7.09.2009

ARCTV - Ridpath on Patrick Henry

Thanks to Myrhaf for making me aware of a video posted to the relatively new ARCTV. (new to me, at least)

John Ridpath, in February of 2004, gave a speech detailing the history and many shining moments of Patrick Henry, one of America's greatest heroes. To paraphrase something B.H. Liddell Hart wrote about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus:
For proof of this claim look at the progressive and co-ordinated steps by which, starting from the valley in America's darkest hour as the storm clouds of the British menace gathered, Patrick Henry climbs steadily and surely upwards to the summit of his aims, and plants America's flag on the sunlit peaks of freedom. Henry is a mountaineer, not a mere athlete of liberty. The vision that selects his line of approach, and the oratorical gifts which enable him to surmount obstacles, are for him what rock-craft is to a climber.
This video by Dr. Ridpath is incredibly moving. He gets choked up speaking about the greatness of the man, and I got choked up watching it. Watch the video by clicking on the image below. You won't regret it.

15 comments:

Brian Fritts said...

If you are interested in Economics, I highly recommend John Ridpath's talk on Say's Law. I think it is available from the Ayn Rand Bookstore.

Tom said...

Get this book, yesterday: http://www.amazon.com/Son-Thunder-Patrick-American-Republic/dp/0802138152

Patrick Henry is my hero. I watched this speech and I don't think it did Henry justice. Yes, it did tell about a lot of the great things he did, but it didn't focus on the great things he's not recognized for. The passage of the Bill of Rights is wholly due to Henry, this is true, but the constitution is still a flawed document that has allowed such things as the Sherman Act, The Federal Reserve Act, the Income Tax Amendment, etc, etc, etc. The consititution did not go far enough to protect individual rights and Henry knew it. He gave a great many speeches before, during, and after the Virginia ratification convention outlining the many reasons that the constitution was itself anti-federal, and why it destroyed individual rights. The great tragedy of our time is that we all think the constitution instituted liberty when in fact it destroyed it.

Unknown said...

"This video by Dr. Ridpath is incredibly moving. He gets choked up speaking about the greatness of the man, and I got choked up watching it."

Lol, I saw it as depressing though I enjoyed the speech. Patrick Henry was certainly a hero, but look at our government today.

C. August said...

Brian: thanks for the suggestion. I'll look it up.

Harold: Did you find it depressing in contrast to what it could have been, and to the greatness of Henry and the founders? I suppose I can see that, as it certainly made me mourn, in a way, what might have been. But it was inspirational because it also shows what could be, which is one of the main things I took away from it.

Uttles: Your statement about the Constitution has me wondering if you're not evaluating it in the correct historical and philosophical context. You said that people "think the constitution instituted liberty when in fact it destroyed it," but that statement is based on what I think are some major misconceptions. In my view, that notion ignores the facts of reality and the state of knowledge of the foundation and source of individual rights that the Founders had.

As Peikoff said, to paraphrase, America was founded with an amazingly good political system, but built on a wobbly foundation.

The Founders looked to the natural rights thought of Locke and others, who based their theory of natural rights on their supposed "god-given" existence. So they held an implicit individual rights-respecting philosophy in their politics, but explicitly advocated Christian altruism as the ideal. These contradictions -- ones that weren't resolved until Ayn Rand just 50 years ago -- also showed up in the Constitution.

You can't on one hand laud the Founders for establishing the first moral society and government on earth which sprouted unprecedented freedom and prosperity for generations, and on the other hand fault them for not having knowledge which wouldn't be available for another 200 years. Their accomplishments, Henry's and the rest, were the pinnacle of human achievement at the time. For that they deserve the justice of our deep appreciation.

Their contradictions and the insidious forces of anti-life philosophies proceeded to erode the wobbly base upon which the Founders built the political protections of our liberties, to the point where today they are under great peril. But their ideas and the government they created were vulnerable precisely because they lacked the knowledge that wouldn't come for 200 years.

I agree that this seems tragic... it was so close, so agonizingly close, and the success that did happen was a testament to how close to being right they were. But now we have the knowledge, and it's time to work to fully reclaim the liberties that Henry fought for.

All I'm saying, to sum up, is that we owe the Founders their due, including for the creation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but because we are armed with greater knowledge due to Ayn Rand's works, we can identify and fix the problems they couldn't solve.

Anonymous said...

To my knowledge, Patrick Henry has never appeared in Amercian historical fiction (except, perhaps, as a mere propagandist, so characterized by left-wing novelists) as the giant he was. I corrected that omission in Sparrowhawk: Book Four - Empire, in which he introduces his Stamp Act Resolves in the Virginia House of Burgesses in May 1765. In the relevant chapters, he opposes the arch-conservative Tidewater gentry who wanted to beg the Crown not to impose the Stamp Act taxes on the colonies. Henry would have none of that. All seven of the Resolves he introduced for debate and vote (the ones we know about, the record is scanty) passed by a margin of one or two votes. When the Resolves were broadcast throughout the other colonies (but not in Virginia, the lt.-governor controlled the only newspaper here), men were inspired by the courage of Virginia to defy the Crown. Except from Georgia, the Crown collected not one penny of the tax, and the Act was repealed exactly a year later. I date the true begining of the American Revolution to 1765-1766.

John Ridpath called me years ago to tell me that Book Four was his favorite title of the series.

Ed Cline

Tom said...

First off, let me say that I do not have the time to study this enough to be considered an expert, but about 6 months ago I did read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and Son of Thunder (about Patrick Henry - my favorite anti-federalist.) It was at that time that I drew my conclusions about the Constitution.

Having said that:
"You can't on one hand laud the Founders for establishing the first moral society and government on earth which sprouted unprecedented freedom and prosperity for generations, and on the other hand fault them for not having knowledge which wouldn't be available for another 200 years."

I disagree with this. The founders clearly had the knowledge or the Declaration of Independence wouldn't have been written the way it was. Sure, they didn't identify it as Objectivism and yes they did make reference to a creator but more importantly they identified our rights as natural, inseparable from our lives.

My theory on the chain of events is this: The newfound wealth of the gentry class in the colonies was in jeopardy with the crown issuing more and more edicts governing trade, culminating in the stamp act. The ruling elite (who were not capitalists by any means, they were the pull peddlers and pull profiteers using the might of the British governors to their advantage) were fine with that silly college boy Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence because they had seen in the reactions of the people to "Common Sense" how that language got the regular folks all fired up and ready to fight, but when the war went on for years and the colonists actually won it the reality struck them that they were now faced with a country full of individualists who wanted to have complete control of their lives. This would mean that their most dreaded enemy, an able competitor free of the shackles of government, could take them down.

So a compromise was made. Instead of constructing a government for the sole purpose of protecting individual rights ( as the Declaration states so succinctly) they decided to allow each one of the states full sovereignty so that they could in fact govern their people however they wanted to. This is when the Articles of Confederation were instituted. Those articles contained no language whatsoever about individual rights.

It then became apparent that the large monied interests in certain states were not able to effectively control their customers in other states. This was mainly the banks vs the farmers as the banks were using currency manipulation to put the farmers into a state of perpetual indentured servitude (kind of like how everyone in America is now an indentured servant to the government.) So then, they invented a crisis here and a crisis there along with imagined foreign crises to scare the people into amending the original Articles. Never let a good crisis go to waste, right?

Only they didn't amend the Articles. As is what happens in any compromise situation, evil always wins. They came back to the table and pulled a bait and switch. Neither Jefferson nor Henry were able to make it to the new convention, so they had little barriers for their new plan: centralized power completely overruling the state governments and having no specific protections of individual rights: The US Constitution.

Tom said...

To see what I'm talking about in all of its obvious glory, just look at these two intros:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

and


"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Now, can you honestly say the constitution was created to protect our individual rights? I say it was created to erode them. Why else would they have had to add 10 amendments to the thing to outline certain rights that the people should have? Because they didn't want the people to actually have them, but they had to get Patrick Henry to shut up somehow, so they "let" us have a few derivative rights, but not the natural rights of free men.

Unknown said...

"Harold: Did you find it depressing in contrast to what it could have been, and to the greatness of Henry and the founders? I suppose I can see that, as it certainly made me mourn, in a way, what might have been."

Yes, that was my impression. Look at what was and now look at what is. It's almost comical.

C. August said...

Uttles, I'm not sure quite how to respond to your points. In essence, I think you are swaying too close to a conspiracy theory view of what happened that, as I said earlier, misses the historical and philosophical context.

You point to "monied interests" and say that the Constitution "was created to erode" individual rights. Really? It was designed to destroy liberty and subjugate men? And it was only to shut up Patrick Henry that the Bill of Rights was created?

I understand your frustration with the way the country has gone over the last century, but I think your statements both overly aggrandize the supposed "evil schemers of the Founding Era", and belittle the actual accomplishments of the Founders.

Tom said...

I don't think it's a very honest debate tactic to simply label an argument a "conspiracy theory" to try and debunk it entirely without addressing any of its points.

Read some history from the perspective of the Anti-Federalists.

Also, try to find a single clause in the constitution that ensures individual rights. (not including the bill of rights, which I've already shown to be an incomplete list of derivative rights.)

Intentional or not, the fact of reality is that the constitution does not protect individual rights, and instead relies on checks and balances that assume the conflicting branches actually differ in philosophy, which they have not for at least 100 years.

C. August said...

I already stated that your view "ignores the facts of reality and the state of knowledge of the foundation and source of individual rights that the Founders had," and then supported it with facts, many comments ago.

Then you came back with the claim that, essentially, there was a [secret plan? conspiracy?] of the rich who "allowed," patronizingly, Jefferson to pen the Declaration, and then set out to actively crush individual rights with the Constitution. Am I not construing your argument correctly?

Then you essentially called me dishonest for identifying your argument for what it is.

I have read arguments from both the Federalist and Anti-Federalist (Democratic Republican) sides, and I generally come down on the latter's side of the debate. However, as I have said before, they all suffered under a lack of knowledge of the metaphysical grounding of rights, of the understanding that rational egoism is the only valid and just moral system, and even of the science of economics and that laissez-faire capitalism is the proper political and economic system. Even Jefferson employed mercantilistic policies against the British, restraining trade and thus violating individual American's rights. This is because they didn't fully grasp the contradictions between their explicit (altruism) and implicit (egoism) moral codes.

Where you see some sort of grand plan by the authors of the Constitution (and apparently all the states that ratified it?) to actively destroy the liberties that they had all just fought a long and horrific war to secure, I see honest mistakes and a general context of knowledge that lacked certain fundamentals.

Philosophy and ideas shape history, and we're seeing today the failure of the culture to continue progressing from the contradictions present in the founding era, towards the full, proud embrace of rational egoism. Now that we know, because of Ayn Rand, the proper philosophical foundation for rights and what political system fully protects them, we can pursue it to secure those rights. But pointing to the difference between the Declaration and the Constitution and asserting that everyone should have grasped the true nature of individual rights by reading the Declaration is absurd. It took Ayn Rand, 200 years later, to figure that all out.

Tom said...

Your entire argument rests on the notion that the founders had nothing but good intentions and the only reason they didn't explicitly define and protect individual rights in the constitution is that they didn't understand objectivist philosophy and its ramifications.

To me, that argument is clearly false. Obviously they hadn't discovered Objectivism (I wish they had) but they had discovered the importance of individual rights, as well as the consequences. Evidence of this exists in the writings of the day, from Paine to Henry to Jefferson and on. There were many invocations of individual rights throughout the prominent pamphlets and essays of the time, including Brutus, the anonymous Farmer, etc.

So for some reason, the members of the convention that created the constitution decided to omit any such declaration or definition of individual rights (despite Jefferson's great work on the Declaration.) It is not factually correct to say they omitted this because of ignorance. So then why did they?

Look at the circumstances of the individuals who created the constitution and you will see.

Also remember that many scare tactics were used to get states to ratify the constitution, including threats of revolts, indian attacs, British reprisals, etc, etc. Also remember that it wasn't a vote of the individuals within a state that was required for ratification, and that the individuals in each state were represented by those who were voted in my a strictly limited electorate.

Again I am not sure of the mechanisms of this process... conspiracy, fear, lack of conviction, political expediency, debt pressures... I don't know. I doubt much written history of anything negative on the part of the Founders would have been allowed to survive this long anyway - history is written by the winners. The point is that the result, the product of the founders, tells you everything you need to know. The constitution had to be amended immediately to include the slightest notion of individual rights, a patronisingly short list of derivative rights from life, liberty, and property, and this is a tragedy that mere ignorance could not have afforded.

C. August said...

I understand what you're saying, and you make good points about the conflicting pressures the founders had to address. I'd also add the concern they had in looking at how the ancients fared in creating their governments: they did not want to repeat the mistakes of the Greek city states, or of the Roman republic. And, they were concerned with the very real threat from Europe.

In this situation, the framers of the Constitution set out to figure out how to construct a government that would unite the states which were essentially at economic war with one another, and that would "secure the blessings of liberty." In that context, they held the moral truths of individual rights as self-evident, which means that they didn't need to be fleshed out... they were obvious and everyone agreed on them. Obviously, they were wrong.

They also operated under conflicting moral codes. I think you are simply not giving enough credit to this crucial fact. That is the "wobbly base" I mentioned earlier, and you'll see where I got that idea in the following quote.

Leonard Peikoff wrote, in the Ominous Parallels (p 118, end of Ch. 5):

"Such was the American conflict: an impassioned politics presupposing one kind of ethics, within a cultural atmosphere professing the sublimity of an opposite kind of ethics.

The signs of the conflict and of the toll it was to exact from the distinctively American political approach were evident at the beginning. They were evident in Jefferson's proposal for free public education; in Paine's advocacy of a number of governmental welfare functions; in Franklin's view that an individual has no right to his "superfluous" property, which the public may dispose of as it chooses, "whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition"; etc.

...

Philosophically, America was born a profound anomaly: a solid political structure erected on a tottering base.

The Founding Fathers did not know that the era in which they lived and fought and planned was on the threshold of yielding to its antipode. They did not know that they had snatched a country from the jaws of history at the last possible moment. They did not know that, even as they struggles to bring the new nation into existence, its philosophic gravediggers were already at work, cashing in on the period's contradictions: in the very decade in which the Founding Fathers were publishing their momentous documents, Kant was publishing his.

Symbolically, this is America's philosophical conflict, running through all the years of its subsequent history. The conflict is: the Declaration of Independence, with everything it presupposes, against the Critique of Pure Reason, with everything to which it leads."

------------

You may be right that some of the framers of the Constitution had bad intentions -- and here, I can only assume that you have Hamilton fixed in your mind as one of the villains -- but I think even Hamilton actually believed what he was doing was right. And in the absence of a better argument than "rights come from God and are unalienable," there was little more than a conflict of opinions.

Even had they asked Patrick Henry to write the Constitution with a full enumeration of rights, just like we might hope to have, the seeds of philosophical destruction were already sown in the wider culture. Because they could not ground individual rights in their proper metaphysical base and recognize egoism as the proper morality for man, they were vulnerable to attack. A better Constitution may have warded off the decline a bit longer, but that document in itself could not have protected the culture as a whole.

History has shown that calling individual rights self-evident is not a proper defense of them against their philosophical enemies. That "tottering base" is the cause, and we're now dealing with the effects.

C. August said...

FYI, I've enjoyed this discussion so far, and have posted most of it to a new entry because I think it's valuable. If we continue our debate, I think we should move it over to the new post.

Debates on the Founding Era

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