Friday book learnin'

Steve Goldman writes the Pinstriped Blog and the Pinstriped Bible over at the Yankee Entertainment and Sports Network site. Goldman is an agile, witty writer and a terrific analyst of all things baseball, especially the Yankees and Alex Rodriguez. And he's never shy of taking on his employers if he thinks they're not pursuing the best direction for the Yankees to win.

But what makes him especially entertaining is the wide variety of subjects and interests he brings to his ostensibly baseball-focused sites. F'rinstance, yesterday he tackled the subject of "What would the Founders have thought" through a review of Revolutionary Characters, by Gordon S. Wood. Goldman writes,

There are always a slew of books around asking, "What would the founders thought?" One of the subtexts of this volume is that it's not an easily answered question regardless of what the subject is. First, their concerns, their very vocabulary, was different from ours. They were motivated by a concept of service and noblesse oblige that seems alien to us now. Second, as the experiment with self-government got underway, they lost a lot of their illusions about the kind of enlightened, virtuous leadership Americans were capable of. Instead, liberated from British rule, America rapidly produced its first generation of demagogues. Americans, Adams rapidly concluded, had "never merited the Character of very exalted Virtue." There was, "no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others." As George Washington wrote at the time, "We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederacy." Virtue, he said, had, "in great degree taken its departure from our land."

As such, the answer to "What would the founders have thought?" depends on which founder you ask and from where in his life you take the answer. Woods makes clear that for many of these men, as enlightened as they were in many cases they died embittered with the direction the country had taken and isolated from the political mainstream, which now admitted far more democracy than they had ever intended. Ironically, they facilitated that change, with the result, Woods writes, "that they succeeded in preventing any duplication of themselves."

The heart of the book is four interconnected essays on Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Adams that demystify some of the controversies in the years after 1787. When talking about the early republic, particularly the first three presidential administrations (Washington, Adams, Jefferson), many historians do a poor job of explaining the political bifurcation of society. Compared to the Federalists, who (as described) only wanted to have a functional, modern state, the Republicans (for those who came in late, these are not the same Republicans as today. That's the party of Lincoln. These fellows are on the left wing of the early republic) always seemed shrill, paranoid dreamers. The reaction to Alexander Hamilton's debt assumption plan and his other economic policies always seem hysterical. There were constant references to Hamilton being a secret monarchist and of wanting to make a king out of George Washington. There were several problems with that formulation that must have been clear even at the time. Washington was too concerned with his legacy as a statesman to undo the revolution; had he desired to, the time to do so would have been before his army disbanded, not after; and as Washington put it in one draft of his first inaugural address, "the Divine Providence hath not seen fit, that my blood should be transmitted or my name perpetuated by the endearing though sometimes seducing channel of immediate offspring." In other words, he had, "no child for whom I could wish to make a provision - no family to build in greatness upon my country's ruins." There would no Washingtonian dynasty because the great military hero had spent his life shooting blanks.

Wood makes it clear that men like Jefferson didn't understand a great deal about banking, credit, and currency. "Nothing can produce nothing," Jefferson said of paper money. But The newness of capitalism was only a minor cause of the extreme revulsion created by Hamilton. When the Republicans spoke of Hamilton creating a monarchy, they didn't necessarily mean that the president would become a king in the literal sense of the term. What they meant was that by acquiring certain powers, the executive would accrue the tools and trappings of dictatorship.

There's more, much more, including a discussion of the events that led up to the disaster of the War of 1812, in which the Republicans were finally forced to build the very institutions they most feared.