Wilfred (Bill) McClay

speaker

209 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Wilfred (Bill) McClay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Radio Atlantic · American History as Rorschach Test · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

I do generally go by Bill, yeah, and I'd be happy if you did.

We had a long conversation.

We closed the place down.

We probably talked for five hours about the very kinds of things you and I are talking about.

And he came up with this formulation that really stuck in my mind.

He said, you know, I believe that if you teach young people that they live under a bad regime, it damages their souls.

And I have to admit to you, I've never thought of it in that way.

It's more dramatic, more metaphysical than anything I would have said up to that point.

But I realized it is important that studying American history for an American is not the same.

I think, as almost any other subject because you're teaching them about what it means to be a citizen.

I think that it's justifiable to...

have the earliest exposures to American history?

not fabulistic, not phony, not fairy tales, but grounded in affection for the country as one of the sources of your being.

And then as you get older, then to introduce complexity, it's such that you may come to the point where I can't really be friends with this country as when I know all of these things about it.

That's, I think, a legitimate outcome of education.

You can't control that.

You shouldn't try to control it.

But the earliest stages do seem to me to matter a lot.

You know, I have a lot of friends in the profession who write critically about early America and the founders and framers.

And I say it in a nice way.

Showing 1–20 of 209 · page 1 of 11