Historian: America's Origin Story Is A Lie - Craig Fehrman - Craig Fehrman

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1:18Because Slackbot isn't just another AI. It's AI that knows your work as well as you do. Visit slack.com forward slash meet slackbot to learn more. These are complex people. I don't want to cancel these people. I just find that this is stupidity. That was the time that they lived in. You're driving around in a car, okay? You're spewing fossil fuel. Someday there's going to be clean energy 300 years from now. They're going to put a shroud over your statue, okay? They're going to be like, who are these guys? Okay, what the hell were they doing ruining the earth like that? I totally agree. My view is it's not a historian's job to say these are the heroes, these are the bad guys.

1:50My job is to put you in the canoe, show you what Jefferson cared about, show you what Lewis cared about, then you make up your mind. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Craig Fairman. He is a journalist and a historian and is out with a new incredible book, The Vast Enterprise, A New History of Lewis and Clark. I mean, lots of, I mean, it's hard to imagine, okay? I thought everything that could have been written was written about Lewis and Clark, but you have uncovered so much more new information. So before we get into the book, I'd like our viewers and listeners to know a little bit about you, Craig.

2:28Tell us about your background. Welcome to the show, and congratulations on this awesome book. Sure. Well, thanks for saying all that, and thanks for having me. I'm talking to you guys from Indiana today. That's where I live. That's where I grew up. And so I went to grad school at Yale and I actually went to be an English professor because I just love books and I love stories. But while I was in grad school, I found a few small archival things and I was like, this is really fun. Like that. It's kind of almost like a detective story. You get that charge, that thrill of finding new things. And so what I love about my job now is I can kind of combine both.

3:00I can tell big stories and I can try to find new things. And this book on Lewis and Clark was the best synthesis I've ever had in my career. It's probably our best American epic. It's such a great story, but I was also able to find so many new things and bring those together in hopefully an engaging way. So, I mean, this is the quintessential mid-century American story. Okay, so tell us why I'm saying that. Early century, I'd say early 19th century American story. Tell our viewers and listeners why I'm saying that. Sure. I really think, and this ties into sort of being in the middle of America's 250th birthday, too, that this is just one of the best stories, maybe the best story to understand America at the start.

3:46Because what you have to remember is Lewis and Clark leave in 1804. That's a while after the Revolution and the Declaration and all that stuff. But America wasn't finished yet. The White House wasn't finished. There were chunks of plaster falling out of the ceiling. The country wasn't finished either. So America was 30 years later just starting to figure out what it could be. So I think of Lewis and Clark as our first act of foreign policy. I think of Lewis and Clark as our first big kind of research project, our first sort of proto-NASA attempt to understand the world around us. Lewis and Clark was a chance for Americans to do what Americans do best, and also in a few cases to do what we don't always do best.

4:20But that's why it's a good story. It's got everything you would want in terms of humanity, morality, excitement, action. And, you know, listen, you did five years of research on this. OK, so tell us why you have this passion about Lewis and Clark. Well, when I started looking for my new book, I knew I wanted to tell an action story. And Lewis and Clark was was probably where my mind went first. I mean, when you think of American epics, that's where you go. But I didn't want to write a book that that just retapitulated what other books had said, because there's been a lot of great writing about the expedition.

4:54So I went to the journals. The journals are probably the best thing about Lewis and Clark. They're more than a million words recorded in real time from different perspectives on what they saw and what they did. And as I read the journals, I realized I only know half of the story. Let me give you a quick example. When I was reading early in the journals, before they even left St. Louis, there's just this one little line from Clark where he says, York commenced sawing with a whipsaw. York was the black man that Clark enslaved, and he was on the whole expedition too. And I just thought, like, what does that line mean?

5:21What's a whipsaw do? Well, it makes planks. It's a really complicated tool to use correctly. Planks put roofs on huts. They build beds. They really needed these planks. Well, why did they pick York? There were dozens of white soldiers around there because York was skilled. So York was so skilled. How did that affect his relationship to Clark? How did he fit in the unit? From this one little detail in the journals that's always been there for people to kind of pluck out, I was able to understand so much about York's story, York's contributions. And so once I started seeing these kind of human moments and realized that there was a lot more story to tell, in addition to talking about, you know, Lewis and Clark, I was like, okay, this is worth spending five years of my life on because I got to get this story right.

5:58This story matters to so many Americans. So I felt an obligation to tell it the whole story. Vast enterprise. It comes from Jefferson's phrase. It's a Clark letter to Jefferson. A Clark letter to Jefferson. So tell us about what he meant and tell us why you made that the title of the book. Sure. Well, I think a lot of us, when we picture Lewis and Clark, we just picture Lewis and Clark, right? Like that's even the even the signs you see all over the American West, the highway signs are like those brown signs with a white silhouette, and it's just two guys on it. But to me, the expedition was always about way more than just the two guys at the top.

6:36And what's important is that Lewis and Clark saw this too. This isn't me imposing some kind of modern view on this. When Clark wrote to Jefferson, he was like, I'm happy to join, quote, this vast enterprise. Clark knew it was going to be big, not just in terms of geography. They were going to cross a continent. He knew it was going to take a lot of people and a lot of hard work. And so my book tried to capture everybody, not just Lewis and Clark, but the working class soldiers who are standing in the freezing river trying to tow the canoes, the native people who kind of have their own agendas and their own priorities.

7:05I tried to bring everybody in. This is an ensemble. And those are my favorite kinds of stories, not just a star at the top, but a story where lots of human beings are kind of clashing and conflicting and coming together. Jefferson funds this, right? Oh, yeah. That's one of the things that's new in my book is that the expedition was just so expensive. If you sort of adjust for percentages, America's federal government spent as much on Lewis and Clark as we spend on NASA today. So it was a huge expense on government resources. And it was hard for Jefferson to get it funded. You know, this doesn't really need much explanation because the world we live in now.

7:39But Washington in 1804 was a very partisan place. There were two sides. They hated each other. And pretty much any idea from one side was going to be opposed by the other side. So even though Lewis and Clark seems all American, seems like something everybody would want, Jefferson's political opponents despised this idea and did everything they could to stop him. The fact that Jefferson was able to work this through Congress, it's sort of like the power broker. It was kind of like a Robert Caro story, but set in 1804. And my book's the first one to tell that story. If you could go back in time and you could interview Lewis, Clark, or Jefferson, what would be some of the things you would want to talk to them about?

8:17What are some of the things you would say, hey, wow, this was amazing coming to you from 250 years later, under 50 years later, this is amazing? Yeah, that would be such an amazing opportunity. I think with Jefferson, I would probably try to pin him a little down a little bit more about what exactly he wanted the expedition to do and in what time frame. Because Jefferson is such a great writer that he almost seems to shift letter to letter. His writing is so evocative, but it's not always precise. And you can see this in his relationship to race and all kinds of other things, too. But I would sort of try to understand more, you know, what precisely he wanted the expedition to do.

8:56because my reading based on reconstructing it from these letters is that he kind of wanted the expedition to do everything. You know, we think about how hard it was for Lewis and Clark to go 8 ,000 miles and deal with rapids and mountains and all that. But Jefferson's sort of research checklist for them was just overwhelming. And it's just, it's amazing how many things he wanted them to do. So I would, I would ask Jefferson a little bit more pointedly, you know, like what exactly were you imagining? And then I guess I would ask Lewis and Clark, you know, I would ask them about their relationship with their soldiers, especially.

9:27Because one thing I thought was really interesting that I found sort of hints was that Lewis and Clark picked a different way to be military leaders. This was very much a military mission. But in this time period, most officers would just kind of beat their men and ask questions later. It was a very violent time. Lewis and Clark chose to do things in a more democratic and kind of progressive way, not in terms of political terms or anything like that, but just in terms of, you know, they let the men vote on things. They let the men participate. And I thought that was such an interesting choice in terms of leadership.

9:55And I would love to ask them, you know, what was your idea there? Was that just sort of necessity? Or did you guys have a theory? Whatever the reasons, it worked out. So you found Clark's college notebook. That's right. It turns out he was a bad speller, right? He didn't really, you know, he didn't have that going on for him. But how did that change your view of him? Well, I'm glad you bring this up because it's a really key detail. Nobody else even knows that Clark went to college. Like if you read the other books, there's just a joke about his spelling and they kind of move on. Lewis is the brainy one, right?

10:29And Lewis definitely was brainy. There's no question that he was kind of the scientist on the mission. But Clark was an enlightenment thinker too. And so I found Clark's college notebook and I found a biography written by somebody way back in the 19th century who was a family friend. And this person talked about Clark going to college. And so when you're a historian, you know, you find these documents and it's exciting, but you have several steps where you want to vet it. So I went to some professors in colleges and sort of shared what I'd found with them. And it's so cool. They know this stuff so well.

10:58Then I was like, when I was like, this is the astronomy textbook that Clark was reading. They said, okay, well, that means he probably went to William and Mary. That's how well they know this time period, which is great. But they didn't know that Clark went to college. And so if we understand that, you know, yeah, he was a bad speller, I'm going to give him a cut him some slack here. He didn't have spell check. He didn't have air conditioning, you know, he's doing the best he can. But even though his spelling was bad, his ideas were really complicated. And so like Jefferson, he thought that the expedition was an attempt to sort of change a region, remake a region, sort of be America's first attempt at regime change and sort of cultivating this vast stretch of country that was full of people, but people who, from the American point of view, could change and develop.

11:39And those are ideas Clark learned in college. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. Okay. So again, fascinating about this book are some of the forgotten figures. So I want to talk about John Ordway for a second. Sure. And his impact on this exploration. Yeah. Well, when I wrote this book, I sort of, if anybody has read Game of Thrones, that might be the best analogy here. Each chapter rotates to a different point of view.

12:15So, you know, chapter one starts with Lewis. Chapter three is Jefferson. We get the main people too. But also some of the chapters rotate the people that you might not have heard of or might not have thought of. And John Ordway is one of them. It's really important to include him because he was a working class guy from New Hampshire. And his experience of the expedition was totally different than the captains. The captains were both wealthy elites. Like we said, Clark went to college. So these are people from the very, you know, the 1 % of American society. John Ordway was not. So his experience, first of all, shows how hard the regular men had to work.

12:45The detail that always sticks with me is when they were towing their canoes against the current in the Missouri, they would lean forward to grab bushes just to get leverage. One time, one of the soldiers leaned forward, grabbed a bush and pulled, and instead he pulled out a rattlesnake in his hand. Somehow he didn't get bit. It's just an unbelievable detail. So that was the life of the soldiers. But Ordway also cared so much about land. He was poor, which is why he was a soldier. And so he's on the Missouri, seeing all this beautiful land around him. And you can sort of understand what potential for a farm might mean to a working class person in this time.

13:18So there's an enslaved man that you're writing about in this book by the name of York. You know, you've helped to raise the attention actually of this person. So tell us who York was. I think, I mean, am I saying this right? I would call him a slave of Clark's, right? No, that's exactly right. Clark freed him, but more than a decade after the expedition. So York spent the vast majority of his life enslaved by the Clark family. York was about the same age as Clark. And so they grew up together. But there are so many examples from enslaved people in this period talking about this, that once you turn eight, nine, ten, the kids start getting treated like adults when they're enslaved.

13:58And so they have to go do the hard work and they start to realize, well, my life isn't like this other person's life at all. And so York was there every step of the way. And it was a difficult and complicated relationship for him. Clark was a difficult owner. Clark beat his slaves. Clark participated fully in the institution of American slavery. But it was really important for me in telling this story to not just talk about Clark as somebody who was enslaved, but to talk about him as an explorer. I found these new documents that make it really clear that York was one of the best people in a canoe on the entire expedition.

14:28He was a great swimmer, which might not seem like much today. but in the 19th century, a lot of people did not know how to swim, which it's kind of hard to wrap your mind around it today. You're on the Lewis and Clark expedition and you can't swim. Why are you even here? But that happened a lot. So when they hit the worst rapids, they needed their best swimmers and their best paddlers to get the boats through. And York was one of those people. So in multiple ways, we can see, you know, there are just little mentions of him like that whipsaw or like these new letters I found. But we can see that York wasn't just somebody who was there to take care of Clark, he was there to explore.

15:00And he ended up becoming one of the most important members of the entire expedition. I read Ambrose's book, Daunted Curse, got to be about almost 30 years ago. And I thought, okay, this is a fascinating story. But again, I read it 30 years ago, forgive me, but my impression after reading your book is there was some hagiography in his book and there was some simplicity to his book. It was more about the adventure and less about the complexity of the personalities. I didn't I didn't remember in the book, for example, how volatile Lewis was. Um, and, uh, and so I want you to compare and contrast your book because I'm sure you've read on the undaunted courage.

15:41And then let's talk a little bit about Lewis, uh, whose death almost certainly was from suicide, more or less. I think you accept that. Absolutely. Um, and so compare your book to Ambrose, tell us about Lewis and the volatility in it and also the weirdness about his strengths were also his weaknesses. Sure. Well, first, let's be clear. Ambrose's book is an American classic. I have friends who still say, you know, that's my favorite book of history ever written. So it's a wonderful book. It's a great narrative. He's a great writer. Yeah. For no doubt. But they were donated because of him to what was the D-Day Museum in New Orleans.

16:20And then it became the World War II Museum. I went to see him speak at the New York Historical Society, and my uncle was in D-Day. And so he was forming the D-Day Museum after he wrote that book. Sorry for that segue, just want to let you know how, I mean, this was an important guy to me. I read most of his books, including Eisenhower. No, he's an important guy to so many readers and lovers of American history. And we don't need to take that away. That is all absolutely true. But there's two things I would say about my book compared to his book. The first is that there's just a little bit of a different focus.

16:54I feel like when Ambrose wrote, it was very much kind of a man versus nature story. So yes, he would talk about the mountains and the rapids and that stuff's in my book too. But to me, what makes the expedition so fascinating are the human beings. I always think human beings are the most interesting thing of all. And so I think my story is not man versus nature so much as it's man versus man. So the captains versus their soldiers, the Americans versus the natives, trying to sort of get that human complexity you're talking about. And I would also just say that, and this is not Ambrose's fault, but he didn't have the scholarship that I had.

17:26So when I say people tell half the story, the Native people show up in his book, and he, to his credit, writing back in the 1990s, is honest about Americans took their land. He doesn't pretend that that didn't happen. But he's not able to get inside the Native point of view. He's not able to make the Native people seem like their own characters. They're just sort of supporting characters who show up and go away. I was able to draw on decades of scholarship and the new documents I found and interviews I did with Native people to kind of make this a story with two sides. And I just think that's a better story.

17:56You know, when I think of my favorite stories, it's always where both sides of the equation are really interesting and nuanced. That's what I tried to do in this book. So Undaunted Courage, if that's how you came to love Lewis and Clark, that's great. But I still think you're going to find a lot new in my book, and I think you can compliment. You mentioned the Game of Thrones. I mean, this book reads like a nonfiction book. The characters are rich. The story is there. The earth is untended, you know, and there's a brilliant story here about the wealth transfer on the Native Americans, frankly, that were living in this area.

18:34There's a little bit of a morality thing here as well, but there's a wealth transfer going on between the European settlers and the Native Americans that's also in the book. So when you talk about Game of Thrones, everything is in here, Craig. This is why we wanted to get you on to talk about all this stuff. And speaking of Native Americans, you draw on some of the oral histories, the indigenous oral histories alongside of the traditional archives. Why Why was that so important to you? And how does it change in your mind what we consider to be the historical truth here about the exploration? Sure.

19:11I think I'll just kind of give you a case study because these issues are really complicated. But my sort of operating idea is that oral history, written history, people want to pit them together, but they work best in conversation. So let me give you an example that also happens to be the coolest thing I found during my research. Probably the coolest thing I'll ever find in my career. I found this interview with a guy named Wolf Calf, who was a Blackfoot man. And it was, we know it's a really good source. It was written by a historian who was meeting with him in the 1890s when Wolf Calf was very old.

19:40And you can tell from the way the historian was writing that he just was trying to write this down in real time. And so Wolf Calf, as a young man, way back in 1806, met with Lewis and the Blackfoot and the Americans ended up having a battle. That was the word that Wolf Calf used. And this is something that is one of the probably two most famous encounters with Native people that Lewis and Clark had. It certainly shows up in Ambrose's book. But all historians have sort of taken the American point of view on this and said, the Blackfoot were trying to steal our guns. And, you know, let's be honest.

20:10If somebody's trying to take your guns, you're very within your rights to fight back, to try to get your guns to try to protect yourselves. And that's what the Americans were doing. But Wolf Caff's interview says something different. Wolf Caff's perspective is different. He says we were trying to take their horses, not their guns. And that honestly lines up with all the best scholarship on the Blackfoot people, stuff done by the Smithsonian and other institutions. But here's the key thing. And this is what I mean about them working best in conversation. Once I read Wolf Caff's interview, I went back to Lewis's journal and I noticed something that nobody had seen before that, that honestly I hadn't seen before, which is that the first half of Lewis's account of this battle, Lewis wasn't awake.

20:48He was relying on the testimony of an American soldier. And this American soldier fell asleep on the job. Literally, he was supposed to be on watch. He fell asleep. So he was the person who killed one of the native people. And what you really come down to is not Lewis's words versus Wolfcalf's words, but this soldier's words versus Wolfcalf's words. And this soldier has a very vested interest in making the Blackfoot seem dangerous because otherwise Lewis is going to court martial him or get him in trouble. You know, falling asleep on watch is a capital crime in this time period. So having these oral sources, having these written sources, bringing them together, they can kind of illuminate each other.

21:21But I never would have gone down this journey and sort of reinterpreted this moment if I hadn't had Wolfcap's perspective first. So that's why it's important for me to bring it all together and then still do the historian's work, which is to evaluate all your sources. What can we tell for sure? What is sort of more in the maybe category. A historian has to be rigorous for all sources, but a historian should also look at all sources. Listen, I mean, you capture it better than I can, and I'm grateful to you. And also, you wrote another book about the presidents and their writing of books. And I guess I didn't get a chance to read that book, but it made me think about your own writing as you're reflecting about your own writing.

22:02I believe the title of it was author in chief. That's right. How did the process teach you about how historical myths get manufactured? Well, it's interesting with presidents. That book sort of looked at the books presidents wrote, and I spent a lot of time in archives for that one too. And so many of the books written by presidents are our best source to understand presidents as young people. I still think about Harry Truman's memoirs all the time and how when he would talk about his childhood, his love of history in high school, how much he loved reading about the lives of great people in the past.

22:38You know, that's historian David McCullough's book on Truman still used that material today. So presidents are so good about talking about their personal relationship, their patriotism, all that stuff. But then, of course, the closer you get to real power, that's when you start to get the president's side of the story and not everybody's side of the story. If you read Harry Truman's account of why he dropped the atomic bomb, you're going to be left wanting more information because Truman just isn't able to be as honest as you might want. So that was my main takeaway from that, that books by presidents can have real value and that they've been really important throughout American history.