Tonsor: US History: Washington, DC

I. 

I was having a beer with a couple of other graduate students. We were looking out onto State Street, enjoying the warm air and kibitzing about our classes during Week One at Michigan. The man across the table swilled his beer and then said, with apparent satisfaction, "There are no more conservative professors in Ann Arbor."

"Oh, that's not true," I shot back. "I had lunch with him."

Rackham Graduate School at U of M

That comeback may have gotten a laugh, but it pointed to a real problem: the anemic state of ideological diversity among academics in 1987. Not just at Michigan but across the nation, faculty in the social sciences and humanities were overwhelming liberal and voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Political diversity was noticeably absent in Rackham Graduate School, the home unit of history graduate students at the university. Tonsor informed me that he knew of only one other professor in U of M's history department who voted Republican, and with more than 60 profs, our history department was arguably the largest in the U.S.

I hasten to add that, although the other profs I would encounter at Michigan were liberal, my experience in Ann Arbor was not as horrid as what was being reported on many American campuses. Perhaps I chose my classes wisely and had a little luck, but my profs were fair. They challenged but never docked me on ideological or religious grounds, nor did I sense there was ever a political litmus test to win grants or earn good grades. David Hollinger, Raymond Grew, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Tom Tentler, David Bien, Kathleen Canning, Jim Turner, Victor Miesel, Linda Neagley -- I never saw them politicize history in their lectures, classrooms, or seminars. Indeed, it was they who taught me that academic rigor requires intellectual diversity.

II.

The next morning, a Tuesday, I arrived at Tonsor's office in Haven Hall to tell him about an upcoming trip that would require me to miss one of his classes. He was not yet in for office hours, so I looked at the material he'd posted on his door. You can tell a lot about a person by what they post on their door. What caught my eye was a cartoon from the New Yorker. It showed a baseball scorecard of two teams, the Realists and Idealists. In each of the nine innings, the Realists had scored a run or two, while the Idealists had been shut out. Yet the final score was Realists 0, Idealists 13. It made a good laugh all the better knowing who posted the cartoon on his door.

"Hello, Mr. Whitney," said Tonsor as he neared his office. I was beginning to learn his tone of voice, that note of deliberation characteristic of his greeting. It was as though he awaited the unwrapping of a pearl. As he flopped his satchel down on the desk, I sat briefly to tell him about my upcoming trip to Washington, DC, in observance of Constitution Day. I could tell that he was genuinely pleased for me, as I had won first place in a national essay contest on American foreign policy in the Middle East.

"Visiting the monuments to American leaders and ideals is de rigueur, of course, but at this stage in life I prefer the art museums -- the Corcoran, National Portrait Gallery, and American Art Museum. I do not linger outside in the shadows of all those cold marble exteriors, but stay as long as possible inside our temples dedicated to art. It is where I find 'emotion recollected in tranquility.'"

"Speaking of marble," I said, "I'm excited to make a pilgrimage to the Jefferson Memorial, but I was wondering if you knew of a memorial to John Adams."

"Yes, but it's not in marble. It's in the parchment of the Constitution of 1787. As you know, Adams was not in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention. He was in London. But he had drafted the oldest extant constitution in the U.S., the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and his intellectual architecture provided the scaffolding for the framers in Philadelphia.

"An interesting study in contrasts, Jefferson and Adams. Jefferson told Americans what they wanted to hear. Adams told Americans what they needed to know."[1]

I looked at Tonsor quizzically.

"All Americans," he replied, "tend to look at the nation either as disciples of Jefferson or as disciples of Adams. To the Pollyannas, Jefferson wrote what they wanted to hear, that we were a good and exceptional people. He was sunny, optimistic, a philosophe of the Enlightenment, a Republican as radical as Paine, an ideologue in sympathy with the Jacobins who really did think all men were more or less equal at birth. His Lockean intellectual and moral formation made him emphasize not nature but nurture. It was experience and institutions that shaped the man. This is why he put such great emphasis on reform and education, even on the necessity of bloody revolutions to make institutions more enlightened.

"Adams, on the other hand, was the spokesman for us skeptics with a tragic sense of life. He was dour, pessimistic, a man of Augustinian temperament, though doctrinally a Unitarian. In his eyes America was not exceptional for the reason that Americans were just as evil, covetous, and lecherous as people anywhere else in the world. Constitutionally a Burkean, Adams revered the achievement of the British Constitution and Common Law to forestall ambitious men grasping at power. Through observation he concluded that men were not equal at birth, and thus he believed nature more powerful an influence than nurture. He had great fear that American democracy would descend into demagoguery, disorder, and decline. The passage of time has vindicated him.

"Were Plutarch alive today, he might have made an interesting study in contrasts between Jefferson and Adams. Such a study would invite Americans to decide who got it right, or whether either got it fully right. For myself, I am much more inclined toward Adams than toward Jefferson. In fact, I am occasionally told by his biographers that I am temperamentally and intellectually similar to Adams. He understood history and human nature better than Jefferson did. But what about you, Mr. Whitney? Are you not more -- ?"

"I honestly do not yet know," I said, sensing that Tonsor was about to indict me for being more Jeffersonian. "I have a lot more reading to do. At this point I know more about Jefferson and like thinking about him as a person. Adams is less approachable to me -- too dark and excitable."

Tonsor sat silently in his chair like a block of marble, looking at me with expressionless eyes. I felt judged.

III.

After an awkward moment Tonsor admonished me: "Do not become corrupted by the Imperial City. It's where scholars go to die. As for the conservative movement -- well, it died when it put on a blue suit and went to Washington."[2]

Now that -- that last sentence -- illustrates how Tonsor tossed out seemingly effortless aperçus that left me vexed. I was under the impression that conservatives were enjoying their heyday with Ronald Reagan in the White House. Before I could ask for elaboration, he returned to the matter at hand, and said that we could arrange to discuss the material in History 416 that I'd miss. That was considerate of him -- not every professor was so accommodating.

On my way out the door, I remarked with a smirk that Cassirer's Philosophy of the Enlightenment was as tough as its billing.

With an arch smile and a waggle of the head, Tonsor replied, "Among intellectual histories of the Enlightenment, it's Moby Dick. There are easier whales to harpoon, but they wouldn't be as much fun to pursue."

__________________________

Notes

[1] This formulation is also Gordon S. Wood's in talks and in Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin, 2017), Chap. 1.

[2] Even though he enjoyed access to the art and to the Library of Congress, Tonsor did not particularly care for Washington, DC. In one of his letters he wrote upon his return from a two-week stint in DC, "I am so pleased to be home. Washington is not my place ... however kind everyone was to me." Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, June 16, 1980, p. 1; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.

Tonsor: Intellectual History: Equality

I.

After we began the walk back to campus, the mood settled and Tonsor broached a topic related to the one we had probed over lunch. "You'd be interested in a book I'm working on, Mr. Whitney. It's about equality. Remarkably, there has been no systematic historical exploration of the idea of equality in recent times. This, despite the ridiculous overproduction of monographs! Yet historians have failed to provide an account of the development of the idea of equality. I argue that this notion -- equality -- has provided the key signature of the modern world. No idea has played a larger role in the history of the past two or three centuries than that of equality."[1]

"When it comes to equality," I said, "it seems everyone nowadays embraces some form of trickle-down Marx." 

"Very true," Tonsor said with a gust of laughter. 

"Now," he said, "insofar as the historian can discern, inequality characterized all civilizations in the past. In fact, if one were to argue that the experience of history constitutes a prescriptive norm, then one must confront the fact that the great bulk of human experience constitutes an argument against equality. Until the eighteenth century nearly all men regarded inequalities of wealth, status, and power as in the nature of things, an unalterable given. That changed sometime in the eighteenth century. Witnessing the American and French revolutions, men in substantial numbers questioned inequality from the standpoint of political and social justice.[2]

"Roughly speaking, equality is to the modern age what freedom was to the early modern age. As you know, freedom -- freedom of thought, speech, religion, politics, economics, national independence -- stamped nearly all important historical struggles from the Reformation to the French Revolution and beyond. We are still under freedom's spell. But at some point after the French Revolution, equality eclipsed even freedom as a value and now plays a larger role than ever in our debates, polities, and aspirations."[3]

"Your subject reminds me of Robert Frost's poem, 'The Black Cottage.' There the poet ponders Jefferson's famous lines in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created free and equal. It is 'a hard mystery,' Frost says. The idea is so radical that people don't know what to do with it:

But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.[4]

"Yes," my professor said. "It is a hard mystery."

We waited at Hill Street to let the traffic near the campus clear.

"As you know," Tonsor resumed, as soon as we could walk again, "I advise my students to be alert to historical development. By historical development I mean neither the ideological distortions that you see in the Hegelian dialectic, nor the Whig notion that the 'past is prologue,' nor the nationalists' Darwinistic chest-thumping, nor the Marxian scheme that imposes a theory of scientific inevitability on the historical record. None of that is history. That is ideology -- a one-size-fits-all ideology. History is an empirical discipline. I want students to explore historical development empirically. I want them to order their thinking in a disciplined manner, which means, first, examining the symbolic record men have left behind and, second, basing their interpretation on the canons of reason, logic, and evidence. 

"History is also a humanistic inquiry. So it is important that students understand the meaning of any given development to the human person in community. What are the implications -- morally, spiritually, politically, socially, culturally -- for the human beings experiencing that development?"

I thought: Tonsor's advice to students was about as succinct a statement as I'd heard of the normative method that had been developed by historians over the last two centuries. It was the method championed by the German historian Leopold von Ranke in the mid-nineteenth century. But nothing stays the same in the modern age. The Rankean method had come under withering fire by the time I was in graduate school. In fact, the Rankean ideal was the subject of a book I had been encouraged to read, That Noble Dream, by Peter Novick. The University of Chicago historian was wholly skeptical of the quest for historical objectivity -- it was a myth.[5] Not that anyone was arguing that history was a nomothetic science; it was as far away from Platonic absolutes as a field could be. But historians influenced by postmodern theory were drawn to the other extreme, that history was just another literary genre; as such, it was nothing more than subjective, relativistic "narratives" filled with tentative truth-claims. Tonsor in his Aristotelian way rejected both extremes -- rejected the view of history as a rigorous nomothetic science and rejected the view of history as a mere literary genre. History for him was the sweet spot in between. It was an empirical discipline that valued evidence, facts, reasoning, and veracity; it was also a humanistic inquiry that plumbed how man's interior struggles and external confrontations and accommodations with reality left a record that subsequent generations could examine. This record helps us understand what human beings believed and valued. 

I further appreciated that Tonsor did not confine exploration of the past to "the written record" as so many historians taught, but to the larger "the symbolic record" since he himself liberally used art, iconography, music, and architecture in his intellectual history and cultural criticism. His return to the topic at hand pulled me out of my meditations on the complex nature of historical inquiry.

"In the case of equality," Tonsor said, "the development has been exceedingly complex. The idea is more convoluted, has meant more different things, has undergone more transformations, than just about any other idea in the modern age.[6] Would you agree?"

"I would!" I said, excited that Tonsor was sharing his book proposal with me. "Recently at Mass the reading was from Matthew,[7] the parable about all the laborers getting the same wage, even the ones who show up near the end of the day. It caused quite a ruckus. People didn't get it then, and we don't get it now." 

I continued: "There are so many different ways to look at the idea of equality because there are so many different arenas in which the struggle for equality has taken place. It's been humankind's running struggle, I suppose, since Hammurabi and Moses. The priests -- they have to define what religious equality looks like. Are all human persons equal by virtue of having souls and being created in the image and likeness of God? The judges -- they have to work out what the equality of all persons under the law looks like. The politicians -- they have to determine political equality through norms like one man one vote. The entrepreneurs -- they must seek economic equality by eliminating barriers to entering the marketplace and obstacles to growing their businesses. The social theorists -- they come up with redistributive policies like guaranteed income and school vouchers to give every disadvantaged family a ladder up." 

"You are referring to Milton Friedman," observed Tonsor. "One of our most creative thinkers on the right when it comes to the problem of equality and the related idea of equity. And then there are the abstract philosophers who continue to spin out their ethereal theories. They can be interesting and not altogether unproductive. But it's important to note that when a philosopher like John Rawls writes about equality, he is only ratifying changes that have already occurred in a Sitz im Leben, in a real historical and cultural context."[8]  

II.

I hardly heard what Tonsor last said because a policy idea suddenly occurred to me, out of the blue: "What if we provided a national income for every American adult below a certain line of adjusted gross income, and tied that income to the nation's economic performance. In any given year, if the economy did well, and more revenues came in to the Treasury, then the income floor would be higher. Giving everyone the dignity of a minimum income would satisfy the left. And giving everyone a stake in robust economic growth would satisfy the right. Maybe such a vision of the common good could unite left and right," I offered, steeling myself against his usual charge, that I was being Pollyannaish. 

"It will never happen," he said grumpily. "Still, you should write your idea up for National Review. They might publish it."

III.

After a few moments my professor continued: "What I find especially fascinating is the distance between all the paeans to equality -- by the political scientists, philosophers, Marxist theorists, and historians -- and the absence of equality in the world as we find it. As you know, works dealing with the organization of human society tend to divide into how society is, or how it ought to be: into descriptive or prescriptive treatments. So: Machiavelli in The Prince wrote descriptively; Plato in the Republic wrote prescriptively. Christopher Jencks in Inequality wrote descriptively; Huxley in Island wrote prescriptively. But no author can claim to have found true equality in our civilization. Is this not strange? In a day when demands for equality are at an all-time high, when the rhetoric of equality is at a fever pitch, when the promise of equality is a staple of political life, the fact is that while certain kinds of equality have increased over the past two centuries, there is, overall, little enough by way of genuine equality.[9] 

"Muhammad Ali seeks more political and economic equality. But he is who he is and earns what he earns because of a peculiar combination of genetics, metabolism, training, and opportunity that can only be described as extraordinary. No amount of political or economic equality can suppress that fact.[10]

"And so it is that our experience of individuals and of society is not the experience of equality but rather the experience of the most intense and pervasive inequality. And yet the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence asserted that 'all men are created equal.' Surely there is a contradiction in American political theory in particular and in Western political theory as a whole between prescriptive and descriptive social and political analysis. So we must ask, what exactly does the clause mean? Did it mean the same thing to Thomas Jefferson as it did to the son of a hardscrabble farmer in south-central Illinois named Abraham Lincoln?[11]

"The idea of equality is central to understanding the American experience. It is the fundamental idea that lies behind the American Revolution and the extraordinary society we in America have created. More important still, the idea of equality has transformed not only the political life and society of the United States but also the life and society of the world.[12] 

"Yes, the notion of equality has been the single most potent revolutionary force the world has ever seen. Over and over again in the course of the past 200 years, mankind has defied tradition and status, blood and accumulated usage, in the hope of regenerating and recreating society. More often than not these revolutions have ended in failure and even a diminution rather than an increase in equality."

"Thus confirming Orwell's quip," I said, "that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others?"

"Yes," Tonsor chuckled. "Orwell's mordant wit gets straight to the heart of the matter: Ideologues have been manipulating the idea of equality for two centuries now. Still, it is equality that has provided the dynamism, the moving force that has energized modern history. The great liberal and leftist revolutions of the past two centuries have all been made in the name of equality."[13] 

____________

Notes

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "A Few Unequal and Preliminary Thoughts," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), pp. 63-65.

[2] This statement stretches the chronology found in J. B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought (Kindle ed.), p. 8; Bury's book is favorably cited by Tonsor and informed some of his thinking on the subject. See Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, p. 65.

[3] Again, this statement stretches the chronology found in J. B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, p. 8. See Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, p. 65.

[4] Robert Frost, "The Black Cottage," lines 64, 68-70, in North of Boston (1915). Many thanks to W. Winston Elliott III for reminding me of the origin of those lines.

[5] Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[6] Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, p. 63.

[7] Matthew 20: 1-16.

[8] Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, p. 63. 

[9] Ibid., p. 64.

[10] Ibid., p. 65.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., p. 68.

[13] Ibid.

Tonsor: Intellectual History: The Romantic Garden II

I.

After Tonsor finished his lecture on Romantic gardens and landscapes, he packed his satchel with the notes and books he had brought to class. I remained in my seat -- motionless, ruminating, processing all that I had just heard. It felt as though my mind had been stung by the proverbial torpedo fish, likened to Socrates because he paralyzed his interlocutors with probing questions and dazzling intellect.[1]

As my professor left the lectern and approached and asked, knowing he was being ironic, "Did the lecture convey anything of interest to you, Mr. Whitney?"

"It certainly did," I said. "It was the best lecture I've heard you give. I'm still taking in what you said during the last 90 minutes. I've read a good deal about landscape architecture but have never heard the things you taught us today. Landscapes will never look the same."

"Landscapes frame our lives, do they not? As you know, with paintings it behooves us to pay attention to the frame because the frame interprets the picture. It's the same with a man. You cannot understand all the dimensions of a man until you know the landscape he grew up in." 

"What was the landscape like where you grew up?"

Saul Steinberg's famous cover,
"View of the World from Ninth Avenue"

"It was the landscape of central Illinois, in the Great River country. Of course, Saul Steinberg and the East Coast cognoscenti would laugh at my saying there's anything remarkable about it. They disparagingly call it 'flyover country.' But for people who have eyes to see, it's the very heart of America's heartland. And it's not just flat cornfields either. Interspersed with the cornfields are upland woods of oak and hickory; bottomland forests of silver maple and sycamores; and the topographic transitions between them that separate the glaciated tableland on top from the riparian floodplains below. There is even the occasional island of tall-grass prairie that makes one marvel at how hardscrabble pioneers ever tilled the soil. What pulls the entire scene together is the panoramic vastness of the Illinois prairie peninsula. The sense of space is liberating!

"This past July, when Caroline and I were driving back to my hometown of Jerseyville, I started looking at the different kinds of lines in the heartland landscape. The most dominant lines reflect the checkerboard pattern of township-and-range surveys bequeathed by Thomas Jefferson. His vision for the Old Northwest gives us those long, straight roads that follow the original survey lines. Other lines are sinuous, usually where roads follow the meandering of rivers or the curve of lakes. Still other lines characterize the way farmers grow things to conserve the soil. Most apparent are the lines of trees, windbreaks to shelter the farmhouse and barns and fields from blizzards. More subtle than the windbreaks are the lines among the crops. There are the furrows made by the plough, of course, like a Rembrandt etching that follows the contours of the land. Then there are lines separating the ocher-green of ripening corn from the dusk-green of maturing soybeans from the yellow-green of flowering milo; lines separating crop from the spring-green of grass in the creases of the hills; lines separating crop from stubble; lines separating crop from the fallow earth. I suppose only someone who grew up on a farm cares about such things, but it's the frame that interprets me."

"I'm no farmer," I said, "but on my road trips I try and understand the landscapes I drive through. There's no such thing as a boring road trip, even across the Great Plains --"

Tonsor's eyes smiled and he interrupted: "You mean where the earth ends? Once, when my family was driving across the Great Plains, my son asked if we were going to the end of the earth. I said, 'No, it's not the end of the earth, but it's what the end of the earth would look like!'"

He laughed in little puffs and I with him, saying I'd experienced the same thing with my family. "They think I'm weird because I love driving across Kansas. When I studied geography, one of the things I most enjoyed was analyzing landscapes not just for their utility but also for their beauty and sublimity. One of my favorite Willa Cather passages, from My Antonia, captures the feeling: 'I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh easy blowing wind; and in the earth itself as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide; and underneath it herds of buffalo were galloping, galloping --'"[2]

"Yes," said Tonsor in laconic affirmation. "I'd add Walt Whitman to your collection of favorite passages. He was quite smitten with the prairie lands of the Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas country. After visiting the Colorado Rockies he told a reporter that 'much as the grandeur of the mountains impressed him, the impression of the plains will remain longest with him.'[3] In Specimen Days, which is his travel log out West, he wrote: 'As to scenery ... while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone, and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but that the Prairies and Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the aesthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape.'"[4]

"Whitman got it right!" I said. "Just about anything west of the Hundredth Meridian is magical. As for Kansas country, especially in a place like the Flint Hills, both landscape and sky are sublime. Who cannot feel overwhelmed by those towering cumulonimbus clouds on a hot summer afternoon during the monsoon season. I always carry a 35 mm. camera in the car to try and capture the sublimity of those moments. Speaking of which, where did you learn about Romantic landscapes and English gardens?"

"My earliest experience of the romantic landscape, believe it or not, was also in the Illinois country. West of Champaign, along the Sangamon River, is a remarkable park on the old Allerton estate. Nowadays it's managed by the University of Illinois. But around the turn of the century, an eccentric artist and philanthropist named Robert Allerton transformed acres of prairie outside his mansion into gardens and forests. There's not only the requisite herb patch and bowling lawn, but also a parterre garden and various flower plots, all surrounded by woods and meadows that overlook the Sangamon River -- the same Sangamon River that Abraham Lincoln knew.

"Given your interest in landscape architecture, you will want to make the trek to Allerton not just for its natural beauty but also for the remarkable sculptures it contains. Perhaps in your art classes you have seen a photograph of Emil-Antoine Bourdelle's 'Death of the Last Centaur' or of Carl Milles's 'Sun Singer.' Experiencing the vistas in person leaves one alternately feeling the satisfaction of classical beauty and the awe of romantic grandeur. I'm sure this morning's lecture had its origins in the many happy hours I spent exploring the park."

"Death of the Last Centaur," by Emil-Antoine Bourdelle, Allerton Park, Monticello, IL
Photo at URL http://www.iloveallertonpark.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Centaure-5-8-2012.jpg

II.

Later that week I was having lunch with Tonsor and Caroline and the subject of Allerton Park came up.

"Oh, the old Allerton estate!" said Caroline, delighted by the very name. "When Stephen and I were in college we used to bicycle in the park. There was something special about leaving the cornfields behind and making your way through the dark brooding forests to 'The Sun Singer.' Stephen was quite taken by the drama of the setting."

"On one of my road trips back to Colorado, maybe I'll stop at Allerton," I said to be polite, doubtful that I would ever really get around to visiting such an out-of-the-way place.

"You should," said Tonsor authoritatively. 

III.

"The Sun Singer," mixed media, by Caroline Tonsor.
From the title page of a chapbook that Caroline Tonsor
made for Stephen Tonsor (2009)

It would be three decades before I would finally make the trek to Allerton Park and experience the work of Bourdelle and Milles in surroundings of haunting beauty.

__________

[1] For the original reference to Socrates as a torpedo fish, see Plato's dialogue Meno.

[2] Willa Cather, My Antonia.

[3] For Whitman's observation see Robert R. Hubach, "Walt Whitman in Kansas," (Topeka: Kansas Historical Society, May 1941), pp. 150-54; at URL https://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-historical-quarterly-walt-whitman-in-kansas/12865. 

[4] Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (1879).

Tonsor #12 -- Conservatism, Liberalism, Reaction

View of Washington, DC, on the approach to National.

September 17, 1987, was the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. That morning I was on a jet bound for Washington, DC, to see one of the world's great charters of ordered liberty.

The descent was turbulent. The view from the left side of the plane offered a welcome distraction. On the approach to National I could look east onto the Washington Monument, Capitol Hill, and neoclassical buildings on either side of the Mall. The White House was barely visible, but the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials were vivid and close. This first visit to the nation's capital made me feel like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Besides being infected with a corny kind of enthusiasm for historical sites, I was truly stirred by the monuments of civic republicanism.

But something else was stirring, too. Looking out at nation's capital, I thought the bleached monuments made the city look like a colony of the ancient Roman Empire. The scene reminded me of Stephen Tonsor's words: "Do not become corrupted by the Imperial City, Mr. Whitney. It's where scholars go to die."

In his autobiography, Edward Gibbon recounted his first trip to Rome where he experienced his "Capitoline vision." He ascended steps that overlooked the ruins of ancient Forum, musing as barefooted friars sang Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter. Suddenly he conceived the project to write what the world would later know as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).

My view from the plane did not inspire a correspondingly ambitious project. But I was working hard to understand what Tonsor had said one week before, after our first History 416 class. It was the conversation that left me scratching my head, yet I felt it mattered. What did my professor mean when he said that both "liberal conservatives" and "reactionaries" were his kind of people? How did three quite different -isms -- liberalism, conservatism, reactionaryism -- fit together in one man's head? I sensed that the answer would help me understand not only Tonsor's view of modernity, but also his notions of civilizational decline, cultural decadence, and imperial decay.

*     *     *

On the flight's descent, I found my imagination taking off. I was embarking on a journey that would lead me into territory for which my map had only the broadest contours, and not very accurate contours at that. So the key at the start of the journey was to take Tonsor at his word. No ideologue, the man said that he embraced life's complexities. He contained multitudes.[1]

1. In time I would understand that the conservative in Tonsor was grounded in the West's Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman patrimony. Our civilization's first order had been informed by that synthesis during the Middle Ages. You can see it in the way St. Thomas Aquinas baptized and then went beyond the teachings of Aristotle. It's why the civilization Aquinas helped build was called "Christendom." Significantly Tonsor, a man of the modern age, did not cling to the forms of bygone Christendom. He would later tell me that a book like James J. Walsh's The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries was too nostalgic for his tastes. "The good old days," he like to say, "were not all that good."[2] So it was not the forms but rather the essence of the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman synthesis that inspired him -- its ethical precepts, religious insights, and spiritual comforts in a world wondrously made by its Creator. In essence, then, the conservatives were the guardians of civilization, men and women alive to Tocqueville's habits of the heart that are formed in families, religious communities, civil society, and local politics.

2. In time I would understand that the liberal in Tonsor celebrated the spirit of liberty in human nature. That spirit was always present in the West but emerged quite forcefully in the Enlightenment and challenged Christendom directly. (The Renaissance had challenged Christendom indirectly.) Our civilization succeeded in absorbing many of the resulting intellectual, moral, and spiritual tensions between Christendom and the Enlightenment, but these binary sources of authority led to the de facto renaming of our civilization. Henceforward we would be "the West" or "Western civilization" instead of Christendom. The Enlightenment was epitomized by Thomas Jefferson, whose newly articulated natural right to the pursuit of happiness would prove to be one of the most potent concepts to emerge from the so-called Age of Reason. The pursuit of happiness would justify the efforts of individuals to free themselves from "oppressive authority, outworn customs, arbitrary rules, unfair regulations, and tyrannical taboos." The process of liberation was good -- to a point -- so long as the pursuit was properly ordered to man's imperfect and imperfectible nature. Tonsor was no utopian.

Allow me to pause to emphasize Tonsor's argument that, in a healthy civilization, the liberal type who struggles to expand the empire of freedom must be balanced by the conservative type who is the guardian of the civilization's institutions and teachings. They are complementary types, these two -- the liberal reformer and conservative guardian -- and both are needed in productive tension. Indeed, it was that productive tension that gave rise to the dynamism of the West that we identify with modernity. Tonsor was teaching me to see modernity as successive experiments in freedom -- which sometimes turned out to be excessive experiments in freedom that had to be tested and sifted in light of our older Judeo-Christian patrimony.

3. In time I would understand that the reactionary in Tonsor required me to abandon the security of my Merriam-Webster preconceptions. Reaction, I would learn, was not a temporal concept -- it was not the politics of nostalgia that sought to turn back the clock to some mythic golden age. It was impossible to go back to anything. Rather, reaction was a philosophical or political or perhaps even a sociological concept at the center of what Tonsor called the "West's inner history."

Aristotle, son of the physician Nichomachus 

I had difficulty grasping Tonsor's unconventional notion of the reactionary, but my road-to-Damascus epiphany came when I could see the idea through his eyes as an Aristotelian.[3] If one sees the reactionary as a kind of physician in the Aristotelian mold, then the type makes sense.[4] The Aristotelian physician viewed diseases in terms of excesses or defects of elements in the body. Applied to politics, we see that the reactionary is an Aristotelian-like physician who seeks to restore the balance between the change element and the continuity element in a culture. Reaction is thus the cure for any disease of excess or defect in the body politic. It applied to the excess of liberalism (too much change) and to the excess of conservatism (too much continuity). When confronting liberals, the reactionary sought to reintroduce order in a society whose abuse of liberty had led to widespread disorder, anarchy, and licentiousness; thus the reactionary, seeing liberty abused, fought for order restored. When confronting conservatives, the reactionary sought to enliven the patient with an injection of reform that a dynamic society needs to stay healthy; otherwise the patient does not thrive.

Conservatism. Liberalism. Reaction. These three elements made sense in dynamic relation to one another and as part of the organic development of our civilization. Tonsor adopted the role of the Aristotelian physician. To preserve the West's humane order, the reactionary in him sought a balance between the liberal push for innovation and the conservative temperament for preservation. Thus the civilizational task of the reactionary-liberal-conservative to balance change and continuity was in no way ideological. From generation to generation the ideal is always evolving, always developing out of the tension between innovation and conservation. In his ethical critique of modernity, Tonsor's task was to discern the degree to which change and continuity were in right relation to one another.

I knew that it would take time fully to digest the meaning of these three concepts and their relation to one another. Tonsor's thought was not always easy to understand. His personal interactions were not always easy to navigate either, and in fact could get in the way of understanding his thought. As his colleague, fellow historian John Willson, observed, "Steve was often an enigma to me."[5] Willson's observation reminds me of a passage from Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"[6]

*     *     *

With the plane's descent, the nation's civic monuments disappeared from view, one by one. Then came the bump of the wheels skidding on concrete followed by the rapid deceleration that pushed me forward in my seat. Soon I would be afoot in the Imperial City.

________________________

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 247.
[2] Bernard Tonsor interview with GW, Jerseyville, IL, July 1, 2014.
[3] Ann Tonsor Zeddies correspondence with GW, January 26, 2015.
[4] Aristotle's father, Nichomachus, was the court physician to the king of Macedon.
[5] John Willson correspondence with GW, November 8, 2016.
[6] My thanks to Winston Elliott for this passage by Dickens.

American Founding -- John Adams 4

His Rotundity -- His Own Worst Enemy

Like any public figure who lives into his nineties, Adams experienced his share of setbacks -- more than a few of his own making. Isn't one of the most difficult things any of us learns is how to deal with our own personality and its liabilities? Adams fessed up that he had a difficult personality. He could be his own worst enemy -- ironic given that he once wrote Abigail a letter cataloging all her faults!

Examining the numerous liabilities of his personality, biographer John Ferling observes, "Adams struck many people as vain, irritable, irascible, supercilious, and tactless. He maintained a stiffly formal and aloof demeanor, what one acquaintance called a habitually 'ceremonious' manner.... Abigail once scolded him for his tendency to indulge in 'intolerable forbidding expecting Silence' while in the midst of a conversation; 'tis impossible for a Stranger to be tranquil in your presence'" [Ferling 170].

Moreover, he nursed a tendency toward brooding pessimism. As he revealed to his diary on the eve of the Second Continental Congress -- the Congress that would declare independence -- "I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate. We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune -- in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety" [McCullough 23].

Adams also had a hot temper. He managed to keep his outbursts confined to private conversations, but there was widespread conjecture that he might be emotionally unstable. One of the most egregious outbursts occurred the only known time Adams demeaned a subordinate to his face. In the presidential mansion one day he dressed down an aide, James McHenry, unjustly accusing him of scheming with Hamilton to bring Adams down. Then came the volley of insults. He frothed that that "foreigner," Hamilton, was "the most restless, impatient, artful, indefatigable, and unprincipled intriguer in the United States, if not the world." "The bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” had a “superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off.” Finally Adams decried “the profligacy of his life; his fornications, adulteries and his incests.” Such a surprising outburst, this, that McHenry later wrote down what happened in letters to friends and family. He ventured that the second president of the United States was "actually insane" [McCullough 538-39].

Besides a penchant for being his own worst enemy, there were situations that arose which Adams thought might do harm to his reputation.

1. At great risk to his young law career, Adams defended the Redcoats who were involved in the Boston Massacre because he believed that the law rather than popular passions should rule Massachusetts.

2. Adams's two terms as Vice President were frustrating for a man of his restlessness, vigor, brilliance, and vanity. Complaining to Abigail, he opined, "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." After eight years of biding his time, a lesser man might have given up and gone home.

3. The four Alien and Sedition Acts as well as the so-called Midnight appointments to the judiciary -- on the eve of Jefferson taking office -- made Adams look thin-skinned, unprincipled, and unpresidential.

Scumbag: James Calender

4. Perhaps his most bitter setback was losing the White House to Jefferson in the Election of 1800. Adams despaired that his reputation could ever recover from such an ugly campaign. We think politicking is a dirty business today, but we forget that it was even dirtier in the early republic. In 1800, Jefferson and his allies roused an unprincipled journalist, James Callender, to attack Adams's character in the Richmond Examiner. The sitting president was accused of being a monarchist, a warmonger, and even a hermaphrodite who had "neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." Callender especially wanted to drive home the impression that Adams was insane with rage. He spread the unfounded rumor that Adams once became so enraged he ripped off his wig, threw it on the floor, and stomped on it [McCullough 536-37].

It gets worse. Callender, with Jefferson's blessings, accused Adams of importing two mistresses shortly after being elected president in 1796. Ridiculous rumor, of course, but in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, this was a serious allegation. One of the mistresses supposedly was from France, the other from Germany. As Alf Mapp humorously puts it, "While retaining the French charmer ... Adams supposedly had returned her rival to her native Germany. The Pennsylvania Germans were incensed, not so much by reports of sexual immorality as by the thought that the president would reject a fräulein while holding fast to a mademoiselle [Mapp 55]. Because Adams couldn't carry Pennsylvania, he wasn't reelected, and to Adams, this further robbed him of respect.

*     *     *

This essay is the fourth in a series on John Adams. The Adams series served as the basis for my talk accompanying the exhibition, John Adams Unbound, organized by the Boston Public Library and the American Library Association. The talk was given at the Loutit District Library, Grand Haven, Michigan, on June 30, 2011.

This Adams series is posted on July 2 because he thought that was the day our country's independence should be pondered and celebrated.

For more on presidents and leadership, see http://www.allpresidents.org/.

American Founding -- John Adams 1

America's greatest philosopher president

Once Forgotten Founding Father and Philosopher President Makes a Comeback.... Why?

Ten years ago, David McCullough told audiences something that still has the capacity to surprise us. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author said that he initially intended to write a joint biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. At first his concern was that Adams could not hold his own next to Jefferson. But the more research he did, the more his concern shifted. At some point he realized that Jefferson could not hold his own next to Adams, so he decided to devote the biography to our second rather than to our third president. As the distingished historian Pauline Maier notes, "McCullough's biography of Adams inevitably has a lot to say about Jefferson, but on virtually all points of comparison between the two men, Jefferson comes in second."

High recommendation, that, and arguably so. John Adams's public life makes for a compelling story. Consider the number of firsts that he is associated with during the early days of the republic. He was:

• the lead author of the oldest constitution in the world still in use (that of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, dating from 1780);
• the first vice president of the United States;
• the first president who lived in the White House;
• the first president who was challenged for re-election, indeed, the only president in U.S. history who was challenged by the sitting vice president (Thomas Jefferson);
• the first one-term president (because he lost to Jefferson);
• the first commander in chief who had to direct major military operations off U.S. territory (the Quasi War that was fought against the superpower of the day, France, in the Caribbean Sea);
• adapting Plato's term, "philosopher king," let us also call Adams our first "philosopher president" -- the best we have ever had.

All of these points make Adams worthy of admiration, but the last point makes him worthy of the fame he coveted and that we posthumously confer on him. And yet, from my experience in the classroom, I am not certain that most Americans are aware of his intellectual achievements.

One of the greatest first ladies, Abigail Adams

I will come back to the intellectual achievements of our philosopher president later in these remarks, but first let's remind ourselves that, in the pre-David-McCullough world, John Adams was our "forgotten founding father." If you go to Washington, DC -- the city of great monuments to presidents -- there is not a single statue of John Adams. His absence in Statuary Hall is especially conspicuous in light of the statue of his cousin, Samuel Adams, and the marker where his son, John Quincy Adams, died at his desk. There is not a single statue of him in Philadelphia, even though he was the most ardent defender of independence at the Second Continental Congress. There is not a single statue of him at the U.S. Naval Academy, even though the first vessels of our permanent U.S. Navy were launched during his administration. The most prominent statue of him you'll find is in his hometown of Quincy (Braintree), Massachusetts; yet even this memorial was erected just a few years ago, after McCullough's biography.




"Dearest Friend" -- John to Abigail, September 14, 1774

Adams himself predicted that he would be the forgotten founding father. To Benjamin Rush, he wrote with mock humility, “Mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me. I wish them not. Panegyrical romances will never be written, nor flattering orations spoken, to transmit me to posterity in brilliant colors. No, nor in true colors. All but the last I loathe” [John Adams to Benjamin Rush, March 23, 1809].

Why the neglect relegating Adams to the founding fathers' back bench? One explanation is that his presidency was shoe-horned between two very dominant figures -- George Washington, the indispensable man who became a legend in his lifetime, and Thomas Jefferson, who was not keen on rehabilitating Adams publicly. Moreover, Jefferson and his party enjoyed longevity in contrast to the Federalists, who would soon die out as a political force. Jeffersonians set the nation's political agenda for more than two decades following the Adams administration. For many decades, the New Englander got lost in a Virginia crowd.

And even though John Adams's son, John Quincy Adams, won the White House in 1825, he also was a one-termer. The Adams name again went into decline because Andrew Jackson booted JQA out of the White House in 1829. The succeeding "Age of Jackson" was not friendly to the Adams brand. As a consequence, the reputations of our 2nd and 6th presidents suffered in the popular imagination.

*     *     *

This essay is the first in a series on John Adams. The Adams series served as the basis for my talk accompanying the exhibition, John Adams Unbound, organized by the Boston Public Library and the American Library Association. The talk was given at the Loutit District Library, Grand Haven, Michigan, on June 30, 2011.

This Adams series is posted on July 2 because he thought that was the day our country's independence should be pondered and celebrated.

For more on presidents and leadership, see http://www.allpresidents.org/.

American Founding -- Top Ten

The professor in me is always curious to discover what a class finds most memorable -- what nuggets will they carry with them long after our course together ends? By way of review, I surveyed my OLLI class at Aquinas College during the last meeting (May 19, 2011), asking them what they most enjoyed learning in "The Amazing American Revolution." More than 50 students participated in polishing these nuggets.

10. Don't believe everything you hear on cable TV. Most commentators don't know the founding well at all. To get a better grasp of what Gordon Wood calls "the most important event in American history, bar none," it's useful to correct some misconceptions.

    



Misinformation began early in the republic's history. This painting is typical in that it depicts the founders as unified statesmen possessing calm resolve. Yet at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, 16 delegates would not even sign the document they had debated. This 1856 painting by Junius Brutus Stearns -- titled "Washington as a Statesman" -- shows the General addressing the Constitutional Convention. It is at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. By the way, Washington spoke only once at the Convention, toward the end of the deliberations.


• Despite assertions to the contrary by some cable TV commentators and pols, the founders were a diverse lot when it came to religion, philosophy, and politics. That's why the question -- What would the founders do? -- is tricky. True, they shared the conviction that King George III and Lord North had violated the English constitution to an unconscionable degree. Applying the principles of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, they agreed to throw off the British Crown (though some were willing to crown George Washington in his stead). They also subscribed to the idea of "ordered liberty" more than we do. Beyond that, the founders could not even agree on what the American republic should look like. 16 of the delegates to the Constitutional convention refused to sign the document. Splitting up into Federalists and Antifederalists, most of the former championed a commercial republic (Hamilton); many of the latter, an agrarian republic (Jefferson).... You could hardly find two more diverse leaders than John Dickinson and Sam Adams. The intellectual antipathy between John Adams and Tom Paine was palpable.... Perhaps it was precisely the tensions among them that led the founders to become the greatest generation of statesmen ever.

The most famous duel in American history: Aaron Burr, our sitting vice president, killed Alexander Hamilton, our first treasury secretary, in Weehawken, NJ, on July 11, 1804.

• It is mistaken to think that the founders basically got along well with one another. Some wore white hats; some wore black hats. Like the rest of us, they nursed resentments, held grudges, and had knock-down-drag-outs. Recall: a sitting vice president shot and killed the first secretary of the treasury in a duel. George and Martha Washington felt personally betrayed by Jefferson.... Then there's John Adams, who had a plethora of apparent foibles. He could not stand Thomas Paine. He poked fun of John Dickinson for hiding behind the skirts of his Quaker wife and mother-in-law. He envied the credit George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson received for the founding. By the Election of 1800, Adams and Jefferson were not even on speaking terms. Each of these "statesmen" had mobilized partisan newspapers to write such scurrilous things about the other that it is a miracle they ever restored their friendship. The campaign rhetoric in 1800 was much more vicious than anything you see today, even on cable TV.




Ever wonder how Gouverneur Morris lost his left leg?


• It is also mistaken to think that all the founders were buckled-shoe Puritans in their private lives. Several of our statesmen were not "family values" people at all. Luther Martin was such a lush that historians like Gordon Lloyd joke that it would be more accurate to call him "Luther Martini." Gouverneur Morris's many affairs on both sides of the Atlantic -- including sharing Talleyrand's mistress -- gives new meaning to the idea of (to use his words in the Preamble) "domestic tranquility." While Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton had a notorious affair with the financially desperate Maria Reynolds, making him vulnerable to bribery. (As Hamilton himself later confessed, "I took the bill out of my pocket and gave it to her. Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable").... In his Autobiography Benjamin Franklin admitted he frequently visited prostitutes; moreover, he was not very considerate of his wife Deborah, abandoning her for long periods of time; and he refused to reconcile with his son when he declared with the Tories. George Washington was still flirting with Sally Fairfax after his engagement to Martha. Washington's famous will, in which he released his slaves (the only founder to do so), certainly betrays mixed motives upon closer inspection. Thomas Jefferson was not only accused of sleeping with his teenage slave, Sally Hemings, but also with trying to seduce his neighbor's wife, Betsy Walker. The sins and peccadillos of our founders would fill an Everest of People magazines.... But that's okay. It is important to see the founders as they were. They were not marble statues, cold and unapproachable and inaccessible. When we bring them down from Mt. Olympus, when we see them as they were, warts and all, we can respect them all the more as flawed humans who nevertheless accomplished much good.... Plus, we can identify with them. If these flawed human beings were capable of such heroic personal sacrifice in the service of a greater good, then perhaps we really can follow in their footsteps and expect better from ourselves.

Politically, America was founded as a constitutional republic. But direct democracy was practiced in early New England town meetings. This illustration is from a civil government text used in the early 20th century.

• It is misleading to assert that America was founded as a democracy. That statement is only partially true. Constitutionally, America was founded as a republic. The populist element in our early history was situational. Ad hoc direct democracy arose on the Mayflower, in New England town meetings, and along the frontier. Moreover, our civil society, marketplace, and militias were democratically organized. The democratic principle in our culture would spill inexorably over into politics during the Progressive Era a hundred years after the founding. But the national government would not change significantly until many decades after the founding generation had passed. Strictly speaking, the national frame of government that came out of Philadelphia in 1787 was republican. A republican constitution by definition balances rule by the one (presidency), with rule by the few (Senate and Supreme Court), with rule by the many (House). America was founded as a constitutional republic. 

• I sometimes hear it said, erroneously, that America was the world's first republic. Actually there were numerous republics that preceded America. Ancient Carthage was a prominent republic that contended with Rome for control of the Mediterranean. Ancient Rome was a republic for almost 500 years. Medieval Venice was a republic for more than 1,000 years. Prior to the American Revolution, in the 17th century, the Dutch formed a powerful commercial republic, and Britain experimented with republicanism under Cromwell. It is more accurate to say that we were the modern world's first constitutional republic.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton (Maryland) was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence and the last surviving signer of the document. He was educated in Europe by the Jesuits. This serene oil painting, by Thomas Sully in 1834, fails to convey all the suffering Carroll and his family endured both as Catholics and as nation founders. Bradley Birzer's authoritative biography, American Cicero, brings to life one of the most fascinating statesman of the founding era.

• "America is a Protestant nation" -- a largely true statement at the time of the founding, but one that needs qualifying. Most citizens were indeed Protestant, but two percent of the population was Catholic and heterodox faiths abounded, as did people who professed no faith at all. In British North America there were numerous Quaker settlements, for example, and many of our foremost founders were either Unitarian (John Adams) or Deists (Jefferson, Franklin, Paine). Only once in his public life did George Washington speak the name of Jesus. (He was nominally Anglican.) Only one of the nine most prominent founders, John Jay, was a devout, orthodox, church-going Protestant during the revolutionary period. During one particularly tense session at the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin suggested that the delegates pray, to which Alexander Hamilton quipped that Americans had no need of foreign intervention. There is no question that most American settlers were Protestant, and that most of the founders were Protestant. But it is also accurate to say that a small number of prominent founders were like flying buttresses -- supportive of the church but happy outside of it.

Texas vaqueros helped win the American Revolution. This historical plaque in New Orleans commemorates the role of Spanish Governor Bernardo de Galvez in defeating the British. Galvez fed Spanish and American armies with cattle from Franciscan ranches around San Antonio, in the Spanish province of Texas.

• When speaking of the War for Independence, it is misleading to concentrate solely on the upper East Coast between, say, Fort Ticonderoga and Yorktown. To do so is to neglect other critically important theaters in the Western Hemisphere. Historically, Boston and New York publishing houses tended to focus on their own region to the neglect of (1) the Carolinas, which saw some of the heaviest fighting in the war; (2) the Caribbean, where the French navy kept most of the Royal navy pinned down; (3) the West, where George Rogers Clark subdued Britain's Indian allies, even in far-off places around Fort Detroit; (4) the Southwest, where Spanish Governor Bernardo de Galvez kept the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River cleared of the British, with even Spanish vaqueros in Texas playing a logistical role. Each theater contributed to the successful quest of the Americans who sought independence. It's not just an East Coast thing.

      Also:

• July 4th, 1776, is not technically Independence Day. As John Adams pointed out, July 2nd was the day when the Second Continental Congress voted on Richard Henry Lee's resolution (introduced on June 7, 1776) to separate from Great Britain. July 4th was the day the Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence, setting forth the rationale for the break with Britain. It was intended for both for domestic and international consumption.

• George Washington was a great man, but he was not a great battlefield general -- certainly no Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon Bonaparte. In fact, GW lost more battles than he won. His strength lay in his ability to hold a ragtag army together, his example of sacrifice, his intelligence gathering, his holding an international alliance together, and his ability to walk away from power. That is why he was great and it is why we honor him. (Even his enemy, King George III, remarked that Washington's ability to walk away from power made him "the greatest man in the world.")

A set of George Washington's dentures, obviously not made of wood. 

• George Washington did not have wooden teeth. His dentures were made of slave teeth set in ivory that were stained by tea, so they eventually looked like wood. They caused him much difficulty (stories about which prompts laughter at the expense of the Father of our Country).

• It is not true that democracies (and, by extension, representative democracies) do not go to war against one another. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant foreshadowed the "democratic peace theory" in his essay, "Perpetual Peace" (1795). Kant reasoned that a majority of the people would never vote to go to war, unless in self-defense. Therefore, if all nations were constitutional republics, international warfare would end, because there would be no aggressors. It's a bad theory refuted by history. Numerous times a body of people or their representatives have elected to go to war against each other: Athens vs. Sparta; Rome vs. Carthage; Great Britain vs. the U.S. in the War of 1812; the North vs. the South in the Civil War, and both, by the way, were the largest two democracies in the world at the time. 

9. The American War for Independence was both a civil war and a world war. It began as a civil war. A formerly united empire consisting of Englishmen loyal to the Crown split up when about 1/3rd of the colonists in British North America decided they had put up with too many abuses for too long. They justified their violent breakout in the Declaration of Independence, citing some two-dozen specific abuses.... Within three years the conflict morphed into a world war, and here the larger global context is important. England and France had fought four wars in the hundred years leading up to the American Revolution. They had scrapped in Europe, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and North America.... In 1754 a young George Washington precipitated the fourth of these wars in a glen in southwestern Pennsylvania. Britain eventually won the Seven Years War, but at a high price -- literally. The American Revolution grew out of the tensions that arose when Britain, financially strapped, taxed colonials without their consent to ease the crushing debt of empire. Patriot resistance led to the War for Independence, but Britain would end up fighting not just 13 of their former colonies, but also France, Spain, and Netherlands, all of which had scores to settle with the British.... After Saratoga, France came in on the American side hoping to humiliate the British after their own humiliation in the Seven Years War. Although France got the satisfaction of seeing Britain humiliated, her war debts, in turn, would lead to the calling of the Estates General and the outbreak of the French Revolution.... Out of the chaos of the 1790s rose Napoleon, whose wars in turn led to financial troubles that would open up the opportunity for Americans to purchase Louisiana, recently purchased by the French from Spain.... The American revolt is further linked to her former allies through the Haitian slaves who unsuccessfully attempted to break away from France and found the New World's second republic, and to all the South American republics that successfully broke away from Spain. It's all linked -- like that old toy, the barrel of monkeys. The American founding is better understood when seen in all its complex linkage to the broader world.


The neoclassical painter, John Trumbull, actually took part in the scene above, titled "The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775." The painting hangs at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.



8. The casualty rate of the Revolutionary War was much higher than anyone today realizes -- second highest of all our wars. In the Civil War, America lost almost 2 percent of her population. In the Revolutionary War (which was also a civil war), America lost almost 1 percent of her population. Out of a population of 2.5 million, the Americans lost close to 25,000 people by mortal wounds, subsequent infections, and disease.... By contrast, in World War II and the War of 1812, the U.S. lost about 1/3rd of 1 percent of her population. In World War I we lost about 1/10th of 1 percent of our population. In Vietnam we lost an even lower percentage of our population.

It was once common to depict George Washington sporting a Roman toga, symbolic of the old high Roman virtues -- labor, pietas, dignitas, gravitas, and fatum. This period piece from the 1840s, by Horatio Greenough, is part of the Smithsonian collection.

7. The American founders were latter-day Roman republicans. Many could read Latin, were classically educated, and consciously identified with some of the leading republicans of ancient Rome. They especially valued the civic virtue of the ancient Romans that made men capable of great sacrifice for others and for the community.





Cincinnatus put down his plow and took up his sword when he was called to lead Rome against tyrants. In this sculpture (in Cincinnati, OH), the republican leader is handing the fasces, symbol of constitutional authority in Rome, back to the republic's legitimate authorities. Fasces are a common symbol of republican power -- and also the origin of the word "fascist." Fasces are depicted in the U.S. House of Representatives on each side of the rostrum. 


• George Washington was alternately regarded as a Cincinnatus (for laying down his sword and returning to his plow) or Fabius the Delayer (for patiently avoiding a military catastrophe with the British). He also was a great fan of Joseph Addison's play, Cato, which he had performed again and again for his men. In both sculpture and painting, contemporaries frequently portrayed GW in a toga.
• John Adams, an attorney, looked back to the greatest lawyer of ancient times, the Roman republican Cicero, for inspiration. 
• Alexander Hamilton signed his Federalist papers with the name of the early Roman republican, Publius. There is evidence that he signed early papers "Julius Caesar."
• James Madison signed his Federalist papers with the name of the early Roman republican, Publius.
• John Jay signed his Federalist papers with the name of the early Roman republican, Publius.
• In fact, when debating the merits of the Constitution, most of the Federalists and Antifederalists used Roman noms de plume.  
• Nathan Hale's last words -- "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" -- were likely based on words from Joseph Addison's play, Cato.



In this famous sculpture of George Washington by Houdon (in the Virginia Capitol in Richmond), the General and first President of the United States rests his left hand on the fasces, symbol of Roman republican power. Fasces were composed of a bundle of rods around an axe. Compare Washington's pose with that of Cincinnatus, above, who is handing the fasces (power) back to legitimate public authorities.

• It was fashionable for earlier generations of Americans to have Roman names. Did you notice the painting of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 at the top of the page? The artist's name is Junius Brutus Stearns (1810-1885).

6. The American Revolution and founding should be chronologically and spatially s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d, seen as (1) beginning much earlier, (2) including more Indian battles in the West, and (3) ending much later than the conventional wisdom suggests. Following Longfellow's famous poem, we tend to put the start of the Revolution at April 19, 1775, when Lexington and Concord flared up. We conventionally mark the end of the Revolution at either the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 or the Peace of Paris in 1783. But John Adams claimed the American Revolution began much earlier, in a Boston courtroom in February 1761, when James Otis delivered a speech asserting that Americans had the right to interpret English constitutional principles and rights differently from British politicians back home. In fact, according to Adams, many Patriot Americans had already declared their independence from the mother country in their minds and hearts before a shot was fired.... But to mean anything, ideas on parchment had to be backed by victories on battlefields. Americans simply had to wear down the British will to keep them in the empire.... We tend to overlook the importance of the Indian battles. Successfully confronting Indian unrest among the Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, and Miami was critical to the struggle for independence. Many Indian battles, even as late as Fallen Timbers (1794) and Tippecanoe (1811), were due to British agitation of her Indian allies who continued to harass American settlers in the West.... As for an ending date, Jefferson called the Election of 1800 the Second American Revolution. And the War of 1812 was widely perceived to be the Second War for Independence because it was not until the conclusion of that conflict that the British seemed truly resigned to having lost her 13 North American colonies.

In 1794 the Battle of Fallen Timbers took place outside of present-day Toledo, OH. It should be seen in the context of the War for Independence and American Revolution.

5. The American founders, a minority of the population, were gutsy. Given similar circumstances today, we would probably be either Loyalists or fence-sitters. I'd wager that most of us today would not be treasonous but play it safe. Americans in 1776 were, after all, part of the greatest empire on earth. We enjoyed more rights and liberties than any other people. Why risk it all?... John Adams observed that 1/3 of the population was Patriot, 1/3 was Loyalist, and 1/3 was opportunistic or neutral. We are not as animated by constitutional ideals and historic precedents as much as they were. Maybe some of us would tip our hat to the most conservative founder, John Dickinson. But probably not. The War for Independence was a vicious civil war here at home. Even non-combatants paid dearly. We'd seek convenience and try to avoid the pain.... American Patriots were fighting the superpower of the day, against the greatest army on earth and the greatest navy on the seas. The odds of winning were slim. There was much to lose if you committed high treason against the Crown, not least of which was life and limb. Most people are not willing to risk their all.... The American Revolution almost didn't happen. On several occasions, it was almost aborted. That's why I title my course, "The Amazing American Revolution." It is amazing that the founders pulled it off.

4. In its street plan, Washington, DC, is one of the great Baroque (and broke) cities of the world. Architecturally, it looks like a latter-day outpost of Rome. In plan, L'Enfant, Ellicott, and the McMillan Commission all reinforced the classical and baroque motifs. Even as late as the 1930s, FDR's Washington seemed to be competing to become the Third Rome (as were Hitler's Berlin, Mussolini's Rome, and to some extent even Stalin's Moscow).

L'Enfant's street plan for the new capital city appealed to the Baroque imagination.

3. George III was every bit the revolutionary that George Washington was. The king was a revolutionizing tyrant, destroying the English constitution and denying the ancient rights of Englishmen to colonial subjects. His tyranny was as revolutionary as George Washington's principled resistance was. Perhaps the American founding could best be described with the Burkean phrase, "a revolution not made, but prevented." For the revolutionary impulse was largely kept within bounds when compared to the later French Revolution or Russian Revolution. As the historian John Willson suggests, maybe this is the true achievement of the American founders, to form a more perfect union without turning the world upside down.

2. The founders' understanding of freedom was different from ours. They did not think it was the right to do whatever you wanted. They were not libertarians. The founders' understanding of freedom merged two intellectual streams of thought. One was the civic republican tradition, an inheritance of classical, Renaissance, and English Whig thought; it emphasized the citizens' duties to the commonwealth and engendered the habit of putting service before self. The other was the natural rights tradition, influenced by William of Occam, John Locke, and the Enlightenment; it emphasized the government's duty to the individual, especially to protect one's God-given right to life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness. Taken together, both the republican and liberal streams of thought recognize that freedom comprises rights and duties.... Further, freedom must be ordered to be secured; otherwise it can devolve into licentiousness and/or anarchy, as Polybius, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus taught when meditating on the Roman experience.... Gouverneur Morris's 52-word Preamble to the U.S. Constitution offers a sublime lesson in the five conditions that must obtain before a people can be truly free. Every American should know this wonderful little lesson in political philosophy.

The first page of the U.S. Constitution containing Gouverneur Morris's 52-word Preamble, one of the most sublime lessons in political philosophy ever crafted.

1. The founders spoke of our nation's happiness. They were concerned about posterity -- about our happiness. Of all the state papers ever produced, one of the most famous is the Declaration of Independence. And of all the phrases Jefferson ever penned, surely one of the most appealing to modern sensibilities is "the pursuit of happiness." That line has played a part in shaping the modern world. Yet most Americans today are not familiar with older conceptions of happiness. The founders would not have confused happiness with power, profit, prestige, pleasure, or pride in getting our way. What does the pursuit of happiness entail? To the founders, above all it meant reconciling the public duties of our civic republican tradition with the private rights of our natural law tradition. But the private sense of happiness does not end there. At the end of Sophocles' play, Antigone, the chorus instructs us in the happiness we seek. The main ingredient of happiness is wisdom. How do we become wise? For most of us, punishment and suffering pound out our foolishness. They school us until we learn the lessons needed to live the good life. Experience teaches that wisdom mostly comes from keeping a clear conscience, worshiping God rightly, and learning from mistakes, our own and others'. If we are mindful of these things, we have a shot at being happy. We are smart about "the pursuit of happiness." For we know that, absent wisdom, there is no happiness.

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Final thoughts in the final class

There were several honorable mentions cited by the class, nuggets that almost made it into the Top Ten. For example, they enjoyed learning about the critical moment in American history that occurred in Newburgh, New York, on the Ides of March 1783, when George Washington saved the new republic from impatient, angry officers who wanted him to lead a junta against the Confederated Congress.

One woman in class was fascinated by how rifling a gun barrel was a technological leap over smooth-bore muskets, increasing the lethal velocity of a lead ball. In a related vein, a man seized on Nathaniel Greene's brilliant strategy at Cowpens and Guildford Courthouse.

Of course, they enjoyed all the people stories -- of Nathan Hale's bravery in the face of death, of Molly Pitcher manning the cannon after her husband collapsed, of Abigail Adams watching the early battles with her children, of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys in the Grants, of John Paul Jones's daring-do off the coast of Scotland, etc. There is never enough time for all the interesting people stories, but they are what make history come alive in any class.

Bottom line: Time will tell, future historians will ratify, whether America is the greatest republic ever founded. A little perspective is in order. Our republic has existed less than 240 years. Chinese dynasties passed the baton for some 4,000 years. Egyptian civilization lasted some 3,000 years. The Venetian Republic lasted more than 1,000 years. The Roman republic lasted some 500 years. A fraction of that age, our American nation is a relative new-comer to the world stage. Are we up to the awesome task of continuing it? As Benjamin Franklin told the woman outside the Pennsylvania State House in 1787, the founders bequeathed to the American people a republic. Now it is up to us to keep it.

The United States Capitol is freighted with architectural significance, marrying the eternal heavens with earthly ambition and achievement. Reminiscent of St. Peter's and (further back) the Roman Pantheon, the circular dome symbolizes the eternal first principles of a constitutional republic in which the people are sovereign under the rule of law. The rectangular floor plan that rises from the foundation symbolizes our nation's connection to bedrock, rich soil, and vast natural resources, a geographic grounding reinforced by the structure's orientation along the four cardinal directions.

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For more about the American founding, please see my other essays on this blog along with the many links to additional works.

For more about leadership, please visit the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies http://www.allpresidents.org/.