Home >  A & E >  Books

Insights into the men who envisioned and created a new world order

Sunday, March 02, 2003

By Bruce Clayton

Bernard Bailyn's latest probing of the Founding Fathers is deep, creative, brilliant and provocative. In a word: dazzling.

	"To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders By Bernard Bailyn Knopf ($26)

Were I envious (which I am), I'd consider heaving my academic robe and mortarboard into the nearest Dumpster. Having read Bailyn's previous award-winning books, I had a hunch that his new work would be extraordinary, but it tops everything he has done -- and that includes his Pulitzer Prize winners of 1968 ("The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution") and 1987 ("Voyagers to the West").

At 80, and after a life pondering what his subtitle calls "The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders," the retired Harvard professor carefully wraps his passionate praise of these men in a balanced, patient tone and style that should be a model for all who want to get at the truth about individual freedom, democracy, order and power.

How, Bailyn asks, did a group of "provincials" -- as the colonists surely were -- conceive of a new society of brilliantly balanced liberty and a necessarily powerful state and encapsulate it in a workable Constitution and other writings?

His reply is that their "provincialism," or distance from the great seats of European learning and wisdom about mankind's limitations, was their strength. They were not, when compared with the grandees of European nobility, sophisticated.

Look, as Bailyn does masterfully, at even the grandest Colonial houses and portraits. One immediately notices the founders' relative rusticity.

The founders were, relatively speaking, farmhands, such as Connecticut's Roger Sherman ("self-educated farmer, shoemaker, surveyor"), whose portrait reveals a sober man bereft of powder and wig. That conspicuous worn spot on the pants of his right knee belied his deft devising of the Bill of Rights.

Surely, Thomas Jefferson, an erudite Colonial aristocrat if there ever was one, who was capable of holding his own intellectually with anyone in the world, deliberately misspoke, as Bailyn notes, when he told a European dignitary, "Ours are the only farmers who can read Homer."

Jefferson is pilloried today for being a philanderer and hypocrite regarding slaves (particularly his own) and his country's native people, as well as a dangerous sloganizer. But for all his "ambiguities," says Bailyn, he was more.

Jefferson was, as Erik Erikson called him, a man of protean intellect and abilities.

The author of the Declaration of Independence was one of the chief architects of "an intensely creative moment in Western history" when, despite what England and Europe's best and brightest said couldn't be done, the founders were inspired to see -- and hope and dream.

However provincial, they were the soul of wisdom and creative inspiration. They could envision and create a better world.

The founders knew they were betting on their ability to outline a government -- and counting on farmers who read Homer.

Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the chief organizer of the Federalist Papers, which shrewdly laid out the case for the Constitution, were feet-on-the-ground revolutionaries willing to gamble on the future.

They were not, as Reinhold Niebuhr would say almost 200 years later in trying to find a realistic foundation for democracy, "foolish children of light" who overestimate man's goodness; nor were they "evil children of darkness" who see only human venality.

Defending the Constitution, James Madison struck a distinctly Niebuhrian note: "As there is a degree of depravity in mankind, which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence."

Writes Bailyn: "The great achievement" of Hamilton, Madison and John Hay, the authors of the Federalist Papers, "is not merely that they replied in detail to specific dangers that critics saw in the Constitution and explained in detail how the new government should, and would, work, but they did so without repudiating the past, without rejecting the basic ideology of the Revolution."

The founders did more: They created a better world through example and ideas clearly and cogently expressed.

There is nothing cocksure about Bailyn's conclusions. He admits to being in awe of the Revolutionary generation and still a bit bewildered, after a half century of studying them, at their accomplishment.

And he warns us to remember that the continued success of the Republic will take more than just good intentions.

It will require, as the founders knew deep in their bones, eternal vigilance in standing up for freedom and equality against those who would abuse freedom in the name of loyalty and, in the name of national safety and social order, deny liberty to honest dissenters.

Bruce Clayton is a historian and critic at Allegheny College in Meadville.