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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The Spider-Man character was introduced in a Marvel comics book in 1962. Since then, he’s been the center of several live action superhero movies over the decades, some well-received animated features and has been reimagined in stories set in different times, even in different universes. One comic book series that began in 2008, “Spider-Man Noir,” imagined the hero as a gumshoe of the 1930s but with superpowers. Now Prime Video has brought that concept to television as “Spider-Noir,” starring Nicolas Cage. Our TV critic David Bianculli says everything about the series is unexpectedly enjoyable.

DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: In this universe, I’m pretty much tired of superhero films and TV series and random multiverses and don’t approach any new one with much enthusiasm. When I heard about “Spider-Noir” and that Nicolas Cage was starring, I couldn’t imagine why he’d choose a superhero story for his first TV starring role. Then I watched the eight-episode first season and realized it probably represents one of the best and boldest Nicolas Cage performances of his entire risk-taking career.

From the very start, “Spider-Noir” takes the noir part seriously. It’s set in the Depression-era New York of the 1930s, and Cage plays a superpowered masked character known as The Spider. When we meet him, he’s loved and lost a woman, a story he recounts in the rain over her grave. He’s gone on a multi-year bender and now has an office as a private eye. His name is Ben Reilly.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “SPIDER-NOIR”)

NICOLAS CAGE: (As Ben Reilly) We were going to be married in the spring. I even bought a ring to make it official, a ring I never had the chance to give her.

(SOUNDBITE OF THUNDER CRACKING)

CAGE: (As Ben Reilly) Ruby once told me that with great power comes great responsibility. Well, she was the greatest responsibility I ever had. And I failed her. The Spider failed her. After that, I didn’t want the power or the responsibility.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CAGE: (As Ben Reilly) So I went back to being just an ordinary man. That was five years ago.

BIANCULLI: If that opening narration sounds as though Cage is channeling a bit of bogey, well, he is. But the imaginative conceit of “Spider-Noir” is that the bite that gave The Spider superpowers also made him more spidery than human. Ben Reilly, in order to blend in and do his job, really does have to act like a human and like a private eye. So he goes to the movies and watches the latest Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney films and imitates them a bit. But there also are scenes where Ben Reilly, the gumshoe, like James Garner’s Jim Rockford in “The Rockford Files,” hands out fake business cards and adopts different accents and dialects.

Cage has enormous fun with all of this but also establishes that his character sometimes is primarily a spider and physicalizes that in a way that’s just a riot. If you saw him in “Vampire’s Kiss,” you’re familiar with his brand of unbridled acting. And he’s not acting alone. Lamorne Morris, who won a well-deserved Emmy as the deputy on Season 5 of FX’s “Fargo,” plays a reporter who works with The Spider and keeps his secret. It’s a rich role, and Morris delivers, and so do the show’s other costars.

The always commanding Brendan Gleeson plays the ruthless power broker Silvermane, who tracks down superpowered mutants to persuade them to join his gang. As always with this genre, the villains have a lot of the fun. Gleeson, as Silvermane, veers easily between playful and menacing, as when he captures a mutant played by Andrew Lewis Caldwell and introduces himself. Caldwell, for his part, is great fun, too.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “SPIDER-NOIR”)

BRENDAN GLEESON: (As Finbar Byrne) Well, I assume you know who I am.

ANDREW LEWIS CALDWELL: (As Dirk Leyden) The man with the mane of silver, born from nothing, built his empire through gut and guile, purveyor of the finest spirited potions, king of the five buroughs, Mr. Finbar Byrne himself.

GLEESON: (As Finbar Byrne) I see you like to talk. Think you could listen for a second?

CALDWELL: (As Dirk Leyden) Oh, I am like a Nebraskan cornfield – all ears.

BIANCULLI: Of course, every classic noir, even a “Spider-Noir,” has to have a femme fatale. This one is a chanteuse and heartbreaker played by Li Jun Li, who played Grace in “Sinners” and was a star of the 2008 Lincoln Center revival of “South Pacific.” She gets to show off her musical talent when Cage’s Ben Reilly first sees and hears her at Silvermane’s nightclub.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “SPIDER-NOIR”)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Ladies and gentlemen, Cat Hardy.

(APPLAUSE)

LI JUN LI: (As Cat Hardy, singing) Stars shining bright, above you. Night breezes seem to whisper I love you. Birds singing in the sycamore trees. Dream a little dream of me.

BIANCULLI: She sounds beautiful and looks dazzling, too, outfitted in stylish costumes with vibrant colors. Well, they’re vibrant and in color, depending upon how you choose to watch “Spider-Noir.” Oren Uziel, who developed this series for TV is presenting it in an unprecedented manner. On Prime Video, you can decide to watch in what it calls either true hue color or authentic black-and-white, or toggle between the two. I found it fun to keep switching, especially to learn the colors of sets or costumes in the color-saturated versions. But both versions are exciting to watch.

There are loads of allusions to classic films. The fight scenes explode with energy, and the various writers and directors work as a coherent team, whether they’re presenting intimate scenes between characters or wildly hallucinatory dream sequences. No matter which way you watch it, “Spider-Noir” is the best TV superhero series since “The Penguin.”

DAVIES: TV critic David Bianculli reviewed “Spider-Noir,” starring Nicolas Cage. On tomorrow’s show, New Yorker staff writer Ben Taub gives us an inside look at Donald Trump’s campaign to acquire Greenland. While it’s faded from the headlines, Taub says there are ongoing influence operations at Trump’s direction to keep the possibility alive. In a new article, Taub reveals some key players in the effort and its impact on Greenland and our European allies. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what’s on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram, @nprfreshair.

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DAVIES: FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley. I’m Dave Davies.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Transcript:

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, we’ll hear a lot about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others. But what if I told you that one of the nation’s founders, one of only six who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a critical voice at the Constitutional Convention, and arguably the man most responsible for the government we’ve had for two centuries is someone you’ve never heard of?

That’s precisely the case made by our guest today, Jesse Wegman. He’s a journalist who writes about the Constitution and democracy. Wegman’s new book is about James Wilson, a man regarded as one of the American colonies’ most brilliant lawyers in the late 18th century and one who led a colorful and impactful life. He was nearly killed during the Revolutionary War when rioters attacked his house in Philadelphia. He later became a Supreme Court justice and died at the age of 55 in the back room of a tavern in North Carolina, on the run from the law and creditors. But Wegman argues that a careful review of records from the founding show that James Wilson was a highly influential figure in crafting the Constitution and a powerful voice for democracy, insisting that direct rule by the people should be the guiding principle of the new government.

Jesse Wegman served for 12 years on the editorial board of The New York Times. He’s currently a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. He was last on FRESH AIR to talk about his earlier book, “Let The People Pick The President: The Case For Abolishing The Electoral College.” Lately, he’s written opinion pieces advocating term limits for Supreme Court justices. Wegman’s new book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” Jesse Wegman, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

JESSE WEGMAN: Thanks for having me.

DAVIES: You know, you write about James Wilson and how he was a significant lawyer in the colonies in, you know, the 1760s, when tensions between the colonies and Great Britain were growing. And he wrote this essay, which was a groundbreaking legal analysis, which concluded that the British Parliament had no legitimate authority over American colonies because all lawful government is founded on the consent of those subject to that government.

This essay proved very influential in the years to come. And, you know, as I was reading about this, it struck me, these ideas don’t seem so novel or revolutionary. I mean, to the modern ears – right? – it’s commonplace. We have lived with this notion of, you know, government by this consent of the government for a long time. And I wonder, was it hard for you, as you got deeply into this research, to get into the mindset of the 18th century, when these ideas were really new?

WEGMAN: That’s a great question. And I was, at first, having trouble, you know, remembering how radical these ideas were at the time. They aren’t particularly new to us now. They weren’t even particularly new then. I think a lot of people were saying bits and pieces of these things. Obviously, you know, the consent of the governed goes back to Locke and before. And many of these ideas are floating around, but nobody took them up with the clarity and the vigor of Wilson.

And I think that came through in this essay, which he writes as a 26-year-old who’s just come over from Scotland on a boat a few years before to the colonies and, you know, apprentices in law and quickly becomes one of the sharpest and most sort of forward-thinking lawyers in the colonies. So he writes this essay in 1768 in which he says all men are, by nature, equal and free. No one has a right to any authority over another without his consent. All lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.

So, you know, these are words and phrases that we actually know very well because several years later, they end up, only slightly altered, in the Declaration of Independence. And so when I see these words coming, you know, eight years before the Declaration of Independence comes out, I think, who is this guy, (laughter) you know? How did I miss him? Did I skip some class? Because, you know, Wilson seems to be at the center of everything from almost the moment he arrives in America.

DAVIES: You know, many of the founders came from very privileged backgrounds. You know, some were wealthy farmers, merchants, many owned slaves. James Wilson was different, right? He grew up in Scotland. Tell us about his background.

WEGMAN: James Wilson was, like a few of the framers of the Constitution – Alexander Hamilton, I think, being the one people are most aware of – he was an immigrant. And he was born into a poor farming family in the lowlands of Scotland, outside of Edinburgh. And so he has this pretty standard Scottish upbringing for a young farm boy of the – you know, in the mid- to later 18th century. He grows up, you know, in the Presbyterian Church, which is far more democratic in its governance than, say, the Anglican Church or the Catholic Church.

The parishioners vote for the elders. There’s much more involvement by the regular people in the church than in these other churches where it’s much more of a top-down hierarchy. So Wilson is – so already he’s imbued with this democratic notion of governance early in his life. He’s also educated in schools in Scotland that are explicitly there to educate all Scottish children. Everybody is expected to get an education. Everyone is expected to learn to read and write.

So Wilson, you know, by the time he’s a teenager, he is already sort of filled with these just very natural ideas of democratic rule, the equality of all people and the sense that everybody – no matter what their station in life, where they come from – has equal access to the truth and has an equal right to govern themselves. And that’s what he brings over to America. And it’s true, you know? Few, if any, of the other founders that he worked with had that kind of background, had that kind of upbringing.

DAVIES: Right. He immigrates to the United States and settles in Pennsylvania, gets a law degree and quickly becomes a well-recognized and prosperous lawyer. He eventually is a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1776, which drafted the Declaration of Independence. What have you learned about his role in drafting that document?

WEGMAN: So Wilson does not have a direct role in the drafting of the declaration itself. That’s obviously Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and a few of the others that we know well. But what Wilson did do was write this essay that, you know, he first drafted in 1768, arguing that the British Parliament had no authority at all over the colonies. This was a groundbreaking argument at the time because Everyone else was trying to argue that, well, you know, Parliament has some power over us. Parliament is sovereign over us, but, you know, they can’t impose taxes.

You know, all of the things that we know the colonists were arguing over are against this backdrop of Parliament being sovereign, Parliament having ultimate authority over the colonies. James Wilson is the first to argue, no, they have zero. They have no authority over us at all. Now, this is such a groundbreaking argument that one of his mentors reads it and says, James, you’re a young man. You have a, you know, big career ahead of you. Don’t put this out there yet. It’s too bold.

DAVIES: And so he kept it secret for, what, six, eight years? Yeah. Yeah.

WEGMAN: So he put it away in a drawer for six years. But in 1774, he publishes it. It’s published anonymously. And instantly, it was attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who, you know, very quickly says, no, this isn’t by me. You know, it’s by a man named James Wilson. And, you know, suddenly, people start to find out who this guy is. We know that Thomas Jefferson, who is the writer of the Declaration of Independence, had whole sections of Wilson’s essay, this essay on the authority of Parliament, pasted into his commonplace book, where he kept, you know, quotes that were important to him. We know that the essay as a whole deeply influenced Jefferson. And historians going back now about a hundred years have theorized that Wilson’s essay was one of the biggest, if not the biggest influence on Jefferson as he sat down to draft those famous words of the declaration.

DAVIES: Right. The words, we hold these truths to be…

WEGMAN: Yes.

DAVIES: …Self-evident, that all men are created equal. It’s likely that Wilson had some significant influence on Jefferson’s thinking.

WEGMAN: That’s right.

DAVIES: Right. It’s interesting that he authored this legal theory, which led to the radical conclusion that the colonies could separate from Britain, but he himself was more cautious about that, wasn’t anxious to do that initially. But nonetheless, the declaration was signed. The rupture was complete. The Revolutionary War erupted. And there’s this remarkable episode in 1779, just a few years into the war, when James Wilson has moved his family into Philadelphia after the British have evacuated it. They had occupied the city for, I guess, nine months or so, and it was tough. I mean, there were – you know, there were killings. There were – shops and homes were looted. The population suffered. There were food shortages, and there was a lot of anger there. And in 1779, a mob starts going after people regarded as disloyal. They target Wilson’s home. Tell us what happened.

WEGMAN: Yeah, so this is, in some ways, the most shocking riot of the revolutionary period because it is Americans targeting other Americans. You know, they’re in the middle of a war against Great Britain at the time for their independence, and this really shakes a lot of the people down to their core. Wilson is one of the elites of Philadelphia at this time. He is a leading lawyer. He’s become very wealthy. He has a young and growing family with his wife, Rachel, and, you know, he’s enjoying the high life. You know, for all his commitment to popular rule and to the power of common people to govern themselves, he really is happy being an elite. And, you know, he is an awkward guy too. This is part of what, I think, made him fall out of the sort of – the founding narrative, our national narrative of the American founding, is that he’s a difficult guy to get to know and to like. And so he doesn’t have a lot of, let’s say, social capital at the time. And in 1779, it’s a pretty tough time. And so people like Wilson stand out.

On this particular day in October of 1779, a mob of militiamen gather at a bar. They drink all morning. They get themselves liquored up, and then they go out looking for the elite of Philadelphia to capture and to, you know, teach a lesson to. Wilson gets word that there is a mob of now, I think, several hundred men coming toward his house. They’re armed. They’re drunk. And he barricades himself in his house with about two dozen of his friends and allies, and the mob approaches the house. There are words exchanged. A gun is fired. There end up being about seven people who are killed. There are many more wounded. Wilson is almost pulled out of the house himself. They breach the front door. They go in with clubs, and they try to pull him down the stairs. He actually escapes, you know, with his life. He leaves town in the middle of the night. He hides out for several days and doesn’t come back until things have quieted down.

But it was – this incident really drove me to want to write this book because I was so struck that a man who was committed to the idea of popular sovereignty, the idea that people are the foundation of all power in government, would experience a life-threatening attack by a mob and come out the other side no less committed to that ideal. I wanted to know, how could somebody experience that sort of attack and not for a second stop and think, maybe I don’t want democracy, maybe democracy is too dangerous?

DAVIES: Well, we should take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Jesse Wegman. He is a journalist who writes about the Constitution and democracy. His new book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” We’ll talk more after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we’re speaking with journalist Jesse Wegman. His new book about James Wilson, an influential figure in the founding of the nation who is not so well-known, is called “The Lost Founder.” So let’s talk about the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787. Colonies, after they separated from Britain, were – they had a loose federation, governed by the Articles of Confederation, which didn’t really work. And so a bunch of them came together in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia to craft a new Constitution. And it’s really kind of interesting just what a weird enterprise this was. These were people who had no particular authority to do this, right? I mean, who does, you know, bring birth to a nation? You write that one delegate from Georgia said, Wilson ranks among the foremost in legal and political knowledge. The delegates were very impressed with him. Tell us about that relationship.

WEGMAN: Wilson is, without question, one of the leading lawyers in the country at the time, if not the leading lawyer. Everyone looks to him for his legal acumen, but also his knowledge of history and of government that he developed through his training in the Scottish Enlightenment. But Wilson brings this energy to the convention that I had not noticed before. You know, he’s constantly saying things that sound more like they were said by someone in the 21st century than someone in the 18th century, and those have to do primarily with the ideals of political equality, the idea that people are the foundation of government, and all people are equal, right?

This is not very welcome to a lot of the delegates who are much more interested, say, in their states, right? They care about making sure their state has equal power. So one of the biggest fights at the convention is over the Senate. Will the Senate be a body of states with equal power, or will it be based on the population of the states and the people themselves? Wilson argues tirelessly throughout the summer for a government based on population. And he says, people should be represented in accordance with their numbers. Why is this so hard? And (laughter) he can’t understand why so many of the other founders resist him. So that fight – that fight over popular rule versus, you know, state equality takes up the entire first half of the summer. And in the end, Wilson, for all his arguments, actually ends up losing that one. Wilson and James Madison and a few of the other nationalists had really wanted a government based on population. They don’t get it. They get a Senate that has equal state power.

DAVIES: Right, but there were some things he did win, and that was the popular election to representatives of the House of Representatives. And that wasn’t an equal apportion for each state. It was based on population, but there was this huge, troubling debate about the slaveholding states, which wanted their slaves to count as members of their population, even though they, you know, had no legal rights and no vote. There was a compromise that resolved this question. What was Wilson’s role in that?

WEGMAN: And this is one of the ironies of Wilson’s life and of his role in our founding. And it’s a complicated one – and I take him to task for it in the book – which is he really, I think, did not go after slavery with the energy and the commitment of some of the other founders, including slaveholders themselves, who were quite open about the evil – the moral evil of the practice. Wilson actually introduces the three-fifths clause, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a free person for purposes of representation in Congress and for taxation.

Now, Wilson didn’t come up with the three-fifths number himself. It was already there, floating around from earlier debates under the Articles of Confederation. But the fact that he was willing to countenance that, the fact that he said, it’s OK, we – it’s more important for us to have a union here, even if it means the perpetuation of slavery, I think, really undercuts a lot of his fundamental commitments to equality, to popular self-rule, to the basic dignity of humans.

And, you know, in the book, I quote a number of his contemporaries being very open about the fact that this is an evil. This is a moral profanity. And Wilson is really quite muted on this point, and it’s something that there’s no good resolution to. He wanted the union more than he wanted an end to slavery, and he accepted – although he was opposed to slavery, he accepted this compromise, and I think, you know, he doesn’t get a pass for that.

DAVIES: Yeah. Well, I think there are clearly a number of cases. That is one. Another one is the proportional representation in the Senate, where he finally agrees to let each state have equal representation. We should also note that there were some things he did win. Like, for example, when the discussion initially began on how Congress would be structured, there was a lot of strong support for having members of Congress selected by state legislatures. I mean, simply the direct election of members of Congress was a contested issue, right?

WEGMAN: Absolutely. And Wilson was the strongest advocate for popular self-rule. You know, he says at one point, can we forget for whom we are forming a government? Is it for men or for the imaginary beings called states? It is all a mere illusion of names. We talk of states till we forget what they are composed of. Right? He had this just laser-like focus on people as the foundation of all government power. And so he really leads the charge, along with James Madison and a few others, for a House of Representatives, at least, that is, you know, apportioned by population.

DAVIES: Right. And he would often invoke the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, you know, that all men are created equal. It doesn’t say all states are created equal.

WEGMAN: (Laughter).

DAVIES: And he brought that up, right?

WEGMAN: Well, yes. I mean, this is the part of Wilson that I think is, in some ways, the most thrilling and the most, I think, useful to us today, is how much he understood the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as being connected. So the Declaration of Independence, you know, is based on this theory of popular sovereignty – the idea that when people are not happy with their government, they may change it. They may change it whenever and however they please. And that is what they do by first declaring independence and fighting a war to be independent from Britain, and then by drafting a Constitution.

And perhaps the way in which Wilson brings the spirit of the Declaration of Independence most directly into the Constitution happens in the middle of the summer. He’s on this committee. It’s called the Committee of Detail. Most of the other delegates go away for 10 days and just take a break ’cause they’re all exhausted over – fighting for the last two months over Congress, and Wilson and a few other delegates write the first draft of the Constitution. We have no records of what exactly they discussed, but what comes out of that committee is Wilson’s opening words of the Constitution. He put the words, we the people, at the beginning of the Constitution. And what he was doing there is he was making clear that this is a constitution. This is a government founded on people – not states, people. We the people he understood to be the three most important words in the Constitution.

DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Jesse Wegman. His new book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” He’ll be back to talk more after this short break. I’m Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF EDGAR MEYER, ET AL.’S “OLD TYME”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. We’re speaking with journalist and senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice Jesse Wegman. In his writing, he’s advocated eliminating the Electoral College in presidential elections and imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices. His new book is about James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution who Wegman argues was more influential in crafting the government we’ve had for two centuries than better-known Founding Fathers. He writes that Wilson, whose colorful life had a tragic end, was a tireless proponent of the principle of direct rule by the people. Wegman’s book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.”

We were talking about the Constitutional Convention. This was, you know, the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. It’s hot. It’s humid. And in the middle of the proceedings, there’s a break, and a five-member committee called the Committee of Detail actually drafts the text of the Constitution, and Wilson was one of those five. He was very influential here. And one of the big issues they had to confront was how much power the federal government would have, as opposed to the individual states. Remember that as the country was governed then, the states had enormous power. The Congress had no power to tax. And so all these centrifugal forces were sort of tearing the country apart. So what perspective did Wilson bring to this question of how much power a central government should have, and how did he wield it in this debate and in the drafting?

WEGMAN: Wilson very much wanted a powerful central government, with several of the other founders on this point. You know, he said – going back, I think, to 1776, he said, we are not so many states. We are one large state. We lay aside our individuality whenever we come here. And I think that sort of sums up his philosophy. He believed that the states were, you know, pointless, imaginary beings that deserve no respect. And Wilson in the Committee of Detail comes up with what we call the Necessary and Proper Clause. This is a clause that ends up being one of the most consequential in the Constitution. It gives Congress massive power to legislate for the nation and over the states. And, you know, there’s a huge amount of resistance to it from the opponents of the Constitution, who come to be known as the Anti-Federalists.

But Wilson pushes strongly for the inclusion of this clause because he believes Congress cannot legislate, it can’t do its job, the federal government can’t do its job without an enormous amount of power, without enormous latitude and authority to pass laws and do the things that a federal government needs to do, such as raise an army, collect taxes. All of these things, Congress has used that clause throughout American history to justify its power to pass laws that have transformed America. So I think Wilson himself is really at the heart of giving the federal government the power that it has today.

DAVIES: Now, another big, big issue that they had to resolve at the Constitutional Convention was the nature of the executive branch of the government. And, you know, today we’re used to the idea of a single chief executive, the president, chosen in a national election. But this was not assumed at all, right? I mean, some people saw – maybe thought the executive branch should be a council controlled directly by Congress. Wilson felt that it’s critical that they have a strong executive and that it be vested in a single person. What were the objections and alternatives? How did that debate go?

WEGMAN: Well, this is how I came to Wilson in the first place. I was writing my book on the Electoral College, and I was looking through the notes of the Constitutional Convention – James Madison’s notes – to find when was the moment that the Electoral College is adopted. And here’s this guy, this long-winded Scot who keeps saying things that sound more like they come from our era than his own and saying, you know, the president should be a single person, which was not at the time fully agreed upon, and that he should be elected directly by the people.

When Wilson says this about the president being a single person, James Madison records what he calls a considerable pause in the room. You know, the other delegates are sitting there basically shifting in their seats. Nobody’s very comfortable at this prospect. You know, they don’t want to have another tyrant like King George, and they’re also sitting right there in front of another George, George Washington, who is widely understood to be the front-runner for any sort of executive office that might be created. So everyone’s feeling awkward at that moment. Wilson is not at all. He says, this is obvious. Of course. We need a single executive who has the power to carry out his duties, and he should be elected directly by the people because anyone who’s that powerful needs to be in direct connection to the people over whom he has that power. If he’s not, there will be problems.

So Wilson basically is the first person to argue for a direct popular vote for president, which is what we still talk about today. He’s saying it in 1787. He does not get a lot of support for this. So they say, you know, James, go home, come up with something a little better. He comes back the next day, and he proposes a system of electors who are chosen by eligible voters and who then, in turn, choose the president. That is remarkably similar to the system that we have today that we call the Electoral College. So this is yet another of the ironies of James Wilson’s life is that he ends up proposing the very system that he opposed for choosing the president.

DAVIES: But once he agreed and the convention agreed that people would choose electors who would themselves choose the president, the question was, how many electors does each state get, which is pretty critical, right? I mean, is it going to be proportional to their population? Is it going to be equal numbers of electors for the states? How does that work out?

WEGMAN: What ends up being adopted is the system that we know today, which is that each state gets a number of electors equal to its representation in Congress. So that’s the number of members of the House of Representatives it has, plus its two senators. So that means smaller states get a real benefit in the electoral college because they have proportionately more electors given their voters. Again, Wilson was not happy with this arrangement, but he accepted it as the price of business. And as the convention neared its end in September, I think everyone was so exhausted and wanting just to get this document out the door and ratified that he agreed to it.

DAVIES: But in the end, they come up with a document that will bring a far more unified country because there’s a strong central government. There is popular election of the members of the House and some participation by voters in the election of the Senate and the president. So it’s a lot of what Wilson wanted. There is, of course, this glaring hypocrisy here in that, you know, it tolerates a half-million humans being held in bondage, and women are denied the right to vote, as well as other basic rights. What, if anything, did Wilson have to say about, you know, those so disenfranchised and exploited?

WEGMAN: You know, at the ratifying convention in Pennsylvania, where Wilson takes a leading role in convincing the delegates to that convention to support the Constitution, you know, he says, I acknowledge this was not the best arrangement. I would’ve done it differently if I had had my way. But we have laid the groundwork for the eventual elimination of slavery in the states. You know, obviously, the Constitution, as it was written, barred any intrusion on the slave trade for 20 years after its ratification.

But as we know, that fight would continue on into the middle of the 19th century and lead to the Civil War, which resulted in the deaths of more than half a million people. And, you know, it was only then that slavery was actually banished from the Constitution. Wilson did oppose slavery. But, you know, he was willing to live with it as the price of a Constitution with the other elements that he wanted so badly.

DAVIES: Need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Jesse Wegman. His new book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” We’ll talk more after this break. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we’re speaking with journalist and senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice Jesse Wegman. His new book is about James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, who Wegman argues was more influential in crafting the government we’ve had for two centuries than many better-known Founding Fathers. The name of his book is “The Lost Founder.”

You know, so this government that was drafted by these 50 men in Philadelphia has endured, I mean, not without some problems. I mean, we needed a civil war to settle the question of slavery and another century to recognize basic civil and voting rights. And, of course, women couldn’t vote until the 1920s. But this basic structure of an elected Congress, you know, and a president, an independent judiciary – the three branches checking one another’s power – has kind of held together arguably until, well, really, recent years, in the current administration in the White House, where we’ve seen – I mean, it’s just a fact that longstanding boundaries and norms have been violated. You’re following this closely. I mean, this is a big question. But what’s the impact of the changes we’re seeing? And, you know, what lies ahead?

WEGMAN: One of the reasons I wrote the electoral college book back in 2020 was the election twice in the century to that point of the person who won fewer votes. That’s a fundamental violation of majority rule, right? You know, majority rule is at the heart of Wilson’s theory of government. Why? Because majority rule is the only way that we ensure political equality. It’s the only way that you count all votes as equal. Any other method, by definition, counts some votes as worth more than others.

So, you know, this violation of majority rule, I think, is at the heart of so much of what ails us today. You know, both George W. Bush in 2000 and then Donald Trump in 2016 were elected to the White House with fewer votes than their opponent. And I really think that there’s a toxin there, that people feel that their wishes, as a majority, are not being represented. And that leads to all these other problems that we see every day now. I think the Senate itself is obviously, you know, by design, a non-majoritarian institution.

The House of Representatives is technically majoritarian. But with, you know, partisan gerrymandering kind of spiraling out of control now, with the help of the Supreme Court, we are finding that fewer and fewer people feel represented by that House of Congress. So on every level of government, you have this sense that what a majority of the people want is not being reflected in their government. And that, I think Wilson understood that 250 years ago as being what he called a poison contaminating the government. And that was why he fought so hard to make sure that there were mechanisms to ensure majority rule would be the way we governed.

DAVIES: You know, the other thing we’ve seen is we’ve seen enormous influence on the judicial branch by the president, him picking political loyalists for, you know, district courts, appeals courts and arguably for supreme court. No way around that, really, is there? I mean, that’s the power that was given to the president under the Constitution.

WEGMAN: Yeah. I mean, every president chooses judges, you know, who are – you know, they think will be ideologically aligned with them. And that’s understandable. But at the same time, you know, this interacts with this life tenure that the founders gave to Supreme court – well, to all federal judges. And this creates a problem because now you have people living far longer than they did at the founding, people serving on the court, like Clarence Thomas, for 30-plus years. He could go 40. He could even go 50 years. He’s not even that old (laughter) by the standards of Supreme Court justices.

And I think when you have presidents appointing justices who sit on the court that long, then you add on top of that presidents who were chosen by, you know, a minority of the population, you have essentially minority rule in America, where you have the judiciary representing political realities from decades before and sometimes not even a reality that was – you know, that represented the majority of the people. So I think you have a real problem with a court that is so unrepresentative. You know, the court is not supposed to be democratically representative the way that the elected branches are. But when it is so far removed, I think you start to run into serious problems of legitimacy.

DAVIES: You have a specific proposal for the Supreme Court. You want to explain that?

WEGMAN: Right. Well, this has been suggested for a long time. But term limits for Supreme Court justices, I think, would go a long way to making people feel more like that the court was a democratically legitimate branch of government. So the most popular proposal out there is 18-year terms. So on a nine-member Supreme Court, that would mean that every two years, a new vacancy would open up. And every president would, by definition, get two appointments to the Supreme Court per term. The justices who finish their 18-year term would be allowed to stay on as senior justices, which is the system we have now in the lower Federal Courts of Appeals. But I think it would make a really big difference in giving people the sense that there wouldn’t be this unpredictability, this sort of unfairness where one president gets four picks to the court and the next one gets zero. We want a Supreme Court that basically reflects the country as it is today, not as it was decades ago.

DAVIES: You know, you write regularly on constitutional questions. You have a Substack, right?

WEGMAN: Yes.

DAVIES: Major Questions, I think, is what’s called.

WEGMAN: Yes.

DAVIES: Right, right. And, you know, as we talk about this stuff, I mean, these are interesting but very tough questions and require a lot of knowledge and thought, and, you know, you want to bring your experience to bear. And when I think about the fact that, you know, nobody reads the newspaper anymore, and, like, internet memes capture our attention so quickly with all the algorithms of the social media, do we have a shot at actually doing – thinking rationally about government anymore?

WEGMAN: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think the founders faced this same question. There was a real concern that most people would not understand politics, were not educated enough. At that time, they were largely right. And I’m not going to stand here and say, I think social media is an unalloyed good. But I do think we also live in this moment of incredible explosion of good writing and thoughtful commentary on the Constitution, on democracy, on the way that we can live together as a people, an incredibly large and diverse country.

When the founders built this country, they were trying to do something that had never been done before, which was to design a republic, you know, over an expanse that was larger than any that had been tried in the past. And I think we’re still, in some way, trying to do that. We’re trying to keep a government running that is far larger and more diverse than anyone could have imagined.

And I mean, I’m actually – when I read other writers and other thinkers – not just legal scholars, but regular people – talking about what they want and what they imagine for the country, I’m actually quite invigorated by it. I think most people want a country in which their voice is heard, in which the majority gets its way, in which there are protections for minorities that are generally, you know, applied by the courts, but that majority rule and political equality are the fundamental guiding lights of our system. And I think, you know, in this moment, we actually have more people more thoughtfully and more critically talking about these things than we’ve had in my lifetime.

DAVIES: All right. Well, a hopeful thought there. Jesse Wegman, thank you so much for speaking with us.

WEGMAN: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

DAVIES: Jesse Wegman’s new book is, “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” Coming up, David Bianculli reviews the new prime video series “Spider-Noir.” This is FRESH AIR.

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