Our Founding Fascination
When President Bush welcomed Nicolas Sarkozy on his maiden state visit to America a few weeks ago, he trucked the new president of the French Republic out to Mount Vernon to pay respects to the original pater patriae and recall the bottomless goodwill once enjoyed between the two countries, symbolized by the key to the Bastille, presented by the Marquis de Lafayette to President Washington in 1790, a gift of fraternal kinship from one free man to another, hanging still on a wall there. For both current presidents, this photo op made for a bit of pleasant officialdom, but for millions of Americans, a trip to Mount Vernon remains a pilgrimage of sorts.
The same might be said about reading — or at least buying — every book emerging from publishing houses purporting to explain Washington and his heady, bewigged compatriots. Joseph Ellis's "American Creation" (Alfred A. Knopf, 283 pages, $26.95) represents the latest effort. And with every fresh book popping up on the American founding, another spate of reviews muses on the phenomenon of our fascination with the founders and the eagerness of publishers to feed it. Indeed, the founding has spawned an industry and soon we may find entire firms dedicated to its maintenance — patriotic books, DVDs, games, ball caps, and all.
One source of this appeal is stark ignorance: Back in school we learned remarkably little about the likes of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, & Co., and so we wish to know more about them for the same reason we wish to know more about a great uncle gassed and decorated for bravery in World War I; we've become amateur genealogists. But the best explanation for this founding fascination remains the quiet, proud wonder we feel whenever we look steadily and hard at one of history's most astounding gatherings of demigods — Jefferson's own word for the drafters of the Constitution meeting in Philadelphia during the broiling summer of 1787 — who, with all their wisdom and daring, blind spots and blunders, made us who we are.
Mr. Ellis has made himself the first among equals with those who have added titles to the burgeoning backlist of books on this marbled, monumental generation. A professor of history, he's written best-selling portraits of Jefferson, John Adams, and, most recently, Washington. These, along with his Pulitzer-winning "Founding Brothers" (2000), have all gained him a reputation for clear utterance and accessibility to a wide and intelligent — though not necessarily scholarly — audience. This book will sustain that reputation. Yet it will likely satisfy neither the hagiographers nor the latter-day denigrators. Writing with a slightly more analytical approach than has become customary to him, Mr. Ellis is out not so much to paint the primary colors of greatness as to explore the ambiguous grays of the founding saga. Instead of composing another straightforward portrait of a kind that passes a Sunday afternoon, he has opted to write a loosely bound series of seven essays examining — in a diffuse, somewhat more academic though still readable fashion — the peculiar range of problems that dogged the men who took upon themselves one of the greatest feats of nation-building in history. Mr. Ellis humanizes the founding generation without tearing them down — a delicate operation in a politically charged time. He takes several crises of the founding years and expands on how they were handled, with the inescapable conclusion that, wise and foresighted as they were, these men also made stunning mistakes that reverberated down the subsequent decades and centuries. Sometimes their acts could seem less than heroic, though time proved them efficacious. During the long and gruesome winter of 1777–78, for instance, when the Continental Army was freezing at Valley Forge, Washington and his officers came to see that a war of attrition — a defensive strategy — offered the only real hope of victory against the insuperable odds of British numbers, munitions, and materiel. The Americans would, in a sense, have to wait and tire them out. This might not be the image of the Revolutionary War's brave colonials we most cherish, but the strategy worked.
Off the battlefield, too, these men often found themselves at a loss to manage tough and unprecedented tasks. The weeks and months leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence were marked by improvisations so fraught with confusion and the drafting of the document so chaotically engineered that Jefferson's preternatural, epoch-making preamble was barely remarked by its first frenzied readers. Later, President Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox failed, after straining efforts, to arrive at a "truly just Indian policy"; the triumph of the Louisiana Purchase became an occasion for lost opportunities, and, most gravely, the founders bucked the issue of slavery — the greatest offense against American principles and ideals — allowing it to smolder till they were safely in their graves and their descendants had to suffer the cataclysm of civil war.
Maintaining that "narrative is the highest form of historical analysis," Mr. Ellis doesn't stray far from storytelling, using it as the handiest tool for constructing his arguments; the drama inherent in each crisis or conundrum isn't stanched under a mass of facts, pretentious verbiage, or politically spiked irrelevancies. The paramount things stand out in high relief.
Academic historian though he may be, Mr. Ellis retains the common touch. He writes for the curious, not the tendentious. Most refreshingly, he doesn't slavishly heave the mandarin preoccupations of his colleagues in the academy who espouse ideas that, to put it gently, could flourish only in the artificial, tenure-protected hothouses where the looniest flora of the mind is permitted to grow. The founders were not, he says, the "racists, classists, and sexists" that today's smug critics claim them to be. They were human beings, with all the predictable flaws thereof, though human beings who saw higher visions, dreamed higher dreams — and had the gumption to act on all of them with a force and consistency that marks the great alone. They were just like us, we might say, only more so.
Mr. Simmons is the author of "Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin" and director of the Dow journalism program at Hillsdale College.
