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Title: Inventing A Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0-300-10171-6 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.55 (22 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Much Needed Reminder of the Past
Comment: Just when we need him most, here comes Gore Vidal with a slim but deep look at our nation's beginning. Vidal's elegant, waspish wit makes this book (along with everything else he writes) a delight, but the true value of this work lies in its content.
Vidal makes it clear in his afterword that the book was inspired by a brief conversation he had with John F. Kennedy in November 1961. Kennedy wondered why we had no great men of the caliber of the Founding Fathers in his own time (how depressed he would have been had he lived forty more years and witnessed our present crop of "leaders"!!) Vidal doesn't really give us a clear answer to Kennedy's question, but he does manage, in less than 200 pages, to remind us of both the Founders' human frailties and their greatness. With Vidal Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and many others don't come out as icons, but neither are they the villains some would make them. One finishes this book in an hour or so aware that the men who created our nation were human after all, but intelligent and dedicated men who compare rather well with their successors in 2003.
Rating: 5
Summary: Americans are better than their government
Comment: Everyone knows George Washington is "the father of his country" who refused a salary as commander-in-chief of the revolutionary armies; the first paragraph of this delightful book points out he collected $100,000 in "expenses."
Gore Vidal has an incisive way of cutting through hypocrisy, and in this book he takes aim at the often very bitter and scorched-earth politics that accompanied the founding of the United States of America. His portrayal of just three founders make today's politicians look as wimpy as a babble of Girl Scouts quibbling about their last box of broken peppermint cookies. Pardon me, I don't mean to insult any Girl Scouts; given their ability to sell cookies, they could probably do better than today's "polluticians."
He links many pecadilloes of the men who created America to modern times; I think, but I'm not sure, that he wants to contrast the founding idealism of the birth of a new democracy to the banal and petty politics which now infect public life. In reality, this book gives me hope that Americans are far better than their politicians -- in 1787, when they were writing the Constitution, and today when so many politicians are trashing it.
Vidal is witty, incisive and a delight to read. One of the warm fuzzy images of Washington shows him wrapped in warm winter clothes as he kneels in prayer in the snow at Valley Forge. Why was Washington praying? Perhaps, as Vidal explains, because he was "dealing with a crooked Congress that was allowing food and supplies to be sold to the British army while embezzling for themselves money appropriated for 'the naked and distressed soldiers,' as Washington referred to his troops."
In other words, this isn't your usual history. Washington describes Congress as a place with "venality, corruption, prostitution of office for selfish ends, abuse of trust, perversion of funds from a national to a private use, and speculations upon the necessities of times pervade all interests." It explains why today's so-called conservatives want to go back to the values of the Founding Fathers.
He may be too cynical. For example, how competent was Washington? Vidal quotes one British observer who wrote, "Any general in the world other than General Howe would have beaten General Washington; and any general in the world other than George Washington would have beaten General Howe."
These are the people who created America. Vidal fails to understand the world in general is run by mediocrity. He should know; he was once a friend of President John Kennedy, a brilliant showman with little substance. It is how the world functions, including the birth of the American system of government from 1775 to 1815. Some politicians are all image and no ideas; great politicians dress noble ideas with inspiring images.
Vidal's weakness is that he understands little of England of the era; if he had, he'd understand the American Revolution as a major reform effort of a basically good system rather than the invention of something new. On this basis, reform (Jefferson called it revolution) is a permanent patriotic duty of all.
Setting these quibbles aside, Vidal does what every good journalist should do -- he afflicts the comfortable, comforts the afflicted. He makes you think about today's politics in terms of the idealism and pettiness of the founding fathers. In 1789, with the new Constitution ratified, the business of governing meant "the days of discussing Hume and Montesquieu were over." In its place came back-room deals and log rolling for special interests.
He offers a refreshing reminder that America was founded on a mixture of idealism and the venality of opportunist politicians. Little has changed. Americans have always been better than their government, as Vidal makes abundantly clear in this inspiring book.
Rating: 5
Summary: when the People shall become so corrupted ....
Comment: Vidal's latest, is a broadside typical of the period he's writing about -- a mixture of historical anecdote, contemporary commentary and unabashed partisan analysis --in other words, a great read! Vidal surveys the period from 1776 to 1800, concentrating on the personalities and writings of Washington, Hamilton, Adams & Jefferson. Along the way, he contrasts 18th century politics and political philosophy with 21st century politics [only, since he sees little reasoned analysis in modern government]. And sometimes he just goes for the quick jab, as when he quotes Adams view of the newly arrived French minister as a comparison with our first unelected president:
>>>>>>>John Adams had known Genet's family in France: he had also known the boy himself. Politely, he received the fiery minister and then wrapped him round with Adamsian analysis of the graveyard sort: "A youth totally destitute of all experience in popular government, popular assemblies, or conventions of any kind: very little accustomed to reflect upon his own or his fellow creatures' hearts; wholly ignorant of the law of nature and nations . . . " Adams did grant him "a declamatory style. . . a flitting, fluttering imagination, an ardor in his temper, and a civil deportment." Thus two centuries ago the witty French had sent us an archetypal personality whose American avatar would one' day be placed in Washington's by now rickety chair.
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But Vidal's slyness is only a cover for his real subject -- the creation of a government that could hold democracy at bay without the trappings of a monarchy. The book is not much longer than an old-style New Yorker series, and he summarizes major events like the constitutional convention to provide details of the men involved, as seen by themselves and their peers. Early on he shows the prescience of many of the founders:
>>>>> At eighty-one Franklin was too feeble to address the convention on its handiwork, and so a friend read for him the following words: "I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well-administred; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
Now, two centuries and sixteen years later, Franklin's blunt dark prophecy has come true: popular corruption has indeed given birth to that Despotic Government which he foresaw as in-, evitable at our birth. Unsurprisingly, a third edition of the admirable Benjamin Franklin: His Lift As He Wrote It, by Esmon . Wright, is now on sale (Harvard University Press, 1996) with' significantly-inevitably?, Franklin's somber prediction cut out, thus silencing our only great ancestral voice to predict Enron et seq., not to mention November 2000, and, following that, despotism whose traditional activity, war, now hedges us all around" No wonder that so many academic histories of our republic and its origins tend to gaze fixedly upon the sunny aspects of a history growing ever darker. No wonder they choose to disregard the wise, eerily prescient voice of the authentic Franklin in favor of the jolly fat ventriloquist of common lore, with his simple maxims for simple folk; to ignore his key to our earthly political invention in favor of that lesser key which he attached to a kite in order to attract heavenly fire.
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In the afterword Vidal pushes the point home, starting from his discussion of the Alien & Sedition Acts, progenitors of the Patriot Act, he follows Jeffersons careful defense of civil rights with his orchestration of the states counterattack that resulted in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Jefferson had to act cautiously, for, even as Vice President, his mere criticism of the acts of Adams & Hamilton could be a violation of the Sedition Act. [Not so different from today's Bush supporters who declare any dissent being aid and comfort to the enemy.] In this case, the ultimate confrontation was avoided by Jefferson's electoral defeat of Adams and immediate suspension of the 2 acts. But nullification remained an inflammatory concept lurking within the Constitution; exploding in the Civil War 2 generations later. Today, Vidal sees it as perhaps the last defense of the states when the Federal Executive abrogates power.
I've only traced here one of several threads Vidal ties to contemporary issues. Others include Hamilton's creation of the financial system, and Marshall's bold construction of judicial review. Shortness doesn't prevent Vidal from presenting many arguments that are vital to today's national politics. Conservatives kneejerk reactions is amusing since much of the discussion in the book is of ideas any true conservative should hold as core values!
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Title: Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta by Gore Vidal ISBN: 1560255021 Publisher: Nation Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Decline and Fall of the American Empire (Real Story Series) by Gore Vidal ISBN: 1878825003 Publisher: Odonian Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1992 List Price(USD): $8.00 |
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Title: An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek ISBN: 0374175268 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 15 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills ISBN: 0618343989 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace by Gore Vidal ISBN: 156025405X Publisher: Nation Books Pub. Date: 10 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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