Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. - Thomas E. Ricks

But as far as I can tell, there does not exist a study of what our first four presidents learned, where they learned it, who they learned it from, and what they did with that knowledge. That is what I endeavor to explore in this work.

One of the few memorable Federalist documents, to be put alongside the government reports of Hamilton, is Noah Webster’s dictionary of the American language, which he compiled during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Webster’s work seems to represent a fallback position for moderate Federalists: If you cannot control the people, perhaps you can control their language, and thus how they think and speak. As one scholar states, “Webster’s main motivation for writing and publishing it was not to celebrate American life or to expand independence. Instead, he sought to counteract social disruption and reestablish the deferential world order that he believed was disintegrating.”106 Not only was

to study a situation, evaluate its facts, decide which ones were meaningful, develop a course of action in response to work toward a desired outcome, and verbalize the orders that needed to be issued. Those are the basic steps in critical thinking,