Review: American Creation
I've been on something of an American Revolution kick lately. Just over a week ago I got back from taking my youth group on a mission trip to the Philadelphia metro area. So we naturally went into town to visit the historic sites: Christ Church, the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall...oh, and a ghost tour around much of this at night (grin). Adding fuel to the fire, Kelly and I also recently watched the wonderful movie version of the Broadway musical 1776.
Perhaps it is somewhat heretical for a Yoderian pacifist to admit this, but for the longest time I've been fascinated with this period of history: the development of colonial America, the struggle for independence, and the fashioning of a new experiment in representative government. My interest has a broad base, resting as it does on everything from the aesthetics of Georgian architecture and urban design (ah, Charleston!) to the audacity of politicans and activists who pursued rebellion and political reform. The stories from this time are many, complex, and deep.
But again, being a Christian shaped by Anabaptistic political theology, I have at least some inclination to move on and dismiss this period as irrelevant at best or idolatrous at worst. In fact, an idolatry of the American founding is inescapable since it is ritually exercised at least each July 4. At that time of the year most in this country reassure themselves with simplistic mythologies about what happened in these crucial years, why it all happened, and how. The Founding Fathers (capital letters, of course) achieve apotheosis in the national consciousness as we ignore the fact that they were typically elitist, sexist and racist. The new nation they created limited the vote to white males who surpassed the minimum property requirement, broke repeated treaties with Native American tribes as settlers pushed across the Appalachians, and retained over half a million human beings in chains. And, as we all know, this wasn't a nonviolent revolution they practiced on the way to independence.
Highly critical accounts of the American Revolution, such as the relevant section of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, argue that the war for independence was no revolution at all. A self-interested foreign elite was simply replaced by a self-interested domestic elite. Americans opposed sensible British policies - fair taxes to pay for the French and Indian war and a western border to protect Indian tribes - and turned them into a pretext for rebellion. Political reforms were either already underway before the war or came about after independence in spite of the founders' own desires and intentions.
The charges are lengthy and serious enough to satisfy any Christian who will brook no patriotism but that which declares our citizenship is in heaven. And yet, while I have been one to dismiss the American Revolution in this way, I keep returning to my fascination. I remember how much I admire John Adams, particularly as he is rendered in David McCullough's Pulitzer-winning bography. When I read The Democratization of American Christianity, I was struck by example after example of how the common person internalized the Revolution as an open door to a new era of liberty; in fact, an era of freedom to be actor rather than acted, subject rather than object. There were figures I find inspirational and there were people who found inspiration. Maybe something more was at stake than a hissy fit between one set of dead white males and another.
So I've been doing some reading to help get a nuanced take on the Revolution - and, from there, to begin to think theologically about its character, aims and participants. The most helpful book I have read so far has been Joseph Ellis' American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. Ellis is a historian of the Revolution who won the Pulitzer Prize for the book Founding Brothers and has also written a biography of George Washington (His Excellency). While his attitude toward the Revolution is quite positive, Ellis is also realistic about the shortcomings of the American founding.
Each chapter highlights a particular experience of America's establishment from 1776 to 1803. Ellis considers the steps toward declaring independence and then the experience of the Continental Army at Valley Forge that led Washington and his lieutenants to believe a strong national government would be necessary. He details the argument over the Constitution as a betrayal or fulfillment of the republican project. Next, he shows how Washington, under the inspiration of Henry Knox, sought a doomed treaty that would recognize the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River as foreign nations to be respected and protected from encroachment. Ellis then turns to the evolution of the two-party system (which he views favorably) before concluding with the story of the Louisiana Purchase.
The main idea I gained is that the multiplicity of interpretations about the Revolution and the early American experiment began not with scholarly studies decades later but in the actual experience itself. Adams and Jefferson, he writes, went to their graves arguing about what they actually founded and how they had done it. The supporters of independence were a strange mix of conservatives opposing Britain on the matter of a constitutional question, but determined to preserve the status quo as much as possible, and radicals, like Thomas Paine, who called for a root-and-branch renovation of the body politic. It was Paine, for example, who successfully counseled the independent Vermont Republic to inscribe universal male suffrage in its 1777 constitution.
As Ellis tells it, the founders were "making it up as they went along." A diversity of voices improvising a rebellion left their mark not by creating the purest and best government. Rather, what they succeeded in doing was institutionalizing argument as instrinsic and beneficial to sound governance. In that vein, the American Revolution created a kind of politics similar to tradition as defined by Alasdair MacIntyre. Just as he suggests tradition is itself an extended argument about the goods that constitute tradition, so did republican politics in America become an extended argument about the goods that constitute a just republic. The enshrining of argument has in essence extended the Revolution beyond the intial founding, through the course of American history, and into the indefinite future. That is why Americans have typically interpreted such movements as women's suffrage and civil rights as organic developments of the founding instead of altogether new creations.
While I will continue to regret that the Revolution was a violent affair, and while the ethical and social shortcomings of its leaders remain worthy of condemnation, I think a Yoderian Christian can applaud the Revolution's gradual opening to the dignity of difference. For while, being a nation-state, America's godlike pretensions remain, and while Christians must still bear witness to an alternative politics, we can at least acknowledge that the founding created a system that respects the right to come to the table...and start arguing!
Perhaps it is somewhat heretical for a Yoderian pacifist to admit this, but for the longest time I've been fascinated with this period of history: the development of colonial America, the struggle for independence, and the fashioning of a new experiment in representative government. My interest has a broad base, resting as it does on everything from the aesthetics of Georgian architecture and urban design (ah, Charleston!) to the audacity of politicans and activists who pursued rebellion and political reform. The stories from this time are many, complex, and deep.
But again, being a Christian shaped by Anabaptistic political theology, I have at least some inclination to move on and dismiss this period as irrelevant at best or idolatrous at worst. In fact, an idolatry of the American founding is inescapable since it is ritually exercised at least each July 4. At that time of the year most in this country reassure themselves with simplistic mythologies about what happened in these crucial years, why it all happened, and how. The Founding Fathers (capital letters, of course) achieve apotheosis in the national consciousness as we ignore the fact that they were typically elitist, sexist and racist. The new nation they created limited the vote to white males who surpassed the minimum property requirement, broke repeated treaties with Native American tribes as settlers pushed across the Appalachians, and retained over half a million human beings in chains. And, as we all know, this wasn't a nonviolent revolution they practiced on the way to independence.
Highly critical accounts of the American Revolution, such as the relevant section of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, argue that the war for independence was no revolution at all. A self-interested foreign elite was simply replaced by a self-interested domestic elite. Americans opposed sensible British policies - fair taxes to pay for the French and Indian war and a western border to protect Indian tribes - and turned them into a pretext for rebellion. Political reforms were either already underway before the war or came about after independence in spite of the founders' own desires and intentions.
The charges are lengthy and serious enough to satisfy any Christian who will brook no patriotism but that which declares our citizenship is in heaven. And yet, while I have been one to dismiss the American Revolution in this way, I keep returning to my fascination. I remember how much I admire John Adams, particularly as he is rendered in David McCullough's Pulitzer-winning bography. When I read The Democratization of American Christianity, I was struck by example after example of how the common person internalized the Revolution as an open door to a new era of liberty; in fact, an era of freedom to be actor rather than acted, subject rather than object. There were figures I find inspirational and there were people who found inspiration. Maybe something more was at stake than a hissy fit between one set of dead white males and another.
So I've been doing some reading to help get a nuanced take on the Revolution - and, from there, to begin to think theologically about its character, aims and participants. The most helpful book I have read so far has been Joseph Ellis' American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. Ellis is a historian of the Revolution who won the Pulitzer Prize for the book Founding Brothers and has also written a biography of George Washington (His Excellency). While his attitude toward the Revolution is quite positive, Ellis is also realistic about the shortcomings of the American founding.
Each chapter highlights a particular experience of America's establishment from 1776 to 1803. Ellis considers the steps toward declaring independence and then the experience of the Continental Army at Valley Forge that led Washington and his lieutenants to believe a strong national government would be necessary. He details the argument over the Constitution as a betrayal or fulfillment of the republican project. Next, he shows how Washington, under the inspiration of Henry Knox, sought a doomed treaty that would recognize the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River as foreign nations to be respected and protected from encroachment. Ellis then turns to the evolution of the two-party system (which he views favorably) before concluding with the story of the Louisiana Purchase.
The main idea I gained is that the multiplicity of interpretations about the Revolution and the early American experiment began not with scholarly studies decades later but in the actual experience itself. Adams and Jefferson, he writes, went to their graves arguing about what they actually founded and how they had done it. The supporters of independence were a strange mix of conservatives opposing Britain on the matter of a constitutional question, but determined to preserve the status quo as much as possible, and radicals, like Thomas Paine, who called for a root-and-branch renovation of the body politic. It was Paine, for example, who successfully counseled the independent Vermont Republic to inscribe universal male suffrage in its 1777 constitution.
As Ellis tells it, the founders were "making it up as they went along." A diversity of voices improvising a rebellion left their mark not by creating the purest and best government. Rather, what they succeeded in doing was institutionalizing argument as instrinsic and beneficial to sound governance. In that vein, the American Revolution created a kind of politics similar to tradition as defined by Alasdair MacIntyre. Just as he suggests tradition is itself an extended argument about the goods that constitute tradition, so did republican politics in America become an extended argument about the goods that constitute a just republic. The enshrining of argument has in essence extended the Revolution beyond the intial founding, through the course of American history, and into the indefinite future. That is why Americans have typically interpreted such movements as women's suffrage and civil rights as organic developments of the founding instead of altogether new creations.
While I will continue to regret that the Revolution was a violent affair, and while the ethical and social shortcomings of its leaders remain worthy of condemnation, I think a Yoderian Christian can applaud the Revolution's gradual opening to the dignity of difference. For while, being a nation-state, America's godlike pretensions remain, and while Christians must still bear witness to an alternative politics, we can at least acknowledge that the founding created a system that respects the right to come to the table...and start arguing!
Labels: Historia
That's a decent analysis. A few years ago I would have strongly disagreed, but my own thoughts have changed. At first, I lost interest in the revolution because I became a monarchist. But that wasn't enough. I began to reject the whole Anglo-narrative. Eventually I accepted something like Sobornopravnist.
Of course, while restricting voting to racial lines can be arbitrary, I certainly don't approve of "mass voting." Hans-Hermann Hoppe has shown the horrors in allowing all of the masses to vote (Aquinas called it mob rule).
But I definitely agree with you that we idolize the Founders (well, we idolize Lincoln, his savage racism notwithstanding). And that should be rebuked.
Posted by
Jacob |
Monday, July 27, 2009 3:34:00 PM
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