Our logo visualizes the Center’s core claim: liberty is best protected by generations who combine moral and intellectual formation with practical self-sufficiency under the watchful guardianship of the American religious tradition.
Ideal: Providence
Ideal: Public Virtue
In Greek Revival architecture — America’s first truly “national” style (c. 18251860) — the pillars represented democratic ideals and civic virtue. The founding Americans called this “public virtue” meaning one’s willingness to voluntarily sacrifice personal benefit for the good of society.
Ideal: Liberty
Ideal: Liber
The scroll represents a liber education. It stands for the intellectual and moral formation that enables people to think for themselves, communicate with power and effectiveness, and develop the character needed for true independence. It points to the classical and founding-era emphasis on education that goes far beyond career training.
In ancient Greece and Rome, society divided into two groups, slaves and the Liber— those able to read, write, engage in contract, understand the law and justice. The liberal arts (Artes Liberales), taught from the 10th to 14th centuries to sustain liberty, equip individuals with the knowledge and skills needed for freedom from political oppression as well as from ignorance, prejudice, sickness, hate, poverty, hunger, sin, and dullness.
Ideal: Georgics
Wheat represents the agrarian, self-reliant tradition rooted in the classical republican ideal (and in the practical skills the Center promotes). It specifically symbolizes the capacity to grow one’s own food, build a self-supporting household, and create an independent living situation. It underscores the goal of families who are economically and practically free rather than dependent on external systems. From the Greek and Latin, it literally means “to work the earth.” Historically, it was a mentality and lifestyle of rural food production that resulted in citizens and communities who valued divinity, privacy, property, traditional family, self-reliance, justice, order, frugality, duty, and self-control.
These are iconic symbols of Americana. Chances are you have seen every one of these symbols, but you may not know of their significance in American history. The very fact that they are part of our history but we don’t know what they mean—is exactly our point. We have lost a part of our heritage, the American Legacy passed down to us by our fathers. Our fathers chose these symbols to represent certain ideals, but over the past 3 or 4 generations, we have forgotten. They are also exactly the source of American greatness. Take them away for too long, and America will fail.
Our Center is designed specifically to restore these five ideals and even more specifically to protect liberty. Protecting liberty requires families whose educational pursuits encompass more than just developing a career or holding down a job. It requires generations who feel the need to sacrifice and pay a price in their early years to become more than followers of the culture, rather leaders and paragons of disinterested citizenship and true community building.
Our goal is to help families face the world with a skill set that gives them the option of not just seeking a job, but rather empowers them to create a self-supporting business and living situation that is completely independent. Such a set of skills wherein they can think for themselves, communicate with power and effectiveness, grow their own food, build their own homes, generate their own electricity, and form a business of value to themselves and to the world. Families with such an education become assets and leaders in any community.
With such a preparation and like our founders before us, we will face future challenges on the firm ground of sound economics, a liber education, and a disinterested character. Much of what we promote is unknown or will be considered antiquated to the average American. But we can assure you that incorporating these principles into your life is one of the most liberating and liberty promoting lifestyles that exists and will lead to the rekindling of the American Legacy.
All-Seeing Eye (Eye of Providence)
This is on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States. It sits in a triangle (often with rays of light/glory) above an unfinished 13-step pyramid. The design was finalized by Charles Thomson in 1782 after earlier committees (including the 1776 one with Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, advised by Pierre Eugène du Simitière). It symbolizes divine Providence watching over and favoring the American cause; the motto above is Annuit Coeptis (“He [God/Providence] has favored our undertakings”). It has appeared on the back of the $1 bill since 1935. It was a conventional 18th-century Christian/European symbol of God’s oversight, not originally Masonic in the Seal’s design.
Eagle (Bald Eagle)
This is the central figure on the obverse (front) of the Great Seal. The American bald eagle is shown displayed (wings spread), with a shield of 13 red-and-white stripes and a blue chief on its breast, an olive branch (peace) in its right talon, 13 arrows (war/readiness) in its left, and a constellation of 13 stars above its head. It holds a scroll in its beak. Congress approved this in 1782; Thomson intentionally chose the native bald eagle over classical or other imagery. It represents sovereignty, strength, independence, and the preference for peace while remaining ready for defense. The eagle is also the national bird/emblem and appears on countless seals, currency, military insignia, flags, and government buildings.
Greek Pillars/Columns
These are a hallmark of neoclassical (Greek Revival and related) architecture deliberately chosen for U.S. civic buildings to evoke the democratic ideals of ancient Greece and republican Rome (including civic duty). Key examples:
Scroll
On the Great Seal (obverse), the eagle holds a scroll (or banner) in its beak inscribed with E Pluribus Unum (“Out of many, one”). This motto dates to the first design committee in 1776. Scrolls also appear as the physical form of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution themselves (parchment documents), and as motto-bearing elements on many state seals, early currency, and official documents. On the reverse of the Great Seal, another scroll-like element carries Novus Ordo Seclorum.
Sheaf of Wheat
This is a widespread agricultural and abundance symbol rather than a single national emblem like the Seal’s main devices. It appears on:
It symbolizes fertility, the harvest, economic prosperity from agriculture (central to the early American economy and Jeffersonian ideals), and abundance.
Today, we live in a time when these sacred ideals are little more than a whisper of bygone times and are no longer valued by the upcoming generations. Much of what is wrong in American culture today is a result of moving away from these American ideals. What once made the American citizen and family strong emotionally, spiritually, physically, and financially are the same ideals that we are lacking in our families, communities, states, and on the national level.
This decline of American values was prophetically exposed in the seminal work, A Thomas Jefferson Education. Oliver DeMille identifies the reasons for the decline and reveals a foundation for a strategy to correct the problem:
In 1987, the bicentennial of the Constitutional Convention, three very important best sellers swept America: Robert Bork’s The Tempting of America, E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, and The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. They presented essentially the same message about law, society, and education respectively: that we have strayed from our founding—and not in a good direction. In fact, together they are a sort of update to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
Consider Allan Bloom’s profound analysis of American education . . . First, societies are successful when people choose to be good. If people choose mediocrity, they end up with mediocre society. If they choose excellence, they build an excellent society; if they choose decadence, society decays. This is not only common sense, it is historically accurate.
Second, people choose to be good when they are taught and believe in good. People’s choices are a direct result of their beliefs. And their beliefs are profoundly influenced by what they are taught by parents, friends, teachers, clergy, etc. If they are taught a falsehood or even evil, and if they believe it, they will choose poorly. Teaching influences belief, which guides action.
Third, the thing which determines how well they are taught is their national books. A national book is something that almost everyone in the nation accepts as a central truth. The national book of the Jews is the Torah; Muslims, the Quran; Christians, the Bible; etc. It could be argued that Shakespeare is a national author for England, Goethe and Luther for Germany, Dante and Machiavelli for Italy, Tolstoy for Russia, and so on. Whatever the nation, its national books—the books almost everyone in the nation revere and believe in—will determine the culture. Good national books, like the Bible or Shakespeare’s works, will lead to a good nation. Bad national books like the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf will lead to bad nations until they reject such books.
Now, what of a nation with no national book, with no central text which almost everyone agrees upon as the measuring rod of right and wrong? Such a nation is simply without culture, or at best it is in the process of losing it.
America’s National Books
This leads to the question, “What is America’s national book?” Bloom argues that when he was teaching college at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, he could tell what the national books were by asking students what books formed the core of their lives, the basis of society. The two answers he always got were the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. In the late 1960s this changed: Bloom’s students really couldn’t answer his question. They stopped referring to the Bible and the Declaration, and they listed . . . nothing. No national books. The Bible and the Declaration remained for the older generations, but the youngsters came up with no core source of absolutes, no central foundation of truth.
In the 1980s it changed again: students began listing various rock n’ roll music artists as the thing they revered and turned to for truth and answers. Practically every college student knew this new fountain of truth, studied it daily and for long hours, and felt passionate about it. If you doubt it, Bloom suggested, try to tell a group of youth why their music is bad and they will respond with the same energy and even anger as if you had tried to tell a group 100 years ago that the Bible was bad. This obviously could have some very negative ramifications for America’s future, but even rock music isn’t truly a national book because it is only shared by the younger generations.
In fact, there is no true national book in America today. No national books means no culture; and this is ominous for the future. Any society which loses its national book declines and collapses in ignorance, dwindles and perishes in unbelief. In Bloom’s own words: “The loss of the gripping inner life vouchsafed those who were nurtured by the Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain any content of its own . . . The delicate fabric of the civilization into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised not educated . . . “People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life.
“The cause of this decay of the family’s traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth . . . In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and . . . provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise—as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.”
Bloom is not only correct about the failure of the American family to fulfill its role as the primary center of education, his analysis of the modern famine of classics as the source of education is equally important: “My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible’s commandments, and their explanation in the Bible’s stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the seeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material . . . There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief . . .
“Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.”
If Bloom is correct, and I think he is, then America cannot remain free, prosperous or moral unless the overall culture adopts a central text of the caliber of the Bible. This is not only profound, it is actually a marching order for parents and educators. The whole problem is a result of families failing to teach, educate, train, and civilize.
These sentiments are echoed by many great American educators such as Russell Kirk, Jacques Barzun, Mortimer Adler, Wendell Berry, and Louise Cowan to mention a few. The five American ideals represent the culture of the most liberty-minded nation known to man.
We are standing on the precipice of history; can a people retain liberty and the culture to perpetuate it—or not? Will the annals of history record that we failed, or will they proudly proclaim that it was our generation that turned a nation away from the abyss of ignorance and slavery.
We declare that the five American Ideals as outlined above are America’s original “national book,” that this culture must be restored to restore America, and that this important task can only be accomplished in the arms of loving families by American parents and grandparents.
The Center for American Legacy Studies is dedicated to leading the way for a return to the original American legacy ideals. As families are the only historically proven means of perpetuating a liberty-based culture, our efforts are aimed at parents and grandparents specifically and families generally.
Krislyn Elliott and Lauren Swanepoel act more like sisters than moms as they take really slow walks through the woods together, looking at and taking pictures of every plant they see & wishing they could remember their names and uses more thoroughly. They also like concocting herbal teas, salves, tinctures and strange drinks.
Krislyn is from Utah and has loved learning about plants since an unusually cool high school biology teacher took his classes on neighborhood botany walks. She has always been fascinated and constantly amazed at the power and beauty of plants.
Lauren is from South Africa, she and her family emigrated to Utah almost 10 years ago. They have fallen in love with the area and know more about this state & the great places to explore here than most Utah natives.
We both feel strongly about taking care of our families with natural methods and the abundant medicine we have growing right around us. We are trying to learn as much as we can about our magical local plants and are looking forward to sharing some of our favorites with you.
Director of Georgic Develeopment
William DeMille is a lifelong vegetable farmer. He studied Horticulture and Agronomy at Northwest Missouri University, Maryville. He holds a certificate in aquaponic engineering and production from Cornell University, NY, and another from GrowHaus Aquaponics in Denver, CO. He also studied soil regeneration and is a graduate of Dr. Elaine’s Soil Food Web School. He is the Director of Georgic Development for The Center for American Legacy Studies.
William is a farm consultant establishing several agricultural startups since 2005 in Missouri, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada and he currently manages 2500 acres of grassland for the Ruby Mountain Foods Company.
His latest venture is a market gardening school called Georgic Revolution where he teaches a 17-week course onsite in Nevada covering soil health and vegetable production without the use of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. and where he operated a soil lab.
William lives with his wife Vernie in the snow capped mountains of Northern Nevada.
World Renown BD Expert
Lloyd Nelson has been practicing the art of Biodynamic (BD) Agriculture for over twenty years. He is a BD preparation maker, builder, artist, farmer, arborist, BD educator & consultant. He is co-founder of Biodynamic Source – a Colorado based non-profit specializing in high potency BD preparations – and he owns and operates a Biodynamic spray, fertilizer and consultation service. He has worked with small and large scale farms, vineyards, and orchards to transition to sustainable Biodynamic land management and Demeter BD Certification.
Educator
Vern Cox is married to Joyce Christensen and they have 8 children. He has 3 earned degrees, a BA in psychology, and both a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in marriage and family therapy.
He has had a diverse and interesting career that started with the Bureau of Land Management, followed by a stint as a Learning Disabilities teacher, and finally a marriage and family therapist, working his way up to executive director of the High Country Counseling and Resource Centers that served two counties in Wyoming.
Dr. Cox served for several years on the board of a charter school. Dr. Cox remains heavily involved in his community and the home schooling movement.
He has extensive background in marriage and family counseling, having held a number of administrative positions during his first career. He holds a BA in Psychology and both a Masters and PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy. He lives with his wife and several married children on their multi-generation farm in Southern Utah.
Educator
Joseph adopted the principles of landrace gardening in response to the harsh growing conditions in a high-altitude, short-season, desert garden. Instead of relying on expensive poisons, labor, and materials to coddle the plants, he encourages genetic diversity, cross-pollination, and survival of the fittest, allowing the plants to adapt themselves to the current and ever-changing ecosystem, thus simplifying gardening and seed saving. Joseph is the author of Landrace Gardening: Food Security Through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination. Joseph loves eating, farming, swimming, hot-springs, sunbathing, bird-watching, running, yoga, leggings, kilts, playing guitar, singing, and living habitually barefoot.
Educator
Dan Brooks was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. During his first career, he spent 20 years working in and managing high-end restaurants and golf courses including extensive banquet/special events services and ice sculptures.
For the past 23 years, Dan has been a successful entrepreneur and family business owner in Las Vegas. He and his wife have 4 children and 11 grandchildren. He serves as a trustee for The Center for American Legacy Studies.
Director
Shanon Brooks is the director of The Center for American Legacy Studies, an institution dedicated to helping families embrace and incorporate the Five American Ideals; Georgics, Liber, Providence, Public Virtue, and Liberty into their lives and communities. America exists because of Americans. Americans are the beneficiaries of a peculiar culture and way of living.
Over the past 75 years, that culture and way of life have been lost. Restore that culture and Americans will rebuild America to once again be worthy of John Winthrop’s 1630 admonition, “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
Brooks has been a leader in alternative higher education for over 30 years, and is the author of two books: AMERICAN: Killing the American Dream and A Thomas Jefferson Education for Teens.
Dr. Brooks is a veteran of military service in the United States Submarine Fleet and holds a Bachelor’s degree in business administration, a Master’s degree in education, and a Ph.D. in constitutional law.
He and his wife Julia reside on the 80-acre conference facility of The Center for American Legacy Studies.