#1629 The Declaration of Independence and Conspiracy Theories

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

One of Clay’s favorite guests, Beau Breslin, talks about the early National Period as rife with conspiracy theories. The Declaration of Independence, for example, argued that the ministry and crown of England were engaged in a systematic conspiracy to “enslave” the colonists. Beau argues that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was a conspiracy—even a cabal—of self-selected white men aiming to tear up the legitimate Articles of Confederation without authorization and begin again. The existing Articles authorized a few amendments but not a wholesale rewriting of the nation’s social contract. We also discuss the South’s paranoid (but sometimes legitimate) feeling that the faraway national government, dominated by commercial and industrial interests, was destroying Southern state sovereignty and meddling with an institution they could not possibly know enough about. And, at the end, we take a quick look at one of the enduring conspiracy theories in America: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to my introduction to this week's podcast of listening to America.
0:05.0	Bo Breslin, one of my favorite scholars from Skidmore College, and I talk about the elections of American history and more importantly, early conspiracies.
0:15.0	So David Horton and I recently have been talking about conspiracies generally and the psychology of them. But this is a more
0:22.2	cerebral approach. And Beau Breslin is a great political scientist. We talked about some really
0:29.1	fascinating things. He did a lot of work to prepare. One is that the Declaration of Independence
0:33.8	itself is part of a conspiracy theory, that Jefferson was propagandizing our
0:39.4	independence by saying, there is a conspiracy by the British ministry and the crown to enslave us.
0:45.2	And again, to use that term, it's always a little weird for Thomas Jefferson, but so it goes.
0:50.8	And he believed that there was a systematic attempt by the British to popperize and subordinate
0:57.0	and recolonize the American system and that therefore we had no choice but to declare independence.
1:03.6	And then perhaps even more insightful is his view that the constitutional convention itself
1:08.4	was a conspiracy because the states didn't authorize
1:11.3	a wholesale revision of the Articles of Confederation. They only authorized a couple of amendments
1:15.9	to the economic issues, particularly that of federal taxation. And so the minute that the
1:21.7	founding fathers got to Philadelphia, they tore up the Articles of Confederation and began again.
1:25.7	And so this was a conspiracy, a cabal,
1:28.5	if you want to call it that, of 55 like-minded, or essentially like-minded white men to build a
1:35.0	stronger centralized constitution. And they roped George Washington into coming and giving it the
1:40.3	credibility that it needed. Meanwhile, there was a sitting government of the United States.
1:45.0	The Articles of Confederation were still operating, and that was the year that the Northwest
1:48.6	ordinance was passed, one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history.
1:53.4	So that's a fascinating story. Then we talked also about the civil rights movement and the South's
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