Lectures
The First and Greatest Generation
Synopsis
Philadelphia is the “metropolis of the American founding” and an iconic symbol of American constitutionalism. America started in Philadelphia. The genius of the founders coalesced there. The United States was constituted there. It was in Philadelphia where the ideals of justice, liberty, and order were codified in a frame of government that remains the envy of the world. What happened in Pennsylvania’s first city in the eighteenth century has been aptly described as the “miracle at Philadelphia” by the late Catherine Drinker Bowen in her classic constitutional history of the same title. American religious, civic, and economic freedoms, as well as, its material prosperity are the consequence of the American order rooted and established in Philadelphia. For all of these reasons and more the John Jay Institute moved its corporate headquarters and educational programs to Philadelphia in February of 2011. On the special occasion of the Institute’s debut in the metropolis of the American founding, it hosted the following lecture to commemorate its relocation and introduction to Philadelphia. At the Carpenters’ Hall and in the very room where John Jay and the other members of the First Continental Congress met in the autum of 1774 to consider the seriousness of human events that ultimately led to the formation of a new nation, Lieutenant General Josiah Bunting, III addressed the Institute on the subject of the character of those founding fathers. His address is titled: “The First and Greatest Generation and Its Successor.”
