Uncommon sense

IN times of real or perceived political crisis, we tend to look toward history, seeking counsel, explanation and assurance. Given the tragedy, partisan rancor and public disgust of the last five years, the spate of books about the Founding Fathers comes as no surprise. Such a return to our ideological roots speaks more to the nation’s current disappointment with all levels of political leadership than to any ongoing love affair with all things breeched and white-wigged.

Gordon S. Wood thoroughly understands the intellectual, political and, most important, sociocultural underpinnings of our emerging nation. The author of “The Radicalism of the American Revolution” (which won him a Pulitzer) and “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787,” Wood has made the Revolution his bailiwick, providing analysis as studied and deep as his research. Now, he delivers “Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different,” a “greatest hits” of energetically reworked, previously published essays that should be required summer reading for all elected officials.

Wood eases the thread of relevance through the eye of that most pernicious of political needles, character, to tailor his cloak for the Founders. He knows their story well, but he’s skeptical of their celebrity, and he strikes a studious balance between the largesse of the hero-worshipful accounts and the titillating exposes of the Founders’ foibles. What chiefly distinguishes Wood’s scholarship is his composure when addressing such titanic figures and their previous chroniclers. His praise never inflates, nor does his criticism vilify, as he writes of the likes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Wood’s authorial level-headedness seems particularly apt given his central claim -- that the Founders’ shared ideal for the novus ordo seclorum was that of enlightened gentlemen leaders rising above mere self-interest to govern a new land. Those with axes to grind or pockets to line need not apply. In making this case, Wood turns down the amplitude of myth and presents the Founders unplugged, in a series of small, pleasant concerts around the theme of character.

As the Founders imbibed 18th century theories of social progress, they envisioned America evolving into a place of civility -- even if they often struggled to hold onto their propriety as the country spiraled away from a genteel republic toward a coarser, egalitarian democracy. Wood writes: “Since civilization was something that could be achieved, everything was enlisted in order to push back barbarism and ignorance and spread civility and refinement.” Accomplishing such lofty aims took gentlemen studied in “politeness, grace, taste, learning, and character” who were able to act in “a disinterested manner in promoting a public good.”

Yet the classic Enlightenment political leader, necessarily hovering above the corrupting influence of commerce, was easier to imagine than to emulate by a first generation of self-created aristocrats in a new land. And there were a few other nettlesome matters that the Founders needed to confront -- such as battling the most powerful country on Earth, taming a rough-and-tumble populace, fashioning a republic from scraps and learning how to govern.

The Founders believed they needed to play a role, setting aside their private doubts to exhibit proper behavior; in short, they became “characters, self-fashioned performers in the theater of life.” This notion of “character” was manifested not internally but in the Founders’ public lives, as they struggled to demonstrate that they were “living up to the values and duties that the best of the culture imposed” on them.

The tensions that arose from this obligatory civil ideal, Wood shows, created public figures who consistently twisted in different directions, such as Washington weighing his earnest if obsessive desire to protect his reputation against the need to promote “patriarchal leadership while creating a new elective republican president.” Jefferson loathed the rise of commercial capitalism but recognized its significance to social development; in his old age, he retreated to crankiness, unable to fathom how the country had traded refinement for capitalistic and religious passions.

Alexander Hamilton, whom Wood credits with creating the “fiscal-military” state, continually faced money problems of his own, but he refused countless entreaties to abuse his position by enriching himself, arguing that “there must be some public fools who sacrifice private to public interest at the certainty of ingratitude and obloquy -- because my vanity whispers I ought to be one of those fools and ought to keep myself in a situation best calculated to render service.”

John Adams believed that the Revolution had to imbue the masses with virtue or it would fail. But he later became convinced that the country was no different from any other, its citizens controlled by avarice and ambition. “What chance,” Adams asked, “has humble, modest, obscure and poor merit in such a scramble?” The short and long answer, says Wood, is none.

The most attractive characters in Wood’s book are Franklin and Thomas Paine, late arrivers to the revolutionary cause but arguably its most vocal converts. Wood portrays Franklin as a shrewd, Zelig-like figure, always aware of the part he must play, especially as a diplomat in France. Franklin cast himself as a “backwoods philosopher” during his eight years in Paris, milking the homespun simpleton shtick to aid the American cause. Upon his return home, he was all but forgotten, his lone public eulogy given by a sworn enemy.

Paine, who single-handedly brought revolution to the masses with “Common Sense,” suffered innumerable slights from those of more polished republican carriage. In their eyes, the failed corset maker was a drunken lout who piped his prose to the worst of the unruly.

As democracy began to flourish in a government of contending parties and splintered interests, the Founders were often rudely hooked from the stage. Wood argues that these men “helped create the changes that led eventually to their own undoing, to the breakup of the kind of political and intellectual coherence they represented. Without intending to, they willingly destroyed the sources of their own greatness.” Ultimately, it was their virtuous adherence to their ideals, despite the dispiriting outcome, that made the Founders different.

Early in his damning and very entertaining essay on Aaron Burr, Wood grumbles: “Amid all the literary extravagances and inflated fantasies about Burr there has not been much room for the plodding prosaic historian.” The sentence perfectly captures Wood’s charm. While the research of an excellent historian certainly contains years of plodding, there’s nothing at all commonplace about how Wood conducts it in “Revolutionary Characters.” *