FFs Forever

Remarkably enough, there's internet access in the Ridge tab room. O'C is sitting in the corner posting pictures of the schematics. All they need to do is throw in some champagne and lobsters and my day will be made.

You'll recall--or you won't recall, depending on a combination of the quality of your memory and the depth of your interest in things Coachean--that we were talking about the uniqueness of the Founders. Of the US, not of LD. I've decided not to say much about Madison and Hamilton, because I'm not particularly expert on them. They were both certainly instrumental in getting the Constitution ratified, and given that we still consult and quote the Federalist Papers is almost comment enough on these two gents. But I will point out that Al, who was GW's protege during the War, later wrote a visionary paper, the Report on Manufactures, that is remarkably eloquent still and explains as well as anything I've ever seen how to turn a backwater nation hanging on by a thread into the United States of America. It's worth your time to read it.

So are the Founders essential and unique? Or merely honed by the times? The more you know about them, you've got to think of them as special. But let's look at my personal favorite FF, Mr. Jefferson. I have read more books about, and by, TJ than any other prexy. I admit I worship at the altar of his complexity.

TJ is the most complicated bundle of contradictions you can imagine. If GW was a rock, TJ was a mosaic. Mercurial. Full of ideas. A true visionary, in a way much like Hamilton, but with radically opposite visions: compare Jeffersonian agrarian democracy to Hamiltonian big business. TJ comes up to Philadelphia to the Continental Congress as a young hotshot Virginia lawyer/landowner who's done some good writing back home, and he gets assigned to write the Declaration, with Franklin and Adams as his editors. What was passed by the Congress isn't much different than what TJ wrote, although it is interesting to compare his draft to the final. Pauline Maier's book American Scripture makes a good case explaining that this particular document, intended to be exactly what it calls itself, became the soul of the United States, the Value statement of the place, if you want to look at it in a debaterly fashion. (This is thanks to Lincoln; to find out why, read the book.) TJ was a Romantic in the poetic sense, and tended to get carried away by ideas like revolution, making the comment, for instance, that the tree of liberty needed to be watered occasionally with the blood of patriots, a quote that makes for great copy but rather dubious practice. I mean, try that one on GW Bush! This romanticism enamored him to the French and their revolution when he was ambassador, and when Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite went south into head-chopping, later enemies of TJ were quick to remind him of his support of the Gallic Repubilc. Oops...

TJ was a scholar, an inventor like Franklin, and like Franklin, an amateur scientist in the golden age of amateur scientists, when they are virtually undifferentiated from the pros. He was an architect, an oenophile and a musician: my favorite of his letters is when he is trying to import four Italian laborers to so some vineyard building for him, and adds to the request that they also play string instruments so that at night when they're not digging and constructing, they can act as a quartet and hammer out some Mozart to entertain in their spare time. Talk about killing many birds with one stone! Among his achievements he was especially proud of founding the University of Virginia, which since its inception has been nationally acclaimed as the party school in the US.

Of course, if you mention TJ in front of a group like the Sailors, their utterance of the name Sally Hemings isn't far behind. The idea of Sally goes back to TJ's own day, and biographers have all had to deal with it since. Most, for hagiographic reasons, discounted it. Dumas, the definitive biographer, absolutely refused to accept it and blamed a Randolph cousin for the red heads and Jeffersonian features in the Hemings clan. But DNA talks, and the controversy has been settled, and no one seriously believes otherwise anymore. Which does not leave a good taste in the mind of those who practically worship the man. How can someone so committed to human dignity commit such an act of human indignation as to, to our minds, not only own slaves but to rape them? His writings about his slaves are not happily modern: he did not believe that blacks were the equals of whites. He probably couldn't believe that and still enslave them. But at the same time, how does he not believe it and then sleep with a black woman? And have children by her? It boggles the mind. It is, in a word, incomprehensible, at least to me. I simply don't understand it. I wish I could do better than that, but I can't.

Anyhow, the original question. Were the times such that your average batch of yahoos was elevated to become special, or were we just lucky to have a special batch of people when the times needed them? For my money, these people would have been special no matter where or when. Jefferson and Franklin would have been just as famous, although probably in the arts or sciences and not in politics. Adams and Madison would have been the richest lawyers or the most famous judges. Hamilton would be a CEO or a Nobel economist. GW probably would be totally unknown, and very happy. Put them all together, they are SO the right people in their times. Think if those times were now? Would the equivalent folks be likewise Founders who would change the world?

Read the paper today. Look at the leaders.

Weep.