We love questions, comments, and small essays from our listeners from all over the country — even all over the world. We take them all seriously and we try to address as many as we can. Sometimes it's easier to address them out of character, and that's this week's program. We talk about a whole range of subjects, all of them generated by our listeners who are fascinated by the connection between Jefferson's era and the current chaos, whatever it is, in our national political arena. We read a letter from our new political friend down south, Tim Clemmons, who wonders whether we are really fair about certain questions of the give and take of our Justice Department. Plus, David gets a chance to brag about his two pound tomato, an Amana Orange.

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CSJ: 00:00 Hello podcasters.

DS: 00:01 Gee, I hope we did Tim Clemmons justice on this show. It kind of got rushed.

CSJ: 00:07 I said, I'm looking for thoughtful conservatives who want to make the caset for Trump, and so we're getting some of that, right? You've gotten a number of letters and people saying, all right, I'll step up and try to address these questions. I think that's really important.

DS: 00:22 The thing that still rings in my ear — In your final essay, you talked about checks and balances. How did you put that? Do you remember?

CSJ: 00:30 I said, instead of all this crazy talk about impeachment, and it may come to that. Who knows. What we really need is accountability, oversight, transparency, supervision and checks and balances. Remember John Adams said to Jefferson, checks and balances, Mr Jefferson, checks and balances.

DS: 00:50 In exactly that voice, right?

CSJ: 00:50 That's his voice, but my point is that, so my evolution and thinking is that — all right now, Trump's had well more than a year. It looks to me like his administration is coming apart at the seams. I believe that the Mueller probe is going to lead to a lot more indictments and it's going to lead the whole chaos in a constitutional crisis. I just hope that we don't have to go through this because it — my larger point is that great nations address great issues: education, immigration, industrial policy, the coming of robotics and AI, our place in the world. We're not addressing those questions because we keep getting tripped up and he's tripping us up. Frankly. I mean, I think that's fair, but we need to focus on what America really will come to represent in the 21st century. China is rising, India is rising. NATO is losing faith in America and starting to say, well, we're going to have to do this by ourselves. The European Union is disillusioned with the United States. Canada and Mexico — I heard John Meacham talking about this over the weekend on a talk show and he said, you want your two neighbors to be your pals and to be reliable and to be in harmony with them. Why would you want to create unnecessary tension with the two parts of your situation that you most want to be stable? He said, no other country in the world has this. Every other country in the world is surrounded by more difficult neighbors. We happen to be surrounded by two world class neighbors. Why would we want to pick fights with them and so the world is going to move forward and great nations move forward and we are tripping up over a bunch of things that I think are unworthy of the most important nation on earth. Certainly unworthy of Jefferson's republic, but Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Is they like to say, he's baked in. He is what he is. He's not changing and he got elected. We have to always remember that he was elected and that's how it works in our system, but we do need checks and balances and the congress has not been a very good other branch of government. For whatever reason, Congress has appeared to be relatively weak in saying, hey, we are a coequal branch of government. We have a fiduciary duty to be a watchdog on any administration, Republican or Democratic. Congress has, I think, failed in some part of that and so that's why people like George Will, who's a very deep, traditional, conservative, have said we must elect a Democratic House of Representatives in November to bring about a greater set of checks and balances for what is in many ways a runaway administration. Anyway, all I'm saying is that I want — I urge all of us to ratchet this thing down and to try to stop taking the bait every time and to be more civil, but also to insist upon the truth if we can understand what the truth is, but to avoid this kind of easy talking point partisanship that I have been guilty of. I won't say you've been guilty of it, but I think all of us are guilty of at times. Does that make sense? Or is that just, is that just Pollyanna?

DS: 04:05 No, and thanks again to Tim Clemmons for that letter. Hopefully he'll keep in touch with us.

CSJ: 04:10 Well, I think he will, because I want, you know, I've been reading — I've probably read a dozen books now trying to understand what the Trump anger phenomenon is all about and it's actually helped, David. Here's I guess the last thing I'll say about this, unless the outraged class, people who just think that Trump is the is Beelzebub, unless the outrage class comes to terms with the anger that he has embodied and now represents, we're going to have a rough go. We can't just dismiss this group of people as deplorable. We have to try to understand what their anger is. If their anger is misguided, we need to try to persuade them. If their anger is just, we need to face that, but it doesn't do any good to call names. 35 million people do actually seem to believe that he can do no wrong. That's worth knowing about. That's worth respecting. Even if you disagree with it. It's worth respecting.

DS: 05:08 And with that, sir, let's go to this week's show.

CSJ: 05:13 Good day citizens, and welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with, about, many things, concerning Thomas Jefferson. And this week we are joined by the creator of the Thomas Jefferson Hour, Mr Clay Jenkinson. It is he who is seated across from me now.

CSJ: 05:35 We are not in the barn because it's 105 degrees on the upper great plains.

DS: 05:40 To steal a phrase that Joseph Ellis used, to name drop, a couple shows back. Can we talk?

CSJ: 05:47 Yeah, he stole that himself.

DS: 05:50 Yeah. Was it Joan — Joan Rivers.

CSJ: 05:52 Joan Rivers. That was her tagline for many decades. Can we talk?

DS: 05:55 Well, can we talk a little bit?

CSJ: 05:56 I mean, sure — about —

DS: 05:58 — the shank of the summer, nearing autumn. And of course — gardens.

CSJ: 06:05 I have seldom looked forward to the freeze, but I am because

DS: 06:08 It's so hot —

CSJ: 06:09 Unnecessarily hot —

DS: 06:11 A hundred and eight degrees in Williston, North Dakota, I heard.

CSJ: 06:14 Is that right? The fires in Canada have have given me a kind of bleary irritated eyes.

DS: 06:21 Well we're getting some from California, those poor people by the way. And some from Canada —

CSJ: 06:27 We're not in the barn is my point — we're in the studio today.

DS: 06:30 Where it's cool.

CSJ: 06:32 Cooler.

DS: 06:32 Cooler, yeah. Several months ago we did a show called tomatoes and we just kind of like, okay, we're going to do this, and an average — was such and as — if people are not interested, they'll at least know —

CSJ: 06:43 You grew a two pound tomato.

DS: 06:45 Well it was a half ounce a pound under, but I've got a couple of the two pounders I gotta —

CSJ: 06:49 That's a lot of tomato and our friends that we talk to, said that's not a good tomato. What you want is a smaller tomato —

DS: 06:55 No —

CSJ: 06:55 It was a good tomato?

DS: 06:56 These are Amana Oranges and you take them out of the garden and just marvel at them and then slice —

CSJ: 07:03 It's like a pumpkin —

DS: 07:03 Like half inch, three quarter inch tomato steaks and make sandwiches out of them.

CSJ: 07:07 Have you had your first BLT?

DS: 07:09 I'd be happy to post a picture.

CSJ: 07:11 Sure. Have you had a BLT?

DS: 07:12 Oh, are you kidding? It's like six, seven, eight nights in a row. And before you take a break from that, if ever. Yeah.

CSJ: 07:19 Fantastic. My tomatoes are coming along.

DS: 07:21 I do not do the bacon bit. I do —

CSJ: 07:23 Oh, you don't?

DS: 07:26 No, no.

CSJ: 07:26 Why not?

DS: 07:27 I don't want to say I'm a vegetarian, but I don't —

CSJ: 07:31 You're careful —

DS: 07:31 I'm like Jefferson. I don't eat much meat. Yeah.

CSJ: 07:33 Well he would be proud of you. He was not a vegetarian either —

DS: 07:37 Sometimes we use a phony —

CSJ: 07:41 No, not faux bacon.

DS: 07:42 No, actually it's quite good. Especially in a tomato sandwich.

CSJ: 07:46 So why not a faux tomato?

DS: 07:46 Where in the world —

CSJ: 07:51 Who cares about —

DS: 07:51 It would be very fun to talk to Paul Klee and Craig LeHoullier again.

CSJ: 07:56 You should send them photos.

DS: 07:59 Well, I actually have to to Craig a couple of times, but — So initially I'm pretty impressed with what Paul Klee has achieved with —

CSJ: 08:13 You mean the commercially available, actually tasty tomato, Florida University, University of Florida.

DS: 08:16 And of course we have to thank our good friend Rick Kennerly for sending us the Paul Klee seeds and also Craig LeHoullier who sent a great amount of seeds to us. As long as we're doing business, why don't you update people on the cultural tours if you wish, sir?

CSJ: 08:33 Well, three tours are coming. Two at Lochsa Lodge west of Missoula. There's Shakespeare without Tears, back by popular demand. People loved it. And Water and the West, one of the most significant issues in the history of the West. And it's kind of be a whopper in the 21st century.

DS: 08:51 That's the great asset, the natural resource that's gonna become more and more and more.

CSJ: 09:17 And John Wesley Powell, one of my characters, said, at the second international irrigation conference in 1893 in Los Angeles, 'Gentlemen, there's not a fraction of the water that you are envisioning for all of the projects that you have in mind. You're heaping up a legacy of litigation and conflict.' And of course we know that's true — the Colorado can't water everyone who needs it and wants it and the Missouri is the same and the Columbia and so we have a water deficit. We couldn't support the communities that we do in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and elsewhere, unless water was engineered by human plumbing.

DS: 09:34 Great book on this: Cadillac Desert. I think —

CSJ: 09:37 One of the books for this retreat —

DS: 09:39 It's a bit dated but I think it's been actually updated —

CSJ: 09:41 It has been. He's dead now but there's also a four part documentary film based on Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner —

DS: 09:48 Did Jefferson write about water?

CSJ: 09:49 Not much.

DS: 09:50 Yeah? He was in a situation where —

CSJ: 09:52 Plenty of it —

DS: 09:54 And not worried about it.

CSJ: 09:55 Plenty of it at Monticello, although we've talked before on this program, about what happened when the cisterns went dry, but water was is abundant in Virginia, but if global climate change is real, and we know something's happening, water's going to become a flash point issue west of 100th meridian and so this — this retreat is about water in the west. There's a series of books we're reading and then the Shakespeare one, and then in March, March 2nd through [8th], Steinbeck out in Monterrey — the second of our Steinbeck cultural tours. So they're all coming and people, there's a huge buzz about them.

DS: 10:31 What I have in front of me is a stack of letters and we're going to get to some questions about France, so hold that one — the water thing — before we stop that discussion. Our state North Dakota, pretty arid. I think, what's our annual rainfall? 13, 14 inches. It depends —

CSJ: 10:51 Twenty in the Red River valley and about 12 out in the west.

DS: 10:53 But we do have a pretty good water source with the Missouri and the reservoir.

CSJ: 10:59 The mighty Missouri has been dammed six times.

DS: 11:01 But we also have thousands of oil wells that are fracked and just — that worries me because it can take up to 17 million gallons of water to frack a well.

CSJ: 11:13 And once you put that water, 13,000 feet down it doesn't come back.

DS: 11:17 Yeah. So it's out of the system forever.

CSJ: 11:20 Forever — Well —

DS: 11:21 I can't help but wonder if you know 50 to 100 years from now, people are going to look back and, 'What were they thinking?'

CSJ: 11:28 What is one of the most important of all human laws? The law of unintended consequences. I don't think we know enough yet. The Missouri appears to be kind of an infinite source. There are going to be a lot of claimants on the Missouri River waters in the next decades, but the Missouri is on the whole and abundant resource. The Colorado is on the whole a deficit resource and it tries to water way too many people. There are massive industrial water projects in Colorado and Arizona and New Mexico, but particularly of course in California and the Columbia and the Colorado and the Missouri are amongst the most industrially compromised rivers in the world. Fascinating. I'm just utterly fascinated by all of this and so we're reading a whole series of books beginning with Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, but also the Emerald Mile, about —

DS: 12:17 It would be interesting if you could share that list and we'll put it up —

CSJ: 12:20 Well it's on the site.

DS: 12:21 It is?

CSJ: 12:21 It's on Jefferson Hour site, but people can start reading — and then the Shakespeare one, back by popular demand. I've been doing this one man Shakespeare thing around the country and I want to do more of it as a fundraiser for entities and so on, but Shakespeare was one of my first loves. Literature, not history, is my is my real field, if you can call it that, and so I've just so enjoyed doing these retreats — and then Steinbeck. Steinbeck — You know I've said this before. He wrote a very nearly perfect piece of art. The right man at the right time, the right subject of the journey story of the Grapes of Wrath, one of America's handful of greatest works. His other works are great, but there's nothing in his body of literature like the Grapes of Wrath.

DS: 13:10 He defined a period of history so well.

CSJ: 13:13 And we Dakotans have a stake in this because North Dakota actually lost more people in the dust bowl years than Oklahoma did. This could easily have been not Okies, but Dakotans. The Dakotans tended to go to Tacoma and northern California. But the dust bowl was the worst human created environmental disaster in American history and it led to an exodus from the great plains and it changed everything. And the Grapes of Wrath is a story about this phenomenon which we understand better today than even Steinbeck was able to understand.

DS: 13:47 Did Jefferson ever have to face a natural disaster of that scope?

CSJ: 13:52 No.

DS: 13:52 He endured hailstorms and early frosts and —

CSJ: 13:56 All that and the new — but there was the New Madrid earthquake in 1812, which was a huge thing. But it was way west of the Appalachians.

DS: 14:03 As I said, I do have a stack of —

CSJ: 14:06 Let's go, let's go to them.

DS: 14:08 And we're going to devote the rest of the show to answering them.

CSJ: 14:11 And I want to say, I've been reading parallel chapters in Jefferson biographies to try to compare and contrast them, so I've been reading Meacham's Jefferson and the Art of Power, John Boles, new recent biography of Jefferson, and then I'm reading Fawn Brodie again.

DS: 14:29 Really?

CSJ: 14:29 Jefferson Intimate History — you know what, she holds up really, really well. There are some whoppers in her book, but that is a great book, but I'm reading about four parallel biographies for certain episodes in Jefferson's life to see how different biographer-historians approach a common subject. It's fascinating.

DS: 14:47 That sounds like a good subject for a Jefferson Hour in the future — would be willing to do that?

CSJ: 14:52 The first one will be about Jefferson and France because that's what I've been reading about, but then next week we're going to do that, right?

DS: 14:57 Exactly. And then I want to do first term. So what should we read on Jefferson? If we're going to pick one, one book to read the chapter on Jefferson and France, what would it be?

CSJ: 15:08 Well, I think Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation has a great chapter on this subject, but if you want to read a recent one, I would read Meacham.

DS: 15:17 Art of Power.

CSJ: 15:18 The Art of Power. That's — it's a fuller — Boles' chapter on France is perfunctory, but Meacham's is fuller.

DS: 15:26 That surprises me.

CSJ: 15:26 It is. Me too. I was surprised, but that's the advantage of reading them in parallel. You think, oh. So I've been taking notes on each one and then saying, why did this author deemphasize this both — I'll just give you —

DS: 15:39 I've learned from you professor Jenkinson that that was the most formative period of Jefferson's life.

CSJ: 15:45 That's exactly right. And maybe not the most formative, but the one that set his adult character and here's what's so interesting. Both Boles, who's at Rice university and Meacham, who's a public intellectual, who I believe lives in Tennessee. They both find themselves trying to figure out if he really meant it when he said all those radical things in his letters to Madison from France, that we should tear up the constitution once every 19 years and that the tree of liberty should be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants, that went to somebody else, but the set of quite radical letters that Jefferson wrote during the five years he was in France. Did he mean it? Was he — What's the context of this? How do we understand this? Was he as radical as he seems to be? I think frankly both of them get it wrong, but I'm fascinated by their analyses and we'll go to that next week.

DS: 16:36 He was pretty overwhelmed by what became available to him in France is my understanding of it. It wasn't like he was a country bumpkin, but boy, he couldn't walk down the street and get Bordeaux anytime he wanted.

CSJ: 16:49 Not In Virginia, but he also saw a failed nation. He saw a nation that collapsed right in front of him and he thought, 'well, I wonder why nations collapse,' and I think that really led to some great thinking.

DS: 17:00 That famous letter about meeting the French peasant woman has always stuck with me.

CSJ: 17:04 He gave her three cents and she burst into tears of gratitude, but he said, we can't let this happen. We can't let our country have a class system in which there are millions of exceedingly poor people. We must never let that happen to us, and he thought, well then what's the mechanism?

DS: 17:21 I know we've talked about that in the show before, but we need to bring that discussion up again when we talk about France — that'll be next week. Right now we're going to take a short break. We'll be back in just a moment to answer listener mail. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

DS: 17:42 Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with or about President Thomas Jefferson, and as promised, Clay, I am going to begin this stack of listener questions.

CSJ: 17:55 We love our listener mail. Thank you everyone.

DS: 17:58 This one