June 27, 2006
Books of The Times | 'Revolutionary Characters'
What the Founding Fathers Had That We Haven't
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
As the historian Gordon S. Wood notes in the opening pages of his illuminating new book, "Revolutionary Characters," Americans who look back on the Revolutionary War era and the lives of the founding fathers are frequently moved to ask, "Why don't we have such leaders today?"
The fledgling nation, after all, was fortunate enough to have an extraordinary assemblage of thinkers — including luminaries like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton — whose vociferous arguments with one another helped shape the character of the new government. And the country was equally fortunate in having the right men around at crucial moments: Mr. Wood points out that it was the trust George Washington inspired in people "that enabled the new government to survive" its infancy, and he argues that "no other American could have done" what Benjamin Franklin did in bringing France into the war against Britain and extracting "loan after loan from an increasingly impoverished French government."
So why have the revolutionary generation's achievements — "the brilliance of their thought, the creativity of their politics" — gone unmatched since? Why was that political generation "able to combine ideas and politics so effectively" and why have subsequent ones had such difficulty doing so?
It is Mr. Wood's view that "as the common man rose to power in the decades following the Revolution, the inevitable consequence was the displacement from power of the uncommon man, the aristocratic man of ideas." As he sees it, "the revolutionary leaders were not merely victims of new circumstances; they were, in fact, the progenitors of these new circumstances": "They helped create the changes that led eventually to their own undoing, to the breakup of the kind of political and intellectual coherence they represented. Without intending to, they willingly destroyed the sources of their own greatness."
In short, the founding fathers helped unleash democratic and egalitarian forces that would put an end to "many of their enlightened hopes and their kind of elitist leadership." They "succeeded in preventing any duplication of themselves."
This is a variation, of course, on the central argument laid out in Mr. Wood's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 book, "The Radicalism of the American Revolution": namely, that the Revolution helped smother the patronage, paternalism and hierarchical relationships of the 18th century and usher in a new, democratic, capitalistic world; that it undermined the whole idea of aristocracy and elitist virtue and helped bring about a new society defined by the common man.
In this volume Mr. Wood tries to illustrate this thesis through a series of portraits of "American worthies" — including such seminal and highly familiar figures as Washington and Jefferson, and lesser, more controversial ones like Thomas Paine and Aaron Burr.
Though these chapters (many of which started out as magazine articles) are all erudite and shrewdly argued, they vary widely in their effectiveness and relevance to the author's central argument. A chapter contending that, contrary to popular belief, James Madison's thinking evinced a consistency throughout his career, is really a stand-alone essay, aimed more at other historians than at the lay reader.
And a chapter suggesting that John Adams was "cut off from the whirling broader currents of American thinking" and ultimately anachronistic in his views about the relationship between the government and the people willfully ignores the more prescient aspects of Adams's thinking, eloquently explicated in recent books by Joseph J. Ellis and David McCullough.
This volume is at its most powerful when Mr. Wood uses his enormous knowledge of the era to situate his subjects within a historical and political context, stripping away accretions of myths and commentary to show the reader how Washington, say, or Franklin (the subject of a 2004 book by the author) were viewed by their contemporaries. He explains how the reputations of these men waxed and waned over the years, and how changing ideological fashions in history writing have continually remade their images: most notably, how the current academic focus on gender, class and race issues has marginalized the study of politics and political leaders and contributed to the vogue for debunking "elite white males."
As Mr. Ellis did in his 2000 best seller, "Founding Brothers," Mr. Wood communicates the huge odds the revolutionary generation were up against in taking on the imperial power of Britain, and he also conveys the tumultuous, highly partisan mood of the 1790's, as the Federalists (led by Hamilton and Washington) clashed with the Republicans (led by Jefferson and Madison), and the legacy of the Revolution and the ramifications of the Constitution were debated.
In addition, Mr. Wood underscores the degree to which personality and personal philosophies informed these leaders' politics: how the realism (some might say pessimism) about human nature shared by Adams and Hamilton shaped their belief in the need for a strong government; how the optimism (some might say naïveté) about human nature held by Jefferson and Paine led them to see government as a threat to human liberty and happiness.
What most members of the founding generation shared, Mr. Wood argues, was a "devotion to the public good," a gentlemanly belief in the importance of disinterested public service, and a self-conscious seriousness about their duty to promote the common welfare.
Among the founding fathers' circle, one who did not share this outlook was Burr. As a senator from New York, Burr used "his public office in every way he could to make money," Mr. Wood says, and his "self-interested shenanigans" alarmed colleagues on both ends of the political spectrum. When the presidential election of 1800 was thrown into the House of Representatives, Hamilton — who would later be killed in a famous duel with Burr — "spared no energy" in persuading his fellow Federalists to support his longtime rival Jefferson over Burr; after more than 30 ballots in the House, Jefferson finally became president.
That bitter enemies like Hamilton and Jefferson joined forces against Burr, Mr. Wood writes, was an indication that they believed he "posed far more of a threat to the American Revolution than either of them ever thought the other did."
As Mr. Wood sees it, however, Jefferson and Hamilton, like the other founders, belonged to the past: in a "democratic world of progress, Providence and innumerable isolated but equal individuals, there could be little place for the kind of extraordinary political and intellectual leadership the revolutionary generation had demonstrated." It was Burr, he adds, who embodied "what most American politicians would eventually become — pragmatic, get-along men."
