The American Founding was an epic, earthshaking, history-making event that still reverberates through the ages. For close to half of our history, America has had a filmmaking industry—Hollywood—one that has often been the envy of the world, although its global prestige has faded in recent years.

Despite the historic weight of the American Revolution, it has been mostly a spectral presence in the cinema. Even if we expand our focus to include the period from the war’s conclusion to shortly before the Civil War, Hollywood’s filmed history of early America is rather thin.  

That is not to say that American history was not present on the silver screen from the medium’s earliest days. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, based on events during the French and Indian War, was portrayed as early as 1909. In fact, there were three different films based on that book, and another film based on Cooper’s novel The Spy by 1920. Betsy Ross (1917), about the famous flag maker, still survives.

Perhaps the most ambitious film about the Founding in the silent era was D.W. Griffith’s 1924 America (also known as Love and Sacrifice), a sweeping tale running two hours and 19 minutes. With America, Griffith intended to tell a kind of American Revolution Romeo and Juliet, featuring Massachusetts patriot Nathan Holden, a minuteman, Son of Liberty, and comrade of Paul Revere, and Nancy Montague, who comes from a Loyalist, pro-British family.

America survives on YouTube, but it is a rather stodgy affair. The film emphasizes America’s deep ties with Great Britain. “Remember, America is the son—not the bastard—of England,” declares a member of Parliament. In a production supported by the Daughters of the American Revolution, all the elements of our history are there: Paul Revere’s ride, Lexington and Concord, the Declaration of Independence, Valley Forge, and Yorktown. George Washington is first seen seated and from behind, portrayed almost as a demigod. The best acting in the film is by Lionel Barrymore in an early role as the villain, the sleazy “renegade American” Captain Walter Butler, who dreams of setting up his own empire in the New World.

The film did poorly at the box office, and Griffith would make only a few more films. One of them was a talkie about Abraham Lincoln. The 16th president has been the subject of three legendary American directors—Griffith, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg. Neither George Washington nor any other historic figure of the American Revolution has had the good fortune of being the main subject of a first-rate feature film.

The ’30s continued to be slim pickings for films on the Founding, with one exception. There is Daniel Boone (1936), essentially a Western, and another version of The Last of the Mohicans (also 1936). But the star of the decade, and a personal favorite, is John Ford’s beautiful Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) with Henry Fonda. In my opinion, this classic film takes place during the American Revolution, with Utah subbing for Upstate New York circa 1776. Any red-blooded American will tear up during the last scene, as Fonda and the settlers raise the American flag at their fort.

I like three other American Founding films from the following decade of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The Howards of Virginia (1940) was poorly received at the time (except by Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who called it “among the best historical pictures yet made”), and its star Cary Grant hated it, but I think it is very underrated. Directed by Frank Lloyd, who made the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, it is essentially a family drama set in Revolutionary War Virginia featuring the struggle between the old Tidewater elite and the rude folk of the frontier. John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave Columbia Pictures the right to film much of the movie at the recently restored Colonial Williamsburg.

It is a touching story, well-acted (except for Grant, according to the critics), and deeply grounded in the American experience. Rough frontiersman Matt Howard (Grant) looks to the West—to Ohio—but settles in the Shenandoah Valley with his new bride. Here, he and his genteel wife (Martha Scott) hew a plantation from the wilderness; “nothing matters in this world, here will be order and dignity.” A sympathetic Thomas Jefferson is a key supporting figure in the film.

While The Howards of Virginia is mostly forgotten, All That Money Can Buy (1941), directed by the great German exile William Dieterle, is a deservedly revered film classic based on the Stephen Vincent Benét short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Beautifully made and deeply evocative of small-town, rural America and the ways of the old republic. When “Black” Daniel Webster speaks, “they say the Stars and Stripes come right out of the sky.” While not properly a War of Independence subject—it takes place in the 1840s—it very much fits into the spirit of the American Founding, a powerful, deeply patriotic film even though it is essentially a homespun fantasy comedy.

My third American Founding favorite from the ’40s is Cecil B. DeMille’s frontier spectacular Unconquered (1947) with Gary Cooper. DeMille was popular with audiences and mostly disliked by the critics, and this film is very much typical of DeMille’s work—lavish, entertaining, somewhat vulgar, and colorful. It takes place on the old American frontier, which in 1763 was essentially Western Pennsylvania. If one can stomach the hokum—Boris Karloff as an Indian chief, Italian American Iron Eyes Cody is listed as an advisor for Indian languages—you certainly won’t be bored. There seem to be more big-budget Hollywood spectaculars about the period of the French and Indian War/Pontiac’s Rebellion (Last of the Mohicans/Allegheny Uprising/Northwest Passage/Unconquered) than about the American War of Independence that followed it. Young Washington, a film released that same year, also focused on the French and Indian War.

I don’t much care for the 1955 The Scarlet Coat, which is a good-looking but dull spy adventure about the Benedict Arnold affair. But 1959’s The Devil’s Disciple, a witty comedy adventure based on the George Bernard Shaw play, is very entertaining. The only problem with it is that Laurence Olivier as British General Burgoyne steals the film from the patriot heroes Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster.

For aficionados of movies on the American Founding, the popular 1972 musical comedy 1776 is an obvious choice which I endorse. I first saw it in public school, where we also saw Disney’s Johnny Tremain and read Howard Fast’s April Morning. It has great songs and silly bits, but it tells a serious story, mostly accurately, and tells it well. I first learned of that great patriot from Delaware, Caesar Rodney, by watching it. Interestingly, actor Howard da Silva, who plays Ben Franklin in 1776, was the villain in 1947’s Unconquered.

The following decades would see a profusion of American Founding content coming out not in feature films but on television, either as television movies, series television (Turn: Washington’s Spies), or miniseries (John Adams, Franklin) shown on broadcast, cable, or streaming services. Though the results were mixed, even when good, they were often constrained by the limits of television in comparison to feature films, with smaller budgets and poorer production values. Despite that, the made-for-television movies of April Morning (1988), on Lexington and Concord, and The Crossing (2000), on the battle of Trenton, are quite good. Both are based on the work of the former Communist (and 1953 Stalin Prize winner) Howard Fast, a former Red but a man who could write.

My last two choices are obvious ones, both very well-known, popular feature films: the 1992 version of The Last of the Mohicans, directed by Michael Mann, and Mel Gibson’s fine 2000 film The Patriot, a highly fictionalized telling of Southern patriot partisans like Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. Both are expansive, epic films that echo the titanic continent-wide scope of the American struggle for freedom, a war for the New World. There is nothing narrow or pinched in them.

That is only eight recommended feature films (maybe ten if you throw in a couple of television movies), a very modest haul indeed for over a century of American movie-making. I wish there were more.

It is easy to decry the anti-American nature of Hollywood, yet patriotic movies have always been part of its output—especially war and Western films—even if the American Founding itself has been largely neglected. So it isn’t that Hollywood is completely incapable of making such films. Perhaps part of the problem is that the stirring events of the American Revolution were too well known for American filmgoers. Now it seems that they are too little known.

Part of the challenge is inherent in making historical films about real-life historical figures. It is not easy to do without coming across as hackneyed or trite, especially in our cynical age. Some filmmakers seemed to have had a knack for history—the great John Ford, who wanted to make April Morning with John Wayne, and John Milius, who once wrote a treatment for a Daniel Boone movie, come to mind. We need to identify more rare talents for our time.

There are certainly many unexplored topics suitable for the wide screen if someone has the vision and the funding. Serious treatments of the likes of Daniel Boone, Daniel Morgan, Casimir Pulaski, and Peter Francisco need to be made. John Paul Jones, the “Father of the American Navy,” was the subject of one bad movie in 1959. He deserves better.

There is cinematic gold to be mined in the plots to overthrow General Washington, such as the Conway Cabal. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans has been remade 11 times, from 1909 to 1992. But the same author’s The Spy, which actually takes place during the War of Independence and features George Washington in a key role, was last brought to the screen in 1914! There are the once highly regarded Revolutionary War novels of South Carolinian William Gilmore Simms. Screenwriter William Monahan produced a supposedly great script for Ridley Scott titled Tripoli, covering the early American Barbary Wars. But the film was never made.

What seems lacking is that fleeting combination of a sincere patriotic and historic vision, real talent, and the means to implement a project. But that has always been the struggle, not just in Hollywood, but for all types of art.

The post Films That Celebrate the Founding appeared first on The American Mind.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

America’s Privileged Class – The Press, Libel, and Defamation | The Roundtable Ep. 321

Having departed from the founders’ understanding of libel, the American Court of today declines to protect the reputation of public figures—a gap that has been abused by the press to run unfounded narratives. Author of Liberty to Libel Carson Holloway joins the hosts this week to trace the morphing values of the 19th and 20th centuries, and to advocate a restoration of older principles. Meanwhile, Spencer Pratt narrowly lost to Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman in the L.A. mayoral race following a sudden wave of mail-in ballots, highlighting California’s lax voting standards.

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 321 appeared first on The American Mind.

Though the Trump Administration has faced a series of legal setbacks on tariffs, it seems to have found a solution. After the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s reciprocal tariffs were wrongfully imposed, the president immediately leapt to plan B: Section 122 tariffs, which allow the temporary placement of global tariffs. But these tariffs—derived from the Trade Act of 1974, which Trump used to install a 10% levy on most imported goods—expire in just over two months, and a court has ruled them unlawful.

Although that case is still working through the system, the administration is already planning to replace Section 122 tariffs with Section 301 tariffs. These, too, stem from the Trade Act, but unlike the previous tariffs, they will be here to stay. They will also allow the Trump Administration to target countries that have relied on unfair trade practices such as lax environmental standards that let our trade “partners” produce at excess capacity—essentially to get one over on the United States.

Section 301, in short, gives the president the power to counter unfair foreign trade practices. Unlike the reciprocal and 122 tariffs, they can be placed only after a long process that includes public hearings and comment periods. While this may frustrate those who want quick action, the process practically guarantees courts will not rule them unconstitutional, as the authority is laid out explicitly in the statutory text.

Currently, the only active 301 tariffs are against China, which have been in place since the first Trump Administration. But the second Trump Administration is planning to broaden the use of Section 301 significantly.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative launched two investigations in the spring that covered 60 countries, accounting for nearly all American imports. The first investigation focused on products made with forced labor across the globe. Earlier this month, the administration revealed the results: those countries, including the European Union, had failed to ban products made with forced labor or to stop forced labor within their borders.

The second investigation, which is somewhat narrower in scope, is still ongoing. It targets “excess capacity”—essentially unfair government intervention stemming from weak or absent environmental regulations abroad, with pollutants from China having been found in American water and air. This harms America’s labor force and limits businesses’ ability to expand facilities and production.

According to United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, these tariffs are being pursued on “an accelerated timeframe” while still ensuring all legal requirements are being met. The next step for the forced labor tariffs will be a comment period ending in early July, followed by a hearing and—most likely—the announcement of the new tariffs.

By relying on Section 301, the Trump Administration is making a smart play for three key reasons.

First, President Trump is obviously committed to dismantling “free trade” ideology and replacing it with fair trade. Leaving office with only a handful of trade agreements and tariffs only on China—tariffs that all but the purest free traders would support—would not meaningfully advance that goal. But if comprehensive Section 301 tariffs can be placed on countries found to violate a range of agreements, it becomes significantly harder for future administrations to lift them, as the Biden Administration discovered with the China tariffs levied by the first Trump Administration.

Second, Section 301 is a more concrete process. It requires hearings and comment periods, conducted in a way where—even if the outcome is broadly understood—there are no surprises. Markets will therefore have essentially priced them in. While President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs came from a well-reasoned place, their back-and-forth nature spooked investors and at times threatened his broader economic agenda. These tariffs, by contrast, are durable, cover almost all American imports, and leave no questions for investors.

Most importantly, Section 301 allows the United States to target trade both broadly and narrowly. Broadly, in the sense that a wide array of countries can be targeted at once, as the investigation of more than 60 countries shows. Narrowly, in that it allows the administration to focus on problems long derided by President Trump, including topics many conservatives have overlooked such as “inadequate environmental protections” and labor law violations. In previous Republican administrations, these would not have been priorities. But the United States has extremely strong environmental protections and labor laws; ignoring the disparity between our laws and those of our competitors means trade deficits never close and American jobs get offshored.

With Section 301, that era is ending. New global tariffs will soon arrive, and this time they won’t be blocked by a court.

The post Tariffs Built to Last appeared first on The American Mind.

The Democratic Party has a problem: Americans are increasingly repelled by transgenderism.

Between 2022 and 2025, the average American’s favorability toward restrictions on transgender policies rose significantly. Support fell both for requiring insurance companies to cover gender reassignment procedures and for protecting trans individuals from job and housing discrimination. All of this happened as the share of Americans who consider it morally acceptable to change one’s gender has fallen from 46% to 40% since 2021.

This drop in support is seen in younger generations too. Eric Kaufmann found that between 2022 and 2025, the number of trans-identifying college students fell by half. The decline was even sharper at elite institutions: at Phillips Academy in Andover, the number of trans-identifying students fell from 9.2% in 2023 to a mere 3% in 2025. At Brown University, the number of nonbinary students was nearly halved between 2023 and 2025. The data highly suggests those rates will continue to fall.

The Democrats’ problem grows more acute when considering the opposition to trans ideology from groups like Gays Against Groomers and the LGB Alliance. They are some of the most vocal advocates against Drag Queen Story Hours for children, gender reassignment surgeries, and cross-sex hormones for children. Their stand demonstrates to moderates that progressive gender ideology was always a radical, far-left movement.

All of this has put Democrats in an awkward position. The party fought hard to add transgender colors to the pride flag, pushed to allow men to compete in women’s sports, and declared Easter Sunday “Trans Day of Visibility.” But as Americans withdraw support for transgenderism, the Democrats’ trans advocacy has become an electoral liability.

Though some Democrats like Representative Seth Moulton argued after the 2024 election that the party’s over-the-top trans activism alienated voters, the party hasn’t backed away. Even as they shift from their “Party of Empathy” messaging, which was meant to counter Trump’s “fascist,” muscular MAGA movement, now giving way to figures like Maine’s Graham Platner, their support for trans ideology has stayed consistent.

James Talarico, perhaps the Democrats’ last major pure empathy candidate, strongly supports transgenderism, though his stance has become noticeably awkward in his fight against Ken Paxton. Recent reporting has revealed that Talarico’s church library is filled with pro-trans books aimed at children. And then there are his comments that “God is non-binary” and that there’s nothing he “[l]oves more than trans kids.”

Meanwhile, the gruff, populist Graham Platner, covered in tattoos and emphasizing his service in the U.S. Marine Corps, has centered his campaign around a Bernie Sanders-like socialist populism. But he still firmly backs trans rights. At a campaign event in 2025, Platner said, “I stand right in the f***ing way of anyone who’s going to try to come after the freedoms of the LGBTQIA+ community.”

Though Platner and Talarico are almost complete opposites in aesthetic and presentation, neither is willing to abandon their support for transgenderism even though it’s an increasingly unpopular issue for the average American voter.

Democrats cannot openly denounce transgenderism, because they still have to keep the trans constituency in their electoral fold. They are stuck with people like transgender Congressman Sarah McBride, whose political identity is built on trans advocacy.

The Platner wing of the party, which seeks to represent the average, working-class American, won’t make trans advocacy a key campaign issue. But they will never denounce transgenderism either. The Democrats’ only long-term strategy is the faint hope that radical gender ideology will vanish into the cultural ether.

The party can’t admit they were wrong. To do so would mean admitting to being complicit in child mutilation and pushing biological falsehoods. Running against the same ideology they spent years promoting would alienate far-leftists whose support for transgenderism remains staunch.

So the Democrats are scrambling to deemphasize their trans activism as they shift toward a more populist approach. But their overemphasis on transgender ideology will haunt them for years.

Conservatives need to press the Democrats on why they backed trans so aggressively, championing the stories of survivors and highlighting the lifelong consequences gender reassignment surgeries bring. Woke is not dead, and the trans issue remains a live one for Democrats.

The post Trapped by Trans appeared first on The American Mind.

On my mantelpiece sits a silver teapot. It is boxy rather than delicate, in the 18th-century American Federal style, with a thick band of vines traced elegantly below the lid. The teapot was a wedding gift in 1797 for my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Frances Eleanor Clark.

For over two centuries, mother has gifted that teapot to daughter, keeping alive the gathered memories of our family. Crafted by a Virginian silversmith, it has traveled from Kentucky to Missouri, from the Montana Territory to California, before returning to the East Coast. One day, I will take my own place in the line of “teapot grandmas,” woven into the long memory of that teapot and its new familial guardian.

Though women who treasured that teapot did not make history—several of them spent their lives with men who left a lasting mark on the American West—they performed an important task: keeping it alive for future generations.

Fanny Clark, widowed early, packed the teapot and her four children and moved into the frontier bachelor pad of two of her older brothers. They were General George Rogers Clark, Revolutionary War hero and conqueror of the Old West, and Captain William Clark, who would unlock the western half of the continent with Meriwether Lewis. Fanny, her children, and the teapot witnessed the final preparations of the Corps of Discovery. I like to imagine the teapot at that final family dinner before Lewis and Clark set off downriver to rendezvous with their men. Two western explorers, three excited boys, the old war hero with his toddler niece on his knee, and my pretty young grandmother were presiding over that one last taste of home before they entered the great wilderness.

The teapot was probably a gift from another of my grandmothers: the siblings’ mother, Anne Rogers Clark, who died just a year after Fanny’s wedding. In 1971, the Honorable John Sherman Cooper, senator from Kentucky, gave remarks on the Senate floor about the Clark family. He noted that Anne was “described by a close relative as ‘the grandest, most majestic woman he ever saw.’” As I look at her portrait, I know this was not a comment about her looks. You could write a complete military history of the American Revolution simply following the adventures of her oldest five sons (she had ten children, all of whom survived to adulthood).

George almost single-handedly won the Western war. Out east, Jonathan and Edmund endured Valley Forge and the siege of Charleston. John, a POW, and Richard, MIA, paid the ultimate sacrifice. William, her youngest boy, must have figured he was doomed to obscurity in their shadow before Thomas Jefferson tapped him and Meriwether Lewis to lead the Corps of Discovery, launching them into history.

So what made Anne so majestic and grand? Unlike her boys, Anne’s life would not make very exciting reading. She wrote nothing but family letters, now mostly lost, and notes about births, marriages, and deaths in the family Bible. She was married at 15 in Virginia and died in Kentucky at 72, surrounded by her surviving children and grandchildren, on Christmas Eve. Anne is known to history as a mother and grandmother—a little blip at the beginning of the biographies of men far more significant.

But as I delve into the historical record of my family in an attempt to better appreciate our teapot and its story, I have realized that Anne made being a wife and mother grand and majestic. We are all familiar with the truism that “the hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world.” Anne did not simply rock the cradle of American heroes; she threw her entire life into nurturing a strong, dependable American family. It was Anne’s sort of family that made her sons the kind of men who would risk death for a new civilization.

The iconic image of the man who conquered the American West is the rugged individual, setting out alone into the wilderness. Many of these sorts spread west. But more important than the wandering loner were those who came west because they wanted to tame it for their families. They envisioned the sort of society where you could find a home with an elegant silver teapot. The Clark men set out to win the West for their mother and father, wives, children, nephews, and nieces. Their vision of the American West was a vision of home.

Reading the letters of the Clark siblings, you discover a tight-knit family that strove to uphold each other, support each other, and promote each other, based on genuine affection that spans multiple generations and over three states.

The four sisters married their brothers’ friends. Uncles set up nephews in business; aunts looked around their social circles for potential partners for their nephews and nieces. All of them welcomed newcomers into the family like they had always belonged. William even “adopted” the children of some of his friends, supporting their education and early careers—including Sacajawea’s children. The resulting benefit to their communities, towns, and states was truly historic.

Such a family dynamic is not one that simply happens. Nor is it one guaranteed to last. Grand, majestic Anne and her quiet, practical husband John cultivated familial pride and affection, as well as a deep sense of duty, in their children. They created a home that their adult children deemed worth coming back to visit across the mountains, through dangerous Indian territory, and through swampy, mosquito-filled rivers. They lavished their attention, affection, and interest upon their family without being overbearing or domineering. Their children responded enthusiastically to this love and showered it in turn upon the next generation, and the one after that.

When William Clark stepped into the great wilderness of the Louisiana Territory, it was to make that land a home for his family. Fanny’s little girl, Anne, who was present at that last family dinner, would take the teapot to Lewis and Clark County, Montana, quietly following in the footsteps of her famous uncle.

I cherish the fact that the one item that links my generation of our family to that of the Clarks, almost 250 years ago, is a teapot. Every self-respecting American lady had a teapot in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was historically a wife’s instrument of welcome, a mother’s preferred invitation to friendship. William Clark and Meriwether Lewis sipped Grandma Fanny’s tea from our teapot as a friendly, familial goodbye, and just a few months later were smoking peace pipes with Native American chiefs. The teapot and the peace pipe do much the same sort of work.

I do not serve tea in our teapot these days. I doubt it has held tea in a hundred years. But it sits comfortably on my mantelpiece at home. Every time my eye catches it, I think of Anne, Fanny, and all of my teapot grandmas who kept history alive by tending to familial love and memory. History sweeps most of us along, and only a few will ever grace its pages. But as long as those of our families carry on our legacy of love and devotion, that is well.

The post The Mothers Behind the Men Who Won the West appeared first on The American Mind.

In November 1839, Joseph Smith traveled to Washington, D.C. Styled the prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he sought an audience with then-president Martin Van Buren. The Saints, popularly called “Mormons” after the reputed author of their holy writ, had been hounded by vigilante mobs in Missouri. Van Buren expressed his sympathy for the Mormons but said regretfully that “if I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri.” A little over four years later, Smith, then running for president, would call Van Buren a “fop or a fool” and blame him for corrupting the principles of the American Founding.

Van Buren was one of many prominent politicians to whom Smith appealed during his meteoric rise to national attention in the 1830s and ’40s. He even once dined with a young Illinois state representative, Stephen A. Douglas, and predicted that Douglas would “aspire to the presidency of the United States.” In his exhaustively researched biography, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, George Mason University Religious Studies historian John G. Turner tracks the Mormon leader’s astonishing trajectory.

Smith was in many respects emblematic of the populist Jacksonian era. He was a man of humble origins and minimal formal education who, through sheer ingenuity and force of personality, achieved a remarkable degree of success and influence. His father, Joseph Smith, Sr., was a modest Universalist farmer and hapless entrepreneur who lost much of his wealth on a failed scheme to sell ginseng (briefly a cash crop in New England). His mother, Lucy Mack Smith, came from a devout but untraditional family of lay evangelists influenced by then-popular revivalist movements.

***

Often in debt, Smith’s family moved multiple times. He was born in eastern Vermont but grew up in Palmyra, New York. The town was part of what came to be known as the “burned over district” of western New York because it hosted so many impassioned evangelical revivals. The young Smith was surrounded by a diverse panoply of religious groups, among them not only more established denominations such as Methodists and Presbyterians, but also fledgling movements such as the Millerites (predecessors to the Seventh-day Adventists), the Shakers, the utopian Oneida Community, and the Ebenezer Colonies.

It was in this milieu that a teenaged Smith, never himself baptized in any Protestant church, sought to learn which religious movement held the truth. After a harrowing spiritual experience in a quiet grove, Smith claimed he was confronted by Jesus Himself. The young man asked the Lord which church he should join. “None of them, for they were all wrong,” was the answer. In time, his parents came to believe Smith’s story.

Dreams, visions, and mystical practices all carried great weight in the folk traditions that shaped the Smiths. One such practice was searching for buried treasure. Joseph Jr. became a “glass-looker,” seeking valuable objects with a seeing stone. It was during one of these searches that Smith claimed to be visited by an angel who told him about “plates of gold” buried in the earth by Mormon, a long-dead indigenous inhabitant of the Americas who was himself descended from the ancient Israelites.

The story goes that Smith, along with several close family members and friends, translated the golden plates into what is now the Book of Mormon. This is an aspect of Smith’s life for which, Turner notes, historians lack significant contemporary evidence. Smith himself claimed he returned the plates to the angel. The Book of Mormon was an “incredibly unlikely achievement” and a “stunning display of American audacity,” writes Turner. It was also a reflection of American entrepreneurship, published with the hopes of selling sufficient copies to cover the $3,000 price of printing.

***

Unfortunately for Smith, the text received quite censorious reviews. Mark Twain would later ridicule it as “chloroform in print,” joking, as Turner summarizes, that “the real miracle was Smith’s ability to stay awake while composing or translating it.” Yet Smith persisted, allegedly performing exorcisms and faith healings which, in the eyes of the growing number of the faithful, confirmed his identity as “seer and translator and prophet.” There followed an abundance of revelations, mediated through Smith, guiding the church’s doctrine and disciplining various dissident members. In 1831, with creditors increasingly hounding him, the prophet was instructed in a vision that he and his church should move west to Ohio. Within a year of his arrival there, however, a dozen assailants burst into his family’s bedchamber to tar and feather him, pulling out a clump of hair that left a permanent bare spot. Yet, Turner notes, Smith had “an almost preternatural resilience…. [H]e moved on quickly from failures and setbacks.” He traveled widely and encouraged the church’s nascent business operations, including stores, an ashery, landholdings, and a publishing operation.

In 1832, with the nullification crisis provoking national tensions, he prophesied that the “rebellion of South Carolina” would provoke a civil war between North and South. Regarding the “peculiar institution” that would kindle such a conflict, Smith’s opinions were troubled and contradictory. In 1836, he described blacks as laboring under the curse of Canaan, an ancient Biblical judgment that allegedly doomed them to servitude. Though he opposed miscegenation and did not believe black Americans should vote, hold office, or perform military service, he once told a dinner party he would never vote for a slaveholder. In 1843 he proposed a plan of “making all coloured people free.”

Even as Smith worked out the finer points of his theology—including shifting away from an early focus on converting American Indians—the numbers of the Latter-Day Saints grew exponentially. By 1833, there were about 1,200 church members in Jackson County, Missouri alone. As this curious new faith spread, the residents and governments of its host states grew increasingly hostile to it. In Missouri, in 1838, mob violence against the Mormons prompted them to form their own militia. The resulting conflict was severe enough to become known as the “Mormon War.” Smith’s troops ransacked stores and burned the courthouse in Gallatin. Vigilantes responded in kind, killing 17 Saints—including a nine-year-old boy—in Caldwell County. Smith was soon apprehended and might have been executed, save for a sympathetic judge who allowed him and several others to escape. Smith then led the Saints to Illinois, founding a colony in Nauvoo.

Read the rest here.

The post A Prophet in His Own Country appeared first on The American Mind.

Revolutionary America, Hillsdale College’s new Ken Burns-style documentary on the founding, arrives at a fitting moment: the nation’s 250th anniversary. Though it resembles Burns’s work in its message, soundtrack (very much like the work of Hans Zimmer), maps, and pacing, it is far superior to anything Burns has done.

The documentary is a gorgeous, straightforward, non-ideological approach to a difficult and complex historical subject. While the film never shies away from explaining political philosophy, its main goal is to tell America’s history as a story, inviting the audience to encounter its drama, myth, and wonder.

Narrated by Tom Selleck and featuring an impressive lineup of Hillsdale professors and well-known political commentators, Revolutionary America is broken into two parts. Its first half explores the events leading up to the Battle of Lexington, the Revolution’s opening salvo, on April 19, 1775. The second half considers the move toward independence, George Washington’s masterful leadership of the Continental Army, and the Revolution’s fulfillment through the creation and passage of the Constitution. The documentary builds to a powerful close, with President Arnn observing that the American Revolution never really ended—that every generation must rededicate itself to the principles on which it was fought.

The Revolution was an eruption of eternal truths in time, a moment steadied by Ciceronian first principles, an expression of Judeo-Christian truths of natural law and natural rights. One comes away from the film not only with an increased devotion to and patriotism for the American republic, but also with a deep appreciation of the men who fought for independence: John Adams, Sam Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Dickinson, and, most especially, George Washington.

Revolutionary America begins, naturally, with the colonial settlement of North America and the policy—or non-policy—of salutary neglect. The colonists were left mostly alone to defend themselves, to govern themselves, and to regulate their own economies.

After the French and Indian War, however, the British government found itself saddled with staggering debt. To pay for it, Parliament—unjustly and unconstitutionally—began to tax the colonists without their consent. The British also began housing peacetime soldiers in colonial homes, and drastically interrupted the very traditional, stable, and beloved common law courts. Naturally, the Americans resented all of this. After the atrocities of the Boston Massacre and the tea monopoly Parliament granted to the East India Company, it was only a short and logical—if somewhat tragic—step to the first shots being fired at Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775.

As Michael Knowles wisely and humorously notes, why would anyone, even a massive empire, pick a fight with a heavily armed people who had been born and bred in the wilderness? Yet pick a fight with the Americans they did.

Brilliantly, Revolutionary America lingers over the creation of the Continental Army and the Declaration of Independence, approved on July 2 and adopted on July 4. Then, at a wonderful breakneck speed, the movie details the ups and downs, the victories and the tragedies, of the Revolutionary War. We learn of the brilliance of Washington, remembered more for his restraint than his action, the suffering of the soldiers, and the many campaigns in New England, the middle colonies, and the American South. The movie crescendos with Washington putting a stop to an attempted military coup at Newburgh, New York, the failures of the Articles of Confederation, and the fight over the ratification of the Constitution.

While all of this is not only accurate but excellent, I would like to have seen some mention of the Northwest Ordinance, the document that defined the future of the republic, bridging the natural law and natural rights of the Declaration and the common law tradition carried on in the Constitution. The Northwest Ordinance led, of course, to the rise of Abraham Lincoln, the inspiration for the Republican Party, and the abolition of slavery. This, however, is a minor omission and a minor quibble. The movie already stands, properly and rightly, at 1 hour and 48 minutes. There is little else they could have added.

At its finale, President Arnn challenges the audience to be worthy of the Revolution and to be worthy of God.

We have a unique opportunity, and from it we get a responsibility to establish for all time whether a people can govern themselves from reflection and choice or whether they must ever depend on accident and force for their institutions. America is THE demonstration of that, and it’s ongoing and has to be redemonstrated in every generation…. America is an experiment. It is the most generous and beautiful political experiment in human history. They set up the standard maxim for a free society. Always to be striven for, always to be sought after, never to be wholly attained. The Revolution continues.

Hillsdale has once again given its time, its treasure, and its talent to the republic with Revolutionary America. The film serves as an anamnesis—a remembering of all that matters. We are reminded that we should all be immensely grateful for 1776 and for 1787, as well as for 2026.

The post A Documentary Worthy of America 250 appeared first on The American Mind.

As we approach our nation’s 250th birthday, Americans will be doing a lot of celebrating. They will honor not only the fact of our independence and nationhood, but also the political thought that shaped America’s founding struggle for freedom. Special attention will be paid, of course, to our Declaration of Independence.

But some may be rather cool to celebrating the Declaration’s doctrine of universal truths, such as the equality of all human beings in their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration has become a source of controversy among some younger conservatives who came of age during the Trump era.

The New Right’s dissatisfaction with the Declaration’s universalism is an understandable—but mistaken—reaction to various political misuses of America’s founding creed in recent decades. The older generation of conservatives who grew up admiring Ronald Reagan loves to boast about America’s defense of universal truths. The New Right has rightly argued that this rhetorical approach has not served the conservative political movement or the country well.

The Reaganite message, so powerful in the late 20th century, proved unable to keep winning national elections in the 21st. As a result, conservatives ceded political power to a Democratic Party and a Left increasingly committed to an alarming agenda of social and cultural transformation. The old guard conservatives could not beat the Obama coalition. Moreover, their excessive preoccupation with America’s commitment to universal moral principles harmed the nation’s interests—and the interests of many Americans, especially those of the working class—in areas such as immigration, trade, and foreign policy.

In response, the New Right developed its now well-known message of American nationalism in the wake of Trump’s victory in 2016. They have embraced an “America First” agenda that places the social and economic well-being of its citizens at the center of national policy. This stands in sharp contrast to the older conservatism, which tended to approach immigration, trade, and foreign policy in light of the country’s universal moral commitments as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

The New Right’s recalibration proved politically successful: witness President Trump’s electoral victories in 2016 and 2024. But such success breeds criticism, and many on the Left and among the older conservative establishment have condemned the new nationalism as a betrayal of the Declaration’s universal principles. Such criticism has, no doubt, deepened the New Right’s skepticism of the Declaration.

What are we to make of all this?

The New Right is correct (as I have also argued here) to reject superficial and politically unhelpful misappropriations of the Declaration. They are justified in repudiating suggestions that America is just a political “idea” with no particular and concrete interests. And they are correct to dismiss claims that the Declaration’s universal principles require us to embrace immigration, trade, and foreign policies at odds with the well-being of our own citizens.

It would be a terrible mistake, however, for the New Right to go further and reject the Declaration itself.

Such rejection is, in the first place, unnecessary. Contrary to the self-serving hectoring from the Left and the old guard conservatives, there is no conflict between the Declaration’s universal principles and the New Right’s America First nationalism. Those principles do not require the open-borders moralism preached by globalists of all stripes.

The Declaration asserts the great and universal truth that all human beings are equal in their natural rights. However, it nowhere asserts that everyone has a natural right to enter a political community of which he is not already a member, much less a natural right to become a citizen of that community. The founders and subsequent generations of Americans regulated immigration according to the nation’s needs and interests rather than a fanciful moral obligation to accept all who want to come here.

Nor does the Declaration rule out an America First trade policy. Its philosophical framework was influenced by John Locke, and in particular his claim that all human beings have a natural right to “life, liberty, and property.” None of these rights, however, entails a right to engage in trade across national borders. Indeed, Locke’s Second Treatise makes clear that government, once established by the consent of the governed, would regulate foreign trade in the nation’s interests. The founders reflected this understanding in the Constitution by vesting Congress with the power to regulate foreign commerce.

Finally, nothing in the Declaration requires the U.S. government to promote democracy abroad or undermine tyrannies in foreign lands. The Declaration famously teaches that a people can appeal to the right of revolution when their government is determined to destroy their individual rights and subject them to despotism. That right, however, must be exercised with “prudence” by the people living under a tyrannical government—not by the people of another nation.

Nothing in the Declaration indicates that America or any nation has a right—much less a duty—to liberate other nations from their tyrannical regimes and to impose on such peoples all the costs of a revolution that cannot be certain of success. The Declaration teaches that America’s foreign policy needs to be guided by our reasonable and just interests, the star by which founding-era statesmen such as Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison steered the ship of state.

Indeed, the Declaration itself affirms a kind of nationalism. Before turning to the political theory in its famous second paragraph, it teaches that peoples or nations are not mere artificial contrivances but instead exist in contemplation of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” They have a right to a “separate and equal station” among the other “powers of the earth.” In other words, every people has a right to control their own political fate. Read as a whole, the Declaration is as much an affirmation of the sovereignty of nations as of the rights of individuals.

There is, then, no reason for the proponents of America First nationalism to reject the universal principles of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, to do so would be a grave mistake. However abused or misunderstood, those principles are a foundational and vital element of America’s political identity.

It is no part of the duty or interest of any movement of the political Right—or of any movement governed by sobriety and caution, not to mention gratitude for what one has inherited—to reconstruct the identity of one’s own nation. An America indifferent to the universal principles of the Declaration would no longer be the America we have all been blessed to inherit—and that we all have an obligation to preserve.

The post Nationalism, Universalism, and the Declaration appeared first on The American Mind.