organizing principles of the revolution and that's, in some ways, how he actually justifies the southern move from independence. he goings-on to say that the founders drew -- principles that are inherited through the enlightenment philosophers but that those principles, here's the key, are stronger than the philosophers or even the founders recognized. the angelo american legal and political traditions communicate those political and social principles that are more compelling than even the founders recognized. he goes on -- he insists that the war against southern independence was just as much a war against northern democracy as it is against southern air stock rah si. i wanted you to take that away from reading and see how it fits into what the tocqueville sees. i think it does fit in quite well. let's take a question on anything at this point.

i wanted to get context. i saw you had your hand up again. >> mr. barone mentioned medicare. it reminded me of earlier this week "the new york times" had an expose on ron paul and his early career when he first opened up his medical practice or he refused to participate in medicare or medicaid. a lot of people, of course, you don't want to treat poor people. he treated anyone, but those people who could not pay, he accepted vegetables, a dozen eggs. i think that speaks a lot towards our ability as individuals to make our own contracts and the ability of us to take care of each other. we don't need these centralized programs like mid care and medicaid. i think when we have an abundance of them, you spoke of america's prevalence of charity and giving to things like that.

we hold an extreme capacity to take care of each other on an individual smaller community basis rather than big centralized government programs. i think -- >> one of the arguments my father was making around the family dinner table in the late '50s. early '60s. >> my father is a physician and a surgeon. his father had been a doctor. he was a family of sicilian immigrants and unusually, they sent him to college and medical school, sort of like jewish immigrants than italian immigrants. he became a doctor and moved to detroit which was the great growing dynamic city. fastest major metro except for los angeles, number two to l.a. it was bigger then. yeah. they didn't charge -- he developed a fine sense of which patients were free loading and said they couldn't afford it but

could and which ones tried to pay you and knew they couldn't afford it. you tried to settle it. i saw people on his office hours on tuesday and thursday nights. they would pay for the office call and the woman would get out her wallet out of her purse and take out four dollar bills and get out the change purse and put the last dollar on there out of change. it was $5 for an office call. $300 for an appendectomy in the 1950s. that was a free market system. people provided for that. you just ate the cost of that. sometimes people came out badly. my grandfather barone lost a house in the 1930s, couldn't keep up the mortgage payment of $100 a month. a doctor. well, there was mass unemployment. people couldn't pay him. they would bring in cookies or a chicken or something. i mean, that was how you got paid. some olive oil or -- i don't know what they made.

tomato sauce. they would bring you, you would do what you can. a lot of his patients were italian. but you know, in some ways the medical profession -- that's not today's medical profession. you can't just wish that situation into existence and you can also imagine that there were situations that were a lot of people weren't getting care that you probably think should have. if you were all knowing, you would want to have get care. you know, not all doctors were going to do this and so forth and so on. increasingly people who entered the medical profession, md's do not go to become entrepreneurs with their own offices. they're becoming part of larger organizations, signing up on hospital staffs doing this or that. it may be this is also the result of in part half of the graduates are women who are somewhat -- tend to be -- i

could be attacked for saying this. it's empirically true who are more likely to want to have stated definite hours rather than office hours on tuesday and thursday nights. oh, and also be on call 24 hours a day for your patients who are sick and in the hospital. and you have e.r. duty. my dad left christmas day parties to go to the emergency room and sew people up. not everybody wants that kind of life. people have good reason for not wanting to do so. that's time away from your family. we're not going to retrieve that perhaps golden era of medicine ever again. we do -- we're facing in this election some what may be very serious questions and consequences may flow depending on how the voters vote, whether or not this law is passed in 2010 is going to go into effect

or how it will go into effect. and we also face the interesting question, was talking about a class this morning of the constitutionality of this law. it's been more than 70 years. >> it covers everything. >> that's what i was taught in law school. in law school we were talked the case, he can't produce oats for his own cows with -- unless the government says he can. that was in 1941 decision. you know, so wicker v fill burn is maybe dead. we have for the first time in 70 years, the supreme court giving consideration and indeed devoting highly unusual 5.5 hours of oral argument to a piece of economic legislation. i think however the court rules, the question of constitutionality of many pieces of legislation will become a lively political and perhaps legal issue, which has not been the case for the last 70 years.

that's a difference. it's a difference that gets us more towards -- that senses at least a little bit in a decentralizing situation as far as these government apparatuses go. because to the extent that's an issue, it may inhibit people from even proposing some forms of centralization which they might otherwise in wicker v. fill burn atmosphere might have done. >> have a follow-up in. >> just to tag on to that. why is everything becoming a grandiose constitutional question now? >> it's grandiose because it's -- well, it's a constitution we are expounding as chief justice john marshall wrote. because it's an interesting question. because you have this -- in this case, the novelty, you got two interesting constitutional questions here at least. a novelty of a mandate to buy a commercial product.

we've never had a court rule that congress can require that. they've never done it before. i mean, everybody has searched the precedence. the people want this to be upheld, surely it would have come forward. if they could have found anything cited as precedent, they haven't done so. we can be sure they've tried. it's not there. so it's a novel question. we have a constitution of limited powers. tocqueville has some chapters on the constitution which i confess i did not review for this meeting. but the idea of limited government and subsidiary is written into the constitution to at least some extent. now a couple of the issues we were discussing in relation to centralization are issues that do look like they're national in scope. who serves in the military in time of war? war at time in which by the way, 400,000 people in the military died. okay? you've got names on your plaques here at the citadel and it's a pretty big one for world war ii.

if you were here during world war ii, you knew lots of those people who died. the question of immigration, who gets within our boundaries. there's no rule of international law or national law, we don't have any -- except diplomats under rules of international law. even then, we don't have to recognize the country and declare them persona non grata. nobody has a right to come in who isn't a citizen. we prudently and intelligently let people come in as doing business as immigrants. we'd be fools not to. we don't have to. we don't have a constitutional responsibility. that's where the powers of the federal government are the greatest. arguably, there's a need for uniformity or you can make the argument you need uniformity and so forth when you get into medical care policies and so forth. why not have more decentralization and also not

just give states -- insurance companies and monopolies within states, but let it go across state lines to purchase policies across state lines. there's a strong argument for that. although it's an argument that says we're going to undermine state and local autonomy. the people of new york want you to pay for podiatry and for psychological counseling about whatever else. neurotic manhattan people. >> dog. >> the dog psychology. you got to pay for that and have it as part of your policy. doggie analysis. you know, somebody was up to albany and figured a way to make money on that. we know how those things get into laws. somebody demands it. it is a local decision. one of the things i think tocqueville would say is when you have local decisions, some

of them are going to be stupid. they're not all going to be smart. some will be real dumb. >> some will be smart. >> and the sum total is going do things. they have to provide ways to improve things better than you can. the french had a system of computer system called the mini tell in the 1980s that was going to take over everything and so forth. that thing you got there is not a mini tele. it wasn't invented by central authority. >> one of the readings was king numbers by john randolph. i think if you go back over that, you'll see how much he takes from tocqueville or how similar. on king number, he refers to the bare majority and how he's horrified at the notion that precedent, tradition and law can be overturned by a mere majority appealing to an abstract principle. though that principle is not one that has been set down in

tradition. consider -- he looks at stability and predictable in economic exchange and social order. he fears that an impulse of an egalitarian pleb sight might usher in the unrest and horror of the french revolution. in short, adding on to what de tocqueville does. the pursuit of equality and widespread democracy rather than rerepublicanism will destroy american tradition of order oed liberty. randolph old republicanism reinforces the notion that the american founding was a revolution not made but averted. that goes back to what speaker gingrich said last week. his work also provides a bridge between jefferson and calhoun. i just wanted to make sure that -- i hope you'll go back and reread that given the

brilliant lecture by mr. barone. i think it will make a lot more sense now. any other -- let's take another one or two questions. cadet slater? >> you were talking about how the society and the religious tradition, really important in maintaining freedom and i guess keeping society together at a local level a lot better. now, i think that played a pivotal role in the peace process right after the civil war. because those local groups could really keep everything together, keep social cohesion. but a lot of times when we're looking at other civil wars that are threatening to relapse back into conflict, the peace process is really just kind of at that macro level. let's throw peacekeepers in there. do you think it should be encouraged that these local civil societies and local village communities should be

really integrated into that peace process? >> that sound like a really smart question. i'm tempted to start off by asking with malice -- with charity towards all. lincoln was addressing the federal government in that. but he was certainly setting a tone after. the most terrifying passage in american oratory that all the bloodshed shall be paid for. it's fair and just all together. whoa. and then he gets right into that. i would recommend in that connection a book that i've read, i can't remember the title of it. the author is drew faust who is currently the president of harvard university. and she has a southern background and she read a book about the remembrances after the civil war. on both north and south. the memorials. the amount of people killed. i refer to 400,000 in world war ii. 600,000 in civil war. a nation of 38 million, okay?

what is that for -- what's the ee equivalent of that today? it's 4,800,000 people dead. that's a lot. you know. you go to any little southern town and courthouse town, any new england town and so fort and you look at the plaque and numbers of people and look up the census numbers for that community and you get an idea of the sort of thing. but as i say, i forget -- i think the word remembrance or something is in the name. it's something you can easily find. it's a book that addresses this in a very intelligent way. since i have developed an anti-harvard prejudice after going there, i have to say that i thought she seems to be a very thorough scholar and a person that writes with great intelligence, sympathy for people in all these situations. >> we have time for one last

question. >> gentlemen? >> mr. lacey. go ahead. >> mine wasn't so much a specific question as just i was curious more on your thoughts with the -- when you brought up education earlier and you spoke about timid and industrious animals type thing. i thought about, i heard about education in some other nations that were trying to compete with, with our education system and perhaps trying to emulate them even though those systems seem to be along the same lines of promoting -- >> please read that -- [ inaudible ] we'll have a couple of chapters on that. please continue, mr. lacey. >> so just to get more of your thoughts on that. along with -- once again, we were talking about de tocqueville and he was talking about these aren't these bonds

necessarily but where these bonds come from. i would say that in america, schools provide a lot of those bonds. like a lot of people associate their alma mater more than hardly any other organization. just to get more of your thoughts on education. >> okay. well, the education. a couple things. number one, my thoughts that i expressed here are sort of few things that i -- a book that i wrote published in 2005. it's portions of american life where you have competition, and soft america is where you don't. one of my basic thesis is most americans lift in soft america, progressive public schools and 1850 in hard america in places like the citadel and selective colleges of all kinds in the military and private sector endeavors of various ways. that -- why do we have incompetent 18-year-olds and

competent 30-year-olds. we don't have the most competent 18-year-olds or so i was asserting. so i was trying to answer that. there's an exception to that period after stputnik. we decide that we've got to have advanced placement courses and higher ed courses in a lot of public schools where you had affluent or high iq kids in large numbers. the private school i went to three years ahead of mitt romney, we certainly had this. we had very smart kids. i thought they were a bunch of jerks, but it turned out they were smart people. you see people in their adolescence, that's their worst. anyway, they were -- so that was it. school ties, yeah, some of the voluntary associations we're talking about, a lot is nurtured by football teams and things. i think at some level, it's silly. why do i care whether my sister

or brother-in-law care whether the university of michigan beats michigan state. it's more important to them because they live in lansing and still have their u of m sticker on their car. but hey, it's a positive thing. it's helped to build, you know, an important academic institution of some distinction. so we have all these different things working together and you have so many worthy institutions that are worthy in one way or another or many ways that it's helpful. the french system by contrast, probably produces more excellence. they had a period where all their presidents and prime ministers had gone to this one school. happened to walk by it one time, one of their installations in paris. they've got an efficient parking garage in the basement of this historic building in the left bank of paris. and these people are very confident they're going to run the country. you know, you get this -- >> they do. >> well, they do.

they run the biggest private firms, the government. they run it. centrally from paris. we do. and britain, you still have an awful lot concentration of oxford and cambridge. i cambridge. the current prime minister, david cameron, is eton and chri christchurch. they identify somebody by saying were you at school? it is understood the only one you could possibly be talking about is eton, and apparently it is ak can dep cli a tough school, david cameron did well there, and the people that run the economist of mostly from oxford, little mafias. we have many mafias in this

country with lots of smart and talented people. lots of them. it is one of our great strengths. if you get a leader, we had a president that went to harvard law school, previous harvard business school, and then bill clinton came from nowhere, went to georgetown which was not a top rated college. newt gingrich came from dysfunctional family background and attended emory and tulane which again, they don't hold the position in our society that oxford and cambridge did, and nobody would mistake them for that, and yet they both ascended to the top of the political heap in part through a show of genuine intellect and skill in the 1990s and against the odds. so there's plenty of room for achievement here. it is not entirely random, but

we're not as centralized as britain and france are that way, and that's probably a good thing. >> well, the insights you have given us are invaluable, i am sure they will live with us forever and i'm sure they'll live with the cadets forever as well. i can't thank you enough. this has been just outstanding. i hope you'll come back again sometime and talk to us. you're always welcome. and i hope you found it enjoyable being here at the citadel. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> every time i see mitt romney, he says cranbrook, a school we both went to. he wants me to write so he talks about it. next week on lectures in history, harvard university professor john stauffer

discusses african americans and their role fighting the civil war. join us each saturday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern and sundays at 1:00 p.m. for classroom lectures from across the country on different topics and eras of american history. lectures in history are also available as podcasts. visit our website at cspan.org/history/podcasts, or download them from itunes. each week, american history tv's american artifacts visits historic places to learn the story of the united states through objects. >> this is the papa tuxent river. this is the end of pennsylvania avenue that runs from d.c. and ends at the patuxent river.

little location, way son's conner, the scorpion, about one mile, two miles up river from that bridge. we are about 30 minutes from washington, d.c. about 20, 25 minutes from annapolis, maryland, and about 40 minutes from baltimore. in 1840, the river was deeper. there's sedimentation from agricultural runoff since 1814. this time during the early 19th century and 18th century, vessels were able to come far up river. due to war of 1812, chesapeake was pretty much undefended. british had free reign to come into the bay and come ashore, lute plantations, villages, also to punish the american citizens. joshua barney, revolutionary

naval war hero proposed to build a flotilla of barges that would be able to defend the coast during the day, intercept british landing parties, and at night hairy the british fleet. he was given permission and funds to do this. these were put under department of the navy. since joshua barney had been retired, was no longer in the seniority of the navy, he was made come door of this flotilla. it was somewhat part of the navy but also separate from the navy. on his first voyage out with his flotilla, this was 15, 16, 17 ships, he ran into superior british ships that chased him up the pa tuxent river. at one point, he was in saint leonard's creek, then was able to fight his way out. he couldn't fight into the bay, was forced to come further up river retreating.

the british following her, to the point he got so far up river, he could not get any further up river and it was apparent the british could capture his ships, so he was ordered by secretary of the navy to abandon his ships and when the british tried to take them to set them on fire, explode them with gun powder, which he did effectively, and at this point where we are now when the british came up river that they could see the mast of barney's flotilla, very soon afterwards they saw the ships were on fire, heard the explosions from the powder gigs that were set. they went further up river and found the fleet entirely can you tell he willed except for one vessel that the fuse went out on and they were able to capture this vessel, bring it downriver with them. >> that buoys we see up there marks the wreck.

>> we are over the site of the shipwreck, could be the uss scorpion, flagship of the barney flotilla. it is the -- the bow is towards the bank, beyond this tree sawed off or cut out, stern comes out into the channel towards the red buoys you see here. we were involved in commemoration of war of 1812, we propose to relocate, excavate this shipwreck site. it was probably one of the best known, best preserved of the navy's war of 1812 vessels. >> so you dive in the water yourself. what's it like diving in this water that's hard to see through. >> it is like diving in pea soup. visibility is not good. best you get is a foot or two. so -- and it is hard to measure and read tapes and work. you almost have to work by

brail. you get used to t if you're an archaeologist, you get used to moving around with limited visibility and also you can, you know, determine what you're working on, what you're feeling by touch, so your other senses improve with time. >> anyway, this is what we propose to do in 2013 in commemoration of war of 1812 is to look at this shipwreck. plans are to build a steel dam around the site, pump the water out, conduct the excavation like a dry excavation on land. we can have more control with the arc eeology and we can bring the public to the site, let them see that excavation in progress, let them ask questions and help

with the interpretation of war of 1812, perhaps make the american public more aware of the war of 1812 and naval action that was part of that war. i might mention, too, this is only the second dry dam done for archaeological site in the united states. previously was done in texas of the 17th century french explorer, this is only the second time anything like this has been done. we think we will be able to put the stealing coffee dam around the site, take the information and data back for conservation, for research, writeup, hopefully have things for exhibit during 2014 while the commemoration is going on. >> watchri