Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
by Donald E. Hester
on Friday, 09 January 2009
Book Reviews
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Donald E. Hester
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Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (Unabridged) by Gordon S. Wood. This book was a great listen. It covered the founding fathers in a way I haven't heard or read yet. It was balanced. They were not portrayed as demigods or vilified as demons. They were portrayed in a manner that was balanced and informational. It is far better than one of my history books that vilifies them for what was then a social norm because now it is considered unconscionable. Other, mostly older books, portray them as some type of titanic individuals who were always noble and unblemished. It is refreshing to read something that does not try to convert the readers to their point of view.
The book covers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Aaron Burr, & John Adams.
It is fair to say that the United States is nothing that any of these men singularly envisioned it to become. Instead, it is a culmination of what each of them envisioned. This, as it turns out, is the best possible outcome. None of us would want the country that anyone of them individual imaged. We are the beneficiaries of a corporate endeavor taken on by these men. We did not get a pure democracy where the rule of the majority outweighs the minority. Collectively they developed a system of government never before seen where majority rules but not at the expense of the minority or one. This system of government derives its power from the people, not the aristocracy or heredity. Collectively they set the stage for the emancipation of the slaves and women's rights.
I see many arguments about the founding fathers where they try to say "they" collectively where this or that by sighting an example of one of these men. With this group, you cannot take what one of them believed or envisioned the future to be. You have to view them collectively, for that is how they build this country, collectively.
I have a greater appreciation for what they did and what it took to create this nation. I still think it is flawed, but not as bad as any other government yet devised by man. When the founding fathers established this nation, they created a government with checks and balances to control corruption and keep the government from becoming a tyranny to the people.
The true power in this nation comes from the people, or what we call popular opinion. Popular opinion is what rules this nation. It was true at the birth of this nation and it is still true today. By the 1790's many of them knew they needed to influence popular opinion in order to get elected or stay elected. Around that time, the press learned that they could influence popular opinion and have done so ever since. With technology, the press can influence popular opinion at a greater level and some people are beginning to think it is moving from influence to controlling popular opinion. The one good thing about technology, or perhaps it is a bad thing, is that everyone can have an opinion and disseminate it without the press controlling it. This blog would be a great example of that. However, with everyone stating their opinion, their voice may be lost in a sea of unintelligible voices.
What the Critics Say
"These pieces add perspective to the founding fathers." (Publishers Weekly)
"The most respected among all scholars of the colonial and Revolutionary periods." (The Washington Post Book World)
Publisher's Summary
Even when the greatness of the founding fathers isn't being debunked, it is a quality that feels very far away from us indeed: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Co. seem as distant as marble faces carved high into a mountainside. We may marvel at the fact that fate placed such a talented cohort of political leaders in that one place, the east coast of North America, in colonies between Virginia and Massachusetts, and during that one fateful period, but that doesn't really help us explain it or teach us the proper lessons to draw from it. What did make the founders different? Now, the incomparable Gordon Wood has written a book that shows us, among many other things, just how much character did matter.
Revolutionary Characters offers a series of brilliantly illuminating studies of the men who came to be known as the founding fathers. Each life is considered in the round, but the thread that binds the work together and gives it the cumulative power of a revelation is this idea of character as a lived reality for these men. For these were men, Gordon Wood shows, who took the matter of character very, very seriously. They were the first generation in history that was self-consciously self-made, men who understood the arc of lives, as of nations, as being one of moral progress. They saw themselves as comprising the world's first true meritocracy, a natural aristocracy as opposed to the decadent Old World aristocracy of inherited wealth and station.
Gordon Wood's wondrous accomplishment here is to bring these men and their times down to earth and within our reach, showing us just who they were and what drove them. In so doing, he shows us that although a lot has changed in 200 years, to an amazing degree the virtues these founders defined for themselves are the virtues we aspire to still.
©2006 Gordon Wood; (P)2006 Penguin Audio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., and Books on Tape. All rights reserved. Penguin Audio is a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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