Steve Reads

I’ve had a sort of low-level displeasure with David McCullough for years. I read his John Adams and found it really fawning; ditto Truman. George Will, in a laudatory review of John Adams, wrote that McCullough

does not write “pathographies.” That neologism, coined by novelist Joyce Carol Oates, denotes a kind of biography that, of late, has been too much with us. Such biographies portray their subjects not just warts and all, but as mostly warts — the sum of their pathologies. It speaks well of McCullough that he abandoned writing a biography of Picasso because he could not stand to be so long in the company of such an unpleasant man.

as though this were a compliment. It seems to me that the proper posture for a historian is disinterest: not adoration, but not hatred either. It’s unintentional left-handed praise, it seems to me, that McCullough can only write about people he likes. Where do I go if I want to find out the bad things about Adams? He’s a human being; surely he made some mistakes.

Reading The Jefferson Image reminds me, more to the point, just how little McCullough adds to the standard Federalist/Democratic picture that U.S. society has painted for over 200 years. When Federalism (in this case Adams) is in the ascendant, Jefferson is normally portrayed as an ineffectual atheist Frenchman with a disagreeable character. And that’s exactly the portrait that McCullough gives us. He’s all about “character”: sure Adams stood behind the Alien and Sedition Acts to punish his enemies, and sure Truman dropped the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities — but at least they both have character. Neither Adams nor Truman has ever been respected as a pioneer in the great American self-government experiment; I suspect that if you asked McCullough, he’d tell you that this has more to do with the snobbishness of American elites than with the merits of either man. Which plays into the argument that Richard Hofstadter made in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life: intelligence has never won American politicians elections.

Which is to say that my recent reading has only reinforced my impression of McCullough.

P.S.: I wrote a review of John Adams on Amazon a few years ago. Scroll down on that page for my review, or just look below the fold here.

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I don’t have time to write about it now, but the last thing I read before I left lunch was a discussion of Vernon Louis Parrington’s three-volume work Main Currents in American Thought: The Colonial Mind: 1620-1800, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800-1860, and the posthumously published third volume, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, covering 1860 to 1920. One of the premises of the series, in short, is that the Jeffersonian tradition in American government had slowly become more and more obsolete, and that the Hamiltonians had always had a much better grasp on the actual levers of governance. Liberals — represented by Jefferson — had always been much more devoted to principle. They were beautiful principles (equality of man and all that), but they were always going to lose to Federalists who understood economic reality. As time went on, and the agrarian society that Jefferson exalted became less and less prominent, liberals were going to lose even more.

Looks like that may be next in the Why Liberals Keep Losing series.

My friend Charlie — sometimes-commenter to this blog, when I write about programming and don’t make too much of an ass of myself, or write about math and invariably make an ass of myself — had a funny story when I was in Berkeley. A professor at Berkeley — some googling tells me it was Leo Harrington — had recently delivered a talk in which he translated Hegel into the language of group actions. (E.g., “We are spirited away towards encountering certain beings; we end up potentially constituted as a set U acted on transitively and faithfully by a group G (although G and U are never actually achieved and are to be viewed as under construction) . . . ”) To one unfamiliar with the jargon, this might seem earnest, but I have some severe doubts that it was delivered that way. I hope that it was delivered totally deadpan, whether or not it was serious; that just makes the joke better. If you grasp the absurdity of this translation — like translating the works of William Shakespeare into recipes for flan — you will find the whole project witty in an extraordinarily subtle way. Merely getting the joke is half the fun.

That’s a long way of getting around to the book I’m reading now, by way of a story featuring two of my favorite things, namely math dilettantism and snarkiness.

The book is The Jefferson Image In The American Mind, which I only discovered a week ago. It’s funny in the same way as that joke, though the joke in the Jefferson book may be all in my mind. [*] It’s 460 pages of Jefferson’s travails after his death, wherein he’s alternately viewed as the savior of the nation; its destroyer through weak government; a powerful man of action; an effeminate, pusillanimous coward; the apostle of individual liberties; the creator of states’ rights; the father of sanctified, timeless liberal democracy; and the inventor of a governmental technology made obsolete by the new industrial world.

This is just very funny. After a couple hundred pages of it, I find myself giggling. I don’t quite know if this was the intent, but it’s almost unavoidable. By the middle of the book, you feel bad for Jefferson’s corpse and somewhat mystified at what the man actually believed.

It’s not that he’s an especially inconsistent or shape-shifty man; indeed, I think part of the point is that his views changed just as much as any responsible human’s would in the face of changing circumstances. But he’s the cofounder of a nation, so his words and deeds take on far greater importance than yours or mine. He also developed and applied a body of philosophy to the new American government, which few others among the Framers (Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Marshall  . . .  anyone else?) can say. When you put your views on the line, you have to expect that you’ll get fired upon.

It’s an exquisite book, meticulously researched and sturdily delivered; Peterson’s sentences are workaday and occasionally funny, but the essence of his humor (if I’m not imagining it) comes over time, not in yuks. It’s enormously thought-provoking, which may be inevitable if you’re an American (and hence may have less to do with Peterson); I filled up three pages of notes during my time at Murky and at the Library of Congress (namely the Jefferson Building — DUH DUH DUH) today. I’ll have more to write on the subject presently.

In the meantime, I highly recommend it if you’re interested in the rather malleable American definition of freedom.

[*] — The Harrington joke can’t all be in my head; I don’t believe that someone could write that “The Doctrine of Essence is about how G acting on U reflects the doctrine of being, where again our access is limited” and be serious about it.

 . . . looks amazing. The dude’s written eight books on Jefferson.

I’ve also always been intrigued by Dumas Malone’s eight-volume bio of Jefferson, but my sense from reading other historians is that they don’t necessarily respect it all that much.

Particularly since reading Blood of the Liberals, it’s seemed clear to me that anyone who wants to understand the United States will one day need to come to terms with the contradictions that Jefferson himself embodied.

P.S.: And as it turns out, The Jefferson Image won a Bancroft Prize. That’s a pretty reliable indicator of a quality book.

P.P.S. (9 July 2006): I’ve now checked it out of the D.C. public library which, for all its problems, does seem to have a decent collection of books about American history and politics. This is, perhaps, not surprising.