You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
What's that mango?
So? I was reading this book The Year of Living Constitutionally by AJ Jacobs, and in it he talks about how voting used to be this really festive thing, like people celebrate democracy with election cakes and by guzzling Martha
Washington's rum punch. And in fact, according to AJ, when George Washington ran for the Virginia Legislature in seventeen fifty eight, he provided voters with twenty eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty four gallons of wine, forty six gallons of ye, and two gallons of hard cider. And also he won the election with more than three hundred well lubricated votes.
God, that is a lot of liquor. But you know, I feel like getting people that drunk doesn't seem like that great of idea, especially if it's a contentious selection.
Yeah, well, apparently it's something they did a whole lot in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, and I guess democracy seems to have survived just fine. But those aren't the only traditions AJ is trying to bring back. For the last year, AJ has been studying the Constitution and hanging out with scholars, but also writing his book By Quill and Candlelight. He's been carrying a musket around everywhere he goes. He's been asking soldiers to stay over at his place
because he sees it as a patriotic duty. And he's been trying to get new amendments passed to the Constitution. And of course he's been baking lots of election cakes too. And I just thought it'd be super fun to have him on the show to talk about what he's learned over the last year.
I love any excuse to have Aj Jacobs on. He is just the best, the smartest, the quirkiest. Everything about him is so great. So I can't wait to hear this interview. Let's dive in.
Aja. I'm so thrilled to have you back on the show. It's been a very, very long time.
I am delighted to be here. Goodmorrow. Of course, I am so thrilled to be talking about this with you.
So the new book is the Year of Living Constitutionally. And I see you're wearing a tricorn hat. Here can you tell me a little bit about that.
Well, sure, I should have brawled for you. I realized that was rude, that was weird.
I feel underdressed for the occag.
Yeah, and also it's a little bit interfering with my headphones. They didn't have headphones back in the eighteenth century.
But yes, this is a.
Tricorn hat that I had handmade for this project, the Year of Living Constitutionally, because the premise was I'm going to try to understand the Constitution by getting into the minds of the founding fathers and not just the mindset, the clothes and the technology, and I just went all in, as is my mo.
But it has even a little bit more of a story than that, right, because the original hat you got was less soft.
Than this one.
Is that correct?
Well, yes, actually this is a third hatanks third thank you for being on top of my hat. Yes, this is not just something you order off of Amazon dot com for Halloween. This one was made by a hatter and it took a long time. And that's one thing I've learned. People who try to reenact the eighteenth century, they are serious, they are not messing around. So they do it by candlelight and they count the number of stitches in each shirt to make sure that it's proper
and authentic. So this is a not from the eighteenth century. It's not two hundred years old. But I think if someone from the eighteenth century came back and put this on, they would be like, Okay, I feel comfortable.
Well, I want to get into reenactments in just a bit, but to begin with, let's just get to the premise of the book. Tell me how you actually came up with this idea for the project.
Sure, well, I actually knew very little about the Constitution. I had seen a statistic that sixty percent of Americans have never read the Constitution, and I was in that sixty percent. And yet every day I would see in the news some story about how influential the Constitution is in our lives and how it affects everything, what we can say, and where we go to school, women's health. So it is just a massively influential document, and I
wanted to try to understand it. And the way I like to understand things is to live them, to actually get inside. And just to give you some quick background, I several years ago, many years ago, wrote a book called A Year of Living biblically, and this one the premise I knew nothing about religion. I grew up in a very secular home. Maybe I should try to understand religion because I had a new born son. And one way to learn about it would be to walk in
the sandal steps of our four bears. And so I did. I tried to follow all the rules of Bible. And we're talking of favous ones like the Ten Commandments, when also the ones like you cannot shave the corners of your beard. I didn't know where the corners were. Just let the whole thing grow. And I looked like Gandalf. I looked insane. I didn't wear clothes made of two different kinds of fabrics, which is forbidden by Leviticus. And
it was a fascinating It was a bizarre year. It was silly at times, but also profound because I really did gain some insight into the Bible. And I always thought I could do a sequel with the Constitution.
You've been thinking about that since that time?
Since that time, Wow, since that time, because many of the same issues apply now literally, should we take this text? How much should it evolve over time? And I decided a couple of years ago. Now is the time because the Constitution has always been influential, But about two years ago, the majority of the Supreme Court at that time became what they called originalist, meaning that the most important way to interpret the Constitution is what did the words mean
in seventeen eighty nine when it was ratified? And that has affected how we live in so many ways. And I thought, okay, well, let me try to be the ultimate originalist and actually try to get into the mindset of those who wrote the Constitution and see what did it really mean?
Then?
What should it mean now? How much should it evolve?
I love the Year of Living Biblically so much because you deal with the topic in such a sweet and approachable way. But it gets these really difficult issues. But one of the other difficulties I think is just how your family adjusts to you living biblically. And in this book you're bringing your family into so much of it. I see your wife participating in your field trips and giving you an advice on playing a fife to wake up someone in your apartment. But how did this book affect your family?
Yes, as you say, my family has mixed reactions to these experiments that I go on. So I lived biblically, but my wife did not kiss me for seven months because I had this huge beard. And in this one, again it was a mix. I was trying to not use electric lights, so I burned candles, but they were these old style beef fat candles, so they smelled like meatloaf. She didn't love that. She didn't love that I was writing in ink with a quill, which meant it was
splattering everywhere. And she didn't love that I was walking around with a must get on the upper west side, as is my second Amendment.
Right.
She's like, you are You're going to get beat up, which I didn't. I got very lucky, and I will say, we're not lucky.
You have a musket with you.
Well that's true, but if I actually had to defend myself with a musket, I'd be screwed. Because it takes five minutes to load. I'd be like, hold that thought, don't beat me up yet. I have to take out the ramrod and pour in the gunpowder. So it is not a particularly practical weapon, which is fine. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to explore what did the Second Amendment.
Mean, and how about your kids, how'd they get involved or not involved?
I mean, I wore my tricorn hat and I would when I did go to restaurants, I would try to sign the check with my goosequill pen, and they were two of them were extremely embarrassed. They wouldn't walk within fifty yards of me. One of them, my oldest jasper, kind of got into it. His favorite comedian is Eric Andre. Oh yeah, whose sort of a performance are this and does these ridiculous things. So he thought of me as sort of a tamer and not as good version of
Uric Dry. So he came along with me on some of my adventures when we went to Times Square trying to find soldiers to quarter in the house, things like that.
And one of the things I loved so much was the scene where you and your family were watching reenactment battle and just how slow the processes. There's like a group that seems to be shooting from one side and then there's a pause as they're loading their muskets and shooting from the other side. Tell me about your first impressions being at this reenactment, and then how is it that you start participating in this experience.
Right, Well, there are no constitutional convention reenactors. I think there should be, But people seem to like guns and smoke better than pens and compromises. So I joined the New Jersey third Regimen of reenactors, and I went and fought in the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey. Of course, it was nothing like being an actual soldier in the Revolutionary War. However, even reenacting it is difficult. It was
super hot. I was wearing my wool regimental coat, and as you say, it takes a while to load the musket, even just getting dressed. There are so many layers, so many buttons. This project may be grateful for many modern conveniences, including elastic socks. I'll never take democracy for granted again, and I'll never take elastic socks because I will never get back the hours I spend putting sockfelts on every morning. But it was not an easy life. It was a
hard life. It was racist, it was sexist. But I think it's emblematic of how difficult life was, and that we don't want to go back to living like that, and that evolution of morals and evolution of technology can be a good thing.
Well, talk about the musket a little bit, because you take it to a shooting range and there's a difference between the muskets that people are using in the reenactments than the original ones, and so can you talk me through that a little bit?
Absolutely. Since I was trying to follow the Constitution as it was written, using the technology of the time to try to understand it, I was like, for the second Amendment, I am going to bare the arms from that time, which were mostly not all, but mostly muskets. So I went on the old Internet and I got an actual musket from the eighteenth century which is super heavy, ten pounds and it's a work of craftsmanship. It's really remarkable. And this one was used not in the Revolutionary Ward
but the War of eighteen twelve. Oh wow, Now it turns out you cannot fire this because it would blow up in your face. But I got another musket, which my wife was doubly unhappy about, and this one was a replica that was made recently, and you can fire it.
Now.
I don't spend a lot of time at the shooting range, but I've shot guns and it's not that hard you pull the trigger. This one It is literally fifteen steps to shoot a musket. You have to take out a little cartridge of gunpowder. You got to pour the gunpowder down the barrel, pour it in the pan, take out the ram rod, shove down the lead ball in the paper, put the ramrod back. It's like building a desk from Ikea. Just fire one shot. So it is a vastly different machine.
And that was part of the point. At what point does something like a gun become so different than what it was in seventeen eighty nine, Then we have to evolve the laws. So I talked to gun rights activists who said, it says gun and that's what it means. The First Amendment doesn't just apply to Ben Franklin's printing press. It also applies to the internet. On the other side, our gun control advocates who say, now this is such a different tool, you can apply the same laws to it.
It's almost a coincidence that they're both called guns. So we have to be able to evolve, and that is the crux of many of these debates that are going on today that affect every part of our life.
I think it's a fascinating way into looking at the second Amendment, and you see this with various points that you tackle in the book.
One thing I also enjoyed was I changed my news consumption because in the seventeen hundreds, Ben Franklin's newspaper came out twice a week and it was like sixteen pages, so that was your news. And I tried to replicate that I would read newspapers from the seventeen hundreds, and that was wonderful because I realized this twenty four hour news cycle is terrible for my mental health. It gives you no time to digest and give context and gus, it is just a fire hose.
Tell me about actually reading these gazettes. We've always heard that Ben Franklin's papers were much livelier than the competitors and much more exciting, but there are also revelations that you can see in the various advertising and things like that.
Yeah. Well, it was a very mixed experience because I think you saw the best of the times and then you saw the worst of the times. I loved reading about these marvelous new inventions that I totally took for granted. There was an article in Ben Franklin's newspaper about they had decided to put numbers on the houses, so when you were going to z Owne's house, so you could say go to eighty nine Elm Street instead of go to that yellow house by the minor pile. So it
made you realize these things. It just happened. People came up with these ideas. On the other hand, there were parts that were so disturbing and nauseating, including almost every issue had advertisements for runaway slaves. And it is really disturbing to see someone who I think is as thoughtful as Ben Franklin would allow this to happen. At the end of his life he did become quite a strident abolitionist,
thankfully and formed one of the first abolitionist societies. But still the fact that during his life he did have at least one enslaved person is just super disturbing.
It really pulls apart that idea of these demigods, or this idea that the Constitution was dictated by some deity to human hands. It makes you rethink who the founding fathers were.
These men, in some ways were incredible and the document thing produced really is remarkable, and in some ways it's a huge step for the big bang of democracy as akil Amar says he's a Yale's college, exactly a Yale school. But in other ways they were incredibly flawed, and they knew that this document they made was flawed. George Washington said to his nephew and a few weeks after the convention, he said, this is a flawed document. It's up to you to try to make it better. And it's so
flawed even in the smallest of ways. There are typos, they're not I don't know what you would call them quillows. There are mistakes. The word Pennsylvania is spelled two different ways in the Constitution in four pages pe n Sylvania and pe n Sylvania. So this was not a perfect document. It's an outline, a road map, and we have to try to make it more perfect.
I know there's that one scene that you talk about where Ben Franklin looks at the chair that Washington is in and it has a half a sun on it. Could you talk about that story?
Oh? Yes, I love this story. Ben Franklin at the Constitutional Convention spent a lot of time staring at George Washington's chair. George Washington was sitting in the front this big wooden chair and on the back of the chair was a carving of the sun, but it wasn't the whole sun. It was half the sun, so you could only see the top half and the other was cut off by the horizon, so you don't know is it
rising is it setting? And at the end of the convention, when against all odds, they had come to this agreement on this document, Ben Franklin said, at that point I knew it was a rising sun. The sun is rising on America. And a lot of the motivation for me writing this book was is the sun still rising on America? Because you read the news or you talk to people, and there's so much pessimism and nihilism and despair, and I wanted to try to see can I still find optimism?
And I do think I did. I found some optimism. We've got a lot of work to do, but I don't think we should throw up our hands quite yet. I think we can save democracy.
I like hearing that, so we'll hear more about how to save democracy right after the break on.
It's a cliffhanger.
Sure, So welcome back to Part Time Genius. I'm here with my good friend, the author AJ Jacobs. So Aj we were just talking about the Constitution and democracy and whether it can be saved. One of the things I found really fascinating was in the book there's this phrase about how to read the Constitution, and someone said, you can read the black parts of it writing, or you can read the white parts of it. And this idea
that the Constitution is this unfinished work. Can you talk about the various viewpoints on the Constitution and how you came to understand them.
It is a really hard issue because on the one hand, you can view the Constitution, as Akuila Reedam r Does, as the big bang of democracy. Amazing, for the first time in thousands of years, you have this document where people can choose who represents them instead of having a king or a queen thrust upon them. On the other hand, this was written by fifty five white men, some of them owned human beings, So how do you reconcile that?
And you have people on both sides. You'll have people who say this is a sacred document that nothing should be changed, and then you have people who say it's an elitist document, a perpetuation of slave oocracy. One person I find super inspiring in this debate is Frederick Douglas a great orator and thinker and writer from the Civil War era. Now just quickly before the Civil War, there is the same debate. And one of the other great abolitionists,
William Lloyd Garrison. He was a white man. He took the position that the Constitution was a packed with the devil. That's what he called it, a contract with the devil. It deserved to be burned, and he'd burned it. He was a showman. He would go on stage and burn
the copy of the Constitution. Originally, Frederick Douglas agreed with him, but sometime in the eighteen fifties, Frederick Douglas decided to change his mind and reframe the way he saw the Constitution, and he started to say, the Constitution not a pact with the devil. It's a promisory note because it promises these ideals like liberty and equality and these wonderful notions.
But look at America. America is so far from living up to these ideals, and we have to fight to make it live up to the ideals that it says. And this framing has been super influential. It's the same words that Martin Luther King Junior use. So I love that framing.
Well, you also talk about how maybe the way to look at the founding Fathers isn't so narrow as just this group of men in a Philadelphia courthouse, but rather to expand the view of what founding fathers or founding people of America can be right, And you.
Can expand it two ways. You can expand it in time and say that the founding continues, it didn't end with the signing of the constitutions, and people like Frederick Douglas you could consider founders. And you can also expand it to have a more broad cultural view and include people at the time of the Constitution, like women who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to help the troops.
Or Yeah, there's a woman I'd never heard of who went door to door and collected something like three hundred thousand dollars to get to the troops.
It's stunning, stunning, And there were people who were black who were patriots. So yeah, expanding it both in time and in who we see as a founder.
Yeah, I think that's really important and really fascinating. Also, there are bits from the reenactment that I didn't realize as well, that there were wives who followed the soldiers onto the battlefield and would set up camp a few miles behind or a few paces behind. I didn't realize exactly what the contributions of women were at this point and how strong they were.
Oh yeah, no, the women would be with George Washington's army. They were kept behind the lines. And actually my wife Julie did join the third Regiment and had to stay behind the lines, so she didn't love some of the more progressive regiments. You can, even if you're a woman or another gender, you can put on the regimental coat and musket. But the fact is, yeah, we could not have won the war without these women who were repairing clothes, They were doing the laundry, making the food, They were
quite possibly repairing some of the equipment. I think it's a problem in all of history. We forget nothing thing in the history happens without thousands of people helping.
So tell me about election cakes. Because we're friends on Facebook. I saw a bunch of posts about election cakes. But I wasn't fully bought in at the time, and now I feel like I missed out.
Yes, I love this because at the time of our founding, elections were very different in a bad way. Women were not allowed to vote, and black and Indigenous people were not allowed to vote. For those who were privileged enough to vote, there was one good part, which was it was not a chore. It was a celebration. It was this new right that they couldn't believe they had, so it was something regarded with joy. There was election parades, there were election music, election rum punch, a lot of
rum punch, and election cakes. People would bake these cakes, sometimes huge cakes. One recipe calls for fourteen pounds of sugar and they would bring them to the polls to celebrate. And I thought, what a lovely idea. Let's try to bring that back. So I got people in all fifty states. I used Facebook for this, which is not age century item, but it is one of the older, one of the older platforms, and I got people in all saifty states
to bake. This was a year ago, in the November twenty three elections, and they would bring him to the polls or to their family. And some would use the original recipe, which is sort of like shags and cloves spice cake, not everyone's taste. Some would just use modern recipes, but they all decorated them with these wonderful, creative ideas of either red, white, and blue, or it says vote or something for their state. Mark Georgia Baker had the
peach cake. So it was just this little ray of positivity in what is otherwise a very stressful political time. And I don't think election cake is going to solve democracy. It's not going to save it. But it's a good little first step. I call it a gateway car. It's a gateway car. Let's get people back interested in civics and participating, and then we can address some of the real issues like gerrymandering, like voter suppression.
One of the things that seems to come up a lot in your book is the joy of congregating, Like you talk about these pipes that are communal at pubs, the election cakes. When people go to hotels, all these people crammed in and men sleeping in the same bed without any question or worry about this, and there was a sense of community that was constantly driving people's thought that maybe we're distanced from now.
I mean, I don't particularly like the idea of sharing a bed at a hotel with a stranger. On the other hand, there are elements of this that I find very appealing. In the First Amendment, one of the rights is the right to assemble peaceably, and it was very important. That's how people They went to taverns, they went to coffee hops, they talked about these issues. And we've lost that.
You know, there's the whole famous book Bowling Alone. Communities as institutions are really crumbling, and I think that that is very important. We need to balance these two important parts of society, the individual and the individual rights and the community and your responsibility to the greater good. Back then, that balance was very explicit. You really thought about your responsibility to society. You were on the bucket brigade, so you would take buckets to put out fires. You'd have
a line on marked houses. Now which houses it pick on fire? Where one number? No, we don't have numbers. Yeah, but now I do think we have gone too far in the direction of individual rights. I am a huge fan of individual rights, but I think they need to be balanced by responsibilities and the sense of duty because otherwise there's no glue that will hold community together. And so rituals like the election cake is just one small way to build up the sense of community.
So when you actually start reading or going through the Constitution for the reader. In this wonderful book, you talk about the First Amendment and what a mish mash of ideas it is. They're like six or seven ideas just thrown into this thing and stitch together and call the First Amendment. But particularly what was interesting to me the idea of the freedom of the press and what that meant at the time versus what it means now. Can you talk a little bit about that.
Well, that was one of the most surprising parts of this. It was just how different the past was. I mean, it is genuinely a different country. And yes, I love the First Amendment as a journalist, but I love I realized modern First Amendment free speech, not seventeen eighty nine free speech, because they had a very different conception when
they talk about freedom of the press. What they were talking about was you don't need to get permission before printing a book or pamphlet like you used to in England. You had to check with the king is it okay if I print this? Now you could just print it, but once it was out there, you could be punished if it was going to threaten this infant republic. You could get in a lot of trouble. So there were laws on the books that were much more restrictive than
we can even imagine today. It wasn't quite Stalinist Russia, but it was very restrictive. So you had state laws, especially that said blasphemy was forbidden in a crime. There were sedition laws. John Adams he believed that it was perfectly constitutional to have these laws where you couldn't criticize the president. And only in the twentieth century, in like the nineteen forties and fifties, did this idea of being able to express freely your ideas without consequence. Only then
did that come to me what the First Amendment means. Now.
It's also interesting to me that at the time there were different camps of how many amendments should be enumerated for people. Right, there were people who were saying, we don't need to list everything out, and then people who are saying, no, no, we need to list all the ideas out. There really was a lot of friction in that room.
Oh yeah, Well, the anti federalists, who were the people who were against the Constitution were very powerful and it could have gone either way, and one of their complaints was that the federal government was too powerful and was infringing on the states, and that's why they said we need this Bill of Rights. It was partly about individual rights, but mostly about state rights. So they were insistent that we have this list that the federal government cannot restrict
free speech or gun ownership. And initially James Madison, the Father of the Constitution as they call him, was opposed. He's like, this is bad because if we list some then people are going to say, well, they didn't list this, so this this is not an actual right. But he came around and he ended up writing the Bill of Rights.
But the meaning of the Bill of Rights, as we just discussed, has changed so significantly, and that, to me is one of the big takeaways of this book is how different our interpretation of the Constitution now is from that original vision. Sometimes for better. Sometimes it's great because now the Fourteenth Amendment applies to women in gay marriage, which I'm in favor of both of them, but sometimes
for the worse. For instance, the Supreme Court in the vision of the founders was so much less powerful, so constrained, it was almost the runt of the litter Congress was most powerful than the than the Supreme Court, and now we have this Imperial Presidency and Imperial Supreme Court, and I think it's a huge problem.
You document the court continues to grab power along the way, and how it evolves, it's really fascinating.
That was one of the big surprises of the book to me was just how not powerful the Supreme Court was at the beginning, and not even prestigious. We were like, I don't know, so I should go on to the Supreme Court. One guy left to go onto the South Carolina Supreme Court, which is considered more prestigious by some. But yeah, it has over the years become more and more powerful, and.
The architecture has been applied to make sure that people see it as powerful, which I thought was fascinating.
Right, It didn't start out that way. The Supreme courts. The very first one was like on the second floor of a building near a market, so you could hear the squeals of the pigs from the butcher. And then it was in the Capitol along with Congress, and then William Howard Taft, who became Chief Justice after he was president. He said, I want this to be as magnificent as
the White House. I wanted the Supreme Court's rival, the presidency, and he built this marvel palace in the nineteen thirties, which many people are this is ridiculous and pompous, but there remains and the power has come along with it.
And again I think that is a huge problem because at the founding, most of the founders would not have thought, and this is all from a great scholar named Jonathan Gannappitt Stanford, most of the founders did not think that the Supreme Court was the final and ultimate say on what is and what is not constitutional. They thought instead it should be all three branches way in and it was a little messy, which is possibly why the Supreme Court was able to say, no, it's us, We're the
ones who decide. But that has made them more and more powerful. To now, these nine unelected people have such vast influence on our everyday lives.
So talk to me a little bit about the originalist interpretation and what living constitutionally means to you right now.
I think to oversimplify. There are two ways to interpret the Constitution. One is called originalism, which is this idea you have to focus on what those words meant back when they were ratified in the seventeen eighties or whenever the amendment was passed. The other side is sometimes called living constitutionalism, sometimes called pluralism or pragmatism, and that says, yes, consider what the words meant at the time, but also consider what are the effects now, how has the world changed?
And these yield very different interpretations of the Constitution. So, for instance, if you are a hardcore originalist, you will look at the fourteenth Amendment, which promises equal protection under the law for everyone. You will say, well, what did it mean back then? Back then it was right after the Civil War. It meant trying to protect black people from white supremacy. They were not thinking about women, they were not thinking so only about gay people or trans people.
So if you are like Clarence Thomas, you think that's what the fourteenth Amendment should focus on. It should not have anything to say about gender or sexuality. That should be left to the state. On the other hand, a living constitutionalist might say, no, we live in a different time, our morals have changed. We've got to take those words about equality and apply them in a much larger way. And so I try to present both sides. It's a
complicated issue. But I tend to think that pragmatism is a better way to go because it is so hard to get new amendments through the Constitution. The founders would have been shocked by how hard it is. So we can't change it that way. We have to change it some other way. And the way to change it is by changing the interpretation to make it a little wider and more applicable to our modern more race.
You found someone who did actually get a new amendment, right, Yeah.
There hasn't been a new one since nineteen ninety two, and that one only came about because of this character I interviewed for the book named Gregory Watson, and what happened was in nineteen eighty two. He was a student of the University of Texas, Austin, and he wrote a paper on this little known failed amendment. James Madison said, we should have a cap on the salary of congressman. You can't give yourself an immediate race. If you vote for a raise, then only takes effect the next Congress.
Seems reasonable. It never passed enough states. You need three quarters of the states to sign off for a constitutional amendment to take place. This student said, well, it's not dead. We didn't get enough states, but it's still kind of a zombie amendment. If we get three quarters of the states now, then it will become part of the constitution. His teacher said, that's wrong, you're an idiot. She gave him a seat he was, So he decided then and
there he said, I'm going to get this passed. And he spent ten years writing hundreds of letters to state congress people to get them to vote for this twenty seventh Amendment, and finally, ten years later, he got three quarters of the states. And that is the last amendment that has been added to the Constitution. And it's all because of this one guy, Gregory Watson. But when I interviewed him, I said, well, what's the next one? And he said, oh, it's such a divided country, so polarized.
We can't get two thirds or three quarters of the states to agree on the color of green peppers. It is going to be very hard to get another amendment through. And that's a problem, and I think the founders made it too hard. They didn't realize we would be so polarized, so they made it harder than they meant to. So talk about the Third Amendment do love the Third Amendment because it says that you, as a citizen, do not have to quarter a soldier against your will, and not
quarter as in chopping force. Just to clarify for it, it meant you don't have to put a soldier up in your apartment and feed them. Because this was a huge problem that the colonists have. The British would turn their houses into sort of forced airbnbs for the soldiers who were rude and ate them out of house and home. And so they said never again, and they put this in. And what's fascinating is some scholars says the most successful amendment.
No one ever talks about it or questions it. It's like, sure, yeah, don't don't have these people coming. I thought, since I'm doing this originalist experiment, I got to at least address it. So I thought, well, it says you don't have to, but also that implies you can if you want to. So I decided to find a soldier and ask him or her to quarter in our apartment. I went out to Times Square during fleet with the Navy with my son to ask a bunch of sailors to come stay
at our apartment. They were reluctant, got some looks. But I found a friend of a friend who stayed over for about three days. And I could have kicked him out because that is my third amendment, right, But I didn't because he was just so polite and such a lovely man, and I learned so much from him. So I do recommend quartering soldiers if people are interested.
So it's a little used, right, So tell me about the amendment that you're trying to make happen, or that you've tried to make happen.
Yes. Well, one of the most fascinating parts of reading the history of the Constitution is how fluid the ideas were. They are all these ideas being thrown around, and if a few people had voted differently, our country would look unrecognizable. And one of those was the president, the idea of the president. When one of the delegates said, well, I guess we should have a single person as president, a lot of the other delegates said, are you jesting? What
a terrible idea. We just bought a war to get rid of a monarch, and now you want to elect a monarch. That's the fetus of monarchies, one of them called it. But the debate lasted weeks, and in the end they decided, yeah, all right, we'll do one president. But many of the others said, no, we should have had a council of presidents, three presidents. Ben Franklin at one point talked about twelve presidents. Yeah, twelve. I mean that's a lot of Air Force one through twelve. Yeah.
So I was like, this is interesting because that fear that the president would become a monarch seems to be on its way to be coming true. The president has so much more power than he used to. And just to give you one quick statistic, George Washington issued eight executive orders in his eight years. Obama and Trump both issued over two hundred, so it is a vast different office. So I was like, maybe we should revisit this three
president's idea. So my first Amendment, right to petition government, I said, well, just think about it, just bring it up in Congress, and I got hundreds of people to sign it. Now, I will say, in all seriousness, I'm not sure that's the solution because I don't think, you know, having Kamala and Trump and Title Star like sitting side by side in the Oval office not a great idea. But I do think we have to figure out some way to restrain the presidency, and there are ways to
do it, like empowering Congress. More so, that was sort of the idea of my amendment.
So tell me about the letters of mark and how you went about trying to get one.
Well, this was fascinating to me because there's there is stuff in the Constitution that just seems eternal, like you know, the idea of the blessings of liberty and equal protection. But then there are parts that you're like, what this is from another century, because it is. And one of those is Article one, Section eight. Congress has the right to grant letters of market reprisal, which basically means that you, as a citizen, have a constitutional right to try to
become a pirate, a government sanctioned pirate. Meaning you can say, I want to take my boat, my fishing boat, and put some cannons on it and go out and try to capture enemy ships, and I get to keep the booty. I got to keep the food and the gold and the sherry whatever it is in there, and it's still in the Constitution.
But it was also very useful, right, like actually helped those win a War.
At the time it made sense. It was just like the housing British soldiers in the Revolutionary War. We had just a tiny navy, so we outsourced it. We said to these fishermen and whalers, you go out and do it. And they were immensely successful. These privateers is the official word, not pirates. These privateers captured about two thousand British ships and we probably would not have a country without them. So it is fascinating and incredibly important historically, but it
hasn't been used since eighteen fifteen. But I thought, well it's still in there. I'm trying to do this project. So I actually got a meeting with a congressman wrote Conna from California, and he's like, what can I do for you? And I said I would like a letter of mark and reprisal. And at first he was like, great, that sounds good, and then he's like, wait, what is this And then I told him it was about being a pirate and he was like, well, that does sound
a little more complicated than you know. He said he would bring it up with his colleagues, which was very nice, and his age still emails me as Captain Jacobs, which I love. So that's the closest I've come so far.
So what surprised you most during this year of living constitutionally and do you feel like it did inspire you to get more involved in government?
Well? The second part absolutely that story we talked about with Ben Franklin saying is the sun still rising on America? And my conclusion is, I don't think it's like the actual sun. Where's it's gravity that makes it. It's us. We are the gravity. We have to be the ones who roll off our sleeves and become civically engaged. It's about society, It's about people. How do people live together? How can we make it so people live together in
the flourishing way possible? So yes, and I guess one of the big surprises was just how different life was then. It was racist and sexist and smelly, and you had the tobacco enima. But there were parts as well that are I think worth re evaluating and bringing back. Like we talk about the sense of community, this sense of
responsibility and getting together in person. We would not have a country if people had not had the right to assemble and meet and talk in coffee shops and work out these hard issues, and that was one of my favorite parts. I had an eighteenth century style dinner where I had people from all over the political spectrum over and my son cooked some beef stew. We talked about all sorts of issues. We sang Yankee Doodle, which has a very disturbing verse that they leave out for the kids.
We talked about what do we like about America and what would we change. Not everyone agreed, but the one thing we agreed on was that we need more of this. We need more face to face discussions in good faith, assuming the other person is a good person and that they want the best for our country, because if not, we're just going to continue to polarize and divide and we are not going to have a single country. We're going to have two countries.
Yeah. I feel like over the last few years, I've just fallen more in love with the idea of community and seeing the types of people that are drawn to like a community garden to make a space beautiful, or the ways people form around interests which allow them to talk about politics in ways that aren't disputatious, I guess, and so like, I think there's something really wonderful about this idea of more people assembling and less people being siloed.
Absolutely, and even something like being part of the reenactors. There were people who were liberals and conservatives, and one of the reenactors said to me he loved it because you go to an office party and you talk about the weather or sports. Here you talk about philosophy and history and how can we move forward? And so I'm with you. I think community really is the answer.
So one of the things I love most about your writing is that it forces me, or encourages me, rather to take a look at things I'm sort of naturally afraid to. Like I don't want to delve too deep in religion because I'm worried about the effects or what I'll think of others. And same with the Constitution. It's this real divide, And in a moment of sincere political anxiety, I feel like somehow this book was comforting and so lovely and just a wonderful way to tackle issues of
government and constitution and the Supreme Court. And I just want to thank you for it.
Oh my goodness, what a wonderful compliment.
Thank you.
I mean, our country has been through a lot, these are very tough times, but first of all that we have a country is quite astonishing. I mean, we were underdogs against the greatest military might in the world of British and then we had half the country wanted to secede, and so we have been through tough times. So I am cautiously optimistic that we can improve our country. And I love that that was your experience too well.
Aja, thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to try some election cake and check out this musket of yours.
Oh live too, So come on over and we'll go marching around.
Part Time Genius is the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongais Chatikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and
Vine Shoory. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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