By Steve Pfarrer
AMERICAN DIALOGUE: THE FOUNDERS AND US
By Joseph Ellis
Alfred A. Knopf
josephellishistorian.com
Joseph Ellis has long mined early American history and the lives of the Founding Fathers for a string of acclaimed books, from an award-winning biography of Thomas Jefferson to well-drawn portraits of John and Abigail Adams, George Washington, John Jay, James Madison and other key personalities and events.
In his newest book, “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us,” the Amherst historian turns back to four of those figures — Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Washington — to examine how early debates in America about issues such as race, income inequality and foreign relations first evolved and where they stand today, at a time when “we inhabit a backlash moment in American history of uncertain duration,” he writes.
“My goal,” Ellis says in an introduction, “is to provide a round-trip ticket to the late eighteenth century, then back to our location in the second decade of the twenty-first…. The study of history is an ongoing conversation between past and present from which we all have much to learn.”
As the book jacket puts it, “What would the founders think?”
It’s an intriguing idea, and in fact Ellis, a former history professor at Mount Holyoke College, notes that the founders looked back at history themselves to consider what they were trying to do in creating a new country from scratch. John Adams, for instance, after being appointed head of the Board of War and Ordnance in 1776, asked friends in Boston to search Harvard University’s library for books on military history, especially accounts of the Peloponnesian and Punic wars.
“American Dialogue” offers four chapters, divided into “Then” and “Now” subsections, that examine issues continuing to bedevil the country. In “Race,” for instance, Ellis points to the vast contradictions in Jefferson’s life: how the man who wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence kept multitudes of slaves and fathered children with one of them, even as he sometimes spoke against slavery, though in what Ellis calls a “rarified,” detached manner.
Jefferson’s contradictions are perhaps the most vivid symbol of our continued racial divide, Ellis notes, where “each lurch forward along the arc of racial equality” — from Reconstruction to the civil rights era to the election of Barack Obama as president — has created a backlash “that exposes residual prejudices … from some deep pool of racial resentment that was always there and, if Jefferson was right, always will be.”
In a similar vein, Ellis looks at the often cantankerous John Adams — Adams’ diary, he writes in a nice turn of phrase, “was often about the storms surging through his own soul” — who Ellis says was the only founder to envision the eventual emergence of persistent economic inequality in America. That notion seemed so strange at the time that many of Adams’ contemporaries thought “he had obviously lost his mind,” Ellis writes.
Yet in a long series of letters Adams exchanged with Jefferson between 1812 and 1826, Adams took issue with his old friend’s belief that economic equality would be the natural condition of American democracy. To the contrary, wrote Adams, all societies eventually produced social and economic elites who came to dominate the political landscape.
That’s what we have today, Ellis writes: a “second Gilded Age” marked by modern-day Robber Barons and oligarchs like the Koch Brothers, as well as the “dark money” that fuels so many political campaigns. For years, he notes, conservatives have also labored to convince Americans that the federal government is corrupt and incompetent — that the social programs and compacts built in the 20th century, such as Social Security, aren’t worth preserving.
But “without a role for government,” Ellis adds, “the American Dream becomes a realistic prospect only for the favored few.”
Elsewhere in “American Dialogue,” Ellis contends that “originalist” conservative judges and lawyers have misinterpreted the work and views of James Madison, a primary architect of the U.S. Constitution, and other founders: “They are deaf to the pro-government voices of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and the younger James Madison.”
In addition, says Ellis, today’s federal policymakers have drifted a long way from the concerns of George Washington, who as president thought it vital the U.S. avoid “entangling alliances” with other nations. Even granted that Washington and other founders could not have envisioned the growth of the country and the tide of history that catapulted the U.S. to the world stage in the 20th century, Ellis sees an America today whose foreign policy has lost the focus that guided it through the Cold War.
Instead, he writes, we slide too easily into low-scale but still expensive and damaging conflicts that kill civilians and are orchestrated almost exclusively from the White House, with Congress no longer bothering to declare war, and a volunteer military that draws most of its numbers from the poor and working class. As he writes of our wars today, “It is not declared, few have to fight, and no one has to pay.”
“Whether the United States is historically equipped to lead in the new global context remains an open question,” Ellis adds. And, he notes, “The improbable election of Donald Trump has placed an exclamation point after that question.”
Joseph Ellis will read from and discuss “American Dialogue” on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Woodbury Room at the Jones Library in Amherst.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.