Wrong or false beliefs, adopted as popular opinion by a nation’s population, often destroy that nation and culture, Lyndon LaRouche warned. It is not the evil leaders, but false ways of thinking about what it means to be human, that sets a population on the path to its own destruction.

A towering American patriot who understood this was James Fenimore Cooper. In the years between the 1804 assassination of Alexander Hamilton by the traitor Aaron Burr and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, Cooper was one of two great Americans who best carried the torch for the ideas and principles of the founding of our Republic, the other being John Quincy Adams.

Over the next two weeks, Pat Ruckert will look at Cooper (1789-1851) and his fight to save the American Republic and to uplift our citizens with classical culture. Cooper, like so many truly great, and often under-appreciated Americans, came under attack by the enemies of this nation, who saw in Cooper a man who had “constituted himself the literary antagonist of the monarchy, aristocracy, and feudality of all Europe, and particularly England.”

Tonight, we will look at Cooper’s life, as a political organizer and an artist.

Next week, we will look at several of Cooper’s brilliant novels which powerfully address the difference between the oligarchies of Europe and the revolutionary principles of our Republic.

Class attendees are encouraged to read Cooper’s novel, “The Bravo," before the May 14 class. Paperback copies are available on-line and here's a link to a free internet copy: https://archive.org/details/bravo00coopgoog