questions they asked about power, the citizen, and the American state.

He's Jeffrey Rosen this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright mellow orchestral upbeat music) (bright mellow orchestral upbeat music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is an accomplished scholar and author, Jeffrey Rosen is CEO emeritus at the National Constitution Center, and the author of a new book, "The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton and Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America."

He's joined us today from Washington, DC.

Jeff, thank you so much for being with us.

- Great to be with you.

- And congratulations, I mentioned before the interview that I really, really enjoyed this book, and I just wanna thank you for sharing it with us and spending some time with me today.

Hamilton and Jefferson, two touchstones of lasting American debates over the entirety of the American Republic.

Why are those two founders so central to the questions of power and citizenship and their relationship between the two over that history?

- They're central because their early debates over those questions of national power versus states rights, and democracy versus rule by elites, and liberal versus strict construction of the constitution, and the relationship between power and liberty itself have defined all of our constitutional, political, and even social debates ever since the founding.

Just to sum up one basic difference between them, for Jefferson, every increase in government power threatens liberty, and for Hamilton, increases in government power can help to secure liberty; and in that sense, they really represent the pulls between let's say conservatives and libertarians, or Whigs and Tories, or federalists and anti-federalists, and that's the basic division that's gone through ever since.

- And so, I think you sketched it a little bit there, but if we dig down a little bit deeper in terms of what does the essence of it mean to be Jeffersonian?

- Well, it means several things.

First, it is a devotion to state's rights and to government at the smallest possible level.

Jefferson was always saying, "Divide the government into wards," and he thought that only in small communities could people, and in particular, rural white farmers, who were his real ideal of citizens, only then could they deliberate face-to-face and achieve true democracy.

The second thing is that Jefferson believed in democracy itself, he said "The will of the majority should always prevail," and in that sense, he was prophetic of our current devotion to democracy.

To be a Jeffersonian also means to be a strict constructionist of the Constitution.

Jefferson wanted to construe the text so strictly that he refused to imply powers that were not granted.

He thought that the Bank of the United States was unconstitutional; and today on the Supreme Court, we have Jeffersonian Supreme Court justices who are similarly determined to construe federal power narrowly.

And a final thing is that, at least in theory, Jefferson was devoted to a constrained executive and preferred to launch the power in Congress and the states that changed when he became President, and he sort of revised his views on the question, but those are the basic axis of what it means to be a Jeffersonian.

- And then to be a Hamiltonian.

- To be a Hamiltonian is the opposite on almost all those questions.

First, it's to favor national power over state's rights.

Hamilton thought that only with a strong national government could we achieve security against foreign and domestic insurrection and invasion, and most importantly, be part of an international system of finance.

It was the Bank of the United States that was the centerpiece of Hamilton's financial plan, and he embraced that until the end of his career.

Also to be a Hamiltonian is to favor, I think, I guess we would call it today, elites, he might have called it aristocracy over democracy.

This may be a surprise to those who know Hamilton from the musical- - Right.

- And think of him as the rapping, self-made champion (Jim chuckles) of the American Dream.

But in his time, Hamilton was attacked in particular by Jefferson as being a monarchist who yearned to resurrect monarchy or Caesarism in America, and that's why Jefferson called that, the party of Hamilton, the monocrats.

Another important difference is that Hamiltonians are liberal rather than strict constructionists of the constitution.

And what that means is that they're willing to read the words broadly to imply powers that are not necessarily written down as long as that will achieve the constitution's broader purposes.

And Chief Justice Marshall, who viewed himself as Hamilton's heir, was also a liberal constructionist, he upheld the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, 'cause he wanted to construe the word necessary and the necessary and proper liberally to mean appropriate or useful.

And since he thought a bank could be appropriate or useful to achieving enumerated powers, he was willing to embrace it.

And then the final thing to be a Hamiltonian is to be a very strong proponent of the executive.

And, in fact, the phrase the unitary executive that we're debating today comes from Hamilton's Pacificus letters, he always thought that you needed a strong president to check the mob.

And his last letter was right before the duel denounced the greatest danger he saw in America which was democracy.

So you can see how different Hamilton and Jefferson were on all of those questions.

- Yeah, and it's remarkable that they both served under President Washington in that first administration, but those differences emerged in things like the question of neutrality and the Neutrality Acts.

I wanna get to some of the more recent things too, but do you wanna just sketch how those different approaches to governing and the role of government sort of manifest themselves in the debate over neutrality?

- Well, neutrality was partly a proxy for the president's power to make treaties without congressional consent, and also which side should we take in the growing tension which became a war between Britain and France; and the Hamiltonians favored Britain, and the Jeffersonians, France.

But it's really a debate about executive power, and that's why I begin the book with what I call the dinner party that defined America in the room where it happened, not the one in the musical, but this is a year later, the same room, Jefferson's house in New York City.

The cabinet is gathered, Washington's away, at some point in the evening, Hamilton looks at the pictures on the wall and says to Jefferson, "Who are those three guys?"

And Jefferson says, "They're my vision of the three greatest men in history, John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton."

And Hamilton pauses for a long time and then he blurts out, "The greatest man in history was Julius Caesar."

(Jim chuckles) And this convinces Jefferson that Hamilton's not only for a monarchy, but a monarchy bottomed on corruption.

He goes on to found the Democratic Republican Party and supposed opposition to the monarchism and Caesarism of Hamilton, and continues to stress that line until he dies, and that's what the Democrats accused their rivals of for the rest of the 19th century.

What's striking is that both Hamilton and Jefferson feared Caesarism in different ways; Hamilton thought it would be a demagogue who had come from below and flatter the people and persuade them to give out their liberties.

His solution is a life-term for the President, that's what he proposes in the Constitutional Convention in a six hour speech that provokes some gasps, although James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris also supported, so it wasn't totally off the wall, but he wants not a hereditary, but an elective president, 'cause he thinks that that president will be able to resist the importunations of Congress and the people and stand up for the public good.

Jefferson's the opposite, he fears that Caesar, who will cross the Rubicon, persuade the Senate to give up its prerogatives, and establish himself as a dictator.

Jefferson's solution is a one-year term limit for the President, 'cause he thinks if the President can't run again, he won't be tempted to or able to install himself for life.

In the end, no term limits are imposed, and the two-term custom, which Washington establishes by stepping down, holds until Franklin Roosevelt breaks it in the 1940s.

- Well, you know, so one of the things that emerges in reading this book is that different political leaders have different approaches to some of these questions based on whether they're in power or out of power.

You mentioned Jefferson and the questions of executive power and how that changed once he became president, But Lincoln sort of had a duality approach to these questions as well too; could you sketch a little of that?

- Absolutely.

Jefferson's greatest, let's call it, flexibility rather than hypocrisy (Jim chuckles) is when he becomes President, he has a chance to buy Louisiana, 'cause Napoleon renounces it.

He can double the size of the United States for, I don't know, $15,000, a real bargain; just one problem, he thinks it's unconstitutional because the territory's clause of the constitution in his view only authorizes the acquisition of territories that were in place when the Constitution was drafted.

So for a moment, he considers a constitutional amendment, but then he thinks Napoleon might change his mind and he says, "Nevermind, I'm gonna buy it anyway, even though I think it's unconstitutional."

You're right that Lincoln has a similarly ambivalent view.

On the one hand, you'd think he'd be a Hamiltonian 'cause he favors broad federal power, in fact, the core of his financial plan is called the American system, a phrase that he gets from Hamilton, and he wants internal improvements and a strong federal government especially during the Civil War; and yet, he stands before Independence Hall in 1861 and says, "I've never had a thought politically that didn't stem from the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson," and he says, "I'd rather be assassinated on this spot than abandon the principles of the Declaration."

So in that sense, he very much embraces the natural law promised in the Declaration that all human beings are created equal, that's at the core of his new birth of freedom in the Gettysburg Address.

So at the same time as he's expanding the federal government, suspending habeas corpus during wartime, issuing more executive orders than previous presidents, all of which are Hamiltonian moves, he's doing it under the banner of Thomas Jefferson.

- Yeah, I think that Barack Obama was quoting somebody, but I can't remember who it was, but President Obama used to say that you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose.

Is that some of the distinction in Lincoln's case, the appeal of the ideals and the Declaration of Independence and then the realities of governing, especially in a Civil War, that makes you lean more on Hamiltonian impulses?

- I think there is something to that, and, of course, in Lincoln's case, he came to shift his views about what the purpose of the war was.

He begins by insisting the only purpose of the war was to preserve the Union, and he said, "If I could preserve the Union by ending slavery, I would do that, and if I could preserve it by keeping slavery, I would do that."

So he really put the preservation of Union above all.

That's a Hamiltonian goal, it was Hamilton who insisted that we were one people, although the phrase came from the declaration, and Hamilton and Washington always said "It was we the people of the United States who were sovereign, rather than we the people of the several states."

And James Wilson relied on Hamilton and Washington in insisting that secession was unconstitutional.

Jefferson had the opposite view, he thought secession was permissible at times when the state strongly disagreed with the federal government, and Madison took an intermediate position but ultimately sided interestingly with Hamilton over Jefferson and thought succession was an extra constitutional act.

So Lincoln starts off by saying, "Secession is unconstitutional, it's my responsibility as commander-in-chief to preserve the Union."

But after years of the bloodiest war in American history, 23,000 men dead or wounded at Antietam, Lincoln comes to see the purpose of the war as ending slavery, and for that, he invokes the ideals of the Declaration as opponents of slavery did ever since the founding, and in the end, although he doesn't get to see the adoption of the 13, 14th, and 15th Amendments, there the culmination of his vision, and, in fact, it was the speech where Lincoln endorses suffrage, voting rights for African-American men, John Wilkes Booth is in the audience, and he says at that moment, he declared, "I'm gonna kill Lincoln," so- - Oh, wow.

- Lincoln at his best is willing to take the Declaration seriously and he gave his life for that.

- It's interesting though because it's Jeffersonian ideals, but it's the Hamiltonian exercise of federal power that actually is used essentially to try to address America's original sin and the civil and legal issues associated with racism, with slavery, and with the post-Civil War reconstruction era.

Is there a way to reconcile that in our heads?

Like, do we need both Hamilton and Jefferson for America to live up to those ideals?

- Well, we really do, I think it's the productive tension between the ideals of Hamilton and Jefferson that sustained the American idea.

I call them golden and silver threads woven throughout American history; sometimes they are side by side, sometimes they cross, sometimes they pull so far apart that they threaten to snap, but we need that tension, and on the rare occasions, when the threads have been pulled too far in one direction or another, then violence results.

And it's not unusual to combine the ideals of Hamilton and Jefferson, I was inspired to write this book when I read a passage in a book called "The Promise of the American Life" by Herbert Croly, who founded "The New Republic" magazine where I spent many years as legal affairs editor.

And Croly called on Theodore Roosevelt to deploy Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends, namely the Hamiltonian means of strong federal power for the Jeffersonian ends of promoting democracy and curbing monopolies and the banks.

And Theodore Roosevelt adopts that, literally, he quotes Croly, he says, "I am a Hamiltonian on federal power and a Jeffersonian on democracy," and he makes that the cornerstone of his new nationalism.

And ever since Theodore Roosevelt, we've seen presidents combining Hamilton and Jefferson in similar ways, and that's why we really do need both of their ideals.

- And it's not just presidents, I think you write about Justice Hugo Black adopting a Hamiltonian view of government and a Jeffersonian commitment to the Bill of Rights.

- Absolutely.

- Could you explain his approach?

- Hugo Black is a great figure, and for viewers who haven't encountered him, it's really inspiring to read his opinions.

He worshiped Jefferson, he's from Clay County, Alabama, he has the collected works of Jefferson, he can recite them by memory, he's a Democrat and Jefferson is the hero of the Democratic Party.

So he has no greater hero than Jefferson.

At the same time, he's a champion of the New Deal and as a senator, he's one of the biggest supporters of things like a federal minimum wage, which that went too far even for some other Democrats.

That's why Franklin Roosevelt appoints him to the Supreme Court because after the Congress rejects FDR's court-packing plan, he's in such a mood for vengeance that he wants to appoint the most radical populist in Congress to the court, but at the same time, this is a populist who also believes in the welfare state and a strong federal government.

That interesting combination of devotion to populism, federal power, and individual rights, which Hugo Black defended more inspiringly than almost any other justice of his time, in particular the First Amendment which he was an absolutist on was characteristic of the Democratic Party for much of the 20th century.

- And, you know, and I think FDR is somebody else that also had sort of a duality approach.

I think you described his first term as being very Jeffersonian, but his second-term being very Hamiltonian.

What was the transition?

- Well, part of it was that the Supreme Court struck down much of the first New Deal, as it was called, on the grounds that FDR had consolidated too much power, and there were unanimous opinions holding that the New Deal was unconstitutional.

So FDR in the Second New Deal adopted his views, and Arthur Schlesinger, the historian said, "If the first New Deal breathed the spirit of Jefferson, the second New Deal breathed the Spirit of Hamilton."

FDR is really interesting figure on this 'cause he's inspired by a book by a guy called Claude Bowers called "Jefferson versus Hamilton: The Battle Between Aristocracy and Democracy."

He reads this in the 1920s, he writes the only blurb he's ever written for a book.

He invites Bowers to speak at the 1928 Democratic Convention.

And once he's elected in 1932, he resolves to found the whole New Deal administrative state on the principles of Jefferson.

You could call this an act of chutzpah as important (Jim laughing) because, you know, he's exploding the size of the federal government, but he's invoking the libertarian hero Jefferson.

He puts Jefferson on the nickel, he builds the Jefferson Memorial, he dies days before Jefferson's birthday with an undelivered speech about Jefferson as the prophet of the post-war order.

But he's really emphasizing the democratic, the populist, rather than the libertarian Jefferson.

And that's why Ronald Reagan says that he left the Democratic Party in 1960s because it had abandoned the libertarian principles of Jefferson, and he wants to reinvent the Republicans in the 1980 by resurrecting the limited government Jefferson rather than the Democratic populous Jefferson.

- Well, so when I read your description of FDR's I guess use of the memory, the historical memory and the analogies of Jefferson particularly in that first term, part of me wondered if that was not less sort of historical accuracy that he was seeking, but rather political-motivated reasoning; in other words, a little bit twisting of Jefferson to fit what his agenda was.

Am I over-interpreting that?

- Not at all, that's exactly what he was doing.

Jefferson was the founder of the Democrats, but FDR is transforming the nature of the federal government.

There are some states rights, Democrats who are uncomfortable with this, and FDR is an effective politician, and he wants to win, so he cannily embraces Jefferson as the hero of the new vision of the Democratic Party.

It's not entirely opportunistic, FDR deeply identifies with Jefferson another heir, kind of privileged man who grows up in rural splendor in Monticello, as FDR grew up in Hyde Park.

FDR is proud of trying to trace his ancestry back to Jefferson, just as Jefferson is always tracing his ancestry back to the ancient Saxons and Celts, and there's a spirit of Jefferson, the Democratic aristocrat that really appeals to FDR who thinks of himself in exactly the same way.

He says it's possible to be, you know, both born with privilege and also to champion democracy, but he also recognizes the political benefits of embracing Jefferson.

- You know, you reflect towards the end of the book about the fact that across American history, so many presidents, so many important political leaders in the history of the Republic were familiar with Jefferson, were familiar with Hamilton.

If we were to... I guess the question I wanna ask is, should we as citizens be asking our elected leaders where they stand on Jefferson and where they stand on Hamilton, and what should we make of their responses?

- Well, we should certainly ask them to be familiar with the ideals just as those previous leaders were.

As you say, I was really struck by how many of our presidents were deep readers of the primary texts of Hamilton and Jefferson themselves, starting with John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren, who wrote the first political history of the US, tracing it back to the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton on democracy versus rule by elites.

And I take it all the way up, Lincoln, and in 1912, all three candidates, not only are Hamiltonians but have written about Hamilton, that Theodore Roosevelt wrote a biography of Gouverneur Morris, Woodrow Wilson admires Hamilton 'cause he wants consolidated power, and he admires Hamilton and Hagel, and William Howard Taft admires Hamilton for his defense of judicial review.

I won't take it all the way up to the present, but viewers can just think about all the deep readers we've had as presidents until quite recently, and I think that citizens can expect our leaders to be historically literate and to make up their own minds about where they stand on the question; and citizens, we the people, have an obligation also to study these primary texts and to familiarize ourself with these ideals and to decide where we stand.

- You know, I could talk to you about this all week, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to do this.

I do wanna bring us up to the current moment.

You know, in the last six years now, we've had sort of not just a massive pandemic which put real stress on executive power and the power of the government, but we've also had an insurgency on January 6th, 2021, and then we've had real shifts in the assertion of executive power by some estimations in the last year and a half in the second Trump Administration.

In the long history with Hamilton and Jefferson as our context, what do you make of the political moment we find ourselves in now, and we've got about two minutes for this?

- Well, at the end of the book, I'm trying to be non-partisan throughout the book and not take sides between Hamilton and Jefferson, so readers can decide for themselves, but at the end of the book, I say there's a big debate today about whether President Trump should be viewed as Julius Caesar or Andrew Jackson.

And his critics say that he's Julius Caesar, the very demagogic dictator who both Hamilton and Jefferson feared, and by consolidating power in the executive with the aid of a supine Congress, which is rubber stamping the views of presidents of whatever party, you know, holds the office when Congress agrees, executive power has expanded in ways that both Hamilton and Jefferson would have resisted.

The counterargument is that he's Andrew Jackson, and like the great hero of the Battle of New Orleans, he's using executive power to shrink the size of the federal government, just as President Trump did with DOGE.

Jackson tried to kill the Bank of the United States, he fired civil service appointed by John Quincy Adams, and instituted the spoiled system, and basically was a populist who denounced elites.

I think it's too soon as a historian to decide that really important question, but history casts a lot of light about the fact that this is the very question that we've been debating since the founding.

- Yeah, I don't know if I... I think on some level, it made me feel better about the current moment to know that it did seem to fit within those long historic debates, and frankly, some of the history you recount of some of the... So Donald Trump's not the first American president that people have referred to as a king, right, so King Andrew with Andrew Jackson, I guess I took a little bit of heart in all of that.

One last quick question for you; it was Henry Cabot Lodge you write, who argued that Hamilton and Jefferson, individuals were destined to either love one, but if they loved one, they were gonna hate the other.

What's he getting at there?

- Well, he's kind of taking a polarized view of the question.

I don't agree, I think that many of us have a little of Hamilton and Jefferson in us, and I am inspired by the fact, and this is the last scene in the book, that when Jefferson was old, he puts a bust of Hamilton across from his own in the central entrance hall of Monticello.

And when he's old and Jefferson passes the bust, he smiles faintly and says, "Opposed in life as in death."

So for Jefferson Hamilton, it's not a hated enemy to be destroyed, but a respected opponent to be engaged with, and that's obviously, I think, the spirit that we must resurrect today.

- Jeffrey Rosen, that is a great place for us to leave it.

It is "The Pursuit of Liberty," and it's a must read, thank you for being with us.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I wanna thank you too for spending some of your time with us this week.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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