The Fourth of July, With Jack Rakove

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the fourth of July.

With me to discuss why the United States declared independent in 1776, and it's meaning for today, is Jack Rakove. Jack is the William Robertson Coe professor of history and American studies and professor of political science and law emeritus at Stanford University. He has written extensively on the origins of the American Revolution and Constitution. He is the author of six books, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history. He's also the author of Revolutionaries: A New History of The Invention of America, which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize. Jack, thank you very much for joining me.

RAKOVE:
Well, it's great to be here.

LINDSAY:
Jack, this is a podcast where we normally talk about foreign policy, what's happening in China, Ukraine war, climate change, and things like that. But today I want to talk about the fourth of July, for two reasons. One, this episode is going to debut on the fourth of July. But also because the idea of the fourth of July, the sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence, in some ways inform a core foundation of the United States and it's a big part of America's appeal abroad.

So I'd like to sort of talk a little bit about how the United States ended up in a revolution, throwing off British rule. And from your perspective, was the Revolution something that was inevitable? If it didn't happen in 1776, it would've happened in 1792 or 1817?

RAKOVE:
I feel very strongly that the Revolution was not inevitable and that its origins really spring out of a series of decisions and particular events that took place, really not going back to the 1760s, really in 1773, 1774. I think the real pivot, and the kind of the dynamic forces that led the British government to make the mistakes it made, had to do very much with events in Massachusetts, in general, and in particular with the behavior of Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was the next to last royal governor of Massachusetts since he was replaced by Thomas Gage, who was also the commander of British forces in North America from 1774 into 1776.

But the story I've always emphasized, actually going back to my first book which was a history of the Continental Congress, is that a set of decisions which were very contingent, contingency is the word historians love to emphasize, a set of decisions made both by Hutchinson in terms of dealing with his opponents in Massachusetts, and then by the British government of Lord North with the actual support of King George III, really were the dynamic factors that brought the colonies to the point of rebellion in the Crisis of Independence, which essentially is, I'd say really begins with the arrival of news of the Boston Port Act in May 1774, and effectively ends with the decision for independence in June and July of 1776.

LINDSAY:
So let me ask you, Jack, what were the specific things that happened in that period, 1773, 1774, that essentially caught fire and ignited this revolutionary spirit? Now, I grew up in Massachusetts. We were required every year to make a pilgrimage to Lexington and Concord. I've walked the Freedom Trail. I suspect whoever, if you're not growing up in Massachusetts, you may not be as steeped in the events that transpired in the city of Boston at that time.

RAKOVE:
Well, I think the story probably begins in the fall of 1772 when Samuel Adams and his cronies in Boston organized the Boston Committee of Correspondence. So they begin corresponding with the town meetings elsewhere throughout the province. They're complaining particularly about a decision of the British government to try to put Hutchinson and the judges who were royal appointees on royal salaries. When the general court, better known as the Massachusetts Legislature, convened in early January 1773, Hutchinson decided to kind of make a move of his own.

He delivers a speech, very much like the king's speech opening a session of Parliament today, in which he tries to reopen all the great issues that have been disputed back in the 1760s, during the Stamp Act controversy of 1765, 1766, and the dispute over the Townsend duties. He really wants to reopen the question of are the American colonists not ultimately subject to the jurisdiction of parliament? Which was in a certain sense the core constitutional issue in dispute between the Americans and the British government from the mid 1760s down to 1776.

So Hutchinson opens the General Court with a dispute and the Massachusetts General Court, both his counsel and particularly the lower house respond. They issue their protest, they indicate their disagreements. Hutchinson replies just because, and news of this debate being spread across the colonies, in the usual way, the political news did travel from one colony to another. And then a second part of the story is Benjamin Franklin, who is living in London primarily since the mid 1750s and was also the-

LINDSAY:
He was born in Boston though. He left at an early age.

RAKOVE:
Boston native, but moved on. He had a hankering for cheesesteak, so he moved to Philadelphia. So Franklin, for his own reasons, decides that Hutchinson is really a great threat to the empire. Franklin really wanted to preserve the British Empire. He felt time was on the American side. With every passing year of the American position vis-a-vis London would grow stronger and stronger because of economic issues and population growth and so on. 

Franklin felt that getting Hutchinson out of the way would actually be a boon to improving the politics of the Empire. So he sends over these letters he'd obtained, some of Hutchinson's private correspondences. I think probably went to Thomas Pownall, who was a well-placed British official. And he sends it to Thomas Cushing, who was the speaker of the General Court and says, "You can show this around. Don't let the stuff be published." So Cushing starts showing select individuals Hutchinson's letters that indicates the kinds of attempts that Hutchinson had been making to get the government, in effect, to crack down on his opponents in Massachusetts. Again, Samuel Adams and his crowd at the Boston Committee and so on. But soon word of the letters is so well known that they start to be published. And so you have this other big to-do over Hutchinson's letters, and Franklin in effect was trying to make Hutchinson into the scapegoat. And if you got him out of the way he felt you could kind of restabilize imperial politics.

So that's the second phase. Then the third thing that happens is you have the Tea Act is passed, primarily to rescue the East Indie Company, which is a major, major player in British and imperial politics in this period, but whose warehouses were stuffed with surplus tea and the Tea Duty was the one part of the Townsend Duties from 1767, which had been left in place when the British government repealed the Townsend Duties. It's left in place, in fact, to symbolize that parliament is not renouncing its authority to levy taxes on the Americans if it so wishes. But now the duty's still in place and what the British try to do is they try to reduce the duty, to lower it in the hope that Americans will start buying more legally imported British tea instead of illegally imported tea that's coming from the Dutch West Indies or whatever.

And that, of course, produces the crisis of the Boston Tea Party. In fact, Samuel Adams, and again the circle around him, decide to make a kind of test case in this and you have the weeks of protests and rather than allow the tea to be landed, if the tea were to be landed, the duties would be paid. And Hutchinson had the legal authority to do what British officials elsewhere did, which would be to enable the tea ships to sail back to England, not to force a confrontation. But Hutchinson, I think in effect feeling he had the law on his side, decides to make an issue out of making sure that tea was landed. And the patriots, as we call the Boston radicals and their supporters, the patriots refused to allow that to happen. We had the Boston Tea Party.

News of this goes to England, and in the winter 1774, meaning starting in late December, and I think really January, February, 1774, the government of Lord North decides to make a test case of Massachusetts. It's going to take the general authority to legislate for the Americans that had been asserted, actually back in 1766 with the so-called Declaratory Act, which was passed in conjunction with the repeal of the Stamp Act of 1765. The Declaratory Act said that parliament had the authority to legislate for the American colonies in all cases whatsoever, meaning in theory was claiming unlimited jurisdiction to legislate. It was just a symbolic statement, it wasn't a policy.

But in 1774, that theory became the actual policy of the British government. So we get the Coercive Act, or the Americans called the Intolerable Act. So the first one closing the port of Boston till restitution was made. Second one, the Massachusetts Government Act, which alters the charter of government, which had been granted not by parliament, but by the British Crown to the Colony of Massachusetts. You got the Administration of Justice Act, which deals with the trial of British officials. You get a revision of the Militia Act, which involves the housing of soldiers, and then you get the Quebec Act, which is another matter involving the jurisdiction of-

LINDSAY:
Let me just stop you right there because there's a sort of a question here that has always sort of rattled around my head. And I should note that this December will mark the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. And they were called patriots and they gave the name to the New England football team, the New England Patriots. But one of the things always struck me is that what happened in Massachusetts sort of galvanized the other colonies. And it's not obvious to me that it should have.

RAKOVE:
Right.

LINDSAY:
I mean, Massachusetts is very far north. This is at a time when communications is very poor, could take six weeks for news to get from New England to South Carolina. The various colonies weren't necessarily terribly well-connected. Certainly demographically, they were different. I mean, Boston was still dominated by the Puritans who had come over in the seventeenth century. New York's makeup was different. Virginia's was certainly different. So what was it that led the colonies to come together rather than to basically say, "Ooh, Massachusetts. Home of radicals. The British government's right to crack down on them."

RAKOVE:
Yeah, basically, their strategy was in fact you could isolate Massachusetts. I like to kind of make a pun on the French. There's a French phrase pour encourager les autres. The opposite of that is pour décourager les autres, in other to discourage the others. The government of Lord North felt that by making an object example of the cost of defying the British Empire and the legal authority of parliament, all the other colonies would be dissuaded... 

LINDSAY:
Yep.

RAKOVE:
... From rallying to Massachusetts' defense. But what happened was exactly the opposite. In effect, what happened is that all those issues from the 1760s, which happened very extensively agitated, primarily during the Stamp Controversy of 1765, '66, but then again with the Townsend Duties. When John Dickinson writes his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, he, in effect, extends and enlarges the colonial claims of opposition to any parliamentary jurisdiction over American life.

So all those arguments were out there, and what happens is that as word of the passage of the news of the Boston Port Act arrives in American ports in the second week of May, you start getting responses across the colonies. They're not perfectly even. You get a sharp response from what's turned into kind of a rum session of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the Virginia legislature, you get a somewhat more confused expression from New York and so on. But in fact, in the spring and summer of 1774, you have colony meetings and provincial conventions taking place in nearly all the colonies, that essentially rally around a common set of resolutions. They work them out by themselves. I mean, in effect, every colony, and a lot of colonies and townships are adopting their own resolutions of protest. But there's not much variation among them. There's a lot of agreement that instead of imposing a commercial boycott on Britain, which is what the Boston radicals had started to urge from the very beginning, instead of deciding on some immediate steps of resistance, you should have a meeting of all the colonies.

So that's how you get to the first Continental Congress. So you get from mid-May of 1774 to the first Congress meets in the first week of September 1774. But all the colonies, except for Georgia, which is still kind of a frontier isolated outpost down below South Carolina. I mean Georgia doesn't quite have enough time to rally to the cause, but twelve of the colonies do. And in effect, it seems to me the great question about the American Revolution is the initial response, which the British refused to recognize formally, much less deal with politically. The initial response seemed to indicate that the British strategy was mistaken from the start. But rather than rethink their assumptions, the British in fact continue to double down on their initial strategy.

So in effect, as I used to tell my Stanford students, getting from 1774 to 1776 is pretty easy. Getting from 1770 to 1774, if you're a working political historian, which is how being a native Cook County Democrat is how I've always thought of myself, and my dad was a famous student of Chicago politics. So getting from 1770 to 1774 is the tougher part of the story. Is to explain why does this mobilization, even though there is a somewhat, not tentative or hesitant, but there's a deliberative quality to it. "We can't decide on a strategy until we've all met together." But the net effect is you call into existence... I mean, there've been a couple odd discussions of maybe the Americans should have their own Congress for consultation. There had been the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, driven by a specific protest. Franklin and a few others start to think, "Maybe we should have an occasional Congress." But in effect what the British do is they produce exactly the opposite result. And now the Americans have, what is, in effect, a latent national government.

LINDSAY:
So, Jack, help me understand this. We get to 1775 and you clearly have the event that celebrated certainly in Massachusetts, Lexington and Concord. And Longfellow made it famous in his poem. But it was still another year before the United States declared its independence, before the Declaration of Independence was issued. And my sense is that while there clearly were some members of the founding generation who saw themselves as radicals or revolutionaries, Samuel Adams, whose name now adorns a beer, sort of is first and foremost. But there are others who seem to be more like reformers. We might call them in today's parlance, moderates. I think someone like John Dickinson. What is it that happened that took the moderates from trying to find some way to work things out with London to embracing the idea that we need to separate?

RAKOVE:
Well, I think it's primarily the British strategy. I mean, the moderates, and I've written about this extensively in Revolutionaries and also my first book, the moderate people like John Jay, Robert Morris, James Duane, James Wilson, John Dickinson, Governor Morris, Charles Carroll of Carrollton from Massachusetts. They're not fire breathing radicals like Samuel Adams or Charles Thompson or Alexander McDougall or some of the other names. I think they were desperate, from the get go, to have the government negotiate with the Americans, to actually send over a commission. Which the Howell Brothers, the British commanders in 1776, eventually-

LINDSAY:
Not popular people in Boston.

RAKOVE:
Right, yeah. But but they're not given much authority. When I think the basic scenario is you have a waiting period. So the First Continental Congress adjourn in October 1774. Thomas Gage has arrived. He's in Massachusetts. The problem is, since you're from Boston you know this, but Boston in the eighteenth century is itself kind of a peninsula. It kind of looks almost like a top connected by a causeway to the mainland. So if you occupy Boston, well that's fine. It's the obvious place to go. I mean it's the port, so you need to land your troops someplace where you can resupply them and so on, but you're isolated. So we had this waiting period. The Americas are waiting to see how the government's going to respond to their petitions, with the petitions the First Continental Congress sent. And also the Americans begin a program of non-importation of foreign goods, to be followed later by a program of non-exportation of American commodities.

So the Americans are waiting to see how the British government reacts. So necessarily there's this kind of waiting period from the fall of 1774 into the spring of 1775. The British can't do very much because they're kind of isolated. And of course it's winter and it's harder to move around the countryside. But then Gage gets orders from Lord North and Germain and the people in the cabinet to kind of get his ass in gear and start trying to crack down on the American radical. So that's what leads you to Lexington and Concord. I mean, they think maybe they can capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock who were supposed to may be off in Concord and they know that the Americans are kind of concentrating their munitions there for the provisional army that Massachusetts, it's not yet the Continental army, just the provisional army that Massachusetts has formed.

So you send this group out to, actually to Concord. Lexington's kind of a distraction. They hear some militia have gathered there so the first rounds are fired in Lexington. There's a handful of causalities as the main body of the troops.

LINDSAY:
There's still supposedly a bullet in one of the houses off of Lexington Green.

RAKOVE:
Yeah, I'm not surprised. So, Concord, you have a serious exchange. Then the British have to retreat. I mean, it's really an American victory. I mean, the British don't have the forces to repel the Massachusetts militia, the Minutemen and so on. And the Americans are sniping them all the way back. And then of course, we have Bunker Hill, or actually Breeds Hill, which is better known as Bunker Hill. So the British in the end drive the Americans away from Charlestown, but only because the Americans have run out of ammunition. So they have to retreat to Cambridge. The British, again, take significant casualties.

Meanwhile, between Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, so between April and June 1775, the Second Continental Congress has assembled in Philadelphia. And they have a debate, which to be honest, I think I'm the only historian who's looked at seriously, there's really only one source for this, the diary of Silas Deane, who is a well-known delegate from Connecticut. The Americans have a serious debate as to, "What are our aims? Should we alter our strategy? Should we rethink our position?" And basically what happens is, under the pressure, particularly from someone like John Dickinson, who had joined the First Continental Congress late, but then is a major player of the Second Continental Congress, with support by people like John Jay and Robert Morris and others, the Americans agree they're going to send a second petition to the Crown. And they're going to then appeal in their way of redress the grievances. But they're not going to send their own peace commission to London, which they discussed, and they're not going to alter any of their positions. They're not going to make any concessions.

And since this is a kind of foreign relations audience we're appealing to, on your behalf, and in fact, this is a diplomatic situation. It is an attempt to ask what will be the context or the structure of negotiations. The Americans say, "Okay, we are going to resist. We've been provoked. We have a right to resist." That's a classic part of British Constitutional thinking. When the king is making war, you have the right to resist. "So we're going to reaffirm our positions and we're going to say we're willing to have these discussions." But the British government for its part, when the second olive branch petition makes its way over, it makes no difference. The British government proceeds. Well, it has to do things. One, it makes some changes in the law, which brings the Americans and all the colonies under further legal constraint. It passes an act restricting American trade, not just in Boston, but colonial trade.

LINDSAY:
The British continue the heavy hand.

RAKOVE:
Yeah. But also it doesn't have that large an army. So they have to start negotiating with the various German principalities and states that can provide them with mercenary reinforcements, the famous Hessians and so on. Basically, I think the essential decisions, for all intents and purposes, were effectively made by the summer of 1775.

But the Americans, particularly in the Continental Congress, they want to make sure that the public is united, and there are different colonies. It's easy to talk about New England where it's really you have one common stock, they're all descended from the immigrants from the 1630s. Pennsylvania and New York are very different places. They're polyglot, multi-denominational. And to some extent, maybe there's some fear about the impact of a rebellion on the Southern plantation colonies.

But the other thing is the Americans keep hoping the British will, they said, "We're not going to send a commission to London because, A, it's far away, and, B, all our sources of political authority are here." So they keep waiting and waiting and waiting. And particularly the moderates, that whole group like Dickinson and the Morris'. So they're desperate, literally desperate, for commissioners to come over. But in the end, they kind of give up on the British. By June 1776, the provincial conventions in the colonies issuing resolutions calling for independence, with the colonies starting to write new constitutions to restore legal government within the states. By that point, it's really a matter of timing.

LINDSAY:
Help me think this through, Jack, sort of the zeitgeist, if I can use that term, of the colonies by beginning of the summer of 1776, is pro independence. And that leads to the writing of the Declaration of Independence, one of our foundational document. Why is it that the delegates felt they were compelled to write a declaration, particularly one that comes across as an indictment. It lists all of the injuries they've suffered at the hands of the King of Britain. But also the question of penning a document that asserts generalist universal values that depart from the stark realities of life in the colonies.

RAKOVE:
What do you mean by stark reality?

LINDSAY:
Well, it talks about the rights of man.

RAKOVE:
Yeah.

LINDSAY:
But clearly in the colonies, some people had rights and others didn't. I mean, this is a time of enslaved people.

RAKOVE:
Okay, so there a lot of things I can say on this. So the main aim of the Declaration of Independence was to place the American people, perceived as a collective entity, although they'll have these separate state governments, but also united Continental Congress, is to place them among the nations of the Earth and to secure support from foreign powers. Far and away the most obvious of which was the monarchy of Louis XVI. And the Americans already had some discreet contacts with various French officials. And the French, of course, were very interested in what's going on in British North America and there was a kind of revanchist aspect of French thinking to correct for their losses in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years' War.

So first and foremost, the Declaration of Independence was meant to accompany two other measures that would demonstrate the Americans were prepared to form foreign alliances. So the first was actually to write Articles of Confederation, and that was the work primarily of the committee chaired by John Dickinson, though John Dickinson, because he opposed a final declaration down to the very end, left Congress just as independence was being declared. The other measure, of course, was to prepare what we call the Model Treaty of 1776, to lay down the guidelines under which Americans would solicit and try to secure support from foreign powers, again France being the most obvious thing.

So that's the first thing. I mean, the Declaration of Independence in its origins is essentially part of a diplomatic strategy. It's directed against the king, however, because by American thinking, the king was the last link holding the empire together. Since the Americans had already renounced the jurisdiction of parliament, except for the particular case of matters of regulating imperial trade. Americans, going back to the First Continental Congress, had agreed that there does have to be some central authority to regulate the commerce of the whole empire. And we will agree, not as a matter of right, but basically because as a kind of common sense pragmatic position, that that authority should rest in parliament. But the Americans have never recognized that parliament had any jurisdiction over them, other than this one particular realm of governance. And so the king was the only link that they recognized. So if you're going to declare independence, Americans thought they'd always been independent of parliament, for all intents and purposes. There's some problems with that, but that's their underlying position. So to secure national independence, the king is the last link that you have to deal with. So that's why all the charges in the body of the Declaration indict George III, and some of his predecessors, for the harms they've committed.

And then the third point is when the Declaration says, "All men are created equal," the way in which Americans since, let's say 1789, not 1776, but since 1789, have read that in terms that are very different from what it originally meant. The original meaning of saying, "All men are created equal," was to say that Americans, as a collective entity, as a people, had the same rights as other nations when they were subjected to tyrannical government in the form, in this sense the claims of a Parliament acting arbitrarily with the actual support of a king who really was not a tyrant, but just a constitutional monarch trying to earn his salary on a daily basis.

So when Jefferson and the Continental Congress said, "All men are created equal," they didn't see themselves laying down a statement that said, "Forever after more, the nation of individual equality or civic equality will be the dominant political value in American life." They're just simply saying Americans as a people, when they've been subjected to a long train of abuses by authoritarian arbitrary tyrannical government, have the same right as other peoples, to cast off that government and create new governments of their own devising.

So it wasn't meant to have the impact we gave it. But the critical thing, and every historian who works on this is, once you get to the first debates over slavery in the First Federal Congress of 1790, which has to receive a whole bunch of anti-slavery petitions, you see already what we might call a popular, or even a populist, reading of the Declaration, that all Americans now subscribe to that says, "All men are created equal." It's not about Americans as people, it's about you and me. And that principle is applied, over the course of American history, it's been applied to different groups. Since we're talking about 1776, well, I just turned seventy-six.

LINDSAY:
Happy birthday.

RAKOVE:
So I think about it in those terms. When we think about 1776, we think the dominant principle we owe to that year is this principle of equality. And over the course of my lifetime, since I've lived through the Civil Rights Revolution, or think about disability rights or notions of sexual autonomy and so on, equality, as I like to say, is a corrosive principle. Once you apply it in one realm of behavior, where it seems to make sense, why not apply it in others? So I think the popular, you could say populist, reading of the Declaration as a statement of individual equality, equality for all groups, and not just for the American people as a whole, that's been the great transformative story of American history.

LINDSAY:
Jack, that's a fascinating point because it suggests that the founders who we are taught to revere actually created two revolutions. One was a revolution against British rule, but also another one in terms of this notion of individual liberty. They intended the first, they didn't necessarily all intend the second. And it's that second one that has had epic consequences through the ages. So let me ask you this, as you think about the founders. How do you assess them? And I will note that NBC broadcaster Tom Brokaw popularized the term, "Greatest Generation," to describe people who lived through, fought, in one World War II. Were the founders the original "Greatest Generation," or were they something different?

RAKOVE:
Well, I'm not sure historians like the "Greatest Generation" as an analytically useful term.

LINDSAY:
Okay, I'll allow you to vent.

RAKOVE:
I started as a twentieth century historian. I had no interest in doing early American history. But when I went to Harvard, in the fall of '69, I very quickly got interested in the work of Bernard Bailyn, who was my mentor, who I think was actually the most powerful, most intellectually cosmopolitan American historian of the twentieth century, as Bailyn would say, "bar none."

LINDSAY:
And you dedicated Revolutionaries to him. You called him, him being Bernard Bailyn, "The creative historian."

RAKOVE:
And that was, I mean, because Bailyn's great book, The Ideological Origins, had just come out in '67, won the Pulitzer in '68. And he had a number of really promising students, among whom I can now count myself as well. So I started working in that field. I do think, putting the "Greatest Generation" aside, I think appreciating the novelty of the challenges and the opportunities that the revolutionary generation confronted and dealt with, and I think also taking seriously their commitment to the idea of Republican government, and the number of innovations they made in development of ideas about constitutionalism, broadly speaking, remain I think on the whole great problems to work with historically, and in many ways admirable. Which is not to say that if I were the lawgiver, in the eighteenth century sense of the term, there are any of a number of aspects of the Constitution I would change tomorrow. I'd get rid of the equal state vote of the Senate. I'd have the president elected by national popular vote. I'd probably say some kind of term limits on members of the Supreme Court would be a good idea and I think actually rethinking the whole nature of judicial review itself would be a good idea and so on.

But those are qualms that arise from seeing how the system has evolved over time. If you go back and think about the issues they faced, and the solutions they came up with, it's remains just a fascinating thing. 

LINDSAY:
On that note I’ll close up  the President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe professor of history and American studies and professor of political science and law emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America, and he is also the author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which is the best book out there that I know of if you want to understand the actual debates that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had as they struggled to craft a workable structure for this United States. Jack, thank you very much for joining me.

RAKOVE:
Great to be here.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen. And leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Bella Quercia and Michelle Kurilla for their assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.