#1145 Williamsburg

A special show this week as Brad Crisler returns to the Jefferson Hour as guest host and speaks with President Thomas Jefferson about Williamsburg.

Download this week's episode.

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More from the Thomas Jefferson Hour

The Nobility of Voluntary Renunciation of Power

I was really surprised to learn that Governor Jack Dalrymple has determined not to seek another term. And a little saddened. He has presided over North Dakota at the most prosperous and successful moment of its history. I believe he would have been re-elected effortlessly in 2016. He's popular and extremely well respected, well spoken, calm, unassuming, immune to the superficial trappings of power, without vanity or the slightest hunger for grandstanding or self-praise. When you run into him in the capitol, at the grocery store, or at a restaurant, you would not inevitably conclude he is the Governor of North Dakota. There is none of the Rick Perry huff and puff about him, no stern security detail, no glad-handing, and no inflated self-regard.

When a man of power leaves office before he would have to, two really interesting things happen. First, we suddenly remember that these are actual human beings, not just governors, presidents, or senators. We remember that they have families, interests, hobbies, friends, health concerns, personal goals, travel plans, bucket lists, and a growing pile of books they have neglected during their term of office. Whenever I remember that Barack Obama is a father--of two girls—I like him better. Second, it always makes me feel more hopeful about our system of government to realize that there are people, like Jack Dalrymple, for whom power is not the only measure. Paradoxically, the person who voluntarily relinquishes power restores credibility and dignity to the system.

Renunciation of power is always breathtaking. People ache for power. They calculate and coordinate every element of their existence to achieve it. They avoid glittering temptations and distractions to stay on track. Even when they just want to sit with a beer and watch a ball game on television, or have a quiet evening with their spouse and children, they drag themselves to that precinct dinner in some marginal zip code, because generally speaking you cannot achieve power without making it the central purpose of your life. Bill Clinton openly said that he had wanted to be president of the United States since he was 16 years old.

Think of the two dozen 2015-16 aspirants to the presidency, taking all of those oppressive donor calls, telling every audience as much of what they want to hear as possible, flying at dawn day after day after day to stand at a factory door, do four television interviews with "important" local TV anchors, read a book about whimsical goats to third graders at Lincoln Elementary, address the Rotarians of south Sioux City, then whisk off to Pahrump, Nevada, for a "major speech" about trade policy.

All this to achieve power. In the end, someone—some one—will achieve it. And then, for four or eight years, to have the pundits of the Other Network hammer at you every single day, taking everything you say out of context, gripping like a pit bull anything that could possibly be construed to discredit you, searching incessantly for the slightest crack in your private life, replaying the moment when you tripped off the helicopter like a continuous loop, or the one clip (from 10,000 solemn alternatives) of you smirking through the National Anthem. Look at the before and after photographs of any president. That gray and haggard survivor is who you are going to become.

And yet they line up like lemmings to win the prize.

The Founding Fathers understood the intoxication of power, and its danger to republican values, so they created a mythology of renunciation that they borrowed from ancient Rome. All the Founders read Plutarch's Lives (short biographies about ancient Greek and Roman leaders). Jefferson and Adams read them in the original Greek. Everyone else read them in John Dryden's English translation (1683). The most important of Plutarch's Lives, from this perspective, was his biography of Cincinnatus, a fifth-century Roman aristocrat who lived in great simplicity on a farm, was called to public service during a severe war crisis, served brilliantly, saved Rome, and then immediately retired and returned to his modest agrarian life. All of the Founding Fathers had to pretend they admired the example of Cincinnatus, and a few, like Jefferson, genuinely did.

The great American Cincinnatus was George Washington. As soon as the Revolutionary War was won, Washington resigned his commission and returned to Mount Vernon. This, one of the greatest moments in the history of America, occurred on December 23, 1783, in Annapolis. There, Washington quietly handed his commission as Commander in Chief to members of the Continental Congress. He had his horse waiting at the door. The next day he left for his farm. There were many things he valued more than power.

If he had been Napoleon or Julius Caesar he would have clung to power at the end of a sword or musket, would have installed himself as dictator for life, and ruled with as much force as necessary until death or a coup d'état. When King George III of England heard that Washington was planning to renounce power and return to private life, he said, "If he does that he will be the greatest man in the world.

I was sorry to hear Barack Obama hint recently that he would like to serve a third term as president, if the law permitted it. Bill Clinton loved being president so much that he is said to have slept hardly at all during his last few weeks in office. In Rudyard Kipling's terms, he wanted to "fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run," or, to invite the inevitable gag, he sought to squeeze every possible joy out of his last moments in the White House. Theodore Roosevelt loved power so fiercely that he was really never fully happy after March 4, 1909, when he left the presidency.

Jack Dalrymple's path has been comparatively smooth. If he is a man of ambition, it doesn't show. Now he has the satisfaction of knowing that he leaves the state of North Dakota better than he found it. And it was already doing well on December 7, 2010, when he became our 32nd Governor.

Dalrymple's voluntary retirement leaves an open seat in 2016. The automatic advantage of incumbency will not be a factor in the next election. We all have a short list of likely candidates, but no matter who winds up running, the governor's withdrawal provides a great opportunity for the people of North Dakota. What we need now is a serious and sustained statewide conversation about the future. Thanks to the governor's decision, and the downturn in world oil prices, we have a unique opportunity to step back, take a deep breath, and assess the revolutionary developments of the last dozen years, to ask ourselves who we have been (1889-2008), who we now are, and who we are becoming; what we value, how we want to manage the future of this amazing state, how we should invest the surpluses and the Legacy Fund; what landscapes and habits of our North Dakota identity we should try to conserve as we move into the second phase of the Bakken Oil era; above all what kind of statewide community we want to sustain or create with all of this unprecedented opportunity and abundance.

Meanwhile, no matter what your politics or party affiliation, I think almost every North Dakotan agrees with Matthew 25:21. "Well done, my good and faithful servant."

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A Whiff of What's to Come in the Morning Air

There is no moment quite like that first faint whiff of autumn on a late August morning. I felt it last week, and it filled me simultaneously with sadness and joy.

You can sense the imminence of autumn by the frenetic way people are seeking recreation on our lakes and rivers. I was out on a sandbar on the Missouri River south of Bismarck a few days ago, at what I suppose you would call a pontoon party. To the extent I could still see through the fog of about twenty varieties of brats and beer enough to lift the level of Lake Oahe, I noticed a little edge of anxiety on most of the faces of my companions. You could almost feel the seasonal clock ticking.

The English poet Robert Herrick wrote, "Gather ye rosebuds while you may, Old Time is still a-flying, And this same flower that smiles today, To-morrow will be dying."

This has been an unusual summer, at least in my experience. Six weeks ago we had those two whopping thunderstorms in short order, both of them assassins of our precious trees. But there have been very few classical thunderstorms this summer, the kind where the massive gray-black thunderhead moves in with stately and unhurried violence from the far west, deepening its fury as it crosses the plains. Such storms seldom bring much rain, but the prolonged light show they provide is one of the three or four most characteristic experiences of Great Plains life. Silly as it may sound, I moved home to North Dakota ten years ago in large part to stand out in thunderstorms, the kind unique to the Great Plains, and also to hear the lucidity of the meadowlark, and to lie out under cottonwoods as they dance to the tune of the autumn breeze.

This summer will be remembered for the Day of the Appalling Wind, July 29, 2015. I've never experienced anything like it in my life. Oh, yes, during a terrible blizzard, or perhaps at the climax of a massive thunderstorm, but this was just plain incredible wind, unending for 36 hours, clocked at up to 70 mph in northwestern North Dakota. It blew down three rows of my corn, not in a single blast, but by way of wearing out the corn structure until the stalks just gave up and lay down to die. That wind set most of my garden back significantly. I almost cried when I surveyed the damage, after the wind broke, and I did think sympathetically of the North Dakota pioneers, our forebears, who actually depended on their crops and gardens to get through the winter in this inhospitable place.

Somehow it always makes me a little sad to see mothers and their children in the big box stores buying school supplies. It's the surest sign of summer's end. It makes me remember going into Green Drug on Main Street in Dickinson with my mother when I was in second or third grade. When I see children grabbing up school supplies in mid-August, I want to cry out, "Too soon. Too soon."

My garden this year is in some respects the best I have ever grown—largely weed-free, thanks to a little help from my friends, and flourishing in biomass. Whether my 50+ tomatoes will redden and bear much edible fruit remains to be seen. I have devoured every cherry tomato thus far straight from the vine. My corn is statuesque—taller than any previous year—and now finally filling. I have five varieties: Mandan purple/black corn, Omaha Indian corn, Jefferson's favorite Monticello corn, and two varieties of the kind you buy from the grocery store rack. My onions, for some reason, have largely dug themselves out of the ground as they grew, so they are smaller than I would like. But I'm awash in cucumbers this year. The entire top half of my refrigerator is now occupied by brining pickles, so tart, some of them, that they make my lips smack.

The owner of the for-the-moment empty land west of my house did me an immense service recently. He cut that prairie for hay. In doing so he either scared off or perhaps shredded my pesky pheasant, who spent last fall devouring virtually my entire corn crop, ear by ear, sometimes merely out of spite. My friend Jim, a master gardener and a master bird hunter, told me earlier this year that my rooster pheasant was the largest he ever encountered. It was the size of a Thanksgiving turkey, living off the fat of the land in my subdivision, smug, cocky, unapologetic, and loud. I have stalked that pheasant like a character out of Caddie Shack, but no matter how many times I have wriggled through my back yard in camo with my assault rifle paint gun, that bird got the best of me. It turns out the answer was not lethal force, but habitat encroachment. Good riddance. I shall have corn aplenty.

My friend Jim loves tomatoes so much that he eats them incessantly—the best BLT sandwich I ever consumed—until he gets his first canker sore from the ten varieties of acid they carry. I know fall is coming the first evening I come home to pluck a couple of tomatoes, an onion, a cucumber, and two ears of corn from the garden, and then eat an entirely fresh meal not fifteen minutes later. And I know it is time for winter when the yellow cornstalks clatter in the crisp afternoon breeze.

The cycles of nature are a mystery. Last year I had almost no crickets, but this year, even this far in advance of the first frost, they are massing around the foundation of my house like the Greek hordes before the walls of Troy. I've had to dispatch four or five of the boldest of these warriors in single combat in my laundry room, and I'm bracing for their full-on assault in a few weeks time. The noise they already make is grating, and I can tell that they are just getting warmed up, like musicians before a symphony concert. However unpleasant crickets are, they are nothing compared to the sluggish flies that somehow gather in our houses after the first freeze. They were out of control in my house last year, I'm not sure why. Unless you spend the day with a flyswatter or an old magazine, wreaking exoskeletal carnage in every room in your house, they are sure to light on your arm or face at the worst possible moments, and again and again.

My favorite days of the year are about make their appearance. I love the period between August 20 (or so) to October 15 (or so) when you wake up deep into the night, chilled to the bone, seeking a comforter, when it is chilly, and perhaps even alarming, when you leave the house in the morning, but 85 or 90 degrees by mid-afternoon. Autumn evenings with a good book, a glass of wine, and a fire pit, when the fire is really necessary, are like paradise on earth. North Dakota does fall better than anywhere I have ever lived.

We cherish autumn with special relish here, because we are all too aware of what must follow.

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The Myth of North Dakota History and the Truth About Federal Subsidies

Now that we are rich beyond the dreams of our grandparents, and North Dakota has become one of the most prosperous states in America, we are getting a little cocky in our denunciations of the federal government. Suspicion of outsiders trying to tell us who we are and what we should do has always been deeply woven into the North Dakota character. But until recently, we were so dependent on the national government that we generally toned down our criticism. Things have changed.

It might be useful for us to remember how much and how continuously North Dakota has been made possible by the national government. The national Homestead Act (1862) opened Dakota Territory for settlement. A total of 118,472 homestead claims were filed over the next four decades, encompassing 17,417,466 acres or 39% of the state. North Dakota ranks second only to Nebraska in percentage of acreage homesteaded under federal protocols.

America's transcontinental railroads (including the Northern Pacific) were authorized and massively subsidized by the national government. A quarter of the state was handed over to the railroads (especially the Northern Pacific) to get them to lay track over so empty a landscape.

The national government propped North Dakota up during the Great Depression, through a wide range of programs: the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and rural electrification.

The Rural Electrification Act (1935) brought electricity to some of the most remote corners of America. Probably no other piece of federal legislation had such an impact on the daily rhythms of rural North Dakota life. Rural electrification is a perfect example of why the federal government has been essential in North Dakota history. Depending as it does on profits, market capitalism is not well suited to bringing services to scattered populations, where the cost of running an electrical line may exceed the expected revenues. It took the federal government to get it done.

It was the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 that stabilized the ranches along the Little Missouri, Sheyenne, and Grand Rivers during the Great Depression. The combination of sustained drought and severe national economic depression made it impossible for the great majority of badlands ranches to remain solvent. Under the generous terms of the federal Bankhead-Jones Act, these ranchers were enabled to keep their homesteads, cede the rest of their ranches to the United States government, and then lease the very lands they lost at advantageous rates. What could be more generous than that? Imagine what would have happened if FDR's New Deal had just shrugged its shoulders and "let the market decide" in the grasslands of the American West?

North Dakota has always benefitted economically from the presence of the U.S. military on our soil. In the nineteenth century it was Forts Berthold, Buford, Abercrombie, Totten, Stevenson, and Lincoln. During the Cold War (and continuing to the present) we hosted two massive Strategic Arm Command bases in North Dakota, at Grand Forks and Minot. At the moment, more than 2,500 military personnel are assigned to Grand Forks AFB, and more than 5,500 to Minot AFB. In every round of national base closure initiatives, Grand Forks and Minot lobby Congress to keep these bases open. Why?

The capricious Missouri River was tamed by the federal government. All six mainstem dams on the Missouri were undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, using federal tax dollars. This includes the two massive dams that impound waters in North Dakota: Garrison Dam (1953) and Oahe Dam (1962).

Imagine the last seventy years in North Dakota without the support of the U.S. Farm Program.

This is merely the short and obvious list. In countless ways, from the moment Lewis and Clark (federally funded) passed into North Dakota on October 13, 1804, to the new federal highway bill that is making its way through the U.S. Congress as I write, North Dakota has been the beneficiary of U.S. government largess. We are one of the states that receive more federal tax dollars than we send in. In fact, we rank sixth in this regard, behind West Virginia, Louisiana, Alaska, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Even now that we are rich, we still receive $1.68 for every dollar we send to Washington, D.C.

Federal programs: the Women, Infants, and Children health delivery program (WIC). The Federal Transportation Administration (FTA). TSA. National School Lunch Program. Head Start. The Federal Highway Administration (FHA). Food Stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And on and on.

In short, the settlement of North Dakota was made possible by the federal government. We have been propped up by the federal government. We have been rescued in times of great stress by the federal government. We have been protected from real and perceived threats by the federal government. Our natural and human resources have been developed by way of federal subsidies. And we continue to be subsidized by the federal government in countless ways.

In spite of these unmistakable facts, we North Dakotans love to pretend that it is our gumption that has brought us to this great moment in our history, and we love to rail against federal intrusion into the sovereignty of North Dakota.

It would be interesting to create an interactive website or video that—one by one--stripped away federal programs from the "large rectangular blank spot" that has become today's North Dakota. As each program or infrastructural benefit was lifted from the landscape, we could see the loss of dollars, jobs, rural stability, connectedness, comfort, and economic possibility that program has represented in North Dakota history. Would we have electrified ourselves? What would the great flood of 2011 have done to Bismarck and Mandan had there been no Fort Peck and Garrison Dams? Would we have built our own four lane highways in the state? Imagine if we had been passed over by Dwight Eisenhower's federal Interstate Highway Act. What would have become of North Dakotans had there been no New Deal on the Great Plains? At one time during those nightmare years, 70% of North Dakota's 630,000 people were on some form of federal assistance. Thirty thousand people left the state during the Grapes of Wrath period of our history. How many would have picked up and moved on without the rural stabilization of the New Deal? If you took away federal research dollars from our two largest universities, how much would they shrink?

In periods of sustained drought, when our rivers flood our towns and our fields, when tornadoes shatter a community, we turn instinctively to the federal government for help. Imagine the last twenty years of North Dakota life (including 1997) without FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency).

If you stripped away the cornucopia of the federal encouragements and benefits North Dakota has received since 1862, this would be a very dreary steppe. Surely we would have done some good things on our own. But sit down and do the math and the imagining some Sunday afternoon, and ask yourself just what North Dakota would look like if the federal government had said, "Welcome to statehood. By the way, you will be entirely on your own. Good luck with that. Oh, and start saving your pennies to tame the Missouri River."

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The Elkhorn Ranch: If Not a National Monument, What?

Theodore Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch is back in the news. A coalition of conservation groups and dedicated individuals have been pressing the Obama administration to designate the Elkhorn Ranch as a National Monument. Under the provisions of the Antiquities Act, passed by Congress in 1906, the President of the United States has the authority to designate National Monuments by presidential proclamation alone. No further congressional approval is necessary.

Since 1906, 142 National Monuments have been proclaimed by presidents of both parties, including, most recently, George W. Bush (six) and Barack Obama (sixteen). All eleven western states have National Monuments—in profusion. Minnesota and South Dakota each have one. North Dakota: none.

The history of the National Monuments system, beginning with President Roosevelt's designation of Devils Tower National Monument (September 24, 1906), tends to go something like this. Ardent local or national conservationists convince the president to make the designation, often over the strong, sometimes fierce, protests of local development interests. In the ensuing decades, most of the opposition subsides, except for a little residual grumbling in some quarters, and the localities come to realize that National Monument designation does wonders for tourism, which proves to be a sustainable and lucrative economic engine for the region in question. At some point, like Devils Tower (WY), Jewel Cave (SD), Death Valley (CA), and Scotts Bluff (NB), National Monuments become beloved local and national treasures, and sources of great pride in the very regions where they were at first opposed. 

Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch headquarters is currently one of the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Consisting of a mere 218 acres, it has been called the crown jewel of the National Park. It is remote, pristine, serene, and not effortlessly accessible. As you approach the site, on a hike of about 1/3 of a mile, you realize with great joy that it is little changed since TR last departed.

Maybe indeed Roosevelt just departed—and will return with stories of fabulous adventures, covered with dirt, blood, and grit, "all teeth and eyes," as Victor Hugo Stickney described him in 1884. The Elkhorn Ranch deserves to be cherished as a national shrine to TR, who "became" the larger-than-life Theodore Roosevelt of American memory during his sojourn in North Dakota's badlands, and who turned out to be the greatest conservationist in presidential history thanks to the dynamic interplay of wildlife, habitat, hunting, grazing, resource exploitation he observed along the banks of the Little Missouri River.

Roosevelt chose the Elkhorn site in 1884 for its beauty and remoteness, made it his Dakota Territory headquarters and retreat center, and returned to it again and again, even after he left North Dakota, as a place where he could hunt, read, write, and restore his great spirit in times of perplexity and sorrow. He grieved for his first wife Alice there. He wrote parts of at least two of his books there. He seems to have formulated some of his revolutionary conservation principles there.

The Elkhorn Ranch was much larger than 218 acres, of course. According to the informal custom of the badlands at the time, TR was entitled to "claim" a ranch that extended four miles upriver and four miles downriver from his headquarters, and all the way out to the end of the Little Missouri drainage system. That means he had an effective ranch claim of 20-30,000 acres. When Theodore Roosevelt National Park was created by Congress in 1947, only the ranch headquarters was set aside to protect and commemorate TR's Elkhorn experiences. Back then the size of the NPS site was not particularly important, because it was so remote and inaccessible, and it was surrounded solely by the kind of family ranches that Roosevelt prized.

The Elkhorn National Monument would probably include the 218-acre ranch site, the 5,200-acre former Eberts Ranch, purchased by the U.S. National Forest System in 2006, and perhaps some modest parcels of adjacent North Dakota state lands and private property. The National Monument would attempt to knit these parcels together to conserve forever Roosevelt's "greater Elkhorn Ranch," ensure that the viewshed from the ranch headquarters will never be ruined or compromised by industrial or commercial activity, and provide a critical buffer around the ranch headquarters to protect it from the noise, dust, and visual scarring of oil development. Oil extraction in the vicinity has already begun to diminish the quality of experience that Roosevelt sought at the Elkhorn (silence, serenity, the sense of inhabiting a landscape barely touched by human enterprise). As the oil boom continues, pressures on the Elkhorn will grow in intensity.

To understand what is at stake, we need to remember how small the current Elkhorn site is. 218 acres is about a third of a section of land. Imagine what it would be like if Old Faithful were merely a quarter mile from an interstate highway, an array of oil storage tanks, or a gold or copper mine. If we could ensure that the 218-acre Elkhorn headquarters would always be surrounded by traditional cattle ranching, there would be no threat to the sanctitude of the shrine. But the U.S. Forest Service's National Grasslands have a multiple use mandate—mining, oil development, gravel extraction, grazing, recreation, etc.

The Forest Service is decidedly lukewarm about the idea of an Elkhorn National Monument, for at least three reasons. First, when the Eberts ranch was sold to the U.S. Forest Service ten years ago, there was an "understanding" that the land would continue to be available for a range of non-commemorative uses. Second, a re-designation of the land would create a turf between federal agencies. Third, most of the Little Missouri River ranch community is hostile to the idea of the National Monument, in part because they don't want any further acreage "locked up" by the federal government. Since the Forest Service has to work continuously with badlands ranchers to regulate their use of federal grazing lands, it is not eager to damage what is already an often-contentious relationship.

Last week the Billings County Commission rejected the idea emphatically, arguing that commodity production is the heart of the economy of Billings County. Presidents can proclaim National Monuments over the objection of local and state entities, but they are generally reluctant to do so unless they are able to secure at least the grudging support of a state's congressional delegation, the governor, and local communities. It seems unlikely that President Obama will declare the Elkhorn a National Monument. The president does not seem to have much passion for conservation measures of this sort, and Roosevelt does not appear to be one of his heroes.

But if nothing is done, the Elkhorn Ranch will be seriously degraded in the years and decades ahead.

If we care about Theodore Roosevelt as a man we helped shape for national and international greatness, North Dakota's "honorary president," certainly one of the greatest individuals who ever lived among us, if we cherish Theodore Roosevelt National Park as one of the finest things in North Dakota, if we believe that anything, (something!) is too sacred to sacrifice on the altar of carbon extraction, we must together find a way to protect and conserve the Elkhorn Ranch.

To do nothing because there is no easy thing to do is a formula for the permanent degradation of one of the most important places in America. To do nothing is the very antithesis of what Theodore Roosevelt represents in American life.

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Jefferson and the Nuclear Treaty with Iran

The most remarkeable political occurrence with us has been the treaty with England, of which no man in the US. has had the effrontery to affirm that it was not a very bad one except A.H. under the signature of Camillus. It’s most zealous defenders only pretend that it was better than war. As if war was not invited rather than avoided by unfounded demands. I have never known the public pulse beat so full and in such universal unison on any Subject since the declaration of Independance. The House of representatives of the US. has manifested it’s disapprobation of the treaty. We are yet to learn whether they will exercise their constitutional right of refusing the means which depend on them for carrying it into execution.

Jefferson to James Monroe
March 2, 1796

Many Americans are discontented with the treaty that Secretary of State John Kerry has concluded with the Iranian government in the summer of 2015. Critics have argued that we did not exact enough concessions from the Iranian government, that in concluding a bad treaty we give up the only real tool we had at our disposal, the Draconian trade sanctions that have severely damaged the Iranian economy, and that we have now made it much more likely that Iran will be able to produce nuclear weapons. Critics of the treaty are loudly demanding that the U.S. Senate refuse to ratify the treaty come September. 

Meanwhile, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, has made the case for the treaty by saying that a: it is the best treaty we are likely to achieve; b: that if we don't ratify the treaty we will be unable to convince our European allies to continue the trade sanctions, and c: that the collapse of the treaty negotiations will make it much more likely that Iran will obtain nuclear weapons.

The Obama administration has not exactly built a record of credibility in its Middle East diplomacy, particularly after the president failed to follow up on his now famous "red line" threats against Bashar al-Assad's Syrian oppressions.

It may be useful to think about this diplomatic crisis through the lens of the Jay Treaty of Jefferson's time. 

The French Revolution destabilized Europe for a quarter of a century between 1789 and 1815. As England and France fought a world war for national survival, the fledgling American republic, the United States, was repeatedly buffeted by one of the belligerents or the other, and sometimes both. Britain had been doing whatever it could to keep the U.S. in economic bondage following the Revolution. The added pressures of the wars of the French Revolution made things much worse.

Although President Washington was appalled by British depredations in the Atlantic and the Caribbean--more than 200 American merchant trips were captured by the British Navy--he did not want war. Washington sent the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, to Britain to try to work out some accommodation that would protect American interests and American honor.

Jay did what he could. It was not much. England made no concessions about its practices on the high seas, including seizing American trade vessels. It agreed to establish joint commissions to work out boundary issues along the Canadian frontier, to settle America's pre-1776 debts to British merchants, and to determine how to resolve American claims about confiscated merchandise. The British did agree to vacate its trade and military forts on the American side of the Great Lakes. (This had been promised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution, but Britain had never complied). The British refused to consider compensating southern slave holders for slaves captured during the war.

Although nobody in America was very happy with Jay's treaty, the party in power (the Federalists) put the best face on an imperfect situation and rallied to support the president. The emerging opposition party, the Republicans (informally founded by Madison and Jefferson), was loud in its denunciation of Jay, the treaty, and to a certain extent President Washington. Jay was burned in effigy in larger American cities. When Alexander Hamilton rose in public in New York to defend the treaty, he was pelted with stones and had to withdraw to safety.

Bowing to President Washington's enormous national prestige, the U.S. Senate ratified the Jay Treaty on June 24, 1795.

Jefferson and Madison were livid. Madison had called it a "ruinous bargain," sponsored by "a British party [i.e. the Federalists], systematically aiming at an exclusive connection with the British government and ready to sacrifice. . . the dearest interests of our commerce [and] the most sacred dictates of national honor."

Sound familiar?

But here's the part worth careful consideration.

Scholars, including Jefferson biographers and diplomatic historians, have long concluded that the unpopular Jay Treaty was the best deal we could possibly have obtained without recourse to war, that the treaty, however imperfect, enabled the United States to build its confidence and national economy for a generation before lingering issues brought on the War of 1812. Because the United States had a weak navy and a tiny army, Britain felt no need to grant concessions to its rebellious former colonies. Jay may not have pleased the American people, and he positively offended the emerging Republicans, but he did manage to clarify a number of important issues, and maintain the peace in a very troubled Atlantic world.

Historians conclude that Washington did the right thing to send Jay to London in spite of unpropitious circumstances, and to work hard for ratification of a treaty he knew to be imperfect.

When the alternative is between a bad treaty and war, as President Obama has  repeatedly admonished, sometimes you have to hold your nose and ratify what nobody finds altogether satisfying. Although the Senate has the constitutional right to reject any treaty brought before it, for any reason, good or bad, generally speaking our constitutional "protocol" is to grant the executive the benefit of the doubt, because he and his agents have been involved in the international deliberations, understand the issues more fully than anyone standing on the outside can possibly do, and deserve a fair level of deference in international relations.

That is not to say that Jefferson and Madison were wrong to decry the Jay Treaty. My point is that the Iran crisis is not the first time such a seemingly unpalatable treaty has been presented to the U.S. Senate, and anyone who feels instinctively antagonistic to the Iran Treaty should spend some time reflecting on how the larger trajectory of American history may regard the painstaking and frustrating negotiations that Secretary Kerry and European diplomats have recently concluded.

Jefferson had a visceral and principled aversion to war as a tool in international relations. His view (then) was that time is on the side of the United States, that war should be used only as a "last melancholy resort," and that peace, however tense, is almost always preferable to armed combat.

Further Reading:

• Founders Online: From Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 12 January 1800
• The Jay Treaty Debate: Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture by Todd Estes
• Madison's Gift: Five Partnerships that Built America by David O. Stewart
• The Federalist Era, 1789-1801 by John C. Miller

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Seeking Renewal Among the White Cliffs of the Missouri

The Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Herodotus said you can never walk into the same river twice. He was talking about actual rivers, of course, but also something metaphorical much bigger than rivers. All my life I have been drawn to rivers—more than lakes, oceans, seas, or prairie potholes. I love their linearity, their sinuousness, their purposefulness in carrying their silten loads down towards a faraway sea or gulf. As Herodotus understood, a river is an invitation to philosophize, to muse about the not-same person who wades into the not-same river a second time. Where does the water come from? Where does it go? How does it keep recharging itself? Is it possible to find and bestride its source? If you do, what have you accomplished? Since I was last here, who or what have I become?

We are fortunate to have one of the world's great rivers running right through our lives in North Dakota. The Missouri River and its tributaries drain the entire Great Plains before being absorbed by the mighty Mississippi at St. Charles, Missouri. The Missouri was America's first highway to the far west—until replaced by the Oregon Trail in the mid-19th century. As he closed in on its source in August 1805, Captain Meriwether Lewis marveled that so extensive a river was navigable so deep into the interior of the continent, more than 2,500 free-flowing miles, he reckoned. Lewis was more accustomed to such rivers as the James, the Potomac, and the Ohio, where the fall lines (waterfalls) cut the river in half and posed a serious impediment to navigation.

Unfortunately, the giant dams between Fort Peck, Montana, and the bottom of South Dakota, have metamorphosed (to use one of Lewis's words) the wild Missouri into a series of tame flat-water reservoirs, whose purpose is flood control, irrigation, power generation; and to support an entirely unnecessary barge industry between Sioux City, Iowa, and St. Louis. Not very sexy. The dark genius of America has been to transform the new world Garden of Eden into an industrial infrastructure designed to provide us security and comfort and profit rather than adventure and romance.

You can pretend you are visiting the old authentic Missouri up at its confluence with the Yellowstone River southwest of Williston; or by floating the 90 or so "free-flowing" miles of the Missouri between the tailrace of Garrison Dam and the Oahe Reservoir slack water just south of Bismarck. But even in those beautiful places you are not encountering the true Missouri, but rather humankind's wing-clipped Missouri Valley water management system. There was a proposal in the last thirty years to rip rap the entire stretch between Garrison Dam and Bismarck, just to make sure that the river could never again jump its banks and redesign its course. Thank goodness that weak-souled plan was never fully implemented.

If you want to see the Missouri in something like its natural state, you have to go to Montana. The stretch between Fort Benton and the backwater of Fort Peck Reservoir (hundreds of river miles) bears a very light industrial footprint. Cattle have replaced the buffalo, and dilapidated shacks have replaced tipis, but otherwise the river looks the way Lewis and Clark left it in August 1806. When you turn your canoe into the stretch of river that runs through the White Cliffs (Meriwether Lewis's "scenes of visionary enchantment") or the Missouri Breaks and badlands, you are suddenly thrust back into a time before we decided that the Missouri River could no longer be trusted to manage its own destiny. For a few stolen days you find yourself floating through Karl Bodmer's America rather than the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' hydraulic corridor.

I float the White Cliffs every year now, with a couple of dozen fellow travelers. It has a kind of "same time next year" feel, except that I am not the same person as last year (or next), and the river is a different creature every time, too. Three days are not a lot of time in so magnificent a place, but even in so brief an encounter the experience is profoundly restorative. Each year I go kicking and screaming—not enough time, too many projects, too much work to do, my body and soul are unprepared, and what about my garden? And each year I am in some sense born again on the second day out when the accumulated crud in my heart and soul slips away into the river and transforms me into a leaner, clearer, happier, more serene, more alive, more present organism, more in tune with what Jefferson called "Nature and Nature's God."

By now I've canoed the White Cliffs section of the Missouri River southeast of Fort Benton, Montana, a dozen times. We've had thunderstorms and punishing headwinds and days so hot that you wind up dipping your baseball cap ten times per hour just to stay cool enough to continue. There have been many whole afternoons when my canoe mate and I just rest the paddles and drift down the continent, letting the river take us where it listeth, dozing, soaking up the hot Montana sun like human zucchini, gazing from time to time at the stunning sandstone outcroppings and the igneous dikes that thrust themselves up between sandstone formations eons ago and now stand like the ruins of some lost pre-Columbian empire.

At the end of the day, we usually jump out of the canoes in our life jackets and just bob down the river like corks. That's when you feel closest to God and the river god Missouri, and surrender to something much bigger than yourself.

On the last camping night of the journey, I wandered away from the group and found a spot to lie down in underneath a grove of 50 or so lodge pole pines. It was a calm clear night. A very slight breeze wafted through the mountains every few minutes. At ground level the breeze was so slight as to be essentially imperceptible, but up at the top of the trees it created a gentle sway and stir. Lodge pole pines are named from their pencil-like straightness; they were prized by plains Indians for tipi poles. As I took the time to look up at them, I realized that they are almost unbelievably thin, like reeds or tall grass, no more than a foot in diameter, often less, and yet 75-125 feel tall. All praise to the engineer! The subtle dance of the treetops was astonishingly beautiful. It made me ache. About half the trees are now dying from the pine beetle epidemic in the American West. But as I lay there drinking in the pine tree poetry, mesmerized by their grace, I realized that the pine beetles are just doing their job, filling their evolutionary niche, and the trees will come back stronger when that moment comes.

I know this, surely. I will continue to make this odyssey as long as my body holds up—twenty years, I trust—and I will try always to look into the mirror Herodotus holds up before us. We see through the glass darkly, but woe to those who refuse to gaze into the river looking for clues.

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Walking Off the Map of the Known World, Via Pluto

It saddened me greatly to miss Buzz Aldrin's visit to Bismarck last week. I was by then in Montana, retracing a bit of Thomas Jefferson's "Apollo program," my annual cultural tour on the Lewis and Clark trail on the Missouri River's White Cliffs stretch, and then on to the Lolo Trail just inside Idaho, west of Missoula. It's always one of the professional highlights of my year.

I was once briefly mistaken for Buzz Aldrin in Grand Forks, but that is another tale for another time.

Aldrin was the second man on the moon. Almost immediately after he stepped down onto the lunar surface on July 21, 1969, he spontaneously formulated perhaps the best short description ever offered about earth's lone satellite. Aldrin called what he saw "magnificent desolation."

Aldrin has written a number of books about his Apollo Program experience, which can be collectively summarized by the phrase, "When you've been to the moon, what's left?" I call this the Buzz Aldrin Syndrome—peaking early, spending the rest of your life trying to recover the ecstasy or learn to accept normalcy. Olympic athletes sometimes experience this, as well as soldiers who have been in harm's way, and extreme sportsmen. Meriwether Lewis suffered grievously after his return from the wilderness in 1806, when he realized that bestriding the source of the "heretofore deemed endless Missouri River" had been the greatest moment of his life. He was just 32 years old. Not only would he never do anything that extraordinary again, but nobody else would ever discover the source of the Missouri again. The philosopher Nietzsche called this "the melancholy of all things accomplished."

North Dakota's great Eric Sevareid, who covered the American space program throughout the 1960s, reflected on the probable plight of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. "We're always going to feel, somehow, strangers to these men," he said, while the astronauts were still on the moon. "They will, in effect, be a bit stranger, even to their own wives and children. Disappeared into another life that we can't follow. I wonder what their lives will be like, now." As far as I'm concerned, this is a perfect example of Sevareid's genius.

Meanwhile, NASA's New Horizons probe has been sending back stunning photographs of Pluto, once a planet, now demoted to "dwarf planet" status. The most recent photograph, taken within 8,000 miles of the former planet's surface, hurtled across the solar system at the speed of sound, but Pluto is so far away that it took 4.5 hours for the image to reach the earth. Think about this for a moment. Our scientific capacity is so great that we can project a tiny capsule almost three billion miles away from the earth and bring it into a perfect rendezvous with a small rapidly moving spheroid. This would be like shooting a .22 caliber bullet in Bismarck and hitting a bouncing ping pong ball in Japan.

One of my close media friends wondered out loud the other day whether the photographs of Pluto were worth the $700 million it cost to send the probe. I say yes, absolutely, positively, unquestionably yes. Tomorrow marks the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I regard that event as one of the handful of greatest moments in the history of humankind. It's as great an achievement as Shakespeare's Hamlet, as great an accomplishment as the pyramids of Egypt, as great an triumph as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. I feel tremendously fortunate to have lived through that moment, to have sat in my parents' living room and watched the first human ever to set foot on a celestial object other than the earth. I find it appalling and unbearable that we have no rocket today that can project our astronauts into orbit, that we are forced to lighten our geopolitical pressures on neo-imperial Russia in part because they are the only space taxi that can get our astronauts up to the International Space Station.

We humans are measured by what our innate restlessness can make happen—in poetry, in sculpture, in architecture, in philosophy, in technology, in exploration. If we ever turn away from that restlessness, we may find happiness, but we will cease to be what Hamlet called "the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals."

Pluto wasn't discovered until 1930. It was demoted in 2006. The man who discovered Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, grew up in a puny village called Burdett, Kansas. A small quantity of Tombaugh's ashes were placed in the New Horizons probe, thus carrying the discoverer to the planetary body he discovered. What could be more wonderful than that? Tombaugh was a Great Plains farm boy who developed a fascination with celestial objects and the kind of unbelievable precision that enabled him to pick out the planetary movement of Pluto against a dizzying sea of fixed stars.

I feel some special affinity with Clyde Tombaugh. We were born on the same day (February 4), though half a century apart. After World War II, he was stationed at White Sands Missile Base in New Mexico, where my father served for two years as a desk clerk and supply sergeant. It is at least possible that they met.

I've been more fortunate than Tombaugh (though I haven't discovered a darn thing), because he lived through the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. His plans to go to college were crushed by a hailstorm that ruined the family's crops and left his parents destitute. He began building home brew telescopes from local odds and ends in 1926. Four years later, at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, he discovered the trans-Neptunian planet that Percival Lowell had insisted must be out there somewhere. Tombaugh was only 24 years old.

Tombaugh has an asteroid named after him (1604 Tombaugh), but he did not get to name the planet he discovered. The name Pluto was suggested by an eleven-year-old English schoolgirl named Venetia Burney. All the previous planets (except earth) were named for Roman gods: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, so it was perhaps inevitable that the new planet would also be named from classical mythology. Pluto was the Roman god of the underworld, of darkness, and of death. Pluto (the Greek Hades) was able to make himself invisible. That's what led the young British girl to suggest the name. Tombaugh immediately approved.

The New Horizons probe has also taken photographs of one of Pluto's five moons, Charon. Charon was the figure in Hades who ferried the dead across the river Styx. Given the deep classical heritage of the discovery and naming of the planets, Charon adds considerable profundity to the designation of the last planet as Pluto.

It was at Fort Mandan, on the upper Missouri, in what would eventually become North Dakota, that Meriwether Lewis walked off the map of the known world on April 7, 1805. He believed, Euro-centrically, that every step he took west of Fort Mandan was the first ever made by a "civilized man." Lewis was so inspired by this idea—that he was going where no white man had ever gone before—that he began writing his journal after almost a yearlong silence. He said he was "now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width upon which the foot of civilized man had never trodden."

Boldly to go where no man has gone before—that's the essence of the human spirit.

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Reflecting on Rodeo at the Calgary Stampede

CALGARY

My daughter and I had the opportunity last weekend to see the famous Calgary Stampede. We were here on professional business, had time off, and reckoned that if you're in Calgary during the Stampede, you'd regret it if you didn't see what is billed as "the greatest outdoor show on earth," and is widely recognized as one of the handful of greatest rodeos in North America.

We bought our tickets online, made our way to the stadium using public transport, and zipped through an electronic kiosk with the greatest of ease. The seats were well marked and comfortable, with good sight lines to the big arena. Because it was Canada, everyone behaved with a kind of civility we haven't seen in American life for decades. In the row behind us, a man and his young son had taken the wrong seats (wrong section). When this was politely pointed out to them by the rightful occupants, there was no dispute of any sort. Everyone apologized to everyone else for a while, all around, and then the father and son edged their way through twenty sitting patrons to the aisle without experiencing a single sigh or glare. Oh Canada.

The arena was flawlessly groomed, the shoots freshly painted in white, with red trim, all the signage professional and tasteful, and every reach of the entire facility, from the restrooms to the furthest reaches of the stands, spotlessly clean.

Calgary really knows how to host a show.

The Calgary Stampede is an invitation-only rodeo. That means that only the best riders in North America participate, which makes for breathtaking but rather predictable rides. The overwhelming majority of bareback and saddle bronc riders stayed on their horses, and well more than half of the bull riders held on for the full eight seconds. The lowest percentages we saw were in tie-down roping and steer wrestling. It's fun to watch that level of professional ability, and to speculate on what it takes for a 20-year-old kid to get that good at riding a large dangerous animal bent on throwing him to the ground and maybe stomping on him too. How many times have you been bucked off bulls in small rural arenas before you learn to stay on more than half the time?

The announcers, some of them famous on the rodeo circuit, kept us informed about who was coming off reconstruction knee surgery, who had to sit out last year after three consecutive concussions, and who got "all tore up" in Las Vegas last year when the clown and bullfighters could not distract some legendary bull from his wrath. The winning barrel racer explained that she now wears a helmet after a fall that required five reconstructive facial surgeries. About one out of four bronc riders lurch-limped out of the arena in excruciating pain, not because they were hurt in today's ride, but because they got "stove up" a week ago somewhere else and determined not to let that slow them down. When the announcers cheerfully explain each rider's recent chapter of grave injuries, from dislocated shoulders to groin pulls, it makes you wonder if these are heroes of the Old West or people lacking in the most rudimentary good sense.

Rodeo had its origins in actual ranch life, often during the spring or fall roundup, when the gathered cowboys would take turns during leisure hours trying to ride unbroken horses or show off their roping and tying skills. That's what I like most about rodeo. It develops and showcases skills that were once, and to a certain extent still are, essential in ranch life. From up in the stands, it is easy to take the skill level for granted, especially in an all-star rodeo like the Calgary Stampede where North American champions make everything look so easy. But when you get down to arena level and observe the actual relationships between man or woman and horse more closely, you begin to feel how the strange, powerful, almost mystical connection works. It is a cliché to call a great rodeo rider a "centaur," the half man, half horse figure from Greek mythology, but there is something to it. The horses are magnificent to watch in action, backing gracefully to their marks, responding to the slightest nudge of a knee, stopping on a dime to let the cowboy jump down to tie three legs of a terrified, squalling calf, or leaning almost prone to the ground around a barrel with only a few inches to spare.

The minute you spend time at a rodeo you realize what a remarkable subculture it is. I generalize but this is what you tend to find: seriously Christian, intensely patriotic, grounded in the best rural values of decency, discipline, hard work, neighborliness, and grit. Country music in every boom box and ear bud. Corny but generous announcers who specialize in "western grammar," who tend at some point during the rodeo edge up towards a hint of sexual or racial stereotyping, but who console the losers and remind the winners that just a week ago in Saskatoon they were thrown headlong into the dust.

My daughter and I drove through the rodeo grounds at Bowman, ND, in early June during the state high school rodeo competition. We threaded our puny Honda civic through a sea of fifth wheel horse-campers the size of Rhode Island, pulled by pickups that you have to use a ladder to get in. Each one had a couple of beautiful horses tied up by its side. There were patios and pullouts and giant gas grills and flags of every sort and tiki lights and deck chairs and racks of cowboy boots and hats that made it feel like an outdoor sales event. It is not an exaggeration to say that some of these rodeo families have more invested in their rodeo rigs than I have in my home, and these are just the amateurs, ranch families working to provide their kids with wholesome recreational opportunities and hold up one of America's great traditions.

We loved the Calgary Stampede, but the truth is that three weeks ago we went to a small rural rodeo in the boondocks of North Dakota, ($6 bucks, "no returns"), and had a much better time. The riders fell off well more than half the time. Almost no team managed to rope a calf at both ends successfully. The announcer dreamed of being famous but he's not likely to quit his day job anytime soon. In the uncomfortable bleachers (no luxury boxes, no jumbotron) neighbors chatted in that familiar friendly way and shred out food. There were no urban wannabees in gleaming new cowboy hats and worn-for-the-first-time cowboy boots scouring their official programs trying to figure out the rules.

The Cowboy Prayer chokes me up every time because it is so perfectly corny, so steeped in romance and faith and Americana. The Calgary Stampede is too slick, professional, efficient to be an authentic expression of rural life, the riders are too masterful, and there aren't enough pint-sized kids bouncing around the arena on giant horses. The rodeo queen and princesses at the Calgary Stampede seem to come from central casting, not last year's prom.

What makes rural culture great is its earnest amateurism, real people doing remarkable things with heart and cheerful imperfection. It has to be just a little clunky to be fully life affirming, and fully authentic. That's what makes you smile and believe again.

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