The Five Thousand Year Leap

The Five Thousand Year Leap tells of the 28 fundamental beliefs of the Founding Fathers which they said must be understood and perpetuated by every people who desired peace, prosperity, and freedom. These beliefs have made possible more progress in 200 years than was made previously in over 5,000 years. (337 pages)

Includes the speech given by W. Cleon Skousen "What Is Left? What Is Right?" on compact disc.

Excerpt from "The Five Thousand Year Leap":

Shades of the Primitive Past

The most striking thing about the settlers of Jamestown was their startling similarity to the ancient pioneers who built settlements in other parts of the world 5,000 years earlier. The whole panorama of Jamestown demonstrated how shockingly little progress had been made by man during all of those fifty centuries.

The settlers of Jamestown had come in a boat no larger and no more commodious than those of the ancient sea kings. Their tools still consisted of shovel, axe, hoe, and a stick plow which were only slightly improved over those of China, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. They harvested their grain and hay-grass with the same primitive scythes. They wore clothes made of thread spun on a wheel and woven by hand. They thought alcohol was a staple food. Their medicines were noxious concoctions based on superstition rather than science. Their transportation was by cart and oxen.

Most of them died young. Out of approximately 9,000 settlers who found their way to old Jamestown, only about 1,000 survived.

Why Jamestown Was Different

But potentially, Jamestown was different.

It was in Jamestown that communal economics were experimentally tried out by these European immigrants, who found them to be worse than Plato had described them. Eventually, it was in Jamestown that a system of free enterprise principles began to filter up through the years of "starving time" to impress on the settlers those dynamic ideas which were later refined and developed in Adam Smith's famous book, The Wealth of Nations.

It was among these early settlers of Virginia that a sufficiently large population finally congregated to permit the setting up of the first popular assembly of legislative representatives in the western hemisphere. The descendants of these Virginia settlers also produced many of the foremost intellects who structured the framework for the new civilization which became known as the United States of America. From among them came Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence; James Madison, "father" of the Constitution; George Washington, hero general of the War for Independence; George Mason, author of the first American Bill of Rights in Virginia.

Virginia was the largest of the thirteen colonies, with half-a-million inhabitants, and she furnished four of the first five Presidents of the United States.