Posts Tagged ‘Gordon Wood’

Founding Amateurs?

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Jack Miller Teaching Fellow, Gordon Wood, contributed an Op-Ed piece to the New York Times on 5/2/2010

By Gordon Wood

THE American public is not pleased with Congress — one recent poll shows that less than a third of all voters are eager to support their representative in November. “I am not really happy right now with anybody,” a woman from Decatur, Ill., recently told a Washington Post reporter. As she considered the prospect of a government composed of fledgling lawmakers, she noted: “When the country was founded, those guys were all pretty new at it. How bad could it be?”

Actually, our founders were not all that new at it: the men who led the revolution against the British crown and created our political institutions were very used to governing themselves. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams and John Adams were all members of their respective Colonial legislatures several years before the Declaration of Independence. In fact, these Revolutionaries drew upon a tradition of self-government that went back a century or more. Virginians ran their county courts and elected representatives to their House of Burgesses. The people of Massachusetts gathered in town meetings and selected members of the General Court, their Colonial legislature.

Of course, women, slaves and men without property could not vote; nevertheless, by the mid-18th century roughly two out of three adult white male colonists could vote, the highest proportion of voters in the world. By contrast, only about one in six adult males in England could vote for members of Parliament.

If one wanted to explain why the French Revolution spiraled out of control into violence and dictatorship and the American Revolution did not, there is no better answer than the fact that the Americans were used to governing themselves and the French were not. In 18th-century France no one voted; their Estates-General had not even met since 1614. The American Revolution occurred when it did because the British government in the 1760s and 1770s suddenly tried to interfere with this long tradition of American self-government.

Of course, a deep distrust of political power, especially executive power, had always been a part of this tradition of self-government. Consequently, when the newly independent Americans drew up their Revolutionary state constitutions in 1776, most states generally limited the number of years their annually elected governors could successively hold office.

“A long continuance in the first executive departments of power or trust is dangerous to liberty,” declared the Maryland Constitution. “A rotation, therefore, in those departments is one of the best securities of permanent freedom.” In addition to specifying term limits for its plural executive, the radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 required that after four annual terms even the assemblymen would have to give way to a new set of legislators so they would “return to mix with the mass of the people and feel at their leisure the effects of the laws which they have made.”

At the same time, the Articles of Confederation also provided that no state delegate to the Congress could serve more than three years out of six.

In the decade after the Declaration of Independence, however, many American leaders had second thoughts about what they had done amid the popular enthusiasm of 1776. Since many of the state legislatures were turning over roughly 50 percent of their membership annually and passing a flood of ill-drafted and unjust legislation, stability and experience seemed to be what was most needed.

As a consequence, many leaders in the 1780s proposed major changes to their constitutional structures, including the abolition of term limits. In Pennsylvania, reformers eliminated rotation in office on the grounds that “the privilege of the people in elections is so far infringed as they are thereby deprived of the right of choosing those persons whom they would prefer.”

The new federal Constitution, itself a reaction to the excessive populism of 1776, also did away with any semblance of term limits, much to the chagrin of Thomas Jefferson and many others uneasy over the extraordinary power of the presidency. Jefferson thought that without rotation in office the president would always be re-elected and thus would serve for life. When he became president he stepped down after two terms and thus affirmed the precedent that Washington had established — a precedent finally made part of the Constitution by the 22nd Amendment in 1951.

Although federal term limits have been confined to the presidency, the fear of entrenched and far-removed political power, as the present anti-incumbency mood suggests, remains very much part of American popular culture. Yet precisely because we are such a rambunctious and democratic people, as the framers of 1787 appreciated, we have learned that a government made up of rotating amateurs cannot maintain the steadiness and continuity that our expansive Republic requires.

Gordon S. Wood, a professor emeritus of history at Brown, is the author, most recently, of “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.”

See Gordon Wood video on the American Founding Fathers.

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Gordon Wood on the Founding Fathers

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

Dr. Michael Andrews, Vice President of Academic Programs, interviews Gordon Wood on the founding fathers.


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Transcript

Intro:                 The Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History presents Dr. Gordon Wood, one of our nation’s preeminent scholars on the American Revolution.  Dr. Wood discusses America’s founding fathers with Dr. Michael Andrews.

Dr. Andrews:     I’m here with Gordon Wood, one of our country’s leading scholars on the American Revolution and founding eras.  Gordon is the Alva O. Way Professor Emeritus at Brown University.  He is also the author of numerous seminal works on early American history, including The Creation of the American Republic which won the Bancroft Prize in 1970 and Radicalism of the American Revolution which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.  Welcome Gordon.

Dr. Wood:         Thank you.

Dr. Andrews:     I’d like to ask you a few questions about early American History.  The American Revolution has long been viewed as one of the signal events in the development of the modern west, the Declaration of Independence, after all, seems to closely reflect the writings of the political philosopher, John Locke, a thinker who is regarded by many as one of the main figures in the development of modern liberalism.  In the past, however, you’ve written the founders to the contrary, were not modern men so much, but representatives of classical republicanism and I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that.

Dr. Wood:         Well, I think the historical profession had emphasized the Lockean liberalism, the individual rights, the individualism so to speak of separate Americans, … and the classic notion of the public good, the Commonwealth had been neglected.  So, I wanted to redress the balance.  The founders, I think, expected the leaders to be more like themselves, more or less heroic individuals with the classical kind of conception of leadership.  You’re not going to be in government to make money out of it.  You’re not trying to exploit office for the sake of your own careers.  You’re supposed to be devoted to the public.  And, by the early 19th century the politicians, in that term they’re not statesmen, they are politicians running for office and doing things that the founders would’ve found objectionable.  Log rolling, horse trading, all of the things that we consider to be the staples of American politics were not something that the founders expected.  They didn’t want that kind of politics.  They expected people not to run but to stand for office.  They did not anticipate electoral politics as it emerged in the 19th century or that we have today.

Dr. Andrews:     This transition from a more Republican to a more liberal culture is also closely paralleled by the transition from a more aristocratic to a more democratic culture.

Dr. Wood:         Yes, that’s right because the classical republican notion depended on leaders who was disinterested, who were virtuous, who were capable of sacrificing the private interest.  And, as society became more democratic, that aristocratic notion fell away and was unable to sustain itself.

Dr. Andrews:     I’m wondering if you could discuss further the transition from an aristocratic to a more democratic society by talking about Benjamin Franklin.  Was not Franklin one of the first great examples of the modern notion of the self-made man?

Dr. Wood:         The conception of the self-made man, with Franklin at the center of it is really an invention of the 19th century.  Businessmen in the 1820s and 30s needed a hero to justify their rise and they could not find that hero in Jefferson or Washington, or after all, aristocratic slave holders.  But, they could find it in the printer, Franklin.  And, they saw in Franklin, the printer who had made it, the kind of person that could justify their rise and they made… they turned him into the self-made man. The exemplar of that kind of rise.

Dr. Andrews:     But, wasn’t Franklin’s first great act of self-making an attempt to try to transform himself into a British aristocrat?

Dr. Wood:         Well, he wants to become a gentleman.  He starts out as a printer.  He’s a very wealthy man.  But, as long as he’s still a printer… even if he’s running a shop with 20 employees, he is looked down upon by the gentry because he has to work for a living.  And, labor was held in contempt.  It had been held in contempt since the beginning of classical times.  From antiquity on.  So, Franklin has to retire.  He does at the age of 42, 1748, he retires from his business in a very elaborate kind of ceremony.  He has a coming out portrait painted.  He becomes a gentleman and he never works again a day in his life.  Now, he participated in science.  He participated in public life.  But, he’s not working as a businessman.  His money is coming to him through all kinds of investments.  He was very self consciously becoming a gentleman and that was a big distinction that we’ve almost totally lost.

Dr. Andrews:     Stories often speak of the significance of the moment when Washington turned his sword over to Congress.  Why was that moment so significant?  And, why did King George III of Britain declare that if Washington turned his sword over to Congress “he would be the greatest man in the world”?

Dr. Wood:         Who in history, what successful general had ever done such a thing?  Except maybe, you could go back to Cincinnatus, which is in the mists of time, an ancient mythical hero.  But, otherwise, we go from Caesar to Cromwell to Marlboro to William of Orange, all of those successful military leaders expected political rewards commensurate with their military victories.  And, here’s Washington saying – no.  I’m leaving.  I’m going back to Mt. Vernon to my farm.  And, it just electrified the world.  They couldn’t believe it.  How could you give up power.  How does anyone give up power at the height of his success?  Nobody else had done that in recent history.  Certainly not since Cromwell.  So, that’s what George III is saying.  He just can’t believe that a person would give up power so easily as Washington did.

Dr. Andrews:     Would it be possible for a figure like George Washington to reappear in the American political scene?

Dr. Wood:         There’s no possibility of us having a Washington.  We live in a very different world.  Much more democratic world than Washington’s world.  It’s very unlikely that anyone like him would appear again.

Dr. Andrews:     You’ve written recently on the state of the historical profession.  Why is that so many popular works of history so often seem to be written by non-academics, like David McCullough?

Dr. Wood:         I think this is especially true of the early American period of the revolution which has been abdicated by professional historians that are much more interested in writing monographs for one another to advance the discipline which is a legitimate concern.  To move into new areas, to work on women when they’ve been neglected, to work on slavery if it hasn’t been, and that’s the kind of monograph that’s being written, but I do think that historians have an obligation at the same time as they’re advancing the discipline to reach out to the general public.  To tell them the story of the country’s history.  Of what’s happened.  How we got to be the way we are.  We’re not physics.  We’re not the kind where you can write your papers for each other.  We need to reach out to the general public and I think that most historians simply aren’t doing that.  They are caught up in issues that concern them and are not necessarily the issues that concern the general public.  As a consequence, that whole area of political, biographical, constitutional history has been filled by non PhD’s and it’s not just McCullough, there’s a whole host of people who do not have PhD’s who have invaded, so to speak, and made a lot of money writing good popular history.

Dr. Andrews:     Thank you so much Gordon.

Dr. Wood:         Thank you.

[Music Out]

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The Most Partisan Election in American History

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

The Most Partisan Election in American History: Gordon Wood

After the most partisan election in the history of the United States of America, the new President made a direct appeal to the unique aspects of the American mind:

“During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1801)

The Jack Miller Center asked Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, Gordon S. Wood, to give us an historical perspective on the most divisive campaign in American history:

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Painting of Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale (1805)

Thomas Jefferson

In 1801 Thomas Jefferson had just been elected president after a hard-fought and bitter campaign between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans. It was in fact one of the most tumultuous and vicious electoral campaigns in American history. The Federalist press had tagged Jefferson with every epithet they could think of–a coward, a radical, an atheist, and, most alarming, the leader of a gang of Jacobins who were trying to take over the American government and make it a satellite of revolutionary France. For their part the Republicans gave as good as they got, accusing the Federalists of trying to foist an English-style monarchy on America. Never in American history has the press been as abusive and as vituperative as it was in the electoral campaign of 1800.

All this newspaper scurrility took place in the wake of the Sedition Act of 1798, by which the Federalist-controlled Congress had attempted to curb the Republican press’s vitriolic attacks on President John Adams and other Federalist leaders. The Federalists had become convinced that elective republican governments could not allow the press to abuse their political leaders and undermine their capacity to rule. How could John Adams exercise his authority as president if he were victimized, as he put it, by “the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fish-woman scurrility, and the most palpable lies” that had ever been leveled against any public official?

Hence with the Sedition Act of 1798 the Federalists in Congress made it a federal crime to “write, print, utter or publish. . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing”  that brought the president or members of Congress “into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.”

Americans believed in freedom of the press and had written that freedom into their Bill of Rights. But they believed in it as Englishmen did, who meant by it, in contrast to the French, no prior restraint or censorship of what was published. Under English law, people were nevertheless held responsible for what they published.  If a person’s publications were slanderous and calumnious enough to bring public officials into disrespect, then under the common law the publisher could be prosecuted for seditious libel. The truth of what was published was no defense; indeed, it even aggravated the offense. Furthermore, under the common law judges, not juries, had the responsibility to decide whether or not a publication was seditious.

Although the Sedition Act horrified the Republicans, it was actually a liberalization of the English common law of seditious libel that continued to run in the state courts. Under the new federal statute, which resembled the liberal argument John Peter Zenger’s lawyer had used in 1735, the truth of what was said or published could be admitted as a defense, and juries could decide whether or not a particular piece was libelous and seditious.

The Republicans were in no mood to accept the Federalists liberalization of the common law. In the debate over the sedition law that spilled into the early nineteenth century several Republican libertarian theorists, including George Hay of Virginia and Tunis Wortman of New York, rejected both the old common law restrictions on the liberty of the press and the new legal recognition of the distinction between truth and falsity of opinion that the Federalists had incorporated into the Sedition Act.  While the Federalists clung to the eighteenth century’s conception that “truths” were constant and universal and capable of being discovered by enlightened and reasonable men, the Republican libertarians argued that opinions about government and governors were many and diverse and their truth could not be determined simply by individual judges and juries, no matter how reasonable such men were.  Hence, they concluded that all political opinions–that is, words as distinct from overt acts–even those opinions that were “false, scandalous, and malicious,” ought to be allowed, as Jefferson put it in his First Inaugural Address, to “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

The Federalists were dumbfounded by these arguments. “How … could the rights of the people require a liberty to utter falsehood?” they asked.  “How could it be right to do wrong?”   It was not an easy question to answer, neither then nor later.  “Truth,” the Federalists said, “has but one side and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.”  Any notion of multiple and varying truths would produce “universal uncertainty, universal misery,” and “set all morality afloat.”  People needed to know the “criterion by which we may determine with certainty, who are right, and who are wrong.”

Most Republicans felt they could not deny outright the possibility of truth and falsity in political beliefs, and thus they fell back on a tenuous distinction, developed by Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address, between principles and opinions.  Principles, it seemed, were hard and fixed, while opinions were soft and fluid; therefore, said Jefferson, “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” Individual opinions did not seem to count as much as they had in the past and thus could be permitted the freest possible expression.

What ultimately made such distinctions and arguments comprehensible was the Republicans’ assumption that opinions about politics were no longer the monopoly of the educated and aristocratic few.  Not only were true and false and even malicious opinions equally to be tolerated, but everyone and anyone in the society should be equally able to express them.  Sincerity and honesty, the Republican polemicists argued, were far more important in the articulation of ultimate political truth than learning and fancy words that had often been used to deceive and dissimulate.  Truth was actually the creation of many voices and many minds, no one of which was more important than another and each of which made its own separate and equally significant contribution to the whole.  Solitary opinions of single individuals may now have counted for less, but in their statistical collectivity they now added up to something far more significant than had ever existed before, something that the New York Republican Tunis Wortman referred to as “the extremely complicated term Public Opinion.”

Because American society was not the kind of organic hierarchy with “an intellectual unity” that the Federalists had wanted, public opinion in America, argued Wortman, the most articulate of the new Republican libertarians, could no longer be the consequence of the intellectual leadership of a few learned gentlemen.  General public opinion was simply “an aggregation of individual sentiments,” the combined product of multitudes of minds thinking and reflecting independently, communicating their ideas in different ways, causing opinions to collide and blend with one another, to refine and correct each other, leading toward “the ultimate triumph of Truth.” Such a product, such a public opinion, could be trusted because it had so many sources, so many voices and minds, all interacting, that no privileged individual or group could manipulate or dominate the whole.

This vast, impersonal, and democratic idea of public opinion, said Federalist Theodore Sedgwick in disgust, “is of all things the most destructive of personal independence and of that weight of character which a great man ought to possess.”  But no matter, it was the people’s opinion, and it could be trusted because no one controlled it and everyone contributed to it.  Despite the Federalist warning that a government dependent exclusively on public opinion was a mere “democracy,” in which “opinion shifts with every current of caprice,” there was no turning back.  In no country in the world did public opinion become more awesome and powerful than it did in the increasingly democratic America of the early Republic.

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This essay is drawn from the forthcoming Oxford History of the Early Republic, Empire of Liberty. Several of Professor Wood’s current books in print are available in our JMC Book Store.

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Gordon Wood on The Jack Miller Center

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Gordon S. Wood finds the work of the Jack Miller Center, “exhilarating and exciting.”

“The Jack Miller Center does great work in getting young scholars involved in the era of the founding,” says Professor Wood, one of the nation’s preeminent historians and a frequent participant at the Miller Center Summer Institutes.

Wood, a Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University, earned his doctorate at Harvard University and taught at the College of William and Mary, Harvard, the University of Michigan and Cambridge University before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” in 1993.

“The young people are so engaged and interested in this material; you just can’t help but be thrilled to be involved,” Wood says.

“The summer faculty development institutes are an integral part of our overall mission,” says Dr. Michael Andrews, Miller Center vice president of academic programs. “Each institute brings together 20 to 30 junior faculty members and advanced graduate students for workshops led by leading scholars, educators and intellectuals.”

A renowned scholar, Wood believes the summer institutes benefit everyone involved. “I am learning as much as the young scholars are learning,” Wood adds. “My thinking is affected by the exchanges that take place at the seminar.

“It’s important because these men who drafted the Constitution created the institutions and ideals by which we are governed,” Wood says. “They have created our identity. America is not a nation in th e usual sense of the term. We have no ethnic or tribal identity. Our nation is based on a set of beliefs and aspirations — equality, liberty, constitutionalism — that came out of the Revolution. We go back to the Revolution and the founding to find out who we are.

“That’s why we keep going back to the founders: to refresh and reaffirm our sense of identity. Our interest in the founding will continue as long as the United States exists.”

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See our video interview with Gordon Wood on the founders here.

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Miller Center Network Publications

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

The Jack Miller Center wants to congratulate the members of our JMC network who have published a book length manuscript in the last calendar year. Few accomplishments are as meaningful and lasting for authors, and those who read them.

The list also is a demonstration of the broad intellectual interests of our network. Although many directly address America’s Founding and History, the list includes subjects and authors that compose the intellectual, historical, and political resources the American Founders drew upon as well as current events that are of interest to all of us.

Nathan Busch, Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Future of Non-Proliferation Policy, co-edited with Daniel H. Joyner (University of George Press, 2009)

Ross Corbett, The Lockean Commonwealth (SUNY, 2009)

Donald Critchlow, ed., Debating Conservatism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009),  Politics and Hollywood (Routledge, 2009)

John Dinan, paperback edition of The American State Constitutional Tradition

Jonathan Dunn, From Schoolhouse to Courthouse: The Judiciary’s Role in American Education, co-edited with Martin West (Brookings Institution Press, 2009)

Robert Faulkner and Susan Shell, co-editors of American at Risk: Threats to Liberal Self-Government in an Age of Uncertainty (University of Michigan Press, 2009)

Michael Gillespie, paperback edition of The Theological Origins of Modernity

Allen Guelzo, Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2009), Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009)

William Hay, Lives of Victorian Political Figures, Part IV (William Bagehot) (Pickering and Chatto Publishers, 2009)

Louie Herbert, More than Kings and Less than Men: Tocqueville on the Promise and Perils of Democratic Individualism (Lexington Books, 2009)

Steve Kautz, The Supreme Court and the Idea of Constitutionalism, co-edited with Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, Richard Zinman (Penn Press, 2009)

Christopher Kelly, Rousseau on Women, Love, and Family, co-edited with Eve Grace (University Press of New England, 2009)

Harvey Klehr, co-author of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press, 2009), The Communist Experience in America (Transaction Publishers, 2009)

Benjamin Kleinerman, The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power (2009)

Robert Koons, The Waning of Materialism: new Essays on the Mind/Body Problem, co-edited with George Bealer (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Ralph Lerner, Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Paul Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic (Yale University Press, 2009), Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (Yale University Press, 2009)

Eric Sands, American Public Philosophy and the Mystery of Lincolnism (University of Missouri Press, 2009)

Brian Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Johns Hopkins Press, 2009)

Colleen Sheehan, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Susan Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy (Harvard University Press, 2009)

Steven Smith, The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (2009)

Barry Strauss, The Spartacus War (Simon & Schuster, 2009)

Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Constitutional Presidency, co-edited with Joseph M. Bessette (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)

Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford, 2009)

Michael Zuckert, The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle, co-edited with Derek Webb (Liberty Fund, 2009).

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