#1618 Are We Still a Republic?

Clay Jenkinson is joined by sports historian Kurt Kemper of Dakota State University and sports fan David Nicandri of Washington State. Our subject: the Caitlin Clark phenomenon. Clark of the University of Iowa now holds the NCAA collegiate basketball record for most career points in either the men’s or women’s league. What is next for her? How does her sudden national celebrity impact the game? How many thousands of girls are out on the driveway practicing their dribble and their jump shots thanks to her example? What should we make of the game's marketing team pitting Clark, who is white, against Angel Reese, an African American? 

Clay speaks with Richard Rhodes, eminent author of numerous books, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The subject: industrial agriculture and the death of rural America. Other countries pass legislation protecting small family farms, but the U.S. government throws its weight behind agribusiness and industrial gigantism. Rhodes believes we need to alter our food production and consumption paradigm for the sake of our health, the planet, and our relationship with the earth and other species. Was Jefferson’s utopian vision of a nation of sturdy and independent family farmers the right one? Was it ever viable? Can we regenerate rural America in the second half of the 21st century?

Clay interviews author and frequent guest Lindsay Chervinsky about her splendid new book on the John Adams administration: Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. In the second of two conversations about the book, Clay asks Lindsay to justify some of her unscrupulous attacks on the life and character of Thomas Jefferson. More to the point, why did John Adams fail to be re-elected for a second term in the year 1800? How much effect did the Constitution’s 3/5 clause have on the outcome? What were Adams’ greatest contributions to American political life? Why did George Washington betray his deepest principles during the Quasi War with France in 1798? Were the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 the reason the Jeffersonians won in 1800 or is it more complicated than that?

Clay talks with eminent historian Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of over a dozen books. Today’s question? Were we ever a republic, and are we now a republic? What did the Founding Fathers mean when they created the American republic? How is a republic different from a democracy? Was Jefferson’s small-r republican idealism realistic? Or was he, as John Adams reckoned, a beautiful but naïve dreamer? When did we cease to be a republic, or are we, in some limited sense, still a republic in 2024? How does the election of 2024 matter from this perspective?

Guest host Russ Eagle interviews Clay about Phase II of his 2024 Travels with Charley tour. What has Clay learned from retracing Steinbeck's famous 1960 cross-country journey? This time from Bismarck to Seattle, then Monterey, Salinas, and Route 66. Clay describes a few mishaps that have occurred. Plus, a visit to the Sylvia Beach literary hotel in Oregon, the annual Lewis and Clark Cultural Tour, the magnificence of the American continent, and people's reluctance to discuss our paralytic political situation. Finally, the lingering question: uncovering the best gumbo in America? 

Clay Jenkinson’s interview with adventurer Alan Mallory about his family’s ascent of Mount Everest. That’s 29,032 feet, a third of it in the Death Zone, where your body actually starts to die from lack of oxygen and other factors. Mallory walks us through the process—getting to Nepal, the cost, the outfitters, the journey to base camp, where you stay to adjust to the altitude, and then the slow, steady, and exhausting climb through four camps before attempting the summit. On the basis of his book, The Family that Conquered Everest, Mallory has a vibrant career as a motivational speaker. At the end he shares his adventures are ahead.

Clay interviews regular guest Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky about her new book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. It’s a wonderfully readable study of the one-term presidency of John Adams. Lindsay sheds new light on some of the most interesting moments of the Adams presidency and examines the first peaceful transfer of power in American political history and the second when Thomas Jefferson displaced Adams in the election of 1800. The book provides fascinating insights into the people and events that set the future trajectory of the great American experiment.

Clay Jenkinson converses with historian Larry Skogen about his new book, To Educate American Indians. Skogen’s book examines US policy of assimilating Native Americans into European-derived white America, including the nightmare of the Indian Boarding Schools, personified by Carlisle Indian School’s superintendent Richard Pratt’s racist mission statement: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” One of the fascinations of this subject is that so many of the white people engaged in coercive assimilation were, at least in their own minds, “philanthropists,” who believed they were doing the right thing. Embedded in the assimilation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was what is called “scientific racism,” the view that Anglo Saxon white people were the acme of world civilization and all others were lower on the scale of civilization, accomplishment, and even capacity. It’s an important and at times chilling subject, and Larry Skogen is one of the nation’s premier historians of these policies.

Clay interviews former NPR CEO Ken Stern, author of a provocative 2018 book, Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right. Weary of living in a liberal cosmos that found the other side “deplorable,” Ken traveled America to experience rituals that many associate with the political Right. He hunted a pig in Texas, visited evangelical churches, went to a NASCAR race, and spent time with the philosopher of Trumpism, Steve Bannon. Clay asks why Ken did it, what he learned, and how his views of America changed. 

Clay talks with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky about her just-published book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. Lindsay explores how, in the nation's early days, John Adams and others pioneered a framework for the American presidency that we now take for granted. One example: The U.S. Constitution was largely silent about the peaceful transfer of power. Chervinsky notes the country was filled with anxiety to see George Washington retire and observe the transfer of power, a new and revolutionary feature of political life.