Forget the Founding Fathers
By BARRY GEWEN
New York Times Book Review
June 5, 2005
THE founding fathers were paranoid hypocrites and ungrateful malcontents.
What was their cherished Declaration of Independence but empty political
posturing? They groaned about the burden of taxation, but it was the English
who were shouldering the real burden, paying taxes on everything from
property to beer, from soap to candles, tobacco, paper, leather and beeswax.
The notorious tea tax, which had so inflamed the people of Massachusetts,
was only one-fourth of what the English paid at home; even Benjamin Franklin
labeled the Boston Tea Party an act of piracy. Meanwhile, smugglers, with
the full connivance of the colonists, were getting rich at the expense of
honest tax-paying citizens. The recent French and Indian War had doubled
Britain’s national debt, but the Americans, who were the most immediate
beneficiaries, were refusing to contribute their fair share.
The revolutionaries complained about a lack of representation in Parliament,
but in this they were no different from the majority of Englishmen. What was
more, the God-given or nature-given rights they claimed for themselves
included the right to hold Africans in bondage. Edward Gibbon, who knew
something about the ups and downs of history, opposed the rebels from the
House of Commons. Samuel Johnson called them ”a race of convicts” who
”ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.”
Observed from across the Atlantic, the story of the Revolution looks very
different from the one every American child grows up with. To see that story
through British eyes, as Stanley Weintraub’s ”Iron Tears: America’s Battle
for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire: 1775-1783” enables us to do, is to see an
all-too-familiar tale reinvigorated. Weintraub reminds us that justice did
not necessarily reside with the rebels, that the past can always be viewed
from multiple perspectives. And he confronts us with the fact that an
American triumph was anything but inevitable. History of course belongs to
the victors. If Britain’s generals had been more enterprising, if the French
had failed to supply vital military and financial assistance, George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and the rest would be known
to us not as political and philosophical giants but as reckless (and hanged)
losers, supporting players in a single act of Britain’s imperial drama. We
would all be Canadians now, with lower prescription drug costs and an
inordinate fondness for winter sports.
But Weintraub’s book does more than add a fresh dimension to a tired
subject. By giving the war a genuinely international flavor, it points the
way to a new understanding of American history. Instead of looking out at
the rest of the world from an American perspective, it rises above national
boundaries to place the past in a global context. This is a significant
undertaking. At a time when the role of the United States in the world has
never been more dominant, or more vulnerable, it is crucially important for
us to see how the United States fits into the jigsaw of international
relations. Weintraub indicates how American history may come to be written
in the future.
A globalized history of the United States would be only the latest twist in
a constantly changing narrative. Broadly speaking, since the end of World
War II there have been three major schools of American history; each
reflected and served the mood of the country at a particular time. In the
1940’s and 50’s, that mood was triumphal. As Frances FitzGerald explains in
”America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the 20th Century,” the United
States was routinely presented in those years as ”perfect: the greatest
nation in the world, and the embodiment of democracy, freedom and
technological progress.” The outside world may have been intruding on the
slumbering nation through the cold war, the United Nations, NATO and the
rise of Communist China, but the textbooks’ prevailing narrative remained
resolutely provincial. ”The United States had been a kind of Salvation Army
to the rest of the world,” the books taught. ”Throughout history, it had
done little but dispense benefits to poor, ignorant and diseased countries.
. . . American motives were always altruistic.”
The histories of that time, FitzGerald says, were ”seamless,” a word that
applied not only to schoolbooks but also to the work of the period’s most
sophisticated scholars and writers, men like Richard Hofstadter and Louis
Hartz. Reacting against the challenge of totalitarianism, they went looking
for consensus or, in Hofstadter’s phrase, ”the central faith” of America,
and they found it in the national commitment to bourgeois individualism and
egalitarianism. Americans clustered around a democratic, capitalist middle.
Uniquely among major nations, the United States had avoided serious
ideological conflict and political extremes; even its radicals and
dissenters adhered to what Hofstadter called the ”Whiggish center” and
Hartz termed ”the liberal tradition.” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote
about ”the vital center.” Daniel Bell spoke of ”the end of ideology.”
Because they emphasized unity at the expense of division and dissent —
Hartz referred to ”the shadow world” of American social conflict — these
consensus historians later were criticized for being conservative and
complacent. There is some truth to this charge, but only some. As a group,
they were reformers, even liberal Democrats, but their liberalism was
pragmatic and incremental. Mindful of the leftist extremism of the 1930’s,
they looked upon idealism as something to be distrusted; grand visions, they
had come to understand, could do grand damage. Taken too far, this viewpoint
could lead to a defense of the status quo, or at least to a preference for
the way things were to the way visionaries said they could be. Down that
road, neoconservatism beckoned. Hofstadter, for one, was discomforted by
some of his critics, and admitted to having ”serious misgivings of my own
about what is known as consensus history.” It had never been his purpose,
he explained, to deny the very real conflicts that existed within the
framework he and others were attempting to outline.
Hofstadter acknowledged that his writing ”had its sources in the Marxism of
the 1930’s,” and an alert reader could detect a residual Marxism, or at
least an old-fashioned radicalism, in some of his comments in ”The American
Political Tradition.” Though the book appeared in the late 1940’s, at the
onset of one of the greatest economic booms in American history, Hofstadter
was still complaining about ”bigness and corporate monopoly,” misguidedly
declaring that ”competition and opportunity have gone into decline.”
Similarly, in ”The Liberal Tradition in America,” Hartz brilliantly but,
it seemed, ruefully, analyzed why socialism had failed to take root in the
United States.
However much these thinkers had been disappointed by Marxism, they were
hardly ready to embrace straightforward majoritarian democracy. Indeed, with
the exception of Henry Adams, there has probably never been a historian more
suspicious of ”the people” than Richard Hofstadter. For him vox populi
conjured up images of racism, xenophobia, paranoia, anti-intellectualism.
The more congenial Hartz described Americans as possessing ”a vast and
almost charming innocence of mind”; his hope was that the postwar encounter
with the rest of the world would awaken his countrymen from their sheltered,
basically oafish naivete.
But if the consensus historians were not Marxists and not majoritarian
democrats, what, during the cold war era, could they be? What other choice
was there? The answer is that they were ironists who stood beyond political
debate, beyond their own narratives. Hartz urged scholars to get ”outside
the national experience”; ”instead of recapturing our past, we have got to
transcend it,” he said. One became an anthropologist of one’s own society.
How better to understand the national character, what made America America?
Yet the outsider approach had real limitations, as became apparent once the
tranquil 50’s turned into the tumultuous 60’s. The consensus historian,
Hartz wrote, ”finds national weaknesses and he can offer no absolute
assurance on the basis of the past that they will be remedied. He tends to
criticize and then shrug his shoulders.” This preference for the
descriptive over the prescriptive, with its mix of resignation and
skepticism, its simultaneous enjoyment and rejection of the spectacle of
American life, was at bottom ”aesthetic.” In retrospect, one can even
begin to see certain links between the consensus generation’s aesthetic
irony and the distancing attitude Susan Sontag described in her 1964 essay,
”Notes on Camp.”
In any event, the work of these historians was drastically undermined by the
upheavals of the 60’s and early 70’s — the Kennedy assassination and the
other political murders, the Vietnam War, the urban riots, the student
revolts, Watergate and the kulturkampf of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. As
division and conflict consumed the country, the emphasis on American unity
seemed misguided. And the ironic stance itself looked irresponsible. The
times demanded not distance but engagement, not anthropologists but
activists, not a shrug but a clenched fist. Everyone was being forced to
make choices, and those choices presented themselves with an almost
melodramatic starkness, especially on the campuses that were the homes of
the consensus historians. It was the blacks against the bigots, the doves
against the hawks, the Beatles against Rodgers and Hammerstein. For
historians, too, the choice was easy: for the neglected minorities and
against the dominant dead white males.
As postwar seamlessness faded in the 1960’s, a school of multicultural
historians emerged to take the place of the consensus historians. This
school has been subjected to a lot of criticism of late, but in fact it
brought forth a golden age of social history. Blacks, American Indians,
immigrants, women and gays had been ignored in the national narrative, or,
more precisely, treated as passive objects rather than active subjects. The
Civil War may have been fought over slavery, but the slaves were rarely
heard from. Who knew anything about the Indians at Custer’s Last Stand? The
immigrants’ story was told not through their own cultures but through their
assimilation into the mainstream. But now, the neglected and powerless were
gaining their authentic voices.
New studies increased our knowledge, enlarging and transforming the picture
of America, even when the multiculturalists worked in very restricted areas.
Judith A. Carney’s ”Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in
the Americas,” for example, describes how the South Carolina rice industry
was built not only on slave labor but on the agricultural and technological
knowledge brought over by the Africans. The book has not found many readers
outside the academy, but it nonetheless changes our understanding of the
black contribution to American life.
At its best, multiculturalism illuminated the niches and byways of American
history. It investigated smaller and smaller subjects in greater and greater
detail: gays in the military during World War II, black laundresses in the
postbellum South. But this specialization created a problem of its own. In
1994, when the Journal of American History asked historians about the state
of their profession, they bemoaned its ”narrowness,” its ”divorce from
the public.” The editor of the journal wrote that ”dazzling people with
the unfamiliar and erudite” had become ”more highly prized than telling a
good story or distilling wisdom.”
Yet what story, exactly, did the multiculturalists want to tell? Could all
those detailed local and ethnic studies be synthesized into a grand
narrative? Unfortunately, the answer was yes. There was a unifying vision,
but it was simplistic. Since the victims and losers were good, it followed
that the winners were bad. From the point of view of downtrodden blacks,
America was racist; from the point of view of oppressed workers, it was
exploitative; from the point of view of conquered Hispanics and Indians, it
was imperialistic. There was much to condemn in American history, little or
nothing to praise. Perhaps it was inevitable that multiculturalism curdled
into political correctness.
Exhibit A, Howard Zinn’s ”People’s History of the United States,” has sold
more than a million copies. From the start, Zinn declared that his
perspective was that of the underdog. In ”a world of victims and
executioners, it is the job of thinking people . . . not to be on the side
of the executioners.” Whereas the Europeans who arrived in the New World
were genocidal predators, the Indians who were already there believed in
sharing and hospitality (never mind the profound cultural differences that
existed among them), and raped Africa was a continent overflowing with
kindness and communalism (never mind the profound cultural differences that
existed there). American history was a story of cruel domination by the
wealthy and privileged. The founding fathers ”created the most effective
system of national control devised in modern times,” Zinn stated. The Civil
War was a conflict of elites, and World War II was fought not to stop
fascism but to extend America’s empire. The United States and the Soviet
Union both sought to control their oppressed populations, ”each country
with its own techniques.” The Vietnam War was a clash between organized
modern technology and organized human beings, ”and the human beings won.”
We have traveled a long way from the sophisticated ironies of the consensus
historians.
A reaction against distortions and exaggerations of this kind was sure to
come. Battered by political correctness, basking in Reaganesque optimism and
victory in the cold war, the country in the 1980’s and 90’s was ready for a
reaffirmation of its fundamental values. After all, democracy was spreading
around the world and history itself (treated as a conflict of ideologies)
was declared at an end. One of the first historians to take heart from the
cold war’s conclusion and to see the value of re-examining the formative
years of the republic was the early-American scholar Joseph J. Ellis. In
”Founding Brothers” he wrote: ”all alternative forms of political
organization appear to be fighting a futile rearguard action against the
liberal institutions and ideas first established in the United States.”
Ellis was a major figure in the new school of founding fathers historians
that emerged in the 1990’s. But as an academic, he was exceptional. Most
were amateur and freelance historians, since the universities had become
hostile to the kind of ”great man” history they were interested in doing.
A National Review editor, Richard Brookhiser, taking Plutarch as his model,
explained that his goal was to write ”moral biography,” a phrase unlikely
to endear him to postmodernist academics; in rapid succession he produced
brief, deft studies of Washington, Hamilton and the Adams family. Ellis, the
biographer of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, saw
himself engaged in retro battle against his own profession, and observed
that his work was ”a polite argument against the scholarly grain, based on
a set of presumptions that are so disarmingly old-fashioned that they might
begin to seem novel in the current climate.” George Washington, Ellis
joked, was ”the deadest, whitest male in American history.”
But if the academy was hostile to these books, the larger world was not. The
volumes by Brookhiser and Ellis, not to mention works by David McCullough,
Ron Chernow and Walter Isaacson, were widely praised. Some won National Book
Awards and Pulitzer Prizes. And in sharp contrast to the restricted
monographs of the multiculturalists, they sold by the truckload. Here was
genuinely popular history, written with a public purpose and designed to
capture a large audience. Ellis’s ”Founding Brothers” was a best seller in
hardback for almost a year, and a best seller in paperback for more than a
year. Isaacson’s ”Benjamin Franklin” spent 26 weeks on the best-seller
list; McCullough’s ”John Adams” entered the list at No.1, staying there
for 13 weeks, rivaling for a while the popularity of novels by the likes of
John Grisham and Danielle Steel. Chernow’s ”Alexander Hamilton” and
Ellis’s ”His Excellency: George Washington” both made the best-seller list
last year.
And yet there are reasons to believe the popularity of the school is
peaking. For one thing, it is running out of founding fathers. The only
major figure still awaiting his Chernow or McCullough is the thoughtful but
unexciting James Madison. No doubt the principal author of the Constitution
will have his day, but the founding fathers school is facing the choice of
reaching down into the second ranks, or going over ground already covered by
others. Brookhiser’s most recent biography was of the less-than-great
Gouverneur Morris, whom he teasingly describes as ”the rake who wrote the
Constitution.” Meanwhile, another formidable biography of Adams has just
come out, and Benjamin Franklin has been turned into an industry unto
himself, the subject of an apparently endless flood of books. There’s always
room for different interpretations, but the bigger picture is in the process
of being lost. A school that arose in reaction to the excesses of the
multiculturalists has started feeding on itself.
Most important, however, 9/11 has changed the way Americans relate to their
past. The war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the
apparently insoluble problem of nuclear proliferation and the ominous but
real potential for a ”clash of civilizations” — all these are compelling
us to view history in a new way, to shed the America-centered perspective of
the founding fathers school and look at the American past as a single stream
in a larger global current. Stanley Weintraub will never equal the best of
the founding fathers authors in the felicity of his prose, and ”Iron
Tears” is unlikely to reach far beyond the campuses. But by embedding the
American Revolution in British history, by internationalizing it, his book
speaks more directly to the needs of our time than do biographies of Adams
and Hamilton.
Weintraub is hardly alone. Another book that gains immediacy by giving a
global spin to an old subject is Alonzo L. Hamby’s ”For the Survival of
Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s.” The New
Deal is as overdiscussed as the Revolution, yet by internationalizing it,
Hamby is able to raise provocative, revealing questions, even disturbing
ones. The Great Depression, he points out, was a crisis that ”begged for
international solutions.” The Western governments, however, pursued
beggar-thy-neighbor policies, including protective tariffs and competitive
currency devaluations, that ”frequently made things worse.” And the United
States, he says, was the worst offender of all, ”the most isolationist of
the major world powers.” Roosevelt was an economic nationalist who
mistakenly treated his country as a self-contained unit, even actively
sabotaging the feeble efforts at international cooperation. Whatever
economic successes he had domestically — and Hamby, following other recent
historians, shows that those successes were modest indeed — his actions
contributed to the nation-against-nation, Hobbesian atmosphere of the world
arena. Hamby does not go so far as to blame Roosevelt for Hitler’s growing
strength in the mid-1930’s, but it would not be difficult to take his
argument in that direction. Roosevelt was an ”impressive” figure, Hamby
writes. But from a global perspective, the New Deal record was ”hardly
impressive.”
AS if to signal to historians the kind of reassessment that needs to be
done, the National Endowment for the Humanities will sponsor a four-week
institute at the Library of Congress later this month on ”Rethinking
America in Global Perspective.” And one group of professional historians
has already begun submerging the United States within a broader identity.
The growing field of ”Atlantic history,” connecting Europe, Africa and the
Americas through economics, demography and politics, has become a recognized
academic specialty, taught not only in the United States but also in Britain
and Germany. It is generating books, conferences, prizes and, of course, a
Web site. No less a figure than the eminent Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn
has devoted his most recent book to this ”very large subject” that is
”now coming into focus.” Bailyn writes that Atlantic history is
”peculiarly relevant for understanding the present.”
It may be that for general readers trying to understand the present (as
opposed to scholars), Atlantic history goes too far in dissolving the United
States into a blurry, ill-defined transoceanic entity — the might and power
of the nation are not about to disappear, nor is the threat posed by its
enemies. But because the post-9/11 globalization of American history is
really just now taking shape, there is sufficient flexibility at the moment
to accommodate a wide range of approaches. Three recent books, for example,
offer starkly contrasting visions of America’s past and, correspondingly, of
its present world role. They are of varying quality but in their different
approaches, they point to the kind of intellectual debates we can expect in
the future from historians who speak to our current condition.
In ”A Patriot’s History of the United States,” Larry Schweikart, a
professor of history at the University of Dayton, and Michael Allen, a
professor of history at the University of Washington, Tacoma,
self-consciously return to 50’s triumphalism, though with a very different
purpose from that of the consensus historians. Not interested in irony or in
standing outside of history, they are full-blooded participants,
self-assured and robust moralists, who argue that the United States is a
uniquely virtuous country, with a global mission to spread American values
around the world. ”An honest evaluation of the history of the United
States,” they declare, ”must begin and end with the recognition that,
compared to any other nation, America’s past is a bright and shining light.
America was, and is, the city on the hill, the fountain of hope, the beacon
of liberty.” Theirs is a frankly nationalistic — often blatantly partisan
— text in which the United States is presented as having a duty to lead
while other countries, apparently, have an obligation to follow. ”In the
end,” they write, ”the rest of the world will probably both grimly
acknowledge and grudgingly admit that, to paraphrase the song, God has ‘shed
His grace on thee.’ ” This is a point of view with few adherents in the
academy these days (let alone in other nations), but it’s surely one that
enjoys warm support among many red-state conservatives, and in the halls of
the White House.
Critics of the Bush administration will find more to agree with in the
perspective of ” ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,”
Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of 20th-century mass murder.
Unlike Schweikart and Allen, she does not see virtue inhering, almost
divinely, in American history. Instead, she judges that history against a
larger moral backdrop, asking how the country has responded to the most dire
of international crimes, genocide. The record is hardly inspiring. Power
reveals that throughout the 20th century, whenever genocide occurred,
whether the victims were Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Kurds or Tutsis, the
American government stood by and did nothing. Worse, in some instances, it
sided with the murderers. ” ‘A Problem from Hell’ ” exhorts Americans to
learn from their history of failure and dereliction, and to live up to their
professed values; we have ”a duty to act.” Whereas Schweikart and Allen
believe American history shows that the United States is already an
idealistic agent in world affairs, Power contends that our history shows it
is not — but that it should become one.
A third book, Margaret MacMillan’s ”Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the
World,” is in effect an answer to Schweikart, Allen and Power — an object
lesson in the ways American idealism can go wrong. MacMillan’s focus is on
Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I. A visionary, an evangelist, an
inspiration, an earth-shaker, a holy fool, Wilson went to Paris in 1919 with
grand ambitions: to hammer out a peace settlement and confront a wretched
world with virtue, to reconfigure international relations and reform mankind
itself. Freedom and democracy were ”American principles,” he proclaimed.
”And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and
women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community.
They are the principles of mankind and they must prevail.” Other leaders
were less sure. David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, liked
Wilson’s sincerity and straightforwardness, but also found him obstinate and
vain. France’s prime minister, the acerbic and unsentimental Georges
Clemenceau, said that talking to him was ”something like talking to Jesus
Christ.” (He didn’t mean that as a compliment.)
As a committed American democrat, Wilson affirmed his belief in the
principle of self-determination for all peoples, but in Paris his
convictions collided with reality. Eastern Europe was ”an ethnic jumble,”
the Middle East a ”myriad of tribes,” with peoples and animosities so
intermingled they could never be untangled into coherent polities. In the
Balkans, leaders were all for self-determination, except when it applied to
others. The conflicting parties couldn’t even agree on basic facts, making
neutral mediation impossible. Ultimately, the unbending Wilson compromised
— on Germany, China, Africa and the South Pacific. He yielded to the force
majeure of Turks and Italians. In the end, he left behind him a volcano of
dashed expectations and festering resentments. MacMillan’s book is a
detailed and painful record of his failure, and of how we continue to live
with his troublesome legacy in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Yet the idealists — nationalists and internationalists alike — do not lack
for responses. Wilsonianism, they might point out, has not been discredited.
It always arises from its own ashes; it has even become the guiding
philosophy of the present administration. Give George W. Bush key passages
from Wilson’s speeches to read, and few would recognize that almost a
century had passed. Nor should this surprise us. For while the skeptics can
provide realism, they can’t provide hope. As MacMillan says, the Treaty of
Versailles, particularly the League of Nations, was ”a bet placed on the
future.” Who, looking back over the rubble, would have wanted to bet on the
past?
Little has changed in our new century. Without the dreams of the idealists,
all that is on offer is more of the same — more hatred, more bloodshed,
more war, and eventually, now, nuclear war. Anti-Wilsonian skeptics tend to
be pessimistic about the wisdom of embarking on moral crusades but,
paradoxically, it is the idealists, the hopeful ones, who, in fact, should
be painting in Stygian black. They are the ones who should be reminding us
that for most of the world, history is not the benign story of inexorable
progress Americans like to believe in. Rather, it’s a record of unjustified
suffering, irreparable loss, tragedy without catharsis. It’s a gorgon: stare
at it too long and it turns you to stone.
Fifty years ago, Louis Hartz expressed the hope that the cold war would
bring an end to American provincialism, that international responsibility
would lead to ”a new level of consciousness.” It hasn’t happened. In the
1950’s, two wide oceans and a nuclear stockpile allowed Americans to
continue living blithely in their imagined city on a hill, and the student
revolts of the 60’s and 70’s, if anything, fed the notion that the rest of
the world was ”out there.” ”Bring the troops home” was the protesters’
idea of a foreign policy.
But the disaster of 9/11 proved that the oceans do not protect us and that
our nuclear arsenal, no matter how imposing, will not save our cities from
terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. Today, there is no
retreating into the provincialism and innocence of the past. And because
withdrawal is not an option, the work of the globalizing American historians
possesses an urgency unknown to scholars of previous generations. The major
lesson the new historians must teach is that there is no longer any safe
haven from history’s horror story. Looking forward is unnerving, but looking
backward is worse. The United States has no choice. Like it or not, it is
obliged to take a leading role in an international arena that is
unpredictable and dangerous, hopeful perhaps, but also potentially
catastrophic.