35/50: excellent American history!
Dec. 29th, 2008 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerAnother book on CD I enjoyed tremendously was Jospeh J. Ellis's American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. I bought this out of desperation because I had a long car ride ahead of me and had forgotten to get another recorded book from the library. I was able to regift this at Christmas, but I might almost be tempted to buy a copy of the book itself at some point to refer to again in the future.
Ellis, who wrote Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation which I know![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
soccer_fox thought very highly of (and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), covers six episodes in American history in this book, including the Valley Forge winter that hardened the cadre of the Continental Army, the creation of the two-party system of politics, the attempt by the first post-Constitution government to create a just Indian policy that failed through the greed of the American people, the attempt by the Republicans to destroy the authority of a national central government, and ironically their use of that power to vastly expand the nation by buying Louisiana from the French. In doing so, he illuminates a number of subjects of misunderstanding, some common and some less common, that help the thinking person to question the cult of personality that surrounds the early leaders of the republic. But the result of such questioning (at least for me, and I think for most readers) is not a rejection of the founders but simply a rejection of the rather crude and limited stereotypes of them we are prone to, which are simply replaced with much richer and more complex pictures of individuals who, for my part, I find the more fascinating.
I could talk for hours about this book (and I think I have, after a few drinks, to the unutterable tedium of several of my friends), but I think perhaps two subjects will serve to represent some of the many elements I found fascinating in American Creation. One is the emergence of the party system and the other is the strange personality of Thomas Jefferson.
One thing I certainly did not understand about the political language of the 18th century was that 'party' and 'faction' were almost cursewords to most of the politicians on 18th century America. They saw parties as dangerous and inimical to stable and rational government (as they also feared and loathed the idea of 'democracy'-- mob rule at its worst, with no ability for educated, thoughtful, intelligent, propertied men to moderate the rage and fancies of those filled with passion but who had no stake in the welfare of the nation). For the early years of the republic, to describe someone as a member of a party was to suggest they were combining with others to pervert the action of the national government to the advantage of some restricted group. I was familiar with this perspective from what I have read about English Parliamentary government in the 16th and 17th century, but I had not realised that the concept had retained its stain so long.
AC left me wanting to read and learn much more about Thomas Jefferson: he seems one of the most amazingly complex and tragic figures of the early republic. Growing up in Virginia, I was subjected to a steady diet of Jefferson idolatry scarcely short of the Washingtonophilia that is a state religion in 'the Cradle of Presidents'. I had gained an appreciation of how there was a good deal of moral complication over years of reading odds and ends, and the sometimes tiresome national fascination with his sexual behaviour. But I only began it get an idea of his cruelty, viciousness, and duplicity in the television version of David McCullough's John Adams. Of course bound to be slanted somewhat to Adams' point of view, that account of history, and others I've seen, is very frank about the way in which Jefferson engaged in dirty tricks against Adams and his legislative policies and later presidential campaign, whispering campaigns and what amounted to an 18th century Swift-Boating of an honest and devoted (if contentious and cantankerous) servant of the United States.
Ellis goes even further, exploring the extent to which not only Jefferson's active and bitterly unpleasant role in attempting to force the extension of slavery to the Louisiana Territory but his much earlier opposition to the creation of a strong federal government, while clad in the banner of resisting an overmighty national government, (later more familiar as the sackcloth garments of 'states rights') was really all founded on a desire to maintain slavery in the United States in perpetuity. That he engaged in all these extensive battles while loudly and regularly publishing denunciation after denunciation of slavery as a great moral evil is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Jefferson's startling hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, and conflicting fires of self-interest and self-loathing. The man who was willing to accuse even George Washington himself of having been a secret monarchist *throughout the entire Revolution* was only able to justify his own violent opposition to abolition by asserting that no plan for abolition could ever result in an American free of Blacks, and no Blacks could ever live free in America without slaughtering every White person they could find and thus destroying the republic forever. Thus, maintained Jefferson through Looking Glass logic, any attempt at abolition would lead directly to the destruction of the United States, and therefore even *discussing* it, let alone attempting it, was *treasonable* behaviour.
You see why I'm now strongly moved to learn more about Jefferson. It's like watching a train wreck--horrifying, disturbing, repellent, but fascinating in a sick and twisted kind of way. If John Adams was America's Lenin, Thomas Jefferson bids fair to have been America's Stalin.
Ellis, who wrote Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation which I know
soccer_fox thought very highly of (and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), covers six episodes in American history in this book, including the Valley Forge winter that hardened the cadre of the Continental Army, the creation of the two-party system of politics, the attempt by the first post-Constitution government to create a just Indian policy that failed through the greed of the American people, the attempt by the Republicans to destroy the authority of a national central government, and ironically their use of that power to vastly expand the nation by buying Louisiana from the French. In doing so, he illuminates a number of subjects of misunderstanding, some common and some less common, that help the thinking person to question the cult of personality that surrounds the early leaders of the republic. But the result of such questioning (at least for me, and I think for most readers) is not a rejection of the founders but simply a rejection of the rather crude and limited stereotypes of them we are prone to, which are simply replaced with much richer and more complex pictures of individuals who, for my part, I find the more fascinating.I could talk for hours about this book (and I think I have, after a few drinks, to the unutterable tedium of several of my friends), but I think perhaps two subjects will serve to represent some of the many elements I found fascinating in American Creation. One is the emergence of the party system and the other is the strange personality of Thomas Jefferson.
One thing I certainly did not understand about the political language of the 18th century was that 'party' and 'faction' were almost cursewords to most of the politicians on 18th century America. They saw parties as dangerous and inimical to stable and rational government (as they also feared and loathed the idea of 'democracy'-- mob rule at its worst, with no ability for educated, thoughtful, intelligent, propertied men to moderate the rage and fancies of those filled with passion but who had no stake in the welfare of the nation). For the early years of the republic, to describe someone as a member of a party was to suggest they were combining with others to pervert the action of the national government to the advantage of some restricted group. I was familiar with this perspective from what I have read about English Parliamentary government in the 16th and 17th century, but I had not realised that the concept had retained its stain so long.
AC left me wanting to read and learn much more about Thomas Jefferson: he seems one of the most amazingly complex and tragic figures of the early republic. Growing up in Virginia, I was subjected to a steady diet of Jefferson idolatry scarcely short of the Washingtonophilia that is a state religion in 'the Cradle of Presidents'. I had gained an appreciation of how there was a good deal of moral complication over years of reading odds and ends, and the sometimes tiresome national fascination with his sexual behaviour. But I only began it get an idea of his cruelty, viciousness, and duplicity in the television version of David McCullough's John Adams. Of course bound to be slanted somewhat to Adams' point of view, that account of history, and others I've seen, is very frank about the way in which Jefferson engaged in dirty tricks against Adams and his legislative policies and later presidential campaign, whispering campaigns and what amounted to an 18th century Swift-Boating of an honest and devoted (if contentious and cantankerous) servant of the United States.
Ellis goes even further, exploring the extent to which not only Jefferson's active and bitterly unpleasant role in attempting to force the extension of slavery to the Louisiana Territory but his much earlier opposition to the creation of a strong federal government, while clad in the banner of resisting an overmighty national government, (later more familiar as the sackcloth garments of 'states rights') was really all founded on a desire to maintain slavery in the United States in perpetuity. That he engaged in all these extensive battles while loudly and regularly publishing denunciation after denunciation of slavery as a great moral evil is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Jefferson's startling hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, and conflicting fires of self-interest and self-loathing. The man who was willing to accuse even George Washington himself of having been a secret monarchist *throughout the entire Revolution* was only able to justify his own violent opposition to abolition by asserting that no plan for abolition could ever result in an American free of Blacks, and no Blacks could ever live free in America without slaughtering every White person they could find and thus destroying the republic forever. Thus, maintained Jefferson through Looking Glass logic, any attempt at abolition would lead directly to the destruction of the United States, and therefore even *discussing* it, let alone attempting it, was *treasonable* behaviour.
You see why I'm now strongly moved to learn more about Jefferson. It's like watching a train wreck--horrifying, disturbing, repellent, but fascinating in a sick and twisted kind of way. If John Adams was America's Lenin, Thomas Jefferson bids fair to have been America's Stalin.
