January 15, 2003, Week 1 - University of Hawaiikpatrick/classesHI301Lecture6.doc · Web viewThomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" travels back to pre-Revolutionary times to map the "cryptic

FROM BACON'S REBELLION TO

THE POPULISTS TO OKLAHOMA CITY, VIOLENT

RURAL MOVEMENTS HAVE DEEP ROOTS

IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

BY ROS DAVIDSON

saturday marks the second anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight people died, more than 500 were injured and two men, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, have been charged with the crime. Jury selection in McVeigh's trial is

expected to be completed perhaps by next week. Nichols is scheduled to go on trial soon after McVeigh.

The stunning crime focused attention on the extreme right wing in America, especially on rabidly anti-government militias. But rather than harming the movement, according to Klanwatch and other hate group monitors, the bombing and attendant publicity has actually drawn more people to it.

Salon spoke to Catherine McNicol Stock, author of the recently published "Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain" (Cornell University Press). Stock, a Yale-trained historian, is assistant professor of history and director of the American Studies Program at Connecticut College in New London, Conn. Her previous book was "Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains" (1992, University of North Carolina Press).

The immediate reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing was, "No American would do that -- it had to have been planted by an outsider, perhaps someone from the Middle East." But you argue that such acts have an all-American heritage.

Yes, one thing I try to say -- and it gets me in trouble sometimes -- is that some of the basic ideology of right-wing extremists should be definitely considered all-American. And some of the people who had similar beliefs we consider to be quite heroic.

Going back to colonial times.

Right. Ethan Allen, for example, of Vermont, or Nathaniel Bacon, who led Bacon's Rebellion, are early examples of anti-government radicalism. In 1676, Bacon led a group of former indentured servants on a march on the capital of Virginia, called Jamestown at that time, and especially against its aristocratic and arrogant governor, William Berkeley.

These were rural rebellions.

What they wanted was more access to land; they wanted to have their own homesteads. They also wanted equal standing in the government -- they didn't want Berkeley and his cronies to have all the power while the newly freed fellows had no power. Well, that's a very all-American idea. And Bacon is often considered to be a precursor of the American Revolution. He rose up against Gov. Berkeley in the same way that 100 years later all of the colonists would rise up against the British. I also should point out that on the way to Jamestown, Bacon massacred as many Native Americans as he could.

Most people would think of the American Revolution as "progressive" and democratic with a small "d." Are you suggesting that it's not just rhetoric when right-wing extremists today say they are acting in the spirit of the Revolution?

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The point I try to make is that some of their ideas go very far back in our past. And they were held by people on the left, especially on the agrarian left, as recently as the 1930s. What's really important to realize is that these ideas have now been completely co-opted by the far right, and that the hatefulness and the regressiveness in some of these ideas have won the day.

And the violence.

Yes, historically, there's been a vigilante style for redressing grievances. You see rural radicals in a bunch of these historical movements pretty much taking these issues into their own hands, often violently.

How did this traditional heartland radicalism re-emerge in our times?

In the 1980s, during the farm crisis in the Midwest and the Far West, right-wing organizers found a lot of interest and new recruits. The Posse Comitatus (a far-right group opposed to taxation) organized lots of folks in Nebraska and Iowa. A lot of terrible things were happening at the time. In the 1970s, when the FHA (Farmers' Home Administration) were giving loans to farmers to expand their acreage, (Secretary of Agriculture) Earl Butz said, "get bigger, get better or get out." So farmers started to expand. Then interest rates went sky-high. They couldn't pay back their loans and a federal agency foreclosed on their farms. That didn't make people feel very good about the government!

Where were the Democrats, part of whose base was supposed to be rural America?

The Democrats were concerned with urban problems -- urban crime problems, in particular -- and were trying to forge a coalition of wealthy Easterners and minorities. That left middle-class white rural people out of the equation. The Republican Party was only concerned with wealthy people. So both major political parties walked away from the problems of rural America. People there felt alienated, they had no voice in the political process.

Which you say was a common theme in rebellions of the past.

Absolutely. When we think of the American Revolution, we tend to think of people in Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston getting fed up with the centers of economic and political power in London. But at that same moment people on the frontier were fed up with the centers of economic and political power in Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston. One historian at the turn of the century described this by saying there were two revolutions. It wasn't just about home rule, it was about who would rule at home. Was it going to be these big, powerful guys or ordinary back-country Americans?

Were the themes of these early rebels similar to those of the McVeighs of today?

Yes, particularly with centralized power, both economic and political power. In the Whisky Rebellion in the 1790s, a group of Pennsylvania frontiersmen refused to pay a tax that was imposed by the federal government. They said, "I thought we just fought a war about taxation with no representation." They thought the federal government had no right to tax their whiskey. That's one trend that holds a lot of these groups together.

The modern militias refuse to recognize any authority higher than the local sheriff.

And they only recognize the first 10 Amendments, and they're going to run their affairs their own way. Again, we've seen this over and over again. You see it in the 1930s in the Farmers Holiday Movement strikes, and lynch mobs and posses and union massacres in the Far West. You see this style of taking the law into their own hands over and over again.

Was there a populist, democratic rural radicalism that was less extreme and less violent?

In the book, I separate out two strands, "producer radicalism" and vigilantism -- what I call the politics of hope and the politics of hate. I argue how close those two sides of the coin have always been.

"Producer radicalism"? 2

"Producer radicalism" or "producerism" is a term historians use for democratic or progressive movements. Agrarian liberalism is another term, or Jeffersonian liberalism. These were movements in which small farmers, small landholders, have tried to get a fair share. The one movement that most people know about is the Populist Party in the 1880s and 1890s. Some were cotton farmers, some were wheat farmers, some were in extractive industry, and they said, "Look, big business is getting too big a share of the profit from what small producers make. The profit should go to the person who makes it, and farmers who are growing food shouldn't be starving to death." At that time the railroads were charging exorbitant amounts to Western farmers to ship their products.

That time has been called the "Populist moment," a moment in America when anything seemed possible. But I like to remind America, too, that many Southern Populists helped create the Jim Crow laws in the South, and that Populist rhetoric was absolutely rife with anti-Semitism.

How do you tie these historical issues of rural America to Timothy McVeigh, who is from a small rust-belt town in New York state?

In my book I include small industrial towns in what I consider to be rural areas. Rural America is not all farms. But even if you don't agree with me, you have to admit that Terry Nichols (McVeigh's alleged accomplice) comes exactly from this background. He loses his farm during the farm crisis. In a lot of ways I think of McVeigh as the blue-collar, rust-belt loser who was making minimum wage as a security guard. Then he meets and links up with this classic prototypical rural radical, who had been hard-core since he lost his farm.

McVeigh and Nichols are accused of blowing up a federal building, which you see as an anti-big-government or "anti-bigness" act.

Henry Wallace called it "big bureaucrats with their briefcases." In the New Deal period, it was called the "brain trust." That anti-bigness includes big business and corporate farms, too.

You know "Little House on the Prairie," Laura Ingalls Wilder's book written in the 1930s? Set in the 1880s and '90s, it appears to be total rural nostalgia. Wilder's daughter claims they were written as an attack against the New Deal. So I went through the books looking for references to the government, and in every case it's this big, ugly, alienating, incompetent machinery up against the intimate, small community of people on the frontier.

Do you seen anything specifically new that sets the McVeighs apart from these historical antecedents?

A lot of people make connections to McVeigh's Gulf War experience -- you know, learning to kill and hate. More important than that, I think, is the Vietnam generation that's in a lot of these movements. A lot of these guys did learn to kill, to love weapons and to hate the government in Vietnam. The government didn't let them win, and they wanted to win.

How many McVeighs and Nichols do you think are out there today?

I've been on a lot of radio shows, and people call in from rural areas and they say, "You know I wouldn't blow up a building but it feels like there's no place left for white men in this country anymore." And they don't sound like lunatics. They say, "Honest to God, I can't get a decent job!"

We used to hear a lot about "angry white men." You're saying that we really need to be looking at angry rural white men.

There's significant economic dislocation in both manufacturing and agriculture in rural America. The only work many people can get is at places like McDonald's -- and you're supposed to be grateful. Many of the manufacturing jobs, like meat packing, that have returned to states like Iowa and Wisconsin, to semi-industrial rural America, now employ immigrant workers who work for minimum or sub-minimum wage. That just makes things even more dreadful.

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What other issues come up when you're on talk radio?

Waco. Waco is really something that people are still struggling with. They say, "You can't possibly think that what the government did at Waco was right." And of course I don't!

You have some personal links to the subject you write about.

One of the things that first interested me in being a historian was that my grandparents, who were from North Dakota, all their lives carried these incredibly strong negative feelings about Roosevelt. They admitted that Roosevelt had essentially saved North Dakota and many of their friends from utter and complete failure, had made a big difference in the Depression, and essentially saved the world in World War II. But my grandfather just basically thought Roosevelt was a Communist. He was one of these people who thought farm programs killed anybody's sense of self-worth and that welfare was wrong. I'm listening to all this during dinner table conversations in the 1970s. But it was still so current for them! So I became interested in what certain periods in America could have been like to provoke such strong feelings.

Did any of your relatives act on those feelings?

After my grandfather died, my grandmother learned that the minister at the First Presbyterian Church in Grand Forks had been masquerading -- he was not ordained. So I looked into this a little and found that he was actually the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. He married my McNicol grandparents. My grandmother, I assume, never knew this about him. But one of her parents was a deacon in the church and my great-grandmother ran the Sunday school. You can't tell me they didn't know that about the minister! The KKK was extremely active in Grand Forks. And my grandparents were the most wonderful people I ever knew.

That's why, when I was writing "Rural Radicals," I felt a little as if I was writing about my own people. I tried to tell the truth. In Clinton's first inaugural he spoke of the honor and cruelty of the American past

and of having to know them both. When I teach, that's what I always say: We're going to know them both. So live with it! April 18, 1997

http://archive.salon.com/april97/radical970418.html

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weird morning in america

Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" travels back to pre-

Revolutionarytimes to map the "cryptic &

perilous" contours of a nation.

BY SCOTT McLEMEE ILLUSTRATION BY GARY TAXALI

"Mason & Dixon" By Thomas Pynchon Henry Holt, 773 pages

The all-American lost poet Delmore Schwartz -- best remembered for the proverb "even paranoids have real enemies" -- also deserves credit for the Caffeine Theory of the Enlightenment. By this account, the Age of Reason owed its brilliance, energy and encyclopedic ambition to the arrival, in Europe, of the java bean. Schwartz meant it as a joke. Yet cultural historians have spent many happy years researching the economic, social, literary and political (if not gastrointestinal) consequences of the coffeehouse for the rising bourgeoisie. And the example of Voltaire -- who sucked down a few dozen cups a day whenever possible -- has long seemed to me to clinch the case.

But the most eloquent statement of the Caffeine Theory, as adapted to American circumstances, appears about halfway into Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon." The year is 1761. Charles Mason (an astronomer) and Jeremiah Dixon (a surveyor) have reached Philadelphia, sent by the Royal Society in London to establish the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania. They have yet to put together a work team for the job. And their first trip to an American coffee shop reveals a murky den of iniquity: a "Combination, peculiar and precise, of unceasing Talk and low Visibility, that makes Riot's indoor sister, Conspiracy, not only possible, but resultful as well." Infusions of "the Invigorating liquid" and New World rowdiness give the place a decidedly revolutionary atmosphere: "An individual in expensive attire, impersonating a gentleman, stands upon a table freely urging sodomitical offenses against the body of the Sovereign, being cheered on by a circle of Mechanics, who are not reluctant with their own suggestions."

Besides coffee, these Yankees wolf down sugary pastries and puff away on tobacco. (A few pages earlier, Mason and Dixon have sampled a little of George Washington's hemp crop.) The narrator wonders, "May unchecked consumption of all these modern substances at the same time, a habit without historical precedent, upon these shores be creating a new sort of European? less respectful of the forms that have previously held Society together, more apt to speak his mind, or hers, upon any topic he chooses, and to defend his position as violently as need be?"

Let's see now. Fervent consumption of mood-altering substances ... a certain reckless vigor in the expression of opinion ... pothead humor ... It all sounds rather like the '60s of more recent memory. And that (as old-timey Communists used to say, and militia folk still do) is no accident!

But more paranoia later. The crossroads where serious literature and conspiracy theory meet is not that busy. Potential readers -- most of them, anyway -- will reach "Mason & Dixon" along the High Culture thoroughfare. All the standard Pynchonian elements are in place -- most conspicuously, of course, the erudition, which is casual yet abundant. "The Crying of Lot 49" incorporated thermodynamics, Jacobean revenge plays and the evolution of the postal system. "Gravity's Rainbow" drew from behaviorism, rocket science and German history. With "Mason & Dixon," a nodding acquaintance with British and American history of the period is taken for granted; and it does not hurt to have a look at Dava Sobel's recent

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bestseller, "Longitude," unless you have acquired some knowledge of 18th century astronomical and navigational problems through alternate means.

Other familiar qualities carry over from Pynchon's earlier work. There are references (direct and indirect) to his past novels -- and, as always, funny character names. The narrator, for instance, is the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke. Pynchon once dreamed of writing musicals, and his characters sometimes burst into poetry and song -- all of it deliberately awful, usually to humorous effect. Sometimes, though, it merits only a groan.

And then there is the prose. For nearly 800 pages, Pynchon mimics the rhythms, punctuation and spelling of the 18th century -- with those irregular, tho' colorful, Bursts of Capitalization and Italics, govern'd by one knows not what internal logic, save it be that of the Author's peculiar Humor. Every review of the novel in the continental United States, Hawaii and Guam will compare it to John Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor," and some resemblance is certainly there. But in "Mason & Dixon," the pastiche is livelier and shows a better ear. In the life and opinions of the Reverend Cherrycoke, Pynchon has created a narrative voice that shifts between various styles of prose (novelistic, philosophical, psychotic) -- and unites the comic and the pathetic. Pynchon somehow borrows from Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" without sounding anything like it. That is more difficult than it might sound.

From his earliest work, Pynchon has focused on that state of heightened and modified attention called paranoia. And I do mean earliest. In a piece of fiction from his high school newspaper, he has a character mentioning "a fascinating experiment in psychology entailing the instilling of paranoid hallucinations into the logical mind by psychoanalytic deletion of the superego." And so today -- with the benefit of keen hindsight -- it seems inevitable that he would set a novel in colonial America during the 1760s. After all, the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence were a period of intense conspiracy theorizing. Countless pamphlets and sermons denounced the nefarious intentions of both the king and the pope, and their various minions. George Washington himself believed in a "regular, systematic plan" by which the British intended to reduce the colonists to slaves "as tame and abject ... as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway." Anxiety has deep roots in our history; it finds plenty to nourish it there.

So the mid-18th century colonies offer Pynchon a perfect stage for cabals to skulk upon. "Mason & Dixon" arrives with the requisite number of grand, sinister plots. There are schemes involving -- among others -- the Freemasons, Sweden, France, the Dutch East India Company, calendar reform and a very long-term Jesuit maneuver to take over China. (Diagraming how the conspiracies all link up is a task best left to Lyndon LaRouche's staff.) Cherrycoke's impressions of the New World Order have their echoes in the land today, but the familiar paradoxes of paranoia are not so overtly the focus of Pynchon's own interest, now, it seems to me. He gives Cherrycoke other things to think about.

What has taken its place, then? Mysticism, for one thing. And melancholia as well. In Pynchon's hands, the surveying expedition becomes the model of a rational, scientifically-minded Enlightenment trying to re-create the world in its image. Mason and Dixon use precise instruments and calculations to determine where a perfectly straight line should be. Yet their progress -- moving east to west, slowly, for several years -- cuts through scenes of Old World occultism (golems!) and New World religious enthusiasm. Backwoods surrealism is not the only dominant note, though. Extermination of the Indians is off to a gradual but promising start. And the line divides (or, conversely, joins) a slave state and a free state. The coffeehouse libertarians do not trouble themselves too much about such things.

As Mason and Dixon finish their work, they realize that the line itself is evil. "To mark a right Line upon the Earth," explains their companion, Captain Zhang, master of feng shui, "is to inflict upon the Dragon's very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who live here the year 'round to see as other than hateful Assault. How can it pass unanswer'd?" Or perhaps the line's effects simply confirm "the melancholy suggestion, that the 'new' Continent Europeans found, had been long attended, from its own ancient Days, by murder, slavery, and the poor fragments of a Magic irreparably broken." All of which must sound unbearably gloomy. Not at all. "Mason & Dixon" is, by turns, demanding, silly and profound. And, at times, just plain weird. (There is, for example, an involved subplot involving an amorous mechanical duck that undoubtedly owes something to the "unchecked consumption of ... modern substances.") Pynchon's reputation as a fearsomely abstruse and difficult writer is secure, as long as the larger reading public never finds out how funny and moving he can be. After finishing "Mason & Dixon," I

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am ready to turn back to page 1, to read anew Pynchon's map of "this Country cryptick and perilous." April 25, 1997

http://archive.salon.com/april97/pynchon970425.html

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In What Sense Are Terrorists Cowards? Timothy Noah, Posted Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, at 3:08 PM PT

The conventions of American political rhetoric oblige presidents to denounce terrorist attacks as "cowardly." Ronald Reagan called the 1983 terrorist bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut "cowardly." Bill Clinton called the 1998 terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam "cowardly." So one can hardly single out George W. Bush for calling today's destruction of the World Trade Center and a portion of the Pentagon, which killed hundreds or perhaps thousands of people, "cowardly."

Terrorism is inhumane and unforgivable--an offense to morality, patriotism, international law, and almost everything else we hold dear. Put Chatterbox down for favoring swift and terrible punishment for the perpetrators of today's crime. But is terrorism cowardly? The terrorists who commandeered the planes that leveled the World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon are mass murderers. In committing murder, they also committed suicide. That hardly makes them heroes. But in what sense does it make them cowards?

Perhaps we need to distinguish between moral cowardice and physical cowardice. A physical coward is afraid to risk his life or well-being. Chatterbox is a physical coward. So are most of his friends. A moral coward, one could argue, is afraid to face the burdens of living. Thus anyone who commits suicide is a coward, whether or not he kills others in the bargain. But Chatterbox somehow doubts that George W. Bush equates terrorists with people like Judy Garland and Michael Dorris. Perhaps Bush has a more expansive and political idea about what it means to face life--to work through the system with patience and firm commitment to an ideal. But diplomacy and coalition-building and other political forms of persuasion, worthy though they are, don't strike Chatterbox as being distinguished very often by heroism.

Perhaps the idea is that it is cowardly to make a sneak attack, especially on a defenseless civilian target, rather than confront an armed enemy face to face. But no one seriously expects Osama Bin Laden to invite the 101st Airborne to fight his terrorist organization on equal terms. And besides, the reason we usually consider it cowardly to make a sneak attack is because the attacker avoids facing the consequences. But the people who participated in today's terrorist attacks paid the ultimate consequence. Perhaps terrorists are cowardly for not claiming responsibility for their terrorist acts, as seems to be the case here. Often, though, terrorists do claim responsibility and get called cowards anyway. If someone steps forward to claim credit for today's bombings, it seems unlikely any politician will praise him for bravery.

In truth, notions of "cowardice" and "bravery" are entirely irrelevant when we contemplate the horrors of terrorism. To call a terrorist "cowardly" is to substitute testosterone for morality. Somehow it isn't enough to abhor an act of terrorism or even to promise to make the terrorist pay dearly. The rules demand that the terrorist be branded a sissy. This is not only a childish reflex, but one that weakens the moral force of the condemnation and thereby dishonors terrorism's victims. After all, we don't want brave people to slaughter innocent people any more than we want cowardly people to do so. Still, the public seems to demand that our presidents call terrorists cowards, and our presidents are too--well, cowardly--to deny them.

http://slate.msn.com/id/1008268

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The mystery of courage, By Laura Miller October 25, 2000 | At some point in our lives, most of us ask ourselves whether courage consists of fearlessness or of persevering in spite of our fears, but it's not often that we think any harder or deeper about what Samuel Johnson called "the greatest of all virtues; because unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other." In the wake of his well-received "The Anatomy of Disgust," William Ian Miller, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, had planned to take up the topic of cowardice. Instead, he found himself intrigued and baffled by the opposite of that vice. In Miller's new book, "The Mystery of Courage," he explains that bravery is much harder to define than we might think.

Does it take more courage to launch a bold attack or to maintain a stout defense? Is courage the result of passion or reason? Is moral courage superior to physical courage or vice versa? And has our contemporary life, often shielded from danger and the immediate threat of war, lost some of its grandeur and resonance because courage -- whatever that may be -- is seldom demanded of us? It's impossible to read Miller's book without jumping from these larger philosophical questions to the even more difficult personal ones, questions that explore the limits of our own fortitude. Miller visited the Salon offices recently to talk about his book and the often unsettling conundrums it raises.

You didn't start out planning to write about courage.

No, I planned on writing about cowardice, the little, daily interactions that you walk away from feeling somehow diminished or demoralized because you didn't stand up, or somebody trod on you or dissed you. You know for sure that you've been a coward when you engage in fantasies of revenge. You'll lie awake or spend the next two hours wishing misery on the person.

I started out with this idea and thought, well, of course you've got to know what courage is. Before you can write about the vice, you've got to look at the corresponding virtue. There's the standard philosophical literature and, oh, I'll check out the soldiers' memoirs. Well, it turns out, courage is maybe the only virtue that's more interesting than its corresponding vice. It just generates better stories. It's no accident that at least until the rise of the novel, almost all of the stories we tell have courage as the main theme. So courage just ended up taking over.

Now cowardice doesn't disappear because it's always the thing you've got to overcome. I'm aware of hundreds, thousands of times in my life when I felt like a coward or felt scared, or stayed away from places that I would otherwise have gone to if I were tougher or more courageous, or just cooler. I thought, Are there any times when I felt courageous, is there actually an inner state that would correspond with the feeling of courage or courageous acts? I couldn't think of any. So I thought, Oh, my God! Am I that craven? I ended up an academic, and that might be the proof of the pudding.

But then I thought, Maybe not, maybe I can think of times when people thought I did something that was at least reckless, if not courageous. I'd find out what people who were manifestly courageous thought about, examine their inner states to see if there's some kind of agreement as to what feelings were involved, if they actually knew they were being courageous.

It turns out that, no, there's no agreed-upon inner state. Sometimes people just blank: "It had to be done, somebody yelled 'Medic!' I ran to help the guy." Most of the time, though, they're just confused. There's too much noise. There are no thoughts at all. They're engaged in automatic behaviors. For others, the internal state was simply terror, fear -- the exact same internal state that the coward has. So many of the medal-winning performances, performances that are honored, the person ends up feeling like he faked it. Like he basically hoodwinked everybody else.

When we haven't thought much about courage, it doesn't seem mysterious, as it didn't to you. It's only when you try to put your finger on it that it keeps shifting.

I take the phrase from the title from a Civil War soldier's memoir. He worried because he couldn't predict in his unit, from one battle to the next, from one moment to the next, who would be courageous and who would run. Some days the guy who was noble in the battle before would turn tail in the next. The little schlemiel would turn out to be the big hero that day. He could never predict with confidence who it would be.

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Other people say the mystery is even more profound than that. Even when you look at the actions, the deeds, you can't be sure if the deed is manifestly courageous. They'll tell the story of cowards -- they turn up frequently in war memoirs -- the kind of guy who when the order comes to attack, he says, "No, I'm not gonna." Absolutely defiant: "I'm not going to get my ass shot off for this." And of course, the other guys know he's scared, because they're scared too, but he made a decision -- he ain't going to go forward. And they'll beat him, they'll ridicule him, they'll threaten him in every way. He'll just say, "You can do what you want with me, you can take me and shoot me in front of the firing squad. I ain't going to go." And these other guys will sit there and say, "Man, what balls!" There's a proverbial utterance: "Many more would be cowards if they only had courage enough."

It seems that courage is both a way of behaving and the emotional state that goes with it. People can't even agree on which emotional state constitutes courage when a certain act is performed. One of the examples that you start with is the soldier who is called the Good Coward because every time he's actually at that moment of battle, he runs away. But yet ...

He shows up for the next one.

He keeps coming back to his platoon, and they take him back. And there's a certain kind of respect they have ...

Well, they end up respecting him. At first, they think he's just a straight-out coward. But he shows up again, and starts the next battle. And he actually exposes himself to genuine risk. He doesn't start running. The way they make the distinction is that a true coward would have found a way to be back in Cincinnati or St. Louis on hospital detail. He got to the front, he made himself show up at the front lines -- and then he doesn't run until the guy next to him stops a bullet. But he shows up again. And they know he's just struggling. It's harder for him to do that than it is for them to go forward. And they start to give him all kinds of credit for that.

He's still a coward. He's just a good coward. So they're willing to make these gradations in the types of cowardice. It's not just about internal mental states. It's not just that he's facing fears. It's that he actually exposes himself also to considerable risk. It makes a difference that the guy next to him stopped a bullet. That bullet, he could have stopped it, before he turns and runs.

Nowadays, in spite of the absence of war in most privileged people's lives, we'll still talk about actions being courageous or brave, even though those acts are not happening on a battlefield, and don't involve risk of life and limb. What does courage mean in contemporary American life?

There's a certain anxiety that courage isn't much demanded of those of us in a certain class. I mean, if you grow up in the mean streets, you're in war. So let's say, middle-class to upper-middle-class American life: It's a basically pacified existence. Well, we start thrill-seeking like crazy. We engage in behaviors that are a kind of practice courage. Bungee jumping, sky diving, whitewater rafting. But we still sense that it's circumscribed.

There's also moral courage. The stand-up-in-the-meeting kind of courage. That raises all kinds of difficult issues. In the world I live in, it seems that people congratulate themselves on being courageous for voting no on a manifestly weak tenure file.

The whole term "moral courage" doesn't even come into the English lexicon until the 19th century. Up until then it's undifferentiated courage. It's never very removed from the physical sense. I would argue that even moral courage, the ability to stand up against certain kinds of injustices, cannot be divorced from physical courage. Because what kind of moral courage would there be if when somebody took up an unpopular cause, and somebody else said, "Sit down or I'll kick the crap out of you," the first person said, "OK, I'll sit down"? There's no moral courage there, right?

One of the great observations you make in the book is that people are called courageous today simply for sticking to a diet. Or for being an entrepreneur.

See, courage is a virtue we still care about so much! I think we would most like to think of ourselves as courageous over any other virtue. Right at the core of courage, right at the start, in the earliest

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discussions of it is a competition over what's the most perfect form of it. On the battlefield it's a question of whether it's in the attack, in the ability to charge -- or the ability to stand firm while being charged. The offense never loses its connotations of the battlefield. It's a quick, short burst of paradigmatic masculine energy, not called upon very often, but you have to muster all of yourself to do it.

Eventually, defense starts to free itself from the battlefield. It just becomes the ability to take crap. The ability to stand there and endure. So endurance starts to grow out of the defensive side of courage and that expands courage to a big, big domain. You can get off the battlefield, include women -- who are much better at it than men.

You mean at endurance?

At endurance, at taking it. And Christianity latches onto that. It becomes their patient poverty, their virtues of patient sufferance and martyrdom. But the metaphors of martyrdom, even as they're being roasted, spitted, grilled, they imagine as offensive courage. They're attacking the devil.

But in fact, martyrdom, the whole Christianization of courage, turns it into fortitude. It's the ability to just take shit.

That's another surprising thing you write about. We think, This person is courageous. But as you observe, courage is an exhaustible resource within a given individual, especially in battle. People can perform grandly but not perpetually so.

Aristotle says that courage is a disposition: Once you acquire it, you're just courageous, and you'll be courageous in all the settings that demand courage. Well, in terms of Greek warfare, you march out in the spring and you meet the other side, and the battle would last for an hour, two hours. Then you went home for the rest of the year. But in the last years of the Civil War, or in World War I, and on some places on the Western Front, the battle lasted four years. Everybody cracked up. Nobody could keep their sanity. Those who didn't lose their sanity were psychotic to begin with. Nobody anticipated that courage would be demanded at this level of intensity every day. Of course, they changed the metaphors then. All of a sudden the metaphor that moves in to describe courage is one of a bank account. You don't make deposits to it, you just make withdrawals, and eventually go bankrupt.

Another thing they figured out is that you don't have courage in the face of all the kinds of risks and dangers. Some people were great taking shell fire, some people couldn't bear it. Some could take rifle fire, others couldn't bear it. There's a very specific disposition for every kind of risk.

It seems to me, having never faced any of these threats, that it would be easier to face combat because there is a possibility of victory. It's somewhat random: You might get it and you might not. As opposed to what a person faces as a martyr, knowing you were going to die. So that seems braver to me because there is no hope involved at all, except the faith that a martyr might have of life after death.

OK, so let's look at that. The soldier might reply, "Hey, I might not die in this battle, I might win this battle. But one battle doesn't win the war. I might have to muster up the will to do this the next day, or another month from now." The martyr says, "I've got one performance. And then I'm home free." You only have to be a martyr once, although that's one hell of a hard performance to give.

Another interesting question is, the role of rage. There's almost a kind of connoisseurship, as you mentioned before, where philosophers try to figure out what is the perfect form of courage. They usually disdain the blind rage of the berserker.

Looks pretty good to me. I wouldn't mind it.

If you're the person he's defending, you might want that more than you'd want the tortured, reasoned, self-conscious courage that is author Tim O'Brien's ideal. There are many things that look like courage, but then somebody comes along and says, "Well, that doesn't really count as much as this other form."

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So much is at stake in how it gets defined. The philosophers always say, "No, no, no," to the guys who might also be Saturday night brawlers, to the guys who might be berserkers: "Oh, no, no, no, that's too vulgar and unseemly. What we think courage is about is the exact proper reasoning about risk in relation to effort." And that's because they desperately want to save courage for themselves: "Oh, we philosophers, very good at applying reason to these circumstances. Let's put reason at the core of courage." My God, no! Most of the times courage is demanded in emergency situations where you just have to act. Act! You have to do things, not think about things. You have to do things!

So whoever's defining courage tends to define it as a quality that they can imagine mustering.

I don't want to dismiss their views as silly; they're not. Keeping a cool head, and being able to think under duress is also a very remarkable thing. It's just not the only thing. They define it so that the generals and the officers manifest courage. What about the poor schmoes that are simply told to charge?

I have to admit, though, when I turn on my television set and I see ads with a lot of obnoxious guys bungee jumping and driving their four-wheel SUVs ...

You just want that cord to break so bad, don't you?

Yes, and they congratulate themselves for their courage. But I feel contempt for them. I feel that that's a lie.

We rank those kinds of behaviors. Some we allot more virtue than others. Do you feel the same contempt for the person who actually climbs up Mount Everest? Do you give them a little more credit? Yeah, you do, don't you?

Yes, I do, because it seems like more of a risk to me.

I think it's all symbolic. I think we give all kinds of credit to people who go up, and not to the people who come down. It's just too easy. Gravity does it all for you.

If you were to come to me before I read this book and ask me to think of an example of courage, in fact, soldiering wouldn't even be the first thing to come to my mind. The first thing I would think of would be standing up to the Nazis. That, to me, has become, in contemporary life, our ideal of courage.

I have this part in the book about Lorenzo, the Italian mason who helps Primo Levi when Levi is in the concentration camp. He takes risks to give Primo extra food every day through the fence, and I ask: Is Lorenzo courageous or is he just good? Maybe the courage just comes along for the ride. It seems a natural manifestation of his goodness that he's helping this other man. I've struggled to deal with what this is in relation to courage.

Take the case of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his buddies. The person who dies on a grenade like that does it absolutely as a reflex. Nobody expects anybody to have to do it. It's not cowardly not to fall on the grenade.

There's no shame in not doing it. So there isn't a negative motivation.

So it can't be fear of shame that would motivate you to fall on a grenade. So what is it? Well, it's that "greater love hath no man," I guess. It's just a sacrifice for these people you've lived with or these people you're in the presence of. It occurs almost instantaneously, and maybe love's the way to talk about that rather than courage. Maybe love's the virtue that Lorenzo has. Of course love doesn't mean much if it isn't going to take certain risks on behalf of the beloved.

That may be one reason I don't think the bungee jumper or the Everest climber is really all that brave. I mean, I guess they are, but they don't have a good reason for what they do.

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You're very Aristotelian in this. You want courage to be in pursuit of noble goals. I would say the bungee jumper, the Everest climber is just practicing.

It's just for its own sake. To me it feels degraded, in a way, because they're exercising nerve simply for the sake of exercising it.

This is another problem. The mountain climber, I think, has to be respected in a certain way. How are you going to ever have any sense of confidence that a person will help someone in need under a Nazi menace if that person has never done anything to get themselves ready for that kind of thing?

In fact, I do believe that you can't ever know who the courageous will be. I'm with your guy who says that when the moment of truth comes, when someone has to be brave or make a sacrifice, or simply act in a way that changes things, they just do it. And it's fundamentally mysterious why or how.

You know, the studies on those people who helped Jews say that the single most important thing that generated the helpful response was simply being asked. In other words, they were too embarrassed to say no. I mean, "Take me in, take me in, they're going to kill me!" And what are you going to do, say no? But if you had to actually motivate yourself to do the positive thing, you were much less likely to do it. It is the inability to turn someone down in that kind of emergency.

You could say that's shame, or you could say that's embarrassment, or you could say that being asked reminded them of their own humanity and then they couldn't not respond to that.

About practicing for virtue. Tim O'Brien -- he writes very beautifully on these issues -- describes a time in fourth grade, when some little girl who was dying and had her head shaved was in his class. She wore a scarf, and he adored this girl. Some bully kid, probably just a dumb little boy, decides to tease her about the scarf and pulls it off. And she bursts into tears because she's bald. O'Brien just stood there and watched. He wanted to intervene and protect her but he didn't do it. And he now, of course years later, is still mortified that he didn't do it. And he says, "Maybe standing up in fourth grade would have done me some good later on for Vietnam, when a little practice at being courageous would have helped me quite a bit."

But one of the things that you do observe is that while physical courage seems to be something that can be depleted over time, moral courage actually does seem to increase the more it's exercised. The more someone stands up for what's right in the face of disapproval or threats ...

The easier it gets the next time. Whereas World War I proved that physical courage just drains after too many demands are made on it. One way to distinguish moral courage from physical courage is that it needs its daily constitutional. Although the risk you run with moral courage is simply being ill-mannered and not knowing when to just lump it.

Now, let me ask you this. Let's turn the tables here. You want to give the Everest people a hard time because the goal that they're striving for is, ultimately, trivial. What about the soldier who's fighting in a stupid war. Now, the poor soldier's there for no good reason. All the poor guys who fought in the Vietnam War, or a German soldier during World War II, the same moral demands are being made on him as are being made on the person he's opposing. Even though the war's stupid. And we'll still call it courage, courage it is.

Yes, but he's still in a war. It's not recreation. He's responding to the call of his group, whether it's a tribe, or a clan, or a nation, or whatever. And that's a sense of duty. I don't envy anyone who's in the situation of feeling a sense of duty to their nation and at the same time mistrusting the people who are making the decisions whether there should be a war or not. But that seems really different than doing it for the sake of amusement.

Would you prefer a culture in which we eliminate absolutely all risks? In the university town I live in, appalling things take place. A group of parents mobilized and went over to the school after a snowstorm, and leveled the snow banks the plows had thrown up because they were 10 feet high and of course that's

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kid heaven, right? They dismantled them because it was too risky for the kids. Well, to me, that world -- not only does it destroy childhood, but it destroys any possibility for greatness at all.

Which brings us to the presidential campaign. In the last debate, Al Gore mentioned his service in Vietnam four times. On the most obvious level that's a way of pointing out the lack of same on the part of George W. Bush. However, Al Gore was a journalist and not a soldier. Nevertheless, he did go to Vietnam, and George W. Bush didn't even manage to get that far.

He made sure he didn't get that far.

But we're also talking about an election that began with a candidate who many people felt very idealistic about, John McCain, who has an indisputable record of courage. I'm wondering, how important do you think physical courage is in who we want as a leader?

Don't you think the whole McCain phenomenon was at least partly a desire to still pay homage to that virtue? As a last-ditch effort before we gave ourselves up to the Gores and Bushes, people who it's simply hard to feel good about, either one of them.

Nevertheless, his courage still wasn't enough to elect McCain. Maybe we love this virtue, but how deep is our love?

Don't you think that the popular vote -- if it wasn't mediated, if it was a straight-out popular vote without the party faithful rigging it, without all the Bush money -- McCain would win hands down right now if you threw him into the race?

I feel that we believe that at some level the office doesn't matter that much anymore. The country just runs itself. It's so rich that we'll let one group do its little skimming of the profits and hand it out to its buddies. It only matters who's in there if we're in a serious war situation, and that isn't going to happen anymore with the demise of the Soviet Union. So we just don't think it really matters. Except for the distribution of the spoils.

But in our mythopoeic heart of hearts, what we really want from our leader is a John McCain. And yet somehow we don't wind up with that person.

Because the people who didn't want John McCain weren't the People. The People wanted John McCain. I think that the problem was his virtue.

You mean his courage was actually a liability.

That's the reason they called him a loose cannon. The Republicans were scared of him because they didn't think they could control him. He's maverick in every sense of the word. And he's courageous. Which is just what you don't want if you're one of the people who wants to basically have this little cipher there that you own a couple of shares in, and can tell him what to do. And, you don't want McCain because he's unreliable in that sense. Why is he unreliable? Not because he lacks virtue, but because he has it.

http://dir.salon.com/books/int/2000/10/25/miller/index.html?sid=990027

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Rating the Founding Fathers, The reputation market finds Adams up, Jefferson down, and the others holding steady.  By David Greenberg, Posted Tuesday, July 3, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT

With the 225th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence at hand, the nation's first leaders—the men (and women) who midwifed America into being—are enjoying a spell of adulation uncommon even for a group so long exalted.

Two well-reviewed best sellers, Joseph J. Ellis' Founding Brothers and David McCullough's John Adams, celebrate the founders' achievements: bravely proclaiming the human right to liberty as a reason for breaking with the British monarchy, defeating the superior British army in battle, crafting the world's first modern republican government, and weathering the tempests of early nationhood that doomed other infant republics.

Although they've always been lionized, in other eras the founders were not quite so sacrosanct. In the 1910s, Charles Beard charged them with subverting the revolution's ideals to protect their own financial interests. In the '60s and '70s, Bernard Bailyn and other historians exposed the addled conspiratorial thinking beneath the revolutionaries' Enlightenment rationalism, and the civil rights movement spotlighted their support for slavery. Today, in contrast, a new conventional wisdom holds that these patriots, more even than the GIs of World War II, deserve the title of America's greatest generation.

Within this collective revival, individuals' reputations have oscillated. Riding highest now is Adams. Typically he has been seen as a bullheaded curmudgeon, one of the more conservative founders and a middling, one-term president. But, thanks to his biographers, Adams has rebounded. Ellis first gave him a boost in his 1992 book Passionate Sage and sings his praises again Founding Brothers. McCullough, reprising a trick from his 1990 biography of Harry Truman, turns Adams' crankiness into refreshing frankness, his obstinacy into steadfast principle.

History says as much about the time in which it's written as about the time it seeks to explore, and Adams has also benefited from today's fetish for authenticity in politics. Both Ellis and McCullough excuse Adams' political errors, seeing them as proof of his laudable refusal to posture, and admire his vital 54-year marriage to Abigail. Given today's interest in politicians' private lives, this enduring connubial love and fidelity have earned Adams a shower of bonus points.

Adams' rise has come at the expense of Thomas Jefferson, his longtime foil. Jefferson hailed from Virginia, Adams from Massachusetts. Jefferson favored revolutionary France, Adams sympathized with monarchical Britain. Jefferson led the more democratic Republican Party, Adams the more aristocratic Federalists. As recently as 1996, Jefferson's stock was up. A bevy of biographers scrutinized his life and ideas, devoting attention especially to his alleged affair with his slave Sally Hemings. Already consecrated (unlike Adams) with a monument in the nation's capital, in 1996 Jefferson was graced anew with landmark status, in the form of his own Ken Burns documentary. 

But all that scrutiny found Jefferson wanting, particularly in the areas where Adams is now gaining praise. His ownership of slaves compared poorly with Adams' opposition to bondage. Where a robust marriage reflected well on Adams, mounting evidence of an affair with Hemings (especially a 1998 DNA test) hurt Jefferson's reputation—unfairly so since, contrary to some of his "defenders," there's nothing shameful in the affair, strictly speaking. Jefferson's true crime was owning slaves in the first place, and that was never a secret or a mystery.

In the area of political philosophy, Adams' skepticism about unbounded democracy also looks a bit better these days, at least to those who blame him for the dastardly deeds of right-wing fanatics, such as Timothy McVeigh, who have invoked his more radical statements ("The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants"). Yet another blow was dealt to poor Jefferson four years ago with Pauline Maier's book American Scripture, which showed that the Declaration of Independence, considered one of Jefferson's greatest achievements, in fact drew heavily from many similar proclamations that colonies and towns had issued throughout early 1776. As a final irony, Ellis and

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McCullough remind us that Adams was the one who picked Jefferson to write the Declaration in the first place.

If Jefferson is facing unwonted hard times and Adams is uncharacteristically popular, then the stock of the other founders is holding steady in the market of public opinion. A few years ago, a handful of admiring books appeared about Alexander Hamilton and the fatal duel he fought with Aaron Burr. The Hamilton boomlet rested on newfound regard for his prescient vision, almost unique among the founders, of an American destiny that included an industrial economy, a strong military power, and a powerful executive leading the federal government. Credit redounded to him, too, for being forthright when the scandal-mongering newspaperman James Callendar (who also attacked Adams and reported Jefferson's Hemings affair) revealed his liaisons with another man's wife. James Madison, meanwhile, with somewhat less hoopla, has been justly recognized in recent scholarship as America's foremost political theorist. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington are awaiting their turns, which will surely come with the publication of biographies by Walter Isaacson and (if scuttlebutt can be trusted) McCullough himself, whose treatment of Washington can only improve upon recent, clumsy attempts to further burnish the general's already dazzling luster.

So, why this revival of the founders now? Contemporary attitudes toward our own presidents range from indifference to contempt. Since Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, presidents have been cut down to size—their personal flaws and private lives laid bare, their integrity questioned, their capacity for greatness doubted, their achievements judged as small-time. In contrast, men who won the revolution and built the American republic can only look heroic (that is, when we're not subjecting them to the same vivisection to which we submit our own leaders).

The ascendancy of liberal democracy, after a century of struggle against totalitarianism, also places the founders in an especially favorable light. "Though it seems somewhat extreme to declare … 'the end of history,' " Ellis notes, "it is true that all alternative forms of political organization seem to be fighting a rearguard action against liberal institutions and ideas first established in the United States in the late eighteenth century." In the 18th century, many Americans did not think the republic would endure—Washington gave the United States 20 years—and the dawn of a second American Century gives cause to reflect on the long odds over which Americans triumphed.

But there's also a less comforting reason, it seems, for the founders' current fashionableness: a popular taste for uncritical hero worship. In recent years our culture has taken an anti-intellectual turn. Leaders, including the current occupant of the White House, denigrate science, learning, erudition, skepticism, and critical inquiry; we commend the practical values of efficiency, the rituals of self-help, and the virtues of tradition, authority, and simple religious faith. We search history for role models and moral exemplars.

Thus, when we start with the premise that the founders led exemplary lives, it becomes easy to breeze by their petty feuds, their moral failings, and their stunning hypocrisies. As if singing a happy refrain, we default to a posture of slack-jawed awe before the greatness of their feats—which is, in a sense, the least interesting thing about them. Moreover, when we know that we're studying the founders in such a spirit of reverence, it then becomes impossible not to suspect something more troubling still: that we end up judging this peculiar band of 18th-century politicians as virtuous, brave, farsighted, brilliant, and heroic solely because that is how we set out to see them in the first place.

http://slate.msn.com/id/111270

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Founding sinners By Laura Miller

Nov. 25, 2003  |  "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negros?" said Samuel Johnson, no fan of the American Revolution. The legitimate question behind the jeer has never gone away, mostly because Americans have long avoided answering it. As Garry Wills writes in his new book, "Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power," "Through much of our history Americans have shied away from slavery as too divisive or hot an issue, leading to a great national amnesia about its impact and reach." This means not that Americans have literally pretended that slavery never happened, but that our historians have traditionally avoided asking what slavery really was and what it tells us about our past. That "great national amnesia," however, is coming to an end.

For many decades, American history engaged in the secular canonization of the Founding Fathers. (Sometimes the canonization has been not so secular; defenders of Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument cite the religiosity of the nation's founders, seemingly unaware that many of them -- Jefferson, for example -- were deists, or proto-Unitarians, and arguably not Christians.) Making saints of liberty out of men who were, after all, only human didn't just gloss over the inconvenient truth that Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, James Monroe and -- most revered of all -- George Washington were slave owners, but also egged on iconoclasts to tear down the idols of previous generations.

Replacing the semi-deified vision of Jefferson with the image of a white supremacist hypocrite, while an understandably angry reaction to discovering some of Jefferson's disgraceful ideas about and actions toward African-Americans, is just that: a reaction. It breeds counterreaction, more excessive glorification of Jefferson and excuses for his failings, and in turn more indignation. Serious debate about the nation's formative years descends to the level of Sunday morning political talk shows.

So Wills' book, along with Henry Wiencek's "An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America," are most welcome. They represent a trend in American history that is, in Wills' words, "finally coming to grips with the vast octopus that was slavery, with the tentacles it spread through every part of our nation and its political life." Both authors admire their subjects. Wills has devoted a goodly portion of his career to praising Jefferson; "His labors to guarantee freedom of religion would in themselves be enough to maintain his place in my private pantheon," he writes. And Wills insists that he does not mean for "Negro President" to "join an unfortunate recent trend toward Jefferson bashing."

Yet neither Wills nor Wiencek flinches from scrutinizing the moral compromises made by the great men they study, and those compromises were often grotesque. "Negro President" takes as its central idea the assertion that Jefferson would not have won the 1800 presidential election without the Electoral College votes provided by the "three-fifths clause" in the Constitution, and that Jefferson knew this all too well. (The clause counted each slave as three-fifths of a person in apportioning representation to each state.) "Negro President" goes on to offer a vigorous critique of Jefferson's inglorious efforts to preserve and extend slavery.

For his part, Wiencek tries to pin down the moral evolution of George Washington. The stately Virginian -- more worshipped in his day than any other leader of the Revolution -- went from a man who could participate in the raffling off of a debtor's slaves (thereby arbitrarily tearing apart families) to become the only Founding Father who posthumously freed all of his slaves.

Yet these two books couldn't be more different. Wills is an old-fashioned historian in focus and voice if not always in his ideas; "Negro President" concerns itself with intrigues and maneuvering on the highest levels. It sets Jefferson against a Massachusetts native, Timothy Pickering, who was one of slavery's staunchest foes, and dissects the shaking out of diplomatic, electoral and constitutional conflicts between the two men with so much detail and familiarity that the general reader must struggle to keep up.

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Wiencek's is the more emotional and intimate book, and this makes it a fine example of another new approach to America's past. Wiencek started out as a popular historian of great old houses. He wrote National Geographic and Smithsonian Guides, essentially guidebooks and coffee-table volumes. While not the kind of work that leads to Guggenheim and MacArthur grants, researching such books rousts a scholar out of Ivy League university libraries. It means driving around the countryside where history actually happened and meeting the descendants and neighbors of the people who built and inhabited those great houses. This led in turn to Wiencek's National Book Critics' Circle Award winner, "The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White," the story of a planter who willed his entire estate to his daughter by a slave woman, and the white family members who claimed for generations that he was insane.

So, when Wiencek writes that "the history of slavery is in large part the history of families," he knows whereof he speaks. When he continues, "the recovery of that history has become today, most powerfully, the work of white and black families trying to piece together their history and understand themselves," he gives credit to a category of amateur historians and genealogists whose most visible members are the descendants of Sally Hemings, a slave who DNA tests show almost certainly gave birth to at least one child by Jefferson. (Her family had been claiming as much for years.)

Wiencek's own family doesn't enter into "An Imperfect God," but he's the kind of writer who attends reunions where the black descendants of Southern plantation owners are finally being invited to mingle with their white kin. He is a hands-on historian in more ways than one. After gathering figures about the workload required of Mount Vernon's slaves from Washington's diaries and wondering just how hard their duties were, Wiencek heads off to Mount Vernon itself to put in a day's work at the model farm there, using period tools.

This kind of history isn't better than Wills' painstaking study of the records of the Federal Convention of 1787 or the letters and other papers of nearly forgotten figures like Pickering, just different. It creates a fuller picture of the Founding Fathers and, as important, a more immediate sense of the connection between their times and ours. Wiencek's down-to-earth techniques expand our range of feeling about the past and make it real. In "Negro President," slavery is a moral issue to get outraged about; in "An Imperfect God," it's a rotten taste in your mouth, something to gag on.

Ordinary Americans get this visceral sense of slavery's atrocity in "living history" museums like Colonial Williamsburg, where they can see interpreters acting out the parts of 17th century Williamsburg residents. "An Imperfect God" features a short history of the site's tricky relationship to the truth about Williamsburg. When the site was first restored and established as a living history site in the 1930s, Americans jangled by modernity sought "a historical refuge, a place of repose" in its idealized portrait of noble, gracious life in the old South. (A visitor in the '40s objected indignantly when a guide suggested that Jefferson might have "made merry" in the local tavern.) But, as Wiencek puts it, "the yearning for a history that 'makes sense' has collided with actual historical reality. Slavery wrecks the simple heroic narrative of the Founding."

Today, Colonial Williamsburg and Mount Vernon itself have become places where Americans confront slavery head-on. (Many of these sites expanded their depictions of slaves' lives in response to requests from members of the public, black and white.) Wiencek describes one scene in which site visitors, observing a secret meeting of "slaves" planning an escape, attempted to organize a violent defense when a "slave patrol" made up of white interpreters descended on the conspirators. A year after visiting the park, a 9-year-old Colorado boy was still asking his family to return to Williamsburg because he wanted to help one of the "slaves" escape.

When contemporary Americans witness slavery "on the ground," their reflexive impulse, even when they know they're seeing a performance, is to intervene, to say this will not stand. Surely the Founding Fathers, who saw slavery in its far uglier reality -- the harsh conditions, the brutal beatings and maimings, the children ripped from their mothers' arms, the constant and pervasive degradation designed to smother any inclination toward rebellion -- must have felt something similar.

Some have argued that it's unfair to impose contemporary values on people who lived in what was essentially another culture. But the truth is that all of the Founding Fathers knew that owning slaves was wrong, and the slaveholders among them did it anyway. To oppose it uncategorically was to risk the

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integrity of the union and beggar their own families. Much is made of Jefferson's torments over the matter; he was too intelligent not to see the glaring hypocrisy in his proclaiming that "all men are created equal" while holding fellow human beings as chattel.

The historian Edmund Morgan has advanced the argument that it was slavery itself that made the ideology of the Revolution possible. In England, the restless white working class so frightened their rulers that they clung even harder to the idea of innate social hierarchies. Only an elite presiding over a thoroughly subjected population of laborers, Morgan maintains, could have felt secure enough to develop a doctrine of human rights.

Nevertheless, some American slaveholders did dare to dream of emancipation. Wiencek describes the efforts of John Laurens, scion of a family of South Carolina slave traders, to refresh the understaffed Continental Army with slave soldiers who would earn their freedom by fighting the British. (The Loyalists themselves were offering freedom to escaped slaves who fought on their side.) He had little success; even slaveholders troubled by the institution (Jefferson and Washington, for two) feared angering powerful Southern plantation owners whose wealth depended on slave labor, and everyone knew that allowing communities of free blacks to flourish in the vicinity of slaves would inspire escapes and possibly revolt.

Yet one of the Founding Fathers did eventually act on his desire to "liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings": Washington. Although adored in his own time, Washington doesn't stir the contemporary imagination the way the brilliant, mercurial, complicated and multitalented Jefferson does. Even his military abilities have lost much of their luster, and his successes are attributed more to his peculiar charisma. In his latest insouciant historical riff, "Inventing a Nation," Gore Vidal writes that the Revolutionary War was fought so poorly that "in the end, only Washington's majestic presence held the Army together."

Although Washington resisted Laurens' scheme for manumission through military service, he does seem to have arrived at a plan for freeing his own slaves during his lifetime, perhaps even during his presidency, when he would have set a great example. Wiencek believes that Washington held back from doing so because of his family, specifically his wife, Martha. In one of the low points of his presidential career, when Martha's personal maid, Ona Judge, escaped to New England, Washington tried to secure her discreet return. Wiencek believes that a vindictive Martha insisted on this, "enraged at the disloyalty of the young woman" and seemingly indifferent to the damage that would be done to her husband's reputation if he were known to be offering a reward for the capture of a slave.

Martha, astonishingly enough, considered runaways like Judge to be examples of the "ungratatude" of blacks in general. If she was typical of his family, Wiencek's idea that Washington refrained from freeing his slaves to avoid his relatives' wrath seems reasonable. Martha clearly did not feel her husband's repugnance toward slavery and seems to have bought into several myths of the institution, too. "She expected her slaves to love her," Wiencek writes, "an illusion her husband did not share."

Washington owned outright only 123 of Mount Vernon's 316 slaves. The others were inherited by Martha from her first husband and entailed on her heirs, Washington's stepchildren. But the slaves had intermarried and created families together, entangling the two groups. To free Washington's 123 and set them up as tenant farmers (his initial plan) while keeping the rest in bondage was a recipe for domestic trouble for which Washington had no stomach. He left it to his (strongly worded) will to force the change. (Washington stipulated that they be freed after Martha's death, but she emancipated them early, fearing they would kill her to speed up the process.)

Wiencek's attempt to trace just how Washington reached the point of contemplating such a radical act runs into some obstacles: Unlike Jefferson, the first president left very little record of his inner life. Jefferson captures our imagination today because surviving documents give us more access to his interior. He could believe in both the dignity of man and the inferiority of blacks, and on top of that very likely fathered children in an interracial relationship whose true nature we will never know. We can conceive of him as a great character, racked by his own contradictions: a writer, an artist, a philosopher.

Washington was, by temperament and his own account, a farmer. He didn't especially like being president and fled to Mount Vernon whenever possible. "I think," he wrote in a rare effusion of emotion,

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"that the life of a Husbandman of all others is the most delectable. It is honorable -- It is amusing -- and with Judicious management, it is profitable ... The more I am acquainted with agricultural affairs the better I am pleased with them. I can nowhere find so great satisfaction as in those innocent and useful pursuits. In indulging these feelings, I am led to reflect how ... delightful to an undebauched mind is the task of making improvements on the earth."

Furthermore, Washington was a man of discipline and deliberation, who patterned himself, like many patriots of the Revolution, after the Roman statesman Cato, as depicted in Addison's eponymous play. Today, the neoclassical ideal of self-control that Cato embodies might seem unromantic and even cold-blooded compared with Jefferson's stormy wrestlings with his conscience. Even Vidal, who loves Washington, describes him as "slow." His genius, if he even had one, did not come in flashes.

But if Washington's reason ground slow like the proverbial mill of God, it ground exceedingly fine. Wiencek collects a series of experiences -- the lottery, an auction or two, the presence of Martha's half-sister among the slaves she brought to Mount Vernon -- and floats them as elements that contributed to Washington's change of heart and mind. It's also possible that the man thought long and hard about his beliefs and morality, all the principles for which he risked his life in leading the Revolution, and in the end determined that slavery could not be accommodated among them. It did not fit, it could not be made to fit, and so it would have to go. Consistency has been called the hobgoblin of small minds but in this case it was the spur of a great one.

It would take the rest of the nation another 50 years to realize that Washington was right, that slavery could not be made to fit into any version of the American dream. Then we spent another 100 years pretending it was no more than a transitory blemish on that dream, one that had been entirely wiped away. A new generation of historians is showing us that the evil was deep-rooted and not so easily removed. Sometimes the patience, thoroughness and long view of a master farmer is required for "the task of making improvements on the earth."

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/11/25/slavery/

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Nothing to Declare, The Declaration of Independence wasn't all that independent.By John Patrick Diggins, Posted Wednesday, July 9, 1997, at 12:30 AM PT

The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, gives Americans a holiday; as an intellectual document, it can give us a headache. Did its author, Thomas Jefferson, really mean what he wrote so eloquently? The proposition that "all men are created equal" was declared, and the term "declare" literally meant to "make clear"; yet we remain in the dark when reading its words. What does it mean for truths to be "self-evident" and for rights to be "inalienable"? And if the declaration justified the right to revolution, why has the United States historically been so opposed to revolution in other parts of the world?

The declaration, in short, is a document of numerous ironies. One of them is that although it has become our charter of rights, liberties, and freedoms, much of the declaration was written in the language of determinism and inevitability, as though fate trumped free will. "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another," announced the opening sentence, effectively claiming that the colonists

had no choice but to separate from the mother country.

Jefferson, by enumerating the "long train of abuses" perpetrated by King George III, intended to suggest that the break was unavoidable. Instead of simply saying that they wanted to be free of domination and taxation, the colonists found it more psychologically satisfying to assert that England made them do something they really didn't want to do. A Freudian might suggest that they felt not a little guilt in overthrowing authority and accusing the King of being a "tyrant" when he was actually just a bungler.

As Pauline Maier points out in her excellent American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, some of the colonists themselves thought the term "tyrant" went too far. Pro-monarchist sentiment remained strong in America until 1775, when it was reported that the king had called the colonists "rebels," whereupon they decided that reconciliation was out of the question.

Maier is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of several important books on the American Revolution. American Scripture is an outstanding work of research and analysis, written with grace and wit. In it, Maier discovers the great extent to which sentiment for separation existed throughout the colonies before the declaration. In the spring of 1776, cities and towns in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Massachusetts, among other colonies, all drew up resolutions advocating separate nationhood--following in the steps of Virginia, which had taken the lead in May 1775.

In that month, George Mason authored the "Declaration of Rights of Virginia." A major contribution of Maier's book is that it demonstrates how much of the Declaration of Independence was borrowed from Mason's Virginia Declaration. Jefferson took certain ideas and expressions from Mason and refined them, turning, for example, "obtaining happiness" into "the pursuit of happiness." Jefferson's thoughts and sentiments, rather than being daringly original, were, Maier reports, "absolutely conventional among Americans of his time." 

American Scripture excels in its examination of the historical context surrounding the declaration, elucidating both how the document came to be written and how it was later interpreted. But the author leaves a theoretical dilemma unresolved, one that involves a central question addressed by historians of the period today: How could the ideals of the declaration be reconciled with the reality of Southern slavery?

According to Maier, the Virginia Convention amended Mason's draft to make clear that the declaration excluded African-Americans. "All men are by nature equally free and independent," the convention stated,

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and inalienable rights are not surrendered when people enter society. But "slaves had never entered Virginia's society, which was confined to whites," writes Maier, paraphrasing the reasoning of the time. By a specious twist of logic, blacks were thereby deemed to have no rights at all, not even the natural rights that one would think that they, like everyone else, were born with.

Abraham Lincoln saw through the mendacity of such reasoning. Maier, along with Garry Wills and others, argues that Lincoln ignored Jefferson's original intent when he extended the idea of equality and natural rights to blacks, and that, in so doing, he mythologized the declaration. That may be true, but the claim misses a larger point.

Lincoln regarded the declaration as the "immortal emblem of humanity" for the entire world. The document was born in the blood and tears of revolution, and Lincoln reminded Americans that stories of the valiant struggle, which had the colonists taking on the greatest military power in the world, had once been told around the fireplace by veterans and ancestors while children listened in awe. This oral tradition became "a living history" that represented "a fortress of strength" and sustained the early republic. But, Lincoln lamented in 1838, "the silent artillery of time" had faded the images and silenced the voices of the past, and the glory of the revolution and the meaning of the declaration were no longer being seen and heard.

Lincoln did misconstrue the declaration when he universalized it far beyond Jefferson's intent. Yet the idea of equality that is so central to the document originates not with Lincoln but with the 17 th-century English philosopher John Locke. And although Jefferson is commonly said to have been greatly influenced by Locke, in fact Lincoln's reasoning was closer to Locke's than Jefferson's was. Locke insisted, when criticizing patriarchal rule, that men and women are not born into subjection, and that in the state of nature no one had the authority "to harm another's life, liberty, and possessions." Jefferson may not have wished to extend Lockeanism to the black race (or to women), but there was no reason why Lincoln could not do it for America.

When, in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson came to the conclusion that blacks were "naturally inferior," he was reasoning not according to nature or to Locke but to the conventions and biases of Virginian society. Lincoln recognized that society, not nature, breeds prejudices and other irrationalities. In the Calvinist Lockeanism embraced by Lincoln, slavery stood condemned for violating three principles, liberal principles that Jefferson himself once described as "self-evident": Slavery denied human beings the right to liberty, free labor, and property; it denied them the right to consent to the form of rule over them; and it denied them the right to resist unjust power.

Rather than reinvent the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln thought about liberty and justice in ways a slaveholder could not bring himself to do. While Jefferson bequeathed to America a tradition of rights, the means of realizing, extending, and protecting those rights is the legacy of Lincoln. It is to him, as much as to Jefferson, that July 4 belongs.http://slate.msn.com/id/2994/

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